Create a Resource Pool for Top Talent

An important pillar that underpins Huawei’s customer-driven organizational innovation and design is the creation of the so-called “resource pool.” This has involved Huawei putting all of its top talent into a single, virtual human resource pool. This detaches top talent from functional units and allows them to be deployed and redeployed globally at any time. By breaking the formal ties between top talent and specific … [ Read more ]

Authors: Eden Yin, Peter J. Williamson, Xiaobo Wu | Source: Learning from Huawei’s Superfluidity | Original Publication: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Huawei

Gauge Your Interview Process

Follow up with candidates — both those who got offers and those who didn’t — to get their feedback. You want all candidates who didn’t get the job to still have an incredibly positive impression of your company and your process. The world is small. Reputations are long. You want them to have wished they would have gotten the job — so much so that … [ Read more ]

Author: Dan Pupius | Source: Develop Your Hiring System Like a Product to Eliminate Bias and Boost Retention | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources

Create a “living” driver-tree of your revenue and identify leading indicators

You cannot accurately forecast what you don’t understand. While many CEOs have a strong intuitive grasp of the variables that drive their revenue, far fewer have a deep analytical understanding of them. A digital driver-tree of your business can capture the inputs that influence revenue, sales volume, margins, and costs. It can also help pinpoint forward-looking indicators that can signal when change is afoot. For … [ Read more ]

Authors: Ketil Gjerstad, Sam Farley | Source: Strategic and Annual Planning in Chaotic Times: What Every CEO Should Know | Original Publication: Boston Consulting Group | Subjects: Finance, Management

Ideas for Upper Management to Connect with the Organization

To make their vision resonate, leaders need to demonstrate that they personally care about the organization’s future and do so in an authentic, relatable way. Almost a quarter of the leaders we interviewed regularly host intimate groups to hear from junior employees, “whose voices are often faint,” in the words of one CEO. Personally connecting with people on the front lines was also a universal … [ Read more ]

Authors: Gautam Kumra, Janice Koh, Jennifer Chiang, Joydeep Sengupta, Mukund Sridhar | Source: Everyday habits: How CEOs navigate their six core responsibilities | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Let Workers Evaluate Their Managers

What happens when workers get a say in evaluating their managers? At one Chinese carmaker, the results speak for themselves: happier teams, better leadership, and a noticeable boost in productivity — without a single downside.

Worker feedback did not just lift morale — it cut turnover by half and made teams run more effectively, a big result in an industry like manufacturing where high turnover is … [ Read more ]

Authors: Jing Cai, Shing-Yi Wang | Source: Why Workers Should Evaluate Their Managers | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Profit Mapping
A profit map, the core analytical tool of profitability management, displays the profitability and cost structure of every product in every customer in the company. Profit maps show exactly where profit is flowing and where it is lost.

A profit map is not especially difficult to develop, but it is completely different from the information developed for financial reporting. Many finance managers make the … [ Read more ]

The Premortem Technique
The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and … [ Read more ]

Review Profitability Before Expanding Capacity
When faced with the need to expand manufacturing capacity and the inherent investment required, first perform a thorough profitability analysis (a profit map) of each product produced from the capacity-constrained factories (this includes profitable products being sold unprofitably to selected customers). Since many companies have a significant amount of unprofitable business, it is quite possible that stopping the unprofitable sales can free up enough capacity … [ Read more ]

Role Charters Are a Key Tool in Organization Design
Organization design can and should provide an effective and practical resolution to many stubborn strategy and business-execution issues. If a redesign is to work, senior executives need to recognize that all three elements of design—structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration—are essential in making a change.

If an organization's structure is its skeleton, then individual capabilities are its muscular system, providing energy and vitality, … [ Read more ]

Deploy a Redeployment Pool
Intel monitors changing skill requirements and institutes a redeployment program when it becomes necessary to downsize a business. Under this program, managers effectively lay off people, and the head count of the business unit is moved off the payroll. These excised people enter a redeployment pool under the auspices of human resources. Once in the pool, employees generally have four to six months, and can … [ Read more ]