Understanding the skills you can draw on within your teams is crucial knowledge.
Start tracking the abilities of your current employees to avoid a skills-gap crisis in the future.
Forming the best possible management team is a universal preoccupation for leaders.
Here's how to bring together the right executives to work on a common vision.
Rigid implementation of strategy leads to failure.
Start treating strategy as a hypothesis, using data from staff and customers as a tool for re-evaluation and revision.
How can you ensure you get the best outcome as a Western leader at the Chinese negotiating table?
Understanding the negotiating culture will give you a head start.
Insight can inspire new ideas, but without guidance from business leaders those ideas are unlikely to be successfully executed.
Here's how to be the “architect of your team’s focus and attention”.
The best social-purpose programmes are authentic, inform innovation and steer investment towards social causes.
Match your firm’s social aspirations to its growth needs to create social programmes that meet consumers’ expectations and build business value.
What is the key to becoming a major player in your industry?
If you want to get ahead of your competitors and stay there, you must acknowledge that operational excellence is vital to executing your strategy.
It's easy for entrepreneurs to overlook the need for a clear and coherent business strategy.
Here are the very basics of how to put that right.
Design thinking may be the go-to approach for positive change, but all too often it fails to deliver.
Discover the key steps to help your company use design thinking effectively.
Your company must foster a culture of innovation in order to take advantage of the recent resurgence of corporate R&D departments.
Here's how to create an innovation culture in your firm.
A groundbreaking new model, built by marketing academics at Georgia State University,could give you advance warning of a reliable employee’s potential departure.
So you can take early action to persuade them to stay.
As a successful entrepreneur and market disrupter, you might think you have all the right skills to personally handle constructive transformation of your firm.
But handing over to an outsider could pay off.
You may think you have an impressive set of intrinsic beliefs and behaviours that attract top-rate teams.
Here are some key areas where your authenticity might benefit from closer scrutiny.
GE CEO, Jeff Immelt, has turned the 125-year-old conglomerate into a startup.
As he prepares to leave his job, Immelt’s shares his own insights on how to achieve corporate transformation.
Digitisation is ushering in a dramatic change to the infrastructure underlying industrial civilisation.
If you want to be a leader of the “next industrial revolution”, you must act now.
Could an excessive reliance on data analysis be limiting your company’s scope for imagination and innovation?
Management is more than just a science; discover an alternative approach to business strategy.
Driving successful change isn’t simply about knowing what you want to achieve and getting the economics and technology right.
If you want your teams fully engaged, you will need to create and communicate an appealing vision of a better future.
You've started your own company. You are a successful entrepreneur – so successful that you have been able to hire people to work for you. You are the boss. Finally.
But being a good boss is not the same as being a good entrepreneur.
For continued success in our digitally driven age, your company’s culture needs some close scrutiny.
It’s up to you to take a strong lead rather than hold out for an organic organisational shift.
Your business is reaching a relatively mature stage of digital competence. Isn't it time you appointed a digital executive?
Whatever your circumstances, choose a chief digital officer with the ability to overcome these key obstacles.
Treat digitisation as a crisis that’s happening right now by taking the sort of decisive action normally reserved for emergencies.
If you wait for digitisation to disrupt your markets, you’ve already left it too late.
In the modern world of sales, Amazon is ever poised to make disruptive moves in any industry it sets its sights on.
But it’s how it sells, rather than what it sells, that gives it the edge.
Top-down formal training methods popular during the 1990s do not equip staff to deal with unpredictability and rapid change, write John Hagel III and John Seely for Harvard Business Review.
Instead of relying on process manuals to tell staff what to do, empower them to learn on the job, creating knowledge and developing new ways to share it.
The onward march of digitisation will change the nature of the game for everyone – including your company – over the next ten years.
It's time to recognise and accept this impending change and create a gameplan for a borderless economy.
Here are your four new critical priorities.
When you instigate any change in your organisation there will always be team members who cling doggedly to the status quo.
But ignoring the dissenters can build a virtual wall between those with conflicting viewpoints and encourage a culture of “us” and “them”.
Here's how to steer the two sides to meet in the middle.
The two key motivations driving people to become leaders are dominance and prestige.
But which trait will work best in your organisation? And do you need someone capable of displaying both?
Here's how to find the leader who best suits your organisation’s culture and goals.
It pays to avoid classic pitfalls when the business you take on has been left in a mess by your predecessor. Taking over leadership of any business, especially as an outsider, is a challenge.
Over half the leaders who take over a mess will have failed within a year and a half.
Here are five ways to avoid stepping on the land mines that were left for you.
