Monthly Archives: May 2011

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Making Collaboration Work. Jimmy Guterman wrote about Nokia’s culture of purposefully fostering a collaborative mindset as soon as someone started at the company or moves into a new role. I want … Continue reading →

Christine was a smart and driven Chinese senior executive, a self-declared perfectionist, she set the bar as high for those around her as she did for herself. It was, of course, a recipe for frustration, as this complaint about a … Continue reading →

In an event last spring in New York, I heard the story of a young man who received more than $90,000 for international software projects while he was collecting unemployment benefits. He hadn’t had a visible full-time job in three … Continue reading →

The US economy today borders on schizophrenic. To be sure, we are seeing signs of positive momentum. The last three months have delivered almost 250,000 new jobs per month on average. Great news, but at the same time, unemployment is … Continue reading →

Good companies always strive to be better and a potentially useful way to catalyze such improvement is to consider how analyst and public criticism might be used to institute corporate change. By parallel, managers themselves might similarly benefit from “reverse-engineering” … Continue reading →

Featured Guest: Tom DeLong, Harvard Business School professor and author of Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success. Download this podcast

What do you do when you have a communication impasse with someone you care about? Jim* is a friend and colleague whom I hadn’t seen for a year. It’s been a hard year for Jim and I called him frequently … Continue reading →

A recommendation from the recommendation frontier: You may not want to fire your human editor just yet. For the last year, I’ve been investigating the weird, wild, mostly hidden world of personalization for my book, The Filter Bubble. The “if … Continue reading →

There’s nothing like the feeling of powerlessness that comes over people when a job they really wanted slips through their fingers. The tough questions begin when hardworking professionals with great networking skills find themselves watching people with less impressive track … Continue reading →

The economics and accountability of due diligence have changed. The managerial ability and responsibility to access the source material upon which critical decisions are made has improved so dramatically that traditional business notions of oversight and trust are obsolete. The … Continue reading →