Strategic Leadership

Success comes at high price for CEO

September 3, 2014
During Alyson Pitman Giles’ 13 years at the helm of Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, N.H., the hospital’s finances reversed course. By the time she left in 2012, its operating margin exceeded $3 million. But her success did not come without turmoil.

Are you investing strategically?

September 2, 2014
Do you have too much money in­­vested in low-priority items? Execu­­tives say low-priority initiatives get too much funding, cost-cutting isn’t strategic and budgeting isn’t tightly aligned with strategic planning at their companies, according to research by Strategy&.

Don’t fall for your own story

August 15, 2014
Learn from BP’s mistakes not to fall for your own advertising.

Use questions to teach vital skills

August 12, 2014
Just six days before the now-famous hijacking of the Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates, Captain Richard Phillips held a surprise security drill aboard his ship. He wanted to test his crew’s ability to defend against a pirate attack.

Build winner with run-and-gun strategy

August 6, 2014
Whitey Herzog, winner of a World Series as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, understood one of the most overlooked aspects of leadership: Make the best of what you’ve got.

Too much hype doomed Wyeth CEO

July 31, 2014

In 2007, Bob Essner felt justifiably triumphant. He had engineered a successful turnaround of Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant, after six years of reinventing the company. But even after in­­creas­­ing revenue by 30%—to $20.4 billion—Essner suddenly lost his job. What went wrong?

How to woo 440,000 global employees

July 29, 2014
When Sam Palmisano became IBM’s chief executive in 2002, he succeeded a superstar CEO, Lou Gerstner. In 1993, Gerstner turned around the sinking company, declaring, “The last thing IBM needs is a vision.” By 2002, however, Palmisano felt IBM needed one.

Combine hard and soft data

July 24, 2014
We tend to admire leaders who proclaim, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” But what if that’s not necessarily true?

The power of contrarian thinking

July 16, 2014
In 1962, editors at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists judged that the world was perilously close to a nuclear holocaust. It was at this moment that physicist Freeman Dyson, a visionary in math to medicine, weighed in on bomb shelters …

Spot influencers with ‘snowball survey’

July 7, 2014
Many senior executives think they can spot key influencers. But they are often wrong, survey results show. Use a snowball sampling to find out who those people really are.