|
|
| If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. |
|
| Volume 8, Issue 5 |
|
In This Issue:
 The world's most innovative companies
Top management: Interviewing to win
 Creating people advantage: How to address HR challenges
 New CEO, old team
Shocks to the supply chain
A Time to Mourn–or a Time to Mine?
 Off the shelf: Some mutual fund numbers look great, but for whom?
The wealth trajectory: Rewards for the few
 Presenting smart: What's the worst presentation advice?
What employees want
The wackiest interview blunders
 How healthy can you get on diet alone?
|
|
|
 |
The world's most innovative companies
Suddenly, innovation has a bull's-eye on its back.
As the recession debate shifts from "what if" to "how long," slashing research and development budgets just got a lot more tempting. That high-risk product in your pipeline? It's about to get much more scrutiny. And the "chief innovation officer" your
CEO brought in last year to show his commitment to creativity? He'd better start proving his worth. Outside consultants are starting to pick up on the effects of such belt-tightening. "I'm seeing it in my business," says Jeneanne Rae, president of
Alexandria (Va.)-based consulting firm Peer Insight. "There's this sense of which shoe's going to drop next." Others are seeing two camps emerge. "One is saying times are tough, so it's the most important time for us to innovate," says Scott Anthony, president of
Innosight, a consultancy founded by Harvard Business School professor and innovation guru Clayton M. Christensen. "The other is saying 'we simply don't have the ability to think about innovation right now.' There's a real separation between the innovation
haves and have-nots." Among the haves are the companies that make up the 2008 BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group ranking of the World's Most Innovative Companies. They nurture cultures that value creative people in good times and bad. They develop a
diverse portfolio of projects that helps them weather dud ideas. And no finger-wagging Wall Street analyst is going to keep them from doubling down on smart bets that will position them well when the economy rights itself again. "Strong companies understand
this, and during a recession, they invest," says Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, No. 2 on our list. "And they get pummeled for it: `How could you do this? You're arrogant. The world is falling apart.'" The good news: There can be an upside to the
downturn. Low-cost methods for creating new products are easier than ever as emerging markets provide both cheap labor and booming pockets for growth. That's something No. 4 General Electric is finding...
Read the article. Back to top
Top management: Interviewing to win
Joseph Daniel McCool is a writer, speaker and advisor on executive recruiting and corporate management succession best practices. He is the author of Deciding
Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, which has been recognized as "one of the 30 best business books of 2008" by Soundview Executive Book Summaries.
|
How do you measure the cost of the big fish that got away?
How do you measure the cost of the big fish that got away? If your organization is competing to recruit world-class management talent (perhaps because it has failed to develop potential successors from within), the cost of seeing top prospects bail out of
the executive search process can seem very high indeed. Consider what those individuals might have achieved for your company had they taken their candidacy to the next level. Then think about what they might deliver for one of your chief rivals. Pretty
disheartening, isn't it? Yet this is what organizations face when senior management fails to recognize the importance of the executive candidate interview process and the effect it can have on the company's performance trajectory. Not surprisingly, corporate
bosses usually want to play a role in interviewing and assessing top candidates' experience, qualifications, and fit with senior leadership. [Even the hiring of a
top-notch executive recruiter can't guarantee there won't be bumps along the way. Yes, your company may be doing the buying, but you can't assume it's a buyer's market... ]
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Creating people advantage: How to address HR challenges worldwide through 2015
People challenges are greater than ever before at companies, thanks to globalization, an aging workforce, and employee desires for work-life balance.
This report, which is based on a worldwide survey of more than 4,700 executives, lays out a comprehensive approach to enable companies to understand the HR environment and
how they can create a people advantage. When companies that understand how to measure the effectiveness of their people and harness their talents, they will achieve a lasting edge...
View PDF. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
New CEO, old team
|
You’ve just gotten the word. You are the new CEO—or maybe the word is that your offer to acquire another company has just been accepted.
Whatever the source, you will now have a new bunch of executives reporting to you, and you know that your success will depend on them. Right away, you have two tasks—you have to choose who your team will be, and you have to help them be successful with you.
Complicating the situation, you have little time to spend on these tasks (after all, you are busier than you have ever been—and it isn’t going to let up). And the fact is, managing executives from the CEO position is just different. Among other factors,
everyone you now meet with has an agenda. As one CEO put it, “You no longer even know if your jokes are funny. Everyone will laugh, just because you are CEO.” From our work with CEOs in transition, and from interviews with dozens of others, perhaps we can provide
some facts and advice to help you with these twin tasks in the limited time you have available. First...
Read the article. Back to top
Shocks to the supply chain
Last summer, when The Boeing Co. announced it would delay the introduction of its 787 Dreamliner, CEO Jim McNerney blamed the problem on the company’s supply chain.