As a senior executive, you need to balance the long-term strategic and short-term operational needs of your company. This is not easy, writes Sabina Nawaz for Harvard Business Review, when meetings so readily become dominated by day-to-day concerns.
Here's how to maintain your focus on the long term and stick to the bigger picture.
If you want to form and sustain a new habit you should adopt the “7S Model”, writes Steven MacGregor for European Business Review.
Forming a new habit is hard – making sure that new habit sticks is even harder. Here's MacGregor's a seven-step plan for forming and sustaining your new habit.
The way you think as a leader can leave gaps in the way your business and working relationships develop.
With awareness and know-how you can adapt your thinking mindset to suit the task in hand.
Here are three key strategies to help bring your thinking skills up to scratch.
Build creative dissonance into your team and you’ll turbocharge digital innovation.
If there’s one trait humans possess that artificial intelligence (AI) does not, it’s the ability to think outside the box.
To profit from AI’s ability to accelerate innovation, build your team around creatives who, collectively, combine these six contrasting personalities.
Collaboration is a buzzword in modern business.
But it doesn’t happen overnight, especially if you are seeking to transform outmoded models of command and control, says Carol Kinsey Goman, writing for Forbes.
People think of innovation as a fast-moving process that brings about large-scale change almost overnight.
But there is an alternative. A low-key approach which takes effect gradually over a much longer term. And it’s called “slow innovation”.
Executives spend nearly 23 hours per week in meetings. If your company’s meetings are badly run, that’s a lot of wasted time – and money.
It's time to institute systemic change. Here's how to escape the meeting trap.
As a leader, you may not be able to alter the adverse circumstances you and your team face.
But you can choose how you respond, writes Douglas Conant, for LinkedIn Pulse.
For innovation to thrive, you must create space for open, free-form interaction and engagement.
Get it right – build and nurture innovation-friendly networks – and the ideas will flow.
Are you taking more days away from the office, or delaying replies to emails or calls?
These are all signs that you have become disengaged as a leader. And when you disengage, your employees could follow suit, writes Peter Crush for Raconteur.
The key to resolving a disagreement between members of your team is acting as an effective mediator, write Jeanne Brett and Stephen B Goldberg for Harvard Business Review.
People will always disagree with each other – it’s human nature. But if you have to step in, follow these five steps.
Success increases when your teams have the incentive to push towards shared goals.
A Tour de France team manager describes how to convince your employees to surrender individual dreams for the common good.
In order to unlock the full potential of digital technologies and achieve “digital transformation”, your company must foster a digital leadership structure, writes Stijn Viaene for The European Business Review.
The aim is to enable your company to identify opportunities and take advantage of them quicker than your competitors.
Marketers must ditch “best practice” and avoid a predictable approach in order to differentiate their brand from the competition, writes Rory Sutherland for Raconteur.
Most businesses love rules. Follow the rules and you’ll be safe.
This might work for the accounts department, argues Sutherland, but marketing is different. Successful marketers do not follow rules.
Do your corporate training programmes actually improve the performance of your company? Daniel Dowling, writing for Fast Company, argues that in-house career coaching is a much more effective approach.
To make employees want to learn and perform better, help them prioritise self-improvement as an essential part of their lifestyle – both within and outside work.
A leader should be skilled at getting the best out of coworkers. But all too often his or her leadership style can have the opposite effect.
Karen Firestone, writing for Harvard Business Review, has some advice on how to avoid leader-induced stress.
It’s time to ditch outmoded management models in favour of embracing a leadership style that attracts, retains and encourages creative thinkers.
Exposed to the ever-present risk of digital disruption, organisations need new ideas as never before.
But if modern management is about attracting and retaining clever people, leadership methods must change.
Charming a venture capitalist used to be an art, but now it’s a science.
Why do proposals that look good on paper fail to make it through the pitch stage? That’s what assistant professor at Babson College, Lakshmi Balachandra, decided to find out.
Harvard Business Review reveals the four key points she discovered.
Marketing is one of the most rapidly developing areas of the business world and your company needs a champion with the qualities to embrace that challenge for the long haul, writes David Clarke for Strategy+Business.
It’s not so many years since the extent of most companies’ marketing efforts was an advert in the telephone directory. Today it’s a specialised field.
If you set a clear purpose and cultivate an environment of innovation and collaboration, then you can have a whole company of CEOs, says Micha Kaufman, writing for Entrepreneur.
How you organise and run your business and who you choose to do what are the key elements that determine the destiny of your company.
Could you give up being the main driver and discover a more productive role in the company you created?
There comes a time when this fundamental shift will be the best way to keep your business growing, says Jim Krampen, Seven Corners Inc co-founder and executive officer, writing for Entrepreneur.