Friday Features: 21-June-2019
Friday Features - a weekly selection of useful insights from business schools, consulting firms and publications to help you Unleash Your Leadership
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BY Lisa Burrell via MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
In a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It’s just rearranged.
Could something similar be said about businesses and the value they generate? Companies are destroyed all the time — whether by their own hand, by macro forces, or by competitors they underestimated or didn’t see coming. But each time a new player emerges, is it always at the expense of something else? Should we view growth and destruction as simply value rearranged?
BY Sachin Waikar via Stanford Business Insights
Researchers built on the self-persuasion concept with insights taken from research on perspective-taking, or the idea that putting oneself in someone else’s shoes can open one up to other viewpoints. “A great deal of research suggests that perspective-taking is a useful way to bridge gaps, reduce stereotypes, and bring people closer together,” Tormala says. “We wondered what would happen if we asked people to engage in perspective-taking right before a self-persuasion exercise.”
Their studies showed that while self-persuasion remains a powerful approach to attitude change, putting ourselves in others’ shoes can backfire in this context — in particular, when the opposition’s values diverge from our own
BY Shanil Ebrahim and Timothy Murphy via Deloitte INSIGHTS
We couldn’t function without fast thinking—the autopilot decisions that guide us through many ordinary situations. But fast thinking can lead us to blurt out the wrong thing in a meeting, make a poor strategic decision, or turn self-destructive. How to slow down? Cognitive behavioral therapy is proving helpful.
BY Derek Kennedy et al. via BCG Insights
When defined narrowly, purpose is embodied only in the products a company sells to the customers it serves. That is Purpose 1.0. Purpose 2.0 takes an expansive view of a company’s assets and resources, how it uses them to address broader societal needs, beyond its target customers, and what it should do to manage, if not avert, the unintended consequences stemming from its products and services.
BY Dave McKeown via Inc.
Excellence is about doing ordinary things, extraordinarily well, consistently. It's a simple concept that theoretically should be easy enough to put into practice. Too often, however, we let the chaos of the day-to-day stand in our way as enemies in our pursuit of excellence.
Those leaders who can rise above the urgency of the daily grind to focus on delivering excellence repeatedly and over the long run develop a degree of competency
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue of Friday Features as much as we did putting it together. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do write in.
Narayan Kamath
