Chair
Martha Kesler
Vice Chair
Jamie Kelly
Treasurer
Amy Cowart
Trustees
Marco Cassone
Sherry Duda
Steven Goodwin
Jean Hartmann
Cindy Miller
Sanjay Naik
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Leadership: Your Needle in the Haystack to Growth and Value
Mike Horne, Ph.D., OD Network Member
Leadership talent is the needle in the haystack that entrepreneurs, executives, directors, and trustees require to grow value. Gallup, in a recent State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders report indicated that “companies that hire managers based on talent realize a 48% increase in profitability, a 22% increase in productivity, a 30% increase in employee engagement scores, a 17% increase in customer engagement scores and a 19% decrease in turnover.” In PwC’s 20th CEO Survey, 75% of respondents responded that it was somewhat or very difficult to recruit people with leadership skills. Leadership is the needle in the haystack to driving and sustaining organizational growth and value.
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Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success
Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business Review
The annals of business history are full of tales of companies that once dominated their industries but fell into decline. The usual reasons offered—staying too close to existing customers, a myopic focus on short-term financial performance, and an inability to adapt business models to disruptive innovation—don’t fully explain how the leaders who had steered these firms to greatness lost their touch.
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Those Other Organizations*
W. Warner Burke, OD Practitioner
The organizations that helped to give birth to organization development in the late 1950s were largely from business–industry. Prominent among these were Hardwood Manufacturing led by Alfred Marrow, General Mills with the work of Douglas McGregor and Richard Beckhard, and Humble Oil involving Robert Blake, Jane Mouton, and Herb Shepard. Other organizations were the Episcopal Church in the 1960s and the U.S. Army (they labeled what they were doing as organizational effectiveness, or OE) in the 1970s. Thus, regarding the beginnings of our field of OD, profit-making organizations from business–industry set the tone and direction of the field. In other words, the early learning about changing organizations came largely from business–industry. Moreover, how we practice OD today and the outcomes we hope to achieve remains immersed in this type of organization.
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Leading with Radically Informative Indicators: Understanding Business Impact
Laura Freebairn-Smith, Patrice Murphy, and Ross Tartell, OD Practitioner
In organizations, managers are accustomed to differentiating between tactical, operational, and strategic measures. This is part of a quantitative business approach to decision-making and assessing impact (Gordon & Pressman, 1978). However organizational research and experience show our measurement systems to be fraught with misdirection, blurred focus, and over- or under-application. Business is replete with examples of people and organizations measuring things that do not assess the real impact of their activities at the strategic level.
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Collaboration Overload Is a Symptom of a Deeper Organizational Problem
Michael Mankins, Harvard Business Review
Many leaders are now aware of the dangers of collaboration overload and collaboration-tool overload in the workplace. The evidence continues to mount that, for many organizations, the costs associated with meetings, emails, IMs and other forms of workforce collaboration now exceed the benefits.
But what can get lost in the eye-popping statistics around excess email and meetings is this: Collaboration overload is almost always a symptom of some deeper organizational pathology and rarely an ailment that can be treated effectively on its own.
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Humanizing Change: Developing More Effective Change Management Strategies
Kelly Monahan, Timothy Murphy and Marcus Johnson, Deloitte Review
Research shows that most large change management efforts fail. Why? Something’s been left out of the equation: the human element. Organizations can draw on new behavioral economics lessons to powerfully connect change to human behavior—and keep employees engaged in the process.
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Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse
Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, Harvard Business Review
Looking at the executive teams we work with as consultants and those we teach in the classroom, increased diversity of gender, ethnicity, and age is apparent. Over recent decades the rightful endeavor to achieve a more representative workforce has had an impact. Of course, there is a ways to go, but progress has been made.
Throughout this period, we have run a strategic execution exercise with executive groups focused on managing new, uncertain, and complex situations. The exercise requires the group to formulate and execute a strategy to achieve a specified outcome, against the clock.
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Creating Simple Rules for Complex Decisions
Jongbin Jung, Connor Concannon, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel and Daniel G. Goldstein, Harvard Business Review
Machines can now beat humans at complex tasks that seem tailored to the strengths of the human mind, including poker, the game of Go, and visual recognition. Yet for many high-stakes decisions that are natural candidates for automated reasoning, like doctors diagnosing patients and judges setting bail, experts often favor experience and intuition over data and statistics. This reluctance to adopt formal statistical methods makes sense: Machine learning systems are difficult to design, apply, and understand. But eschewing advances in artificial intelligence can be costly.
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Restructure or Reconfigure?
Stéphane J.G. Girod and Samina Karim, Harvard Business Review
To cope with ever-changing market conditions, companies often have to reorganize. But leaders tend to get conflicting advice about when and how to do so. Does the company need a new structure, or should it tweak the existing one? Will the benefits of a reorg outweigh the costs? Can the work be accomplished before conditions change again? How far should the changes go?
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Michael F. Broom, Ph.D., OD Network Member
Not too many years ago in New York City I was chatting with a not-so-young woman who was telling me that OD is dying. Her evidence of that is that her nascent consulting practice wasn’t going anywhere – after all she had her MSOD. A few months later, I was having dinner with a client in Chicago where our work together was going very well. He says to me, "I’m glad you’re not one of these OD people."
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