Structure Your Presentation Like a Story – HBR

Recommended if you are in a leadership and management role.  Communications how-to.

Excerpt: After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved.

That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle’s three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that’s easy to digest, remember, and retell.

Here’s how it looks when you chart it out:

Read full article via Structure Your Presentation Like a Story – Nancy Duarte – Harvard Business Review.

5 Ways Competitive Intelligence Teams Can Prove Their Worth

There is definitely value to be gained by competitive intelligence teams, but the understanding and how-to are, in my opinion, yet to be mastered.  Good read for all leadership and management

Excerpt:  For CI efforts to shine bright from the top of the food chain, CI teams must prove their efforts positively impact the quality of decision-making among executives and departments leaders. It’s actually not about quantifying tactics or measuring ROI like other service functions may do, CI functions must prove their value is supportive, much like accounting or project management. So instead of waiting for management to ask about analysis and results, CI functions must be proactive and transparent about showing it.

Here are five ways CI teams can show their value day-to-day and in the long term:

Read full article 5 Ways Competitive Intelligence Teams Can Prove Their Worth. From Clear Technology to Compete

Develop Perfect Memory With The Memory Palace Technique

Here is a tool to improve your memory for all leadership and management.   I have been fortunate in this department.  Although sometimes I say my memory is both a gift and a curse …. but mostly positive.  I credit my many years of constantly strengthening my memory in my work with many clients and ALL their numbers.  I am frequently called upon to help with an issue that  starts with “do you remember”  ….  I am happy that most of the time, my memory (even for many clients) can exceed the individual client’s memory of THEIR issue.

Excerpt:  The Memory Palace technique is based on the fact that we’re extremely good at remembering places we know. A ‘Memory Palace’ is a metaphor for any well-known place that you’re able to easily visualize. It can be the inside of your home, or maybe the route you take every day to work. That familiar place will be your guide to store and recall any kind of information. Let’s see how it works.

Read full article via Develop Perfect Memory With The Memory Palace Technique.  From Intelligence Daily

The Brain Performance Test

For all leadership and management.   The heavy weight partners on this test based on neuroscience is impressive.  Short test (and fun) with specialized report to let you know your training areas.

Excerpt:  The Brain Performance Test is a battery of assessments designed to measure your performance in five core cognitive areas. Developed by Lumosity’s neuroscientists, the test is based on the same assessments that doctors and researchers use to measure brain function.

via The Brain Performance Test.  From Lumosity’s

Learning Styles – Learning Skills

Another tool for leadership and management.  Hone your learning skills to effectively handle the information challenges presented daily.

Excerpt:  Once you know where your preferences lie on each of these dimensions, you can begin to stretch beyond those preferences and develop a more balanced approach to learning. Not only will you improve your learning effectiveness, you will open yourself up to many different ways of perceiving the world. Balance is key. You don’t want to get too far on any one side of the learning dimensions. When you do that you limit your ability to take in new information and make sense of it quickly, accurately, and effectively.

Read full article via Learning Styles – Learning skills from MindTools.com#np.

The Next Wave of Process Strategy – HBR

Leadership and management considerations in today’s and tomorrow’s environments requires constant attention.

Excerpt:  When it comes to operational improvement, organizations today are light years ahead of where they were two decades ago, but there’s no time to celebrate yesterday’s wins. They won’t immunize your organization against this decade’s march of ongoing progress. That’s because information technology — not just the Internet, but also mobile devices, “big data” for intensive data-crunching, and other computer hardware and software — will render even some of today’s most proficient business processes obsolete by the end of the decade.

The question for top management is no longer whether your organization’s processes need to be improved, but rather which ones, how much, and when.

I see three big opportunities:

Read full article via The Next Wave of Process Strategy – Brad Power – Harvard Business Review.

Why Changed Goals Require Changed Metrics

Important read with small business takeaways.  Explore why your ROI has probably changed and what to do about it.

Business needs, changes in management, competitive pressures, or any combination, can lead to significant changes in paid search goals. Where the enterprise was using paid search for brand awareness and customer acquisition and was happy to invest in future growth, now the goal shifts to making search profitable in the immediate term, or vice-versa.

The beauty of paid search is that we can turn on a dime to hit those new goals.

The problem is that flawless execution will produce “bad” year-over-year comparisons that are a natural consequence of the change in goal. Senior executives in other departments and consultants (having no institutional memory) will proceed to beat up the paid search manager for doing her/his job well.

Read full article via Why Changed Goals Require Changed Metrics.  SEO Search Engine

The Radical Beauty of Three Simple Management Practices – HBR

I think everyone in leadership and management should read this.  Do you believe your management is in the top tier — think again.

Excerpt:   The vast majority of organizations, it turns out, have a highly inflated view of their management practices. The reality is that many of them are unable to take such basic steps as setting achievable benchmarks, removing underperformers, collecting useful data, or offering coherent bonus schemes to motivate employees. These deficiencies are as common in health care and education as they are in manufacturing and retail.

The good news is that much of the opportunity for improvement lies in the hands of people exactly like you — managers of teams, departments, units, and divisions. And even small improvements in practices can have a huge impact:

Read full article via The Radical Beauty of Three Simple Management Practices – Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen – HBS Faculty – Harvard Business Review.

Four New Tools for Brain Workouts – HBR

I loved this article.  For all leadership and management.  Have you accepted the false premise “you are as you are now and that is the end of it?”  Read this article!

Excerpt:  How do you sharpen your thinking?

We’ve written already about how you can use auto-analytics to measure and improve the tasks you take on every day at work, but there’s another class of auto-analytics that help you improve at a more fundamental level. These tools strengthen the underlying brain and behavioral structures that support smarter thinking, decisions, and routines in any professional field.

