To improve manufacturing operations, don’t forget to fix the organizational issues that can hinder performance. These guidelines can help your company choose the optimal manufacturing setup, based on such factors as your industry, markets, customers, products, internal capabilities, competitive position, and overall strategy. Also included: tactics for managing the inevitable tradeoffs.

In today’s interconnected economy, some companies are so central that their failure would cause significant disruptions to the economy and to society as a whole. In order to avoid the imposition of regulatory constraints on their business, such systemically important companies need to take a broader approach to value creation.

The methods used by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to promote health in a West Virginia city can also be used to raise organizational performance.

As organizations become increasingly global in scope and complex in structure, decisions that need to be made are often left unresolved. People who should be collaborating instead circle around one another warily. A tool known as a role charter can help ensure both effective decision-making and collaboration.

The average company spends 23 cents out of every dollar of revenue on overhead, yet most firms lack a plan or system for managing the spending for greater value. Managerial attention to overhead tends to be sporadic and is often driven by the need to cut costs in the near-term. Even if short-term cost reductions are achieved, companies then find themselves tied to a roller-coaster cycle of cost-cutting, costs creeping back over several years, and then cost-cutting again. Companies that get off the roller coaster will discover not only that financial markets rewards better overhead management, but also that changing the very way they view and manage overhead can significantly increase the return they get for every dollar invested in it

Louis Carter introduces a lesson on the best practices mind-set from The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success, by Carol Sanford.

Here are the 4 key cultural elements all high-performing organizations must have - and how leadership can support them.

Combining agile up-front processes with a lean approach to the back end can help companies outperform the competition.

Given the instability and unpredictability of the new global reality, companies must learn to be as agile and adaptable as possible. In this new era of heightened economic volatility, planning becomes more, rather than less, critical. BCG highlights ten guiding principles for improving effectiveness and efficiency in the planning process.

Business leaders manage goals by setting and systematically striving to achieve them. While management and organizational researchers have laid the groundwork for goal management, the emerging field of Positive Psychology appears to offer many additional findings and insights that will help managerial leaders be more effective as they define and pursue goals. Factors such as character strengths, optimism, and resilience can play significant roles in how well goals are managed. In the end, a managerial leader’s ability to make wise choices and to implement pathways that lead to attaining desired goals is critical to success. Drawing from the field of Positive Psychology, this article provides guidance to help you more effectively manage goals by focusing on such factors as personal values, persistence, and confidence.

Organizational and people capabilities drive performance and enable strategy, but most companies do not know how to measure or take steps to improve them. We have identified 14 characteristics common to most high-performance organizations. Organizations that pursue and embody these 14 characteristics outperform their peers and generate a competitive edge.

All too often, companies unintentionally create their own worst crises. With a little awareness of your organizational DNA, you can avoid that fate — and the headlines that go with it.

The successful acquisition of knowledge across organizational boundaries is essential for innovation and creativity. In a new article, IESE's Marco Tortoriello and his colleagues argue that organizations interested in mobilizing knowledge across formal boundaries must move beyond the simplistic version of "boundary spanners" (individuals who link different organizational units) toward a deeper understanding of the network relationships in which boundary spanners are embedded.

Workers with new skills will leave if they don’t see a career path ahead.

Do you have a vision of where your company will be in three years? In five? 10? Here’s a sure-fire way to get clear about the future you want.

Jeanie Duck is known for mixing Southern charm and sass with business insight and acumen. For the past three decades, she has used that mixture to good advantage in helping companies initiate change and make it stick. Duck recently retired as a senior partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group, but not without leaving behind ten lessons from her long career.

Tacit interactions are becoming central to economic activity. Making those who undertake them more effective isn't like tweaking a production line.

When one company merges with another, common business wisdom suggests that the newly combined firm has a lower risk of going into default, because the transaction gives the merged corporation greater diversity than the two individual participants. But according to a study by Craig Furfine, a clinical professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, and Richard Rosen, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, that common wisdom is wrong. “On average,” Furfine says, “acquiring firms become riskier post-merger.”

“The natural intuition that many people would have is that when you combine two firms, the differences between the two firms would tend to make the combined firm safer through diversification,” Furfine explains. “This is not what happens in practice.”

The study goes beyond that counterintuitive conclusion. It also highlights possible reasons for it. “Our evidence suggests that managerial motivations may play an important role,” the two researchers write. “[T]he increased default risk may arise from aggressive managerial actions affecting risk enough to outweigh the strong risk-reducing asset diversification expected from a typical merger.”

Downsizing all parts of a company equally may seem fair, but it doesn’t make sense. Targeted cuts and capability-building efforts do.

Bad bosses are generally more inept than evil, and often aren't purposefully bad, says Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She discusses common bad-boss behaviors, and how good colleagues can mobilize to overcome the roadblocks.

Fundamental change is painful. The intellectual and logistical challenges may be daunting, but the emotional confusion and chaos created during such change can virtually paralyze an organization. In today’s turbulent environment, however, change is not optional. Farsighted leaders endeavor to use times like these to sprint past their less nimble competitors. In order to capitalize on potential new opportunities, such leaders are able to harness the latent power of their organization and their people by following five basic tenets.

How do you get it done? What steps will help you progress along the path to analytic maturity? Three areas — leadership, breaking down silos, and developing and keeping talent — are fundamental to fostering an analytics culture.

If you made a list of leadership clichés, the “open door policy” would likely make the top ten. Clichés exist because truth exists within them, and clichés often beg further examination beyond the nugget of truth.

Such is the case with the “open door policy.”

Ever noticed that people don’t always do what they are supposed to do?

Whether you recently hired new employees for the first time or have lengthy experience in leading teams comprised of full-time, permanent staff plus contract workers, you may encounter situations in which people don’t do what they’ve been asked to do. Here are common scenarios and suggested fixes.

Many people don’t like planning. But in business, your action plan is the key to focusing on the right information in the right order—much like the combination to a safe—and it helps measure progress toward your goals.

Here's how you should use an action plan to accelerate growth and increase your revenues and income.