People businesses are the fastest growing sector in developed economies. This report focuses on four areas of people businesses that are markedly different from traditional businesses: performance measures, operations, compensation, and strategies. A managers' ability to measure the productivity of employees, as well as to enhance it operationally, reward it appropriately, and transform it strategically is central to building sustained competitive advantage. It can't be done with traditional concepts of management. That is why people businesses need new rules of the game for managing their greatest asset - people.

The 360-degree feedback tool was originally used to determine professional development needs, but quickly gained popularity as a performance appraisal tool. The 360-degree review aims to provide employees with feedback on their performance from those above, below, and at the same level in the company. With managerial support, employees are expected to analyze the feedback to identify their strengths and weaknesses and then develop a plan to improve their productivity and effectiveness. This form of colleague-based feedback has proved useful for determining professional development needs, but many companies have reported difficulties and problems when using the tool for appraisals.

Debates have sprung up over issues including how to: select the feedback tool and process, determine the competencies, select the raters, use the feedback, review and interpret the feedback, use the results to create development plans, and to integrate the process into a larger performance management system. Numerous commentators have identified difficulties in using 360-degree reviews effectively and some even find 360-degree assessments too problematic and recommend alternatives.

Advocates of open-book management say that wealth can be created for customers, employees and shareholders by teaching everyone to understand, track and take responsibility for financials. The process has, in fact, been the salvation of some organizations. But such openness goes against the grain of traditional corporate cultures and the implementation involves major challenges - especially for big companies.

To move up the ladder, it's important that your method of making decisions develops as you do. This excerpt from Harvard Business Review reports on research drawn from a comprehensive Korn/Ferry International database.

Companies are vulnerable to misconceptions, biases, and plain old lies. But not hopelessly vulnerable.

Creativity involves evolving something new from the present ideas and perspectives. It requires seeing and conceptualizing things from newer, unexplored perspectives. Fostering an atmosphere of creativity at the workplace requires implementation of unconventional rules and practices. Creativity is ubiquitous but hidden. In such a scenario, application of uncommon practices helps uncover cutting edge ideas and perspectives. The paper examines these issues and discusses the management of creativity in organizations. [BNET Annotation]

In many instances, a company's efforts to find its identity and articulate it are based on a belief in a single monolithic corporate identity. Our research leads to a different view-namely that organizations have multiple identities. In fact we have delineated five kinds of identity, which can be examined in a framework termed the AC2ID TestTM (ACCID), namely the actual, communicated, conceived, ideal, and desired identities. These reflect respectively: the current, distinct attributes of the organization; what the organization communicates about itself; the perceptions of the corporation by stakeholders; the optimum positioning for the organization; and corporate vision from the perspective of the CEO or management board.

A key premise underlying the effective use of the AC2ID Test framework is that in any given identity situation management should understand each and all of the five identities. Further, management must be alert to critical misalignments among the identities, misalignments that potentially can seriously weaken a company.

Over the past five years, companies invested a lot in IT just to stay in place. Although CRM, ERP, inventory control, and other applications generated huge efficiencies in core processes and practices, businesses are seeing diminishing financial returns from these improvements as competitors race to match incremental gains and customers reap most of the value in lower prices or improved service. As a result, strategic opportunities are spreading to the edges of the corporate ecosystem, where they have direct connections to, and influence on, products, customers, and markets in their reach.

Some marketers may shy away from measuring the Net Promoter Score because it sounds too complex. But others are not daunted. To show how it is done, a Bain & Company team used the approach to quantify the value of promoters and detractors in the personal-computer business. The team used only publicly available data so that what it did could serve as a model for companies that lack sophisticated databases. Indeed, the same approach can be used by prospective investors-even by competitors-to understand a firm's customer-relationship economics.

In business, in government, in diplomatic affairs, anywhere that you are confronted with a need for change, you have to ask: Is it effective to make large, radical changes? Or is it more advisable to merely "muddle through"?

