Decision making and problem solving

I recently moved to a new home. As is typical, my wife and I spent many hours throwing out things that we no longer needed. Old shoes, clothes, electronics, mounds of papers, and old books. It is shocking how much junk one family can accumulate over the years. My 5 year old — our resident […]

Nine problems that face start-ups who are trying to scale.

The primitive, emotional parts of our brains have a powerful influence on the choices we make. Now, neuroscientists are mapping the risk and reward systems in the brain that drive our best—and worst—decision making.

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

Jim, a communications specialist, is sitting opposite me stirring his second coffee. He has declining budgets, repetitive tasks, and an overbearing boss who micromanages his every move. He can’t remember the last time he had a great day at work. He’s shown me a clipping for a lower-paid job which he thinks he won’t get, […]

Executives routinely dose their organizations with strategic snake oil: discredited nostrums, partial remedies, or untested management miracle cures. In many cases, the facts about what works are out there—so why don’t managers use them?

We can't always make the right decision, but we can make every decision right.

Focus your analytics on your most valuable customers.

The way you describe an issue will determine how you address it.

In most companies, strategic planning isn’t about making decisions. It’s about documenting choices that have already been made, often haphazardly. Leading firms are rethinking their approach to strategy development so they can make more, better, and faster decisions.

How to move on without regret.

Your people will have new roles and need new skills.

There are many reasons for not working with jerks, as Bob Sutton has pointed out in his memorably-titled book The No Asshole Rule. But I think I’ve discovered another reason for not having them in your organization’s employ: they often make bad decisions. While all jerks don’t always make bad decisions, and non-jerks occasionally decide […]

As a matter of policy, we don’t review our own books, but we hope you will. Keep an eye out for the following Press titles in September, and let us know what you think of them in the comments. Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business by Josh Bernoff and Ted […]

Effective corporate renewal starts at the bottom, through informal efforts to solve business problems.

As the 1990s overtake us, public interest in ethics is at a historic high. While the press calls attention to blatant derelictions on Wall Street, in the defense industry, and in the Pentagon, and to questionable activities in the White House, in the attorney general’s office, and in Congress, observers wonder whether our society is […]

A close study of the real thing — seafarers’ insurrections during the Age of Discovery — might help you decide.

Four steps to help you think things through.

The information technology explosion was set off by visionaries who thrive on uncertainty. Today that innovation-fueling uncertainty is in danger, a victim of its own success and excess. IT producers have historically built platforms that are useless standing alone, inviting others to parlay them into a variety of useful applications. The first PC makers shipped […]

(Editor’s note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by these posts will help shape the agenda of a symposium on the topic in June 2010, hosted by HBS’s Nitin Nohria, Rakesh Khurana, and Scott Snook.) By the late 1990’s, USA TODAY […]