A large product like an airplane uses thousands of individual parts, but Boeing attempted to mitigate the smaller, individual supply chain quandary by using major suppliers to construct large pieces of the plane. Parts of the wings, for example, are
being assembled as far away as Japan. McNerney reported to the press that the delays were attributed to a “slowing up in the supply chain rather than a fatal flaw in the supply chain.”Boeing’s problem with its supply chain is emblematic of a challenge all
U.S. companies now face: managing supply chains that are longer and more convoluted than ever before. For any given product, raw materials can be sourced in Africa, refined in India, produced in China, assembled in Mexico and finally distributed in the U.S. Today,
however, the biggest problem—faced not only by manufacturers but also by service companies like restaurants—is the rising cost of the supply chain. This is not necessarily because of the manufacturing piece of the chain, which can be performed in
low-wage countries such as China, but because of the rapid rise in transport costs.[“Businesses will continue to span supply chains across the globe,” avers Dan Brutto, president of UPS International. “However, rising fuel costs are driving
companies to move away from a ‘one-size-fits all’ approach to transportation management and toward implementing a multi-modal strategy that reflects product value, life cycle
and handling characteristics at stock-keeping unit level. The side effect is that supply chains are becoming more agile and more closely matched to strategic business plans...”]
Read the article. Back to top
A Time to Mourn–or a Time to Mine?
|
This is a gem!” exclaimed the MD of a renowned European technology firm as he examined the sample of a perfectly formed piece of plastic lens shown to him by the chief technology officer of a Singaporean plastic injection company.
“Why would your parent company want to sell the company away now that it has finally built up all these technological capabilities?” The CTO could only shrug and explain that the parent company was facing cash flow problems and had little choice but to sell
its subsidiary to raise cash to pay its current bank loans. Like the sample of the cut plastic, many “gems” can be unearthed across the world, especially in Asia and Europe, due to the current credit crisis. They are companies that have great growth potential
when cut and polished and are fundamentally solid, but have been affected by the credit crunch. This presents opportunities for strategic acquirers to dig and buy the gems at a discount, especially now that the miners who had been most active in digging them out
over the past four years—the private equity firms—are finding it increasingly difficult to finance their acquisitions with cheap bank loans. For example, in Europe, the valuations of private company sales to private equity has fallen by 14 percent in the
third quarter of 2007 to a multiple of 15.3 times a company’s earnings. Meanwhile, the valuations of private company sales to corporates fell by just 2 percent to 13.4 times earnings. The private equity buyout premium—which pushed up the price/earnings ratio on
the MSCI-600 of “median” stocks to a record high of 20 in May 2007—has vanished. The P/E ratios on the DOW 30 big stocks are much lower—because they are too big even for the large private equity firms like KKR and Carlyle. [For companies with capital or the
ability to raise capital, a window of opportunity to mine gems from around the world has opened. Warren Buffett, Wilbur Ross and Ron Perelman are plunging into the mine shafts to scoop up companies hit by the financial turmoil after years of being shoved to the
side by high valuations and fierce competition from private equity. These savvy “value” investors believe the financial and capital market crisis now offers a great opportunity to dig out the gems. In fact, Warren Buffett has...]
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Off the shelf: Some mutual fund numbers look great, but for whom?
THE public stock markets are in the throes of one of the biggest and most egregious financial scandals in modern history, according to Louis Lowenstein.
The scandal has little to do with highly publicized abuses like market timing or insider trading. It is not directly related to the current credit and subprime mortgage crises. Instead, it involves the $10 trillion in life savings that 90 million individual
investors in the United States have entrusted to mutual funds. This unprecedented scandal is documented in succinct but gory detail by Mr. Lowenstein in
The Investor’s Dilemma: How Mutual Funds Are Betraying Your Trust and What to Do About It. Mr. Lowenstein is a lawyer, a former business executive and a professor emeritus of finance and law at Columbia Law School. Like Warren E. Buffett, he is a
proud disciple of the “value investing” principles outlined by Columbia professors Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd in 1934. Mr. Lowenstein is also a heck of an investigative reporter, as well as an astute financial adviser. Here’s the nut of the
mutual funds industry scandal, as summarized by Mr. Lowenstein: “There is a profound conflict of interest built into the industry’s structure, one that grows out of the fact that the management companies are independently owned, separate from the funds
themselves, and managers profit by maximizing the funds under management because their fees are based on assets, not performance.” As a result...
Read the article. Back to top
The wealth trajectory: Rewards for the few
N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and advised Mitt Romney in his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination. IF there is one thing about the United States economy in recent years that is beyond dispute, it is this: It’s a great time to be rich.