Our experience has shown that the integration agenda with respect to people and culture requires two distinct areas of focus to address the "invisible" drivers of behavior.
• The first involves managing the initial emotional response, the state of mind, of the acquired personnel by making them feel welcome, valued and certain about their future. How they feel then determines their level of engagement with, and commitment to, the new identity.
• The second process is at the heart of the cultural integration. It is the process of aligning the mindsets of the personnel in both organisations. This deeper challenge of achieving a shift in mindsets is one that few acquirers consider, let alone understand what it involves or how to do it.

The need to focus on soft issues has forced managers to take their eye off the ball and lose sight of the fact that strategy matters more than ever. But these same managers must not only realize that strategy matters, they must develop and deploy tough strategies that will defeat the competition. Today, managers must play to win.

To create a complete marketing plan, one that drives near- and longer-term marketing action, I need only four "colors." Those colors are created through a set of analyses that we perform:
1. Customer analysis
2. Competitive analysis
3. Whole Product analysis
4. Forces analysis

It is not exactly breaking news that, due to the need for driving down costs and increasing efficiency, manufacturers (if not enterprises of all kinds) are increasingly subject to massive pressures. These pressures, however, often invalidate the traditional materials requirements planning (MRP) batch- and push-based production planning and associated economies of scale product costing approaches. For this reason, there has been increased interest in the lean manufacturing support philosophy. This multi-part article examines lean manufacturing in depth.

Editor's Note: I found the first two parts (especially part II) the most interesting.

This is a question more and more companies have been asking. Many of the traditional advantages of being public are no longer valid, and the mounting costs all the more obvious.

A key challenge for today's companies - and for the individuals within them - is to build a culture of action, says Jeffrey Pfeffer. He describes some of the common obstacles that can get in the way of knowing what needs to be done, and actually doing it.

Editor's Note: this is one article of the entire Fall 2003 issue in this .pdf file - find it starting on page 12.

Information Technologies (IT) are the central nervous system of today's enterprise. At the same time, implementation of increasingly complex and interdependent IT systems results in a high rate of project failures and underperforming assets. In order to address this challenge, organizations need to adopt a dynamic, streamlined framework for IT implementation that is complementary with the formalized and rigid software development methodologies already in use. The IT Resource Gap Framework offers a model for mapping the perceived quality and quantity of six critical IT resources. The resulting IT Resource Map can help identify relative project risks, systemic weaknesses, and strategic concerns so that project managers can craft a strategy for shifting resources towards alignment and increasing the success rate of implementations.

For the past five centuries, the political genius of Niccoló Machiavelli has been overshadowed by his reputation as a cold supporter of corrupt ruling. Only recently have his true beliefs come to light.

There are nine "deadly sins" that can mess up any merger. Most mergers fail at the execution stage-and execution can be fixed.

Instead of drifting into decline and irrelevance, producers of goods have a chance to seize the future.

Business metrics lie at the heart of every important decision you make. Your decisions are only as good as the numbers that inform them and the communication that presents those numbers to you. Are you communicating these numbers well?

Too many executive teams are neglecting to have thoughtful discussions about their leadership pipelines. Yet forward-thinking organizations know they need leaders and a leadership succession plan that deliver results.

Although the central challenge facing most business leaders today is the need for change, one-time change isn't good enough for today's fast-paced global business environment. High levels of uncertainty and complexity, disruptive technologies, and a premium on speed, choice and innovation all demand a new type of leadership. Business leaders must learn to create an organization with the built-in ability to sense and rapidly adapt to changes in the environment, on a continuous basis. How can established organizations create the capacity for ongoing adaptation? This paper provides a practical leadership process for creating an adaptive enterprise by mobilizing a dynamic cycle of four steps: learn, focus, align and execute. These steps build on one another and through repetition become a dynamic cycle of renewal: Strategic Learning. [BNET Annotation]

Writing an effective questionnaire is not a task for novices. At the very least, it requires an understanding of four basic issues:
1. Considering the differences between a questionnaire that respondents fill out themselves and one that a professional interviewer administers
2. Knowing what questions should be asked early on in the questionnaire, in the middle, and toward the end
3. Understanding how to phrase questions
4. Being sensitive to questionnaire length

Powerful brands can help firms leave rivals in the dust. But brand building today must encompass a more complex set of activities and target a broader audience than in the past.