Process management

What you measure is what you get. Senior executives understand that their organization’s measurement system strongly affects the behavior of managers and employees. Executives also understand that traditional financial accounting measures like return-on-investment and earnings-per-share can give misleading signals for continuous improvement and innovation—activities today’s competitive environment demands. The traditional financial performance measures worked well […]

Steps you can take now to prepare for the future.

After Wall Street firms repeatedly had to shell out millions to settle discrimination lawsuits, businesses started to get serious about their efforts...

Everyone agrees that managing change is tough, but few can agree on how to do it. Most experts are obsessed with "soft" issues, such as culture and motivation,...

Recently added to the growing assortment of quantitative tools for business decision making is the Critical Path Method—a powerful but basically simple technique for analyzing, planning, and scheduling large, complex projects. In essence, the tool provides a means of determining (2) which jobs or activities, of the many that comprise a project, are “critical” in […]

Planning, build-up, implementation, and closeout.

We are programmed at an early age to think that failure is bad. That belief prevents organizations from effectively learning from their missteps.

Six lessons on moving quickly under pressure.

Over the past 25 to 30 years, agile innovation methods have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market,...

Corporate executives and consumers have in recent years adopted divergent views of product quality. Several recent surveys indicate how wide the quality perception gap is: Three out of five chief executives of the country’s largest 1,300 companies said in a 1981 survey that quality is improving; only 13% said it is declining.1 Yet 49% of […]

Projects fail at a spectacular rate. One reason is that too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase. By making it safe for dissenters who are knowledgeable about the undertaking and worried about its weaknesses to speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success. Research […]

Like many other companies, Deloitte realized that its system for evaluating the work of employees--and then training them, promoting them, and paying...

Companies like Shell and DBS Bank are using it to change how their work gets done.

Competitive success depends on learning, but most people, including professionals in leadership positions, are not very good at it. Learning is a function...

Financial incentives don’t reduce errors. Employees must be passionate about eliminating mistakes.

You've been ordered to reduce overhead by 10%, 20%, or even (wince) 30%. How do you do it? First, don't expect to reach your target with a single big...

A few years ago, a major manufacturing-based conglomerate asked a gifted mathematician to join its corporate staff. One of his first assignments was to design a system that senior managers could use to evaluate the operating efficiency of the company’s various divisions. He devoted many months to the assignment and also tapped the knowledge of […]

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

Consumers' tastes are changing fast, but one things remains: they value quality, value, and inspiration in their products.

Researchers who studied the Italian film industry identified four key factors.