Here are four new tools that I’ve spotted in my research. I use the term “DIY” because each option can be tested, and learning outcomes quantified, without the need for an outside instructor or expert.

Quantified Mind is a personal online cognitive testing platform based on psychometrics, the measurement of cognitive performance in areas like reaction time, executive function, and verbal learning.

Read full article via Four New Tools for Brain Workouts – H. James Wilson – Harvard Business Review.

Can Business Embed IT?

The expected changes today will have on the IT management of tomorrow.  Good read information technology.

Excerpt:  The successful ones will. We think you’re about to see a bifurcation of IT. At Forrester we’ve been talking about this term business technology for years and years. It’s happening in the world but what it really means is that there will always be a need for a chief infrastructure officer, all the back end, the network the data center, the telecom, that all still has to be managed well. But now we are in an age with digital all around us where we can’t the separate business function and business capability from the underlying technology. The latter embodies the former in many cases now. So you’re likely to see CIOs who are much more business savvy go in a couple of directions. In one case they will start to be leaders of a business group or a business function and take the knowledge they have around technology to help expedite the differentiation they are trying to drive in a particular business function. In the other you’ll see them anointed into a sort of chief technology officer role where they’ll be more responsible for technology development and technology delivery.

Read full article via Can Business Embed IT? – Information Management Online Article.

For Whom Golden Parachutes Shine — The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance

They still exist and there are still those that believe them to be beneficial.  Personally, haven’t seen a company with one of these in a very long time.  What do you think?  Human resources management

Excerpt:  Golden parachutes, those packages that reward top executives if their company is acquired, have attracted much attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. Defenders of golden parachutes believe that they provide executives with incentives to facilitate a sale of their companies. While the evidence confirms this, it indicates that golden parachutes have significant costs as well and might fail to serve the interests of shareholders over all.

Shareholder resolutions opposing golden parachutes have often received substantial support over time. Congress adopted tax rules aimed at discouraging large golden parachutes, and the rules created during the financial crisis precluded companies receiving government support from providing golden parachute payments to top executives. Subsequently, the Dodd-Frank Act mandated advisory shareholder votes on all future adoptions of golden parachutes.

Read full article via For Whom Golden Parachutes Shine — The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.

Managerial Overconfidence and Accounting Conservatism — The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance

Small business takeaways, of-interest and need-to-know.

Excerpt:  In our paper, Managerial Overconfidence and Accounting Conservatism, forthcoming at the Journal of Accounting Research, we provide evidence on the relation between CEO overconfidence, an important managerial trait, and the aggressiveness of financial reporting. Building on a growing literature in finance which shows that overconfidence can distort investment, financing, and dividend policies, we demonstrate that firms with overconfident CEOs make more aggressive financial reporting choices than other firms.

Overconfident managers are defined as managers who overestimate future returns from their firms’ investments and systematically overestimate the probability of good performance

Read full article via Managerial Overconfidence and Accounting Conservatism — The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.

Positive Thinking, Rational Thinking, Thought Awareness – Stress Management Training

It is not the situation that creates stress but it is how one handles that situation that creates stress.  For all leadership and management

Excerpt:  This set of tools helps you to manage and counter the stress of negative thinking.

Thought Awareness helps you identify the negative thinking, unpleasant memories, and misinterpretation of situations that may interfere with your performance and damage your self-confidence. This allows you to deal with them.

Rational Thinking helps you to challenge these negative thoughts and either learn from them, or refute them as incorrect.

You can then use Positive Thinking to create positive affirmations that you can use to counter negative thoughts. These affirmations neutralize negative thoughts and build your self-confidence. You can also use Positive Thinking to find the opportunities that are almost always present, to some degree, in a difficult situation.

Read full article via Positive Thinking, Rational Thinking, Thought Awareness – Stress Management Training from MindTools.com#np.

An Adaptive Approach to Managing Innovation

Recommended read leadership and management.   Ideas of Axelrod and Cohen as basis of tools.

Excerpt:  It is this author’s view that the gap in management practice, where it exists, results from a mismatch between traditional management methods (command and control) and the unique nature of innovation as a system having non-linear behavior.

This approach makes it possible to build on the ideas of Axelrod and Cohen (2000) regarding complex adaptive systems in general, applying their framework specifically to managing innovation. This permits us to describe the role of managers and specify actions they can take to advance the process. The Axelrod/Cohen framework is evolutionary and has been developed so that improvements can be generated even though every element of a system may not be fully understood and the outcome may not be predictable (a good fit with innovation).

Read introduction and download pdf here via Enterprise innovation articles.  Innovation Tools

How to Outsmart the Competition Through Superior Knowledge Management

Good read — the perspective is a little different but the proof is there.  For all leadership and management

Excerpt:  Superior knowledge management (KM) is often credited with boosting shareholder value, jumpstarting innovation and improving customer service, but with little evidence to support vendors’ heady claims, executives have to rely on faith instead of facts when approving costly initiatives.

Finally, research confirms that acquiring, sharing and using knowledge in meaningful ways definitively improves a company’s return on assets, sales and operating income.

“We only had soft evidence to support the link between superior KM and the bottom line,” says Jiming Wu, Ph.D., assistant professor of management for the College of Business and Economics at California State University, East Bay. “Now after studying the results of 62 companies, we’ve confirmed the link between superior financial performance and superior knowledge management.”

Smart Business spoke with Wu about the tangible and intangible benefits of superior KM.

Read full article via How to outsmart the competition through superior knowledge management | Smart Business.