In both C suites and boardrooms, discussions about business performance usually center on topics like market momentum, M&A opportunities, capital management, and productivity enhancements. While these factors are important, in my experience they are best leveraged when employees are engaged, aligned, and motivated to win. In the course of leading six successful turnarounds and transformations at Schering-Plough, Pharmacia, Pharmacia and Upjohn, Wyeth, and two operating units within Novartis,...

If you're in a workplace in America right now, chances are most of the people around you are pretty checked out. You might even be plodding through the day yourself, counting down the hours until you can fly out the door. Or you're doing your very best to make your unhappiness known to anyone within earshot. This type of disengagement is outlined by Gallup's latest "State of the...

During a painfully dull futures workshop Down Under, a simple word change helped transform a stagnant discussion. The facilitator, with a world-class flair for bafflegab and platitude, had asked the group to envision products customers might desire a decade hence. The conversation regurgitated cliché after customer-centric product cliché until the moment the team rejected and replaced the facilitator's language. Instead of brainstorming new "products," the group instead collectively...

Another women's conference finds another predominantly female group of HR Directors seeking to improve the gender balance in their firms. In reality, women are working far too hard at an issue actually beyond their power to solve. Corporate leaders must recognize that additional women-dominated efforts are not the way to get companies to take the gender issue seriously. Rather, the solution requires action by those in leadership positions,...

Kantar Worldpanel predicts that 75% of growth for consumer products companies in the next decade will come through new product development. And yet, more than half of senior executives declare themselves unsatisfied with the financial returns of product innovation. Why? Because their innovation models don't determine where the growth is actually coming from. So, companies end up developing a product that tested well in market research only to...

Companies in commoditizing industries tend to follow one of two strategies: either they try to find new services to offer around the product or they compete on price. The one certain outcome of these two strategies, of course, is to accelerate the commoditization process itself. But, as an HBR article on this topic once pointed out, even commodities have customers. And where there are customers there can be...

Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called Functional Fixedness and while you probably won't need to build a fort during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from...

"A properly integrated business model forms the essence of a company's competitive advantage," my colleague Mark Johnson advises. That quote ran through my head as I watched a young man in a track suit prance around my table twirling a 10-foot noodle. I was in one of the Shanghai locations of a chain of hot pot restaurants called Hai Di Lao. If anything deserves to be commoditized, it...

An interview with Scott Barry Kaufman adjunct assistant professor of psychology at New York University and author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. Download this podcast...

We all know no one posts the best jobs. The really juicy positions usually get handed around like a treasured prize within social networks. Maybe you'll see a notice on LinkedIn, or a posting on your alumni listserv — but probably not. The most exciting jobs have an infinite number of aspirants, so unless you've been personally recommended by someone close to the action, it's difficult to get...

What advice would you give new college graduates about launching themselves into the workforce? Beginning May 12, 2013, I facilitated a discussion around this question on LinkedIn. The hundreds of responses offered a wealth of advice and insight about what it takes to make a successful transition from college into the workforce. I distilled the discussion down into twelve key pieces of advice — "rules" if you will...

Why is it that when your friends, your significant other, and especially your mom tell you, You need to stop working so much! — you hesitate? On the one hand, you know they have a point. It's unsustainable to pull 12- to 14-hour days on a consistent basis, and you feel burnt-out and cranky. But when it comes to actually setting boundaries, you stall and tell yourself and...