Leadership, competitiveness and best practices on business management
Workplace Survey, Findings 1.Workers are struggling to work effectively. When focus is compromised in pursuit of Collaboration, neither works well. 2. Effective workplaces balance focus and collaboration. Workplaces designed to enable collaboration without sacrificing employees’ ability to focus are more successful. 3. Choice drives performance and innovation. Employers who provide a spectrum of choices for when and where to work are seen as more innovative and have higher-performing employees.
Listening carefully to her team members, adjusting her recognition and praise in response to their concerns, and most of all, by persevering, Elżbieta Górska is making her department more productive while also making it a better place to work.
Elżbieta Górska-Kołodziejczyk manages a warehouse in a Poland’s formerly state-owned paper-making plant in the city of Kwidzyn. International Paper purchased a majority stake from the government 14 years ago, and dramatic changes have taken place at the plant since then. Four-thousand five-hundred people once worked in the facility, but now only 1,600 are needed. The enterprise used to produce 200,000 metric tons of paper each year, but now ships three times as much. As a state facility behind the Iron Curtain in 1980, it packaged paper in five different wrappers. Today, as a private concern and with Poland now a member of the European Union, the paper leaves the plant in 300 different patterns or brands, bound for stores across the continent.
Read more...Fujitsu is the third biggest player in the global IT services market, with sales of US$50 billion and 172,000 employees in 60 countries. It also has a long and distinguished track record as a technology pioneer. And yet, it remains little known outside of Japan. Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove, gained unique access to examine the art of Fujitsu management:
1.Customer first The fashionable business ideas of our time suggest that customers are unreliable guides. Simply, they do not know what the technology is capable of, so how can they tell you what they want or would like? As a result, the emphasis of recent years has been on retaining talented individuals rather than attracting and retaining high spending customers. Fujitsu is old fashioned in its adherence to the edict that customers come first. All Fujitsu executives talked about the vital importance of staying close to customers.
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When Ed Scanlan founded Total Attorneys in 2002 to make customer-relationship-management software for law firms, he and a handful of employees would write code on the fly. Projects were completed quickly, and employees often worked late nights and weekends to launch new features and fix bugs. But as revenue grew to $24 million, the company abandoned the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach in favor of a more formal system. Sometimes referred to as the waterfall model, this system divides a software project into sequential stages, in which the work is handed off from designers to coders to quality-assurance testers. But Scanlan found that the waterfall model made Total Attorneys move a lot more slowly -- so slowly, in fact, that in some cases clients' needs had changed by the time a piece of software was complete.
Recently, a developmental psychologist cited scientific evidence showing that IQ was one of the most significant predictors of emotional resiliency in children. The same pattern has also long been seen in the military, where it has been conclusively shown that higher-IQ soldiers show fewer signs of long-terms post-traumatic stress.
Heightened anxiety has long been shown to dramatically impair people's ability to think. It affects basic functions such as short-term memory and processing of simple information, as well as more complex thinking, where anxiety can aggressively interfere with the ability to differentiate between important and irrelevant tasks. In today's business environment of unrelenting pressure, aspiring leaders must learn how to confront heightened levels of urgency without allowing the accompanying mental agitation to be disruptive.
Read more...As leader you may be involved in many negotiations during your career. They would be all different in some ways, and alike in others. Anthony Tjan, an entrepreneur, investor and CEO at Cue Ball, identifies five "golden rules" to be the most helpful towards productive negotiation outcomes. The rules parallel different stages of a negotiation:
1.Pre negotiation homework: Before any negotiation begins, understand the interests and positions of the other side relative to your own interests and positions. It means a pre-negotiation homework with an emphasis on understanding the specific interests and positions of the opposing side. Put these points down and spend time in advance seeing things from the other side. Making a list of these points is the right starting place as it helps show where the biggest gaps might be.
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