Strategy & Governance

Companies can create a powerful risk culture without turning the organization upside down. Most executives take managing risk quite seriously, the better to avoid the kinds of crises that can destroy value, ruin reputations, and even bring a company down. Especially in the wake of the global financial crisis, many have strived to put in place more thorough risk-related processes and oversight structures in order to detect and correct fraud, safety breaches, operational errors, and overleveraging long before they become full-blown disasters !

Remember when government was a friend to small business – the leading source of new jobs in the U.S.? Me neither. And now it’s getting worse. The Job Creators Alliance — a non-profit organization whose mission is to educate the public and policymakers on what it takes to create jobs – recently surveyed 600 small businesses with 100 employees or less. They found that a majority of small business owners believe the federal government has become more hostile to free enterprise in recent years.

Un-discussable contradictions can drive you nuts, as I explained in my last post.“Contradiction,” is an ambiguous term. If you and your manager have different definitions, assumptions, or information, what seems impossible to you might seem natural to him. If your manager asks you to do more but also to go home on time, you might think he is unreasonable. He may feel he is reasonable because he expects your productivity to improve.

How do you tell 400,000 people they’re terrible at their jobs? Do you hold a meeting? Send a mass e-mail? Tell only a few people and wait for your criticism to circulate, middle school-style? Or do you follow IBM Chief Executive Officer Virginia “Ginni” Rometty’s example and record a video message, post it to your company’s internal blog, and then share it with the entire workforce?

There is something powerful about the way directors speak to one another when they disagree. 

Anyone who has served on a board of directors can appreciate that each board has its own characteristic rhythm, social rules and level of effectiveness. I've been advising boards and management teams for 25 years as a consultant and C-Suite executive, and have served on several corporate boards, and can attest that it's long been a puzzle to me what exactly makes a board effective !

The cyber-ruffians who briefly tanked the stock market recently by faking a news tweet about an attack at the White House showed how much damage can be done with a few well-placed keystrokes. Those who hacked into a Department of Labor website...

It takes tremendous fortitude to utter the words “I was wrong, and I am sorry”.  I love that word: fortitude. but let’s be honest, why go to that trouble
when Bill Gates blessed us with Microsoft Word’s single click to see its synonyms, which are: strength, courage, resilience, grit, determination, endurance, guts, and staying power

In 1492 Columbus sailed off the map and assumed he had discovered a western route to the East. He named the inhabitants Indians as he was sure that he had reached the Indies. Actually he had landed at Watling Island in the Bahamas and discovered the Americas. It made him one of the most famous explorers of our times !

Here's a simple question that can tell you a lot about your life: on the weekends, are you running away from work, or towards other passions in your life?Which of the following best describes you?1.

Appreciated workers make great employees. However, a recent survey shows a gap exists between how senior management and employees perceive company recognition efforts.  While 56% of senior management surveyed felt their company was above average at appreciation, only 23% of staff shared that sentiment !

As many people hit middle age, they often start to notice that their memory and mental clarity are not what they used to be. We suddenly can't remember where we put the keys just a moment ago, or an old acquaintance's name, or the name of an old band we used to love. As the brain fades, we euphemistically refer to these occurrences as "senior moments."

Struggling retailer JC Penny hired former Apple executive Ron Johnson as the CEO to save the company. Seventeen months later, he was ousted in what many consider a colossal failure. Why? Not because he failed to take action, but rather because he tried taking the same actions that worked for him at Apple. He was guilty of a managerial bias called stereotypy – the tendency to believe that what worked for you in the past will work for you in the future !

Business executives are increasingly bypassing the IT department and spending their own budgets on technology as "it's too important for their business to leave to IT", says analyst house Forrester.

HR (specifically talent management) is an art and a science. Achieving the right balance between the two should be the goal of every global leader.

HR is an art because, at its heart, it’s about people – in all their messy glory. It’s about hiring the right people, and then inspiring and enabling them to deliver stellar performance !

Want to know how to "'hack" Google like the pros? The NSA has released a book it produced for its workers on how to find intelligence on the web.

Exceptional leaders differentiate themselves by doing a few things better. Here are six things you can learn from them.

I am convinced we are all still big kids underneath our more formal, business like exterior but sometimes we just can’t help and show it, with or without realizing it. Like recently I was sat having a coffee in a café one lunchtime, catching up on some work when the waitress who was delivering food to a young couple at a table nearby, dropped it all. It certainly went with a clatter as toasted sandwiches; fries, china, knives and forks all hit the floor. For a split second, the whole café stopped stony silent, then all at once as if in unison, everyone let out a long “oooh”. The waitress looked totally embarrassed, the young couple started to laugh and the rest of us smiled at anyone whose eye we caught, and then went back to our own business.

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."— Carl SaganMy friend and colleague Evan O'Neil, editor of Policy Innovations, sent me a list

Your first quarter is over. How did you do? It’s time for a structured review. If you run a small business or division, you can do this yourself. If you have a more complex operation, each of your departments or divisions should do these steps and share their results with you.

For years we have been talking about the education bubble and the problem that colleges charge tons of money and then graduates are unemployable and in debt. Colleges are responding by becoming job