Professional services

By building on a hierarchy of goals, consultants and managers can work toward mutual interests.

Meet the people who can coax treasure out of messy, unstructured data.

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,...

During economic slowdowns, consulting, law, and accounting firms often start offering services and taking on clients they really shouldn't, just to keep...

360-degree feedback is all the rage in companies big and small. But it is frequently bureaucratic, politically charged, and agonizing. The good news is that by understanding four paradoxes inherent to peer appraisal, managers can take some of the pain out of the process—and get better results in.

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.

How to build trust in a new era.

The genetics boom is upon us, promising everything from cures for inherited diseases to smarter children. But companies must tread carefully as the ethical debate plays out.

How can you advise others on things you haven’t done in years?

In the four years since Rob Miranda became CEO of Growing Places, a provider of on-site child care for companies in the Midwestern United States, he has...

It is over fifteen years now since I met my first really dumb multimillionaire, and it made quite an impression on me. Up till then I had thought that you needed brains to make money: I was used to being asked “If you’re so clever, why aren’t you rich?” but this was the first time […]

Lessons from professional services firms

Strategies for overscheduled, under-connected employees.

Many felt pressure to lie about their personal lives.

The ponderous United States Postal Service transformed itself into a competitive business—for a while. Its story holds lessons for any company trying to keep a change initiative from faltering.

If managers want their employees to share information, why do they encourage them to hoard it by rewarding competition among them? My colleagues Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT and Nat Bulkley at the University of Michigan and I have been studying knowledge sharing and productivity in the executive recruiting industry. We asked 71 employees, from partners […]

"Please don't tell me that I need to have a baby to have this time off." Those words were still ringing in the ears of Jessica Gonon an hour after a tense...

The power of lean operations has transformed manufacturing. Jefferson Pilot Financial proves that service companies can use the same principles to push their performance to new heights.

In 2004 the biggest problem the online shoe retailer Zappos faced was how to staff its customer call center with dedicated, high-caliber service reps....

Auditors are like building inspectors: We check out a business’s structure and systems and attest to their integrity so that investors can put their money in with confidence. But having grown up working in my dad’s business, a hardware store in Cleveland, I’ve always liked another side of this trade: helping people actually build things. […]