Crisis management

Three myths that impede their proper use - and three strategies to help your team make the most of the practice.

Talent management matters most when organizations tend to it least.

Lessons from Geisinger Health's four-stage approach.

A three-step approach.

My hunch is that, at some point in your career, your reliance on someone else to get a job done has left you angry, confused, frustrated, and maybe even deeply concerned for your own professional standing. Especially when the stakes are high in a complex, troubling situation, depending on colleagues to make the right moves […]

A resident emergency physician sheds light on how the hospital has transformed to fight the pandemic.

Five great reads on the art of bouncing back.

He really shanked it this time. Tiger Woods is a champ when it comes to hitting a little white ball into a shiny tin cup. His skills are definitely subpar, however, when it comes to managing scandals. Coming during a relatively slow Thanksgiving news cycle, the initial details of the star athlete’s involvement in an […]

Five years ago, the LEGO Group was near bankruptcy. Many of its innovation efforts—theme parks, Clikits craft sets (marketed to girls), an action figure called Galidor supported by a television show—were unprofitable or had failed outright. Today, as the overall toy market declines, LEGO’s revenues and profits are climbing, up 19% and 30% respectively in […]

Yesterday morning I gave a talk on social media to a group of Canadian government employees. The talk was organized by my sister-in-law, Jennifer Jager, who is part of the marketing team at Public Safety Canada that is responsible for promoting emergency preparedness across the country. The fifty civil servants in the room represented a […]

In 1978, before restructuring was a common boardroom term, Jewel sold its Turn-Style discount department store business to the May Department Store Company. Because May could not immediately use many of the Turn-Style stores outside metropolitan Chicago, Jewel closed them. This meant that almost 3,000 full-and part-time employees were no longer needed. We in Jewel’s […]

Don’t let your short-term response get in the way of your long-term plan.

In 1999, Mei Zhang quit her lucrative consulting job to launch WildChina, a small travel company in her native China. Nearly four years later, the SARS...

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s “burning platform” memo has been getting a lot of attention today. In it, the relatively new boss — he came to Nokia from Microsoft in September — outlined the dire straits faced by the mobile-phone manufacturer and suggested that the only thing that can save it would be a leap into […]

A Q&A about the storm’s aftermath.

How to stay the course.

The story of how a 16-year-old company closed its doors.

Empowered employees could prevent these disasters.

Rudyard Kipling, in his beloved poem “If,” speaks to the virtues that make a boy into a man–virtues (without regard to gender) that seem awfully relevant to a world in which financial markets are in meltdown mode, and credit markets are more frozen than the players in this weekend’s NFC Championship Game. The poem begins […]