|THEORY &
PRACTICE|
Defining Moments
by Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.
(Harvard Business School Press)
How should you respond if you are offered an opportunity at work solely because of your race or gender? What should you do if a single parent on your staff is falling behind in his or her work? How do you lead the launch of a product you know will be controversial?
Resolving such dilemmas often requires more than simply following the injunction to "do the right thing," says HBS professor Joseph Badaracco in Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right. The book helps managers tackle the more complex and troubling questions of what to do when "doing the right thing" requires doing something else wrong or leaving a right thing undone. It examines choices in work and life and the critical points at which the two become one.
Drawing on philosophy, literature, and three stories that reveal the increasing complexity that today¹s managers face, Defining Moments provides examples, action steps, and a flexible framework that managers at all levels can use to make the choices that will shape not only their careers but their characters.
Games Businesses Play
by Pankaj Ghemawat
(MIT Press)
Whether or not game theory has applications for business strategy remains unclear - to date, empirical studies have been too limited to yield any definitive conclusions. In Games Businesses Play: Cases and Modules, HBS professor Pankaj Ghemawat addresses this knowledge gap, using detailed, longitudinal analyses of competitive interaction to explore the uses and limits of game theory as a tool for students of business strategy.
As a basis for research as well as a source of teaching materials, Ghemawat focuses on individual cases. He pairs each with a customized game-theoretical model, an approach that presents a wide array of commitment decisions. He analyzes the match between case outcomes and model predications both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The case method offers clues about how to refine existing theory. In addition to helping with theory development, the cases also illustrate the ways in which game theory can help explain actual patterns of interaction.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers of Management
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
(Harvard Business School Press)
In a new book that draws on nearly two decades of her writing and commentary, HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has collected the best of her wit and wisdom on management thinking and practice. Looking back across the changing landscape of business, Kanter helps reveal what has worked, what has not, and what businesses still need to learn. She also offers her assessment of the challenges of leadership and innovation that organizations face today and in the future.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers of Management incorporates all the research articles and essays Kanter has written for the Harvard Business Review, including commentaries she wrote as the magazine¹s editor from 1989 to 1992. The book covers many of the most important issues currently facing business - strategy, innovation, customer focus, global trends, leadership for change, strategic alliances, compensation systems, and community responsibility. Kanter¹s enduring message is that rigidity and top-down management must give way to practices that will allow people to flourish - the key to organizational success.
Do Lunch or Be Lunch
by Howard H. Stevenson
(Harvard Business School
Press)
According to HBS professor Howard Stevenson, most of human history and much of human behavior have been driven by the need to predict and shape the future.
In Do Lunch or Be Lunch: The Power of Predictability in Creating Your Future, Stevenson (with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank) argues that predictability in the business organization - created by practices such as establishing precise performance guidelines and developing long-term value - helps build trust by allowing employees to know what¹s expected of them. Predictability also enhances the firm¹s stability while leaving room for vitality and creativity, Stevenson asserts.
While technological advances, economic dislocations, and regulatory shifts are putting increased strains on predictability, Stevenson writes, the management fads often invoked in response to these changes actually undermine predictability.
In Do Lunch or Be Lunch, Stevenson discusses techniques for honing predictive power, making decisions, and measuring risk, as well as for understanding conflict and improving human interactions.
As general managers advance through their careers, they are often asked to bring their skills to bear on a new level of responsibilities. For the recently appointed country or business-unit manager of a multinational organization, such challenges can be especially daunting. To serve the needs of this type of manager, the School has introduced a comprehensive, six-week Executive Education program called The General Manager (TGM). The course enables participants to step back from their day-to-day responsibilities to gain a broad, integrated perspective on general management.
"We want TGM participants to understand how their role encompasses all organizational disciplines; to learn to manage up, down, across, and outside the organization; to perform a working assessment of their organizations; and to formulate solutions to their individual job challenges," notes TGM course head Professor Joseph L. Bower.
Relatively new to her position as vice president and general manager of North Carolina/South Carolina Consumer Services at BellSouth Telecommunications, Gloria R. Cockerham enrolled in TGM last spring, because she wanted to sharpen her skills, especially when it came to managing in a truly competitive environment. She suddenly found herself making decisions for the largest and most widely dispersed organization she had ever managed, and she "wanted to confirm that some of my own actions and instincts were on target." Cockerham's concern is common to many managers - and TGM participants - in similar positions in a broad range of businesses. Offered for the second time last spring, TGM brought together 43 senior-level general managers from more than a dozen countries, representing industries such as mining, textiles, computers and software, packaged goods, and pharmaceuticals. According to Bower, this "homogeneous mix" - a group that was demographically diverse but similar in managerial function - brought significant advantages to the classroom. "The participants' shared perspectives created a powerful bond that made for some very interesting discussions," he notes.
