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July 17–26, 2016
August 1–8, 2016
August 16–23, 2016
October 7–10, 2016
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Chair
Sherry Duda
Vice Chair
Martha Kesler
Secretary
Beverley Patwell
Interim Treasurer
Zoe MacLeod
Lori Blander
Marco Cassone
Zoe MacLeod
Sanjay Naik
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| Harnessing the Power of Culture in Mergers and Acquisitions Chris Cancialosi, Forbes
There has certainly not been a shortage of merger and acquisition activity in the US over the last couple of years. Organizations continue to find growth strategies that keep them competitive in the rapidly evolving business landscape through M&A activity.
2015 was a banner year, coming in at an estimated $5 trillion (with a t) in deal value emanating from activity. And this trend is showing no signs of stopping in 2016, with recent announcements about Alaska Airlines acquiring Virgin America, and Comcast buying Dreamworks Animation. Consolidation seems to be a viable strategy for many leaders in a variety of industries, as Jeff Golman’s article from January explains.
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| Developing New Products in Emerging Markets Srivardhini K. Jha, Ishwardutt Parulkar, Rishikesha T. Krishnan and Charles Dhanaraj, MIT Sloan Business Review
For more than a decade, multinational enterprises from developed countries have been moving a substantial part of their research and development (R&D) activity to emerging markets such as India and China. While the location of R&D centers in other developed countries has been driven by lucrative markets or specific expertise available in the local ecosystems of those countries, the location of R&D in developing countries has been driven largely by the availability of skilled manpower at low cost. At first, these R&D centers in emerging markets operated largely as extended arms of R&D in the home country, executing well-defined projects under close supervision from headquarters.
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| The Greatest Barriers to Growth, According to Executives Chris Zook, Harvard Business Review
A large, iconic multinational is now struggling to keep growing while being chased by leaner, more aggressive competitors. To find the next wave of growth, they were taking a hard look at their bureaucracy.
“When I joined the company, the front line management jobs were the best,” the CEO told us. He had started his career in one of those jobs, as a country manager, and worked his way up. “It was like running a small business with only a few targets on performance and obeying the rules.” Today, he confessed, “it is the worst job.”
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| Now Is the Time to Focus on Sustainable Business Erik Sherman, Inc. Business owners always hear that they should be positive and never indulge in negativity — even though it can be a useful tool when correctly applied.
Certainly if you keep telling yourself that you can't achieve what you want, chances are you won't. But there's a difference between being confident, or even faking enough confidence that the real thing comes along, and assuming that exterior conditions are rosy. They may not be. You need to consider real information when making decisions. And sometimes the evidence suggests that you need to be wary because the environment may be about to turn ugly.
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| This Chart Shows Why So Many Change Management Efforts Fail Mark Murphy, Forbes
It’s a truism of change management that it’s easier to change a troubled organization than it is a successful one. Why? Because, in a troubled organization, remaining in the status quo seems pretty unappealing. If staying in the status quo means going into bankruptcy, it’s a pretty easy sell to convince people to change and do something different.
But in successful organizations, employees are more likely to question the very need for change. They often ask, “We’ve been doing so well, why would we change what’s made us so successful?” And it’s not an illegitimate question.
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| The Most Effective Teams Adapt to Change Jeff Boss, Forbes It’s been said before that relationships in business are everything, and inherent to relating with others is working together as a team. A recent Economist article stated that “teams have become the basic building-blocks of organizations,” and I disagree. I disagree because they’ve always been the building blocks of performance, and it’s only now that leaders are beginning to realize the power of “we” and networks after working so long for “me” in hierarchies.
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| Why Building a 'High-Performing Team' Is the Wrong Goal Liz Ryan, Forbes
We have to get away from the outdated and limiting idea of “high-performance teams.” It’s an artifact from the Industrial Age mindset that still clogs up the energy in most organizations a hundred years later.
The achievement of some pre-determined level of “performance” is the wrong yardstick and the wrong mindset. When an individual on any team is plugged in to his or her power source, whatever that power source may be, they rock and rule. When the whole team is plugged in, the room feels different.
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| The Surprising Thing Strong Leaders Know That Weak Leaders Don't Rachel Mendelowitz, Fortune Magazine
“Failure is not an option” may sound like a mantra for success, but it’s the very thing that can leave a company treading water.
In a world where results are increasingly tracked and measured, we have plenty of tools that can help us weed out the most error-prone among us. And yet, creating a no-fail atmosphere eliminates the vulnerability that is so critical to innovation at the organizational level and professional development at the individual level.
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| Why the Most "Cultured" Among Us May Be the Most Resistant to Change Katherine Conrad, Insights
Amir Goldberg discovered a funny thing about American culture on his way to researching the ever-elusive topic.
Poking big holes in long-held assertions, Goldberg and his colleagues at Stanford and Yale universities analyzed millions of Yelp and Netflix reviews to reveal that people considered the most culturally adventurous are actually the most resistant to experiences perceived as “crossing the line.”
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| The Economist
Ronald Reagan once said that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.” Today they are run a close second by 12 words: “I’m from human resources and I’m here to organise a diversity workshop.” Most people pay lip service to diversity in public. But what they think in private can be very different. Some HR consultants have even started to worry about “diversity fatigue”. Keep Reading
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| Leading Across Cultures Requires Flexibility and Curiosity Deborah Rowland, Harvard Business Review
How many nights have you spent in a hotel in a city many miles from home? Perhaps nervous about the meeting in the morning, you find yourself lying on the bed flicking through the TV channels for something to watch to keep you awake to offset the growing jet-lag. Automatically, you search for channels and movies in your own language. Keep Reading
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