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THE END OF BUREAUCRACY

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini | page 100

While most business leaders recognize that bureaucracy squashes initiative,risk taking, and creativity, it continues to thrive. In a complex global environment, it’s seen as a necessary coping mechanism.

Many look to start-ups for an answer. But the most promising solution may have emerged in an unlikely place: the world’s largest appliance maker, Haier. Under a renegade CEO, it has been divided into 4,000 self-managing microenterprises. About 250 are market facing(“users”), and the rest(“nodes”) supply them with components and services like IT and HR support. Users can hire and fire nodes—or contract with outside providers—as they see fit, and nodes’ revenues are tied to their users’ success.

Ultimately, everyone is accountable to the company’s customers. Everyone is also encouraged to be an entrepreneur. All targets are ambitious, and rewards are ti ered, performance based, and potentially hefty. So far that formula seems to be working beautifully, producing 18% yearly revenue growth for a decade and $2 billion in market valuefrom new ventures.

HBR Reprint R1806C

BETTER PEOPLE ANALYTICS

Paul Leonardi and Noshir Contractor | page 110

Lately, people analytics—using statistical insights from employee data to manage talent—has gotten a lot of hype and even won mainstream acceptance.Yet most fi rms lack an understanding of which talent dimensions drive performance in their organizations. Why? Their analytics examine only the attributes of employees, when people’s interactions are equally, if not more, telling.

Research shows that a lot of employees’ success can be explainedby their relationships—something that’s the focus of a new discipline, relational analytics. The key is finding “structural signatures”: patterns in social networks that predict who will have good ideas, which employees have the most influence (it’s not senior leaders),which teams will be efficient, which will innovate best, where silos exist, and which employees firms can’t afford to lose.

This article describes what indicatorsto watch for and how most firms already have the raw material they need to build relational analytics models: the “digital exhaust” from their internal communications.

HBR Reprint R1806E

HOW TO SELL NEW PRODUCTS

Thomas Steenburgh and Michael Ahearne | page 122

Senior leaders have great confidence in their ability to develop innovations, say the authors, but not in their ability to commercialize them. This may result from a lack of formal processes and effective talent-management strategies. Steenburgh and Ahearne suggest a new approach: Assess the skills of your salespeople systemati cally. Train them for knowledge and resilience rather than focusing on a product’s bells and whistles. Create a psychological profile of the ideal buyer. And assign strategic account managers to your most important customers.

When new products are launched, the authors write, the best companies are strategically aligned,from the sales force to the C-suite. HR creates competency maps and works with sales managers to establish training and coaching programs. Frontline sales managers support the learning process that their reps go through in the fi eld. And top leaders make sure that pressure to meet earnings targets doesn’t stand in the wayof future growth.

HBR Reprint R1806G