Cockerham agrees. "All of us have had to deal with restructuring, pay-for-performance, and personnel issues in a downsized or downsizing environment," she says. "We didn't need to have any background on these issues explained to us." With this solid foundation, she adds, the more than one hundred case studies used in the course came alive instantly, and the classroom visits by some of the cases' protagonists were enthusiastically received. Furthermore, the program's structure - two three-week units (one in March and one in May) - enables participants to identify a problem or issue, test some solutions between sessions, and then get feedback and analysis from participants and faculty when they return to HBS.
TGM's pool of collective experience was also cited by other participants as a key asset of the course. Jeffrey D. Thiemann, general manager of the rapidly growing NetMetrix division at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado Springs, Colorado, notes, "I came back with specific tools for doing my job, but it's learning from the experiences of others that broadened my own awareness as a manager." Following TGM's final session, Thiemann says he had "the confidence to rely more on my instincts and to take action quickly on less data, which is probably a result of studying so many cases and testing some of the principles on the job."
Next year, TGM's administrators hope to attract more clusters of general managers from a single company. "It's helpful to discover that diverse views exist within one's own organization," explains Bower, who is looking forward to a bright future for this innovative new program.
by Nancy O. Perry
Short Takes
A summary of selected new research by HBS faculty.
Green Stuff: Value, Risk, and Environmental Management
Environmental issues increasingly influence companies in their approach to fundamental business concerns. How these matters play out in terms of corporate behavior is the subject of a working paper, "Environmental Quality and Economic Advantage: A Framework for Understanding Corporate Environmental Management," by HBS associate professor Forest Reinhardt.
"Does it pay firms to be Œenvironmentally friendly?'" Reinhardt writes. "It makes more sense...to ask when it pays, not whether it pays." Accordingly, Reinhardt examines the circumstances under which companies can, in terms of the environment, most successfully create value or lessen business risk. (An example of value created and risk reduced might be found with a newly developed, disease-resistant plant strain: it both enhances yields, creating value, and diminishes the need for herbicides, reducing risk.)
In general, Reinhardt asserts, it is market leaders who, by virtue of their power to shape the nature of competition in their industries, can force other firms to follow. Flexing similar muscle are firms with technological leadership, especially those in rapidly changing businesses. Such companies gain advantage because regulators tend to look to the most technologically advanced operations when setting industry standards.
On the whole, larger and more prominent firms are most likely to need, want, and be able to derive economic advantage from a focus on environmental management. Reinhardt argues that in order to manage the environmental challenge successfully, firms should improve their cost management, reduce risk, create and capture value, and help develop new approaches to complicated economic and social problems.
These goals, Reinhardt notes, have motivated and characterized successful firms for decades, in the environmental arena and elsewhere. Thus, he concludes, "The way to situate business in the context of the natural environment is to integrate the natural environment into the mainstream of business."
Making It Work: Understanding Race Relations in Organizations
The workplace remains the primary locus of racial interaction in American society; as such, it is a valuable, albeit neglected area for research, write HBS associate professor David A. Thomas and Karen L. Proudford of Morgan State University in a working paper titled "Making Sense of Race Relations in Organizations: Theories for Practice."
The authors study race relations in the organization using the conceptual frameworks of intergroup and psychoanalytic theory. Intergroup theory holds that individuals in organizations belong to two types of groups that shape their experiences: identity groups (i.e., race, cultural background, gender, age) and organization groups (defined by shared task roles and hierarchical position). From psychoana-lytic theory, the authors draw on elements that particularly help elucidate individual and group behavior in racially mixed organizational settings. (One such useful psychoanalytic concept is "splitting," a defense mechanism against anxiety in which the individual ascribes positive attributes to one entity ‹ usually one's own group ‹ while imbuing another group with negative associations.)
The authors apply these theories and concepts to several common organizational problems. For example, they examine how a majority group's perception that a minority group or individual is performing poorly can mushroom into a self-fulfilling cycle of negativity. Discouraged at being deemed incompetent or not worthy of advancement, the minority person or group often tends to underperform, thus reinforcing diminished expectations all around.
Examining such a situation with both intergroup and psychoanalytic tools, Thomas and Proudford help reveal the dynamics at the heart of the matter. Intergroup theory highlights the power of the many organizational pressures and relationships that may be affecting the individual's performance. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on the individual's anxiety, beliefs, and values, underscoring their enduring importance as determinants of a person's behavior in any setting, irrespective of race.
With greater understanding of such dynamics, the authors conclude, organizations will do a better job of managing across races, thus contributing to a more positive workplace and a healthier society. Alumni may request copies of HBS working papers by calling 617-495-6852.