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Sales Lessons from Obama's Public Diplomacy With Indians By Vishal Asthana and Nick ...
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Working with Emotional Intelligence
31st December, 1969
25th August, 2009 Quote of the Day
“There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don't like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don't spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.
- Michael Dell
Gary Hamel, a visiting professor at London Business School and the director of the Management Innovation talks about quite an interesting concept – companies without managers. This article is based on a Self Managed company. With some brilliant and thought provoking messages – this article is a good read.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School believes that the traditional objective of business, which is profit-making, doesn’t reflect the way how great companies work toward success. Through her research on the most successful companies situated across more than 20 countries on 4 continents, she proves that an institutional logic lies behind the successful practices of great companies. 
The authors, Thomas M. Hout, vice president of the Boston Consulting Group and John C. Carter, principal of Product Development Consulting, define new managerial roles for senior executives functioning at top level in their well-researched article ‘Getting It Done: New Roles for Senior Executives’ published in the Harvard Business Review. They coin a term ‘senior executive activism’ to refer the essential quality required by senior executives that enable them to withstand increased market competition while they are spurring successful process reengineering efforts in their organizations.
A.G. Lafley, the former chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble and Noel M. Tichy, a professor and the director of the Global Citizenship Initiative at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan explains the art and science of finding the right CEO in this recently published Harvard Business Review. This article discusses some of the leadership development practices that A.G. Lafley had undertaken while he was the CEO at Procter & Gamble.
In the backdrop of the recent economic recession and subsequent failures of giant corporate firms like Lehman brothers and Washington Mutual, the authors- Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, in this journal article analyze the reasons behind such disastrous business failures. According to them, there exists a wide gap between what CEOs preach and what they do. 
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Brad Brown, a director in McKinsey’s New York Office; Michael Chui, a senior fellow with the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and James Manyika, a director of MGI, question the readiness of organizations to welcome the era of ‘Big Data in this McKinsey article. They categorically state that in the era of big data, the future belongs to only those companies that collect more quality data and use it effectively for competitive advantage.
In the latest McKinsey Quarterly Review, W. Brian Arthur, an eminent economist and a pioneer in the science of complexity explains ‘the second economy’ based on ‘digitization’ and how this second economy revolutionizes the way we live, in the same way industrial revolution did almost 60 years ago. He further explains the economic possibilities of this digital economy for the future generation and also the possible down side of such a digital revolution.
In this McKinsey Quarterly article adapted from Robert S. Kaplan’s book, ‘What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential’ the author confirms the untold truth that top executives are less likely to receive constructive feedback as subordinates never want to offend their bosses. So over time, top executives become isolated from criticism and thus a potential source of constructive criticism represented by subordinates remains untapped forever. 
In this article adapted from Scott Keller and Colin Price’s book ‘Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage’, the authors introduce the concept called ‘organizational health’ and go on categorically stating that in order to sustain high performance over the long term, organizations must have in-built capabilities to learn and must keep changing over time; in fact an organization’s ultimate competitive advantage lies in these capabilities.
The authors Olivia Nottebohm, Tom Stephenson and Jennifer Wickland explain in this article how a less-productive sales force can be transformed into a highly productive one just by freeing up the sales force from their non-selling activities for accomplishing actual selling. Emphasizing the need of sales force for spending more time on actual selling, the authors point out that the real success in sales lies in the optimization of the entire sales process and successful relationship building.
The rapid rate at which technological progress is making established companies irrelevant and birthing new champions is scary not only for the vanquished old masters but also for the new champions who may enjoy much less time basking in the glories of success than the old masters did. In this article, two management consultants take up specific examples and explain how certain companies have created success for themselves in today’s volatile business landscape.
Author David Rotman explains the differences between individual technologies and domains while exploring why it takes technology so long to commercialize. This understanding can help enterprises evaluate their product choices, the investments they need to make and the timeline for successful adoption of the new technology. This can show them what to focus on in their development efforts.
Ekman learned that the human subjects he studied betrayed their emotional state through microexpressions, however much they tried to suppress them. He identified 46 facial-muscle movements that, across cultures, signal such basic emotions as fear, distrust, and distress.
A clinical psychologist at McGill University and the Douglas Institute in Montreal, Alain Brunet says "If someone is traumatized, you ask them to recall the memory, give them a pill, and the [emotional] strength of the memory is weakened." The details of the trauma remain intact, but the emotional component of the memory appears to dissipate. 
As touch screens become more popular in other contexts, such as in-car navigation and entertainment systems, this lack of sensory feedback could become a dangerous distraction.
It is said that the only thing constant about life is change. However, in the present context it would be more appropriate to say that the only thing constant about life is rapid change. We are living in a disruptive age where new technologies and other developments bring significant changes to our lives every few years. Business leaders are hardest hit as they cannot even dream of settling down into a comfortable groove because if they do so, it won’t take long for a competitor to copy their solutions and offer it cheaply or come out with a much improved alternative.
The authors Rawlinson and Kuznetsova, discuss the importance and presence of a strong group of consumers who are 50+ and have the money and drive to experiment with new and old products. It is time for them to engage in a full blown market segmentation framework for their products.
Unlike other human organs, the human brain is a social organ and it develops not by the growth of the human body but by the level of its social interactions, as the recent neuroscience research has been able to prove. 
Satyam Computer Services of India, a highly respected company that fell from grace due to massive frauds committed by its top managements and came to be referred to as India’s Enron. The authors of this article Priscilla Nelson and Ed Cohen used to work at Satyam, Priscilla was the global director of people leadership while Ed was chief learning officer.
Culture is the sum total of deeply embedded beliefs, mind-sets, and self-reinforcing behaviors that influence general behavior and thinking in an organization. People within an organization operate on an unstated understanding of the way their organization works, and their place in it. Thus, organizational culture considerably influences everyday actions of its people.
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