Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell are both Directors of Ashridge Strategic Management Centre. Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. In this interview, read what they have to say about their new book Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You.
Too often, management can become distracted from the implicit challenge that they face. Yes, the explicit challenge is to ensure that the respective organizations that they are responsible for are successful and profitable. But the implicit challenge is to ensure that the decisions they make not only deliver this success next quarter, but in every quarter. And to accomplish this, what happens is that they do the equivalent of ârobbing Peter to pay Paul.â
As one of the nation's leading experts on the art of maximizing human potential, former Entertainment Attorney, Marshawn Evans is Founder of ME Unlimited (Marshawn Evans Unlimited), a corporate life-enrichment consulting firm focusing on peak performance, diversity, women's empowerment and leadership. Marshawn is author of SKIRTS in the Boardroom: A Woman's Survival Guide to Success in Business & Life.
Contingency planning might actually be the most critical aspect of your overall strategic plan. Why? Just think about all the drivers of your organizationâs internal and external environments that affect your organization. They are all changing at an accelerated pace. So what can leaders do to adapt to, or at least mitigate, the consequences of change that have negatively impacted well-known and previously successful organizations that fail to understand changes in competition and lifestyles?
For years we have developed our professional skills into disciplines that fit nicely into a variety of silos: marketing, finance, HR, operations, purchasing, etc. Our organizations and universities have developed world-class experts in each of those disciplines. As long as the company was healthy, those disciplines could exist side by side and everyone went about his or her happy business.
In the 1990s, there was a tendency by Governments to focus economic policy on seeking to support high technology industry as the primary opportunity through which to build knowledge-based economies. More recently, however, the concept of knowledge workers has been extended to other industrial sectors. One area which is being recognized as increasingly important for sustaining economic growth is the creative sector which encompasses areas such as the pure arts, performing arts, design, film, television and publishing.
In 1983, LIFENET opened in Madras and became the first comprehensive, for-profit hospital in India. Most private medical care costs are paid by the patient although a growing number of employers offer healthcare benefits to their employees. LIFENET exists to give patients compassionate, high quality, and advanced medical care.
One part of the Northern Rock debacle was the closing up of the money markets as a result of massive defaults in the USA sub-prime mortgage market. However, while the number of mortgage defaults was causing concern, what caused more concern, and the ultimate seizure of the global money markets, was that nobody was quite sure who was bearing the risk because the process of slicing, repackaging and passing on risk made it difficult to track who was holding what.
The focus of facilities management skills and techniques should be in the area that contributes to the overall management of a business by relating accommodation and support infrastructure issues to business, financial and personal criteria. Therefore the issue of measuring facility performance is a critical task to the facilities manager.