February 22, 2012
Some exciting news to share with the HBR community: The new HBR iPad app is now live in the iTunes app store. This launch is the realization of almost a year's worth of planning, proposing, modeling, designing, building, and general preparation. Senior Editor Scott Berinato and Assistant Product Marketing Director Kate Adams led dozens of people in the effort — in the building here and also...
Mustering willpower is a struggle for almost everyone — and it's getting harder. We, as individuals and as a society, lack self-control at precisely the time we need it most.
Willpower is about more than resisting our bad habits. It's the mental discipline that allows us to cultivate good habits, make better decisions, and control our own behaviors — everything from dieting effectively to powering through difficult problems at work. It's a quality that can separate the...
This Sunday many of us will be watching the red carpet arrivals and cheering for our favorite actresses, actors, and films at the 84th annual Academy Awards. Winning an Oscar not only signals the high quality of a film, but also creates a marketing windfall. Given all of this newly-created value, it's fair for cinemas to consider raising ticket prices for Oscar-winning-or even Oscar-nominated films.
The industry could use the extra revenue. While...
Let's get real — and back to basics.
In an era of high unemployment, and especially in this political season of economic nationalism, both parties outdo themselves with promises to "rebuild America." Yet, the imperatives of offshore facilities and employees are — and will remain — central to American companies' international competitiveness. A company's foreign sales can approach or exceed 50 percent; its non-U.S. employees can be 25 percent or greater of total...
February 21, 2012
When I was growing up, one of the principles in our house was that we had to tell the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Lying, we were taught, wasn't something you could get away with. Like Pinocchio's nose, it would be apparent to others.
Children of course need clear rules to learn the difference between right and wrong. However as we get older, the truth becomes more nuanced — and there are times when a...
Complaints about email abound. Perhaps you've heard some of these or uttered them in pain yourself: I receive hundreds of emails a day. I can spend my whole day responding to incoming messages. I can't find anything in my inbox. In response, some companies are taking drastic steps to help workers manage the number of messages they receive. The CEO of Atos, a British IT services company, has vowed to ban internal email by 2015...
"My manager expects me to be at my desk from 9 to 5," a highly successful salesperson lamented during a break at a session I was delivering at a progressive company in Silicon Valley. "I love my job," she went on, "but I have an hour and fifteen minute commute each way, and it's just wearing me down."
"Could you do your work from home?" I asked.
"Absolutely," she told me.
How crazy is that? Her boss shouldn't just be allowing her to work from home, he ought to be...
Having a strong domestic manufacturing base is vital to the United States maintaining its world leadership in innovation. That is because advanced manufacturing provides an important institutional foundation for learning and developing process skills and capabilities that are increasingly intertwined with core R&D in some of the industries most important to the country's economic future. These include advanced and specialty materials, biologics, nanotechnology, and precision mechanical...
February 17, 2012
Something odd and interesting happens to a lot of people who become very successful. Once the initial thrill wears off, they come to perceive their success as "a catastrophe" and even as "a kind of death," as the playwright Tennessee Williams famously put it, after The Glass Menagerie became a smash hit in 1944. Athletes, scientists, generals,...
The realities of globalization, with increasing emphasis on emerging markets, present corporate leaders with enormous challenges in developing the leaders required to run global organizations. Too many multinational companies — particularly Japanese, Indian, German, and some American ones — still concentrate vital decisions in the hands of a small group of trusted leaders from their home country. They hire technical specialists, local experts, and country managers from emerging...
