Summarising GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt’s address at Singapore on growing and building sustainable business in these uncertain economic times, INSEAD Knowledge notes that : 

• successful business players need to have a corporate culture and strategic process that is flexible and can adapt quickly.
• this recovery will likely look different and rely more on the principles of entrepreneurship.
• countries around the world (notably the US) are moving into an era of activist government.

For me, Immelt’s commitment to GE’s core values shone through in this excerpt:

He stressed that ‘commitment to integrity’ comes first, noting that the company is more important than individuals and that everyone must embody the best practices around compliance. Second, a “commitment to performance” where high-performing people are focused on results. Finally, a “commitment to change” where “Knowledge has almost no shelf life,” according to Immelt. He says if you’re not reinventing yourself, or trying to do new things, you become static and are quickly beaten by the competition.

 More on Immelt’s Singapore talk here.

Via : INSEAD Knowledge

In this address to the students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, FBI Director Robert Mueller, talks about how 11 September 2001 was a transformative event in the 100-year history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

One of his biggest challenges was to change the culture of the venerable institution while trying to navigate the new demands being thrown at it.  He explains, "After Sept. 11 one of the side effects was the understanding we could not let it happen again. If we had not had the catalyzing event we would not have made the strides to change the culture to understand the priorities and bring everyone in the bureau behind the concept that the American public expects us to stop [another] Sept. 11. We have to do it — even though more often than not it doesn’t result in slapping cuffs on somebody and putting him in jail."

Source :  Stanford Graduate School of Business

A firm’s organisational chart can uncover important insights into its inner workings. Research by the Kellogg School of Management and the University of Essex finds that , “structure can also reveal much about the competencies and areas of competitive advantage within the organisation.”

Any student of organisational design can tell you that firms can structure along functional form, meaning that the firm organises itself by business functions such as marketing, research and development (R&D). On the other hand firms can alternatively organise themselves by, “product line, such as the models and vehicle types within an automotive company or the brands owned by a consumer packaged goods company.”

The research notes:

A key advantage of a product-line organisation is that it enables the firm to reward the employees’ efforts by using pay-for-performance mechanisms that involve less noise than those used in a functional organisation. This is because the contribution of a product line to firm’s profitability is typically easier to measure than the financial contribution of functions such as human resources or marketing.

In a functional organisation, although compensation can still be tied to product-line profitability, the link between the choices for which managers have responsibility and the performance metrics on which they are rewarded is weakened, injecting greater noise into their compensation.

A product-line organisation provides another benefit to firms in which cross-functional coordination is critical: by consolidating decision making for all functions within a single product unit, managers can better coordinate functional choices. In a functional organisation, coordination is attenuated because responsibility for functional choices is dispersed across functional units.

Imbalances between functions or in the function/product mix tend to favor a functional organisation. For example, when marketing competencies are far more critical to the firm’s success than any other function, the firm might benefit from a functional organisation with a central marketing group responsible for the marketing decisions for all of the firm’s product lines.

The significance of the research lies its usage of economic theory to isolate the economic and organisational fundamentals to eliminate “noise” in evaluating managerial performance and compensation.

Source : Kellogg Insight

Continuing on the always on 24/7 lifestyle, see my earlier post, research by Wharton Business School management professor Nancy Rothbard tries to answer the question - is anyone ever really "off duty”?

Prof Rothbard asks further, "There are huge etiquette issues around the new social media, especially the interactive type. What if your boss friends you on Facebook? That's a dilemma. How do you not accept that friend? What if you really are friends?"

Rothbard elaborates that new communications technology is eroding the boundaries between home and office, which creates a "double-edged sword" for companies.

The flexibility and reach of modern communication tools have created new problems.  Rothbard continues, "On the one hand, it enables flexibility. In some ways, it makes you more effective. But it can also lead to a lot of burnout. In the long term, it may lead to conflict about how you feel towards your other life roles and your ability to be fully present in any one domain."

In related research Patricia Williams, Wharton marketing professor explains that for most of social networks users, "There is an understanding of the multiple roles we play. There is the self we are for our friends, a self for our family [and] a professional self. What's interesting is the degree to which we are comfortable playing all of those 'selves' at one time." 

While research by Monica McGrath, a Wharton adjunct management professor,  points out  that some of the misunderstanding about social networking is generational. She notes, “Older workers and managers may have a Facebook page, but it is not essential to them. Younger workers now entering the corporate world rely heavily on Facebook, Twitter and other social media to communicate. Right now, there is tension between those two generational approaches."

So, are there any rules to prioritise messages? According to business consultant Terry Thompson, the general "pecking order" in the business community when it comes to responding to different forms of communication is : e-mail should be answered within 24 hours, a telephone call returned even sooner with social networking sites taking the lowest priority.

Confused?  I am going offline- no more social networking for me.  Oh for the days of the snail-mail.

Source: Knowledge@Wharton