Yes, I know, being rich has never exactly been a downer. But today it is all the more sweet. You see it in the daily headlines. The financial pages tell us that Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, took home $68.5 million last year. The
political pages tell us that during the last eight years, Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in $109 million. These stories are not mere aberrations. According to the economists who crunch the numbers, they reflect a long-term trend of increasing economic inequality.
The best data on the superrich comes from Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley. Professors Piketty and Saez have been studying historical data from tax returns and recently
updated their work to 2006. They report that one out of every 10,000 American families has income in excess of $10.7 million. These lucky duckies number less than 15,000. Put together, they could all fit into a modest-size town. (We could call it Aspen or
Nantucket.)What’s more, the superrich have been getting an increasing slice of the economic pie. In 1980, the top 0.01 percent of the population had 0.87 percent of total
income. By 2006, their share had more than quadrupled to 3.89 percent, a level not seen since 1916...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Presenting smart: What's the worst presentation advice?
|
John Windsor, an online columnist for Sales & Marketing Management, and president of Creating Thunder, a Boulder, Colo.-based communications training and consulting company. As author of the popular YouBlog, John offers a unique mix of innovation,
communications, sales and marketing ideas. An award-winning marketer, John has held vice president positions in marketing, sales, and business development and has worked with companies like American Express, Reuters, Staples, and Knight-Ridder.
Countless books, seminars and gurus preach how to give an effective presentation. Some of the advice is outstanding, but some of it is less so. But what is really shocking is that the most common piece of advice is perhaps the worst piece of advice:
- Tell them what you're going to tell them
- Tell them
- Tell them what you just told them
|
Now, this approach is not without value. It helps presenters be clear about their message so the audience won't leave thinking, "What was that about?" And repetition and reinforcement can aid retention, provided the repetition is not simplistic. But the
potential for mediocre-to-poor results from following this formula is HUGE. It's much more a recipe for disaster than a clear path to success. Why is it so bad?
What Do We Do Instead?...
Read the article. Back to top
What employees want
|
Brady Wilson is a co-founder of Juice Inc., a Guelph, Canada-based solution provider for leaders who want to boost their organizational energy level and employee engagement.
It's not money or flex hours. Rather, employees want to feel they are a good fit in the organization, are clear about their job, are supported in their role, are valued, and are inspired.
Getting the very best from employees has become the holy grail of the training and human resources industries. Millions of training dollars are spent to determine how to achieve a state of "flow" where workers are functioning at a high level of productivity,
efficiency, and engagement. But can this be sustained for more than a few days? And is it even possible? The answers to both questions are a resounding "Yes." And the benefits lead to bottom-line results. We've seen organizations boost their employee engagement
and report a year-over-year doubling of their sales growth; reduce their returns and credits by 50 percent; set new safety, productivity, and customer service records; and save millions on their bottom line through increased efficiencies. In fact, when
employee research and consulting firm Towers Perrin-ISR conducted a 2006 study of 664,000 employees worldwide, it found a 52 percent gap in the one-year performance improvement in operating income between companies with highly engaged employees versus
those with low engagement. However, the path to getting there is not the one most of us would think of taking because it's right in front of our eyes.
Stairway to Engaggement. The first step is to know...
Read the article. Back to top
The wackiest interview blunders
What's the most unusual thing a candidate ever did in a job interview?
Fall asleep? Disappear? Bring his/her mom? CareerBuilder.com released its annual survey of the most outrageous interview mistakes candidates have made, as related by more than 3,000 hiring managers and HR professionals nationwide. Among this year's top 10 dubious occurrences:...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
How healthy can you get on diet alone?
For any number of reasons, far too many Americans are sedentary.
An estimated 14.2% of the population spends less than 10 minutes a week on moderately intense activities, such as walking and vacuuming, or vigorous ones, such as running, according to 2005 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A
quarter of Americans say they're not performing any physical activity during their free time. All of this sitting on the couch or behind a desk is undoubtedly contributing to the country's rising health care costs--but does a lack of exercise necessarily mean
we're unhealthy? Every day, we're bombarded with new reports about how crucial it is to our good health to consume more heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids (found in fish) and cut the trans fats (e.g., doughnuts, french fries). While, of course, you should
exercise, if you're not, you may be wondering just how far a focus on diet alone can take you...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
Forward to a Friend:
Do you have a friend that would like to receive ExecWatchsm?
Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would
benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits
of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who
may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did!
|
|
|
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from ExecWatchsm
simply change your status,
or send a letter requesting opt-off to:
The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945
DISCLAIMER: ExecWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS.
All other trademarks or service marks contained in this email are the property of their respective owners.
At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point
to sites other than businesswatchnetwork.com, some links may become invalid as time passes.
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. Privacy Policy
|
|
|
| |
