Harvard Business Review Quotes

When you walk in silence your excellence will always speak for you.

You need to choose your association according to your vision.

What the average call excellent, the excellent call average.

It’s tough when markets change and your people within the company don’t.

Data is the new oil

Managers who aspire to be ethical must challenge the assumption that they’re always unbiased and acknowledge that vigilance, even more than good intention, is a defining characteristic of an ethical manager.

Great leaders rise out of adversity.

surgeon general Vivek Murthy in the Harvard Business Review. “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in life span similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

A person who values their goals actually values their achievements.

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.

A leader has to have the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and pain. He has to be able to raise tough questions without getting too anxious himself.

there is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it.

Organizations can’t change their culture unless individual employees change their behavior—and changing behavior is hard.

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

You have to grab the goal, visualise your vision, excel in excellence and then become distinct in distinction.

If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now. —Woodrow T. Wilson

Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330:932. § Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 2012:88.

The Harvard Business Review recommends 15 words max for your big point. We would advise the shorter, the better.

According to Harvard Business Review, “The number one criteria for advancement and promotion for professionals is an ability to communicate effectively

Shotton had an insatiable appetite for feedback—a quality I have seen in all the top business performers I have worked with. They have a particularly strong need for instant, in the moment feedback.

Harvard Business Review that he said reminded him of me. The article—“Parables of Leadership” by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne—was composed of a series of ancient parables that focused on what the authors called “the unseen space of leadership.

Like Stockdale, resilient people have very sober and down-to-earth views of those parts of reality that matter for survival. That’s not to say that optimism doesn’t have its place: In turning around a demoralized sales force, for instance, conjuring a sense of possibility can be a very powerful tool. But for bigger challenges, a cool, almost pessimistic, sense of reality is far more important.

It is useful for companies to look at AI through the lens of business capabilities rather than technologies. Broadly speaking, AI can support three important business needs: automating business processes, gaining insight through data analysis, and engaging with customers and employees.

You cannot pursue all your goals simultaneously or satisfy all your desires at once. And it's an emotional drain to think you can. Instead, you must focus on long-term fulfillment rather than short-term success and, at various points in your life, think carefully about your priorities.

But when things go awry, business and sports superstars dust themselves off and move on.

Speed of change is the driving force. Leading change competently is the only answer.

Once you become a victim, you cease to become a leader,

All models are wrong, but some are useful.” In other words, models intentionally simplify our complex world.

strategic-issue reviews are organized around “facts, alternatives, and choices.

Individuals are most likely to trust and cooperate freely with systems—whether they themselves win or lose by those systems—when fair process is observed.

an adversarial mindset not only prevents us from understanding and responding to the other party, but also makes us feel like we've lost when we don't get our way

Entrepreneur, you don't need 20 years of experience in your industry but rather, you do need an idea that will bring disruption over the next 20 plus years. ~

Entrepreneur, design thinking is the ability to create, portray and deliver tomorrow's distinction, today. ~

Most companies today operate in a turbulent environment with complex strategies that, though valid when they were launched, may lose their validity as business conditions change.

The human job losses we’ve seen were primarily due to attrition of workers who were not replaced or through automation of outsourced work.

Coaching is an interactive opportunity to discover and create previously unknown solutions.

In other words, good negotiators need to develop a poker face-not one that remains expressionless, always hiding true feelings, but one that displays the right emotions at the right times.

Vivek Murthy, former surgeon general of the United States, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”6 A meta-analysis from the Association for Psychological Science warns that loneliness and social isolation significantly decrease length of life.7

We work in a first-draft culture. Type an e-mail. Send. Write a blog entry. Post. Whip up some slides. Speak. But it’s in crafting and recrafting—in iteration and rehearsal—that excellence emerges.

The construction industry is the world’s second largest (after agriculture), worth $8 trillion a year. But it’s remarkably inefficient. The typical commercial construction project runs 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, according to McKinsey.

There are five degrees of initiative that the manager can exercise in relation to the boss and to the system: wait until told (lowest initiative); ask what to do; recommend, then take resulting action; act, but advise at once; and act on own, then routinely report (highest initiative).

Decentralization makes technology more complicated and further out of reach for basic users, rather than simpler and more accessible. While it’s possible to fix this by adding new layers that can speed things up, doing so makes the whole system more centralized, which defeats the purpose.

Personal notes are particularly effective, especially if they emphasize being a role model, treating people well, and living the organization’s values. Doug Conant, a former CEO of Campbell Soup, is well aware of the power of personal recognition. During his tenure as president and CEO, he sent more than 30,000 handwritten notes of thanks to employees.

Leadership couples emotional intelligence with the courage to raise the tough questions, challenge people's assumptions about strategy and operations-and risk losing their goodwill. It demands a commitment to serving others; still at diagnostic, strategic, and tactile reasoning; the guts to get beneath the surface of tough realities and the heart to take the grief.

The critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth. Interestingly enough, those new practices eventually sow the seeds of their own decay and lead to another period of revolution. Managers, therefore, experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile has conducted extensive research on employees working in creative endeavors in order to understand how work environments foster or impede creativity and innovation. She has consistently found that work environments in which employees have a high degree of operational autonomy lead to the highest degree of creativity and innovation. Operational autonomy, of course, can be seen as the extreme version of process fairness.

Yet of the countless articles, books and so-called lifehacks about productivity I’ve read (or written!), the only “trick” that has ever truly and consistently worked is both the simplest and the most difficult to master: just getting started. Enter micro-progress. Pardon the gimmicky phrase, but the idea goes like this: For any task you have to complete, break it down into the smallest possible units of progress and attack them one at a time. ... My favorite expansion of this concept is in this post by James Clear. In it, he uses Newton’s laws of motion as analogies for productivity. To wit, rule No. 1: “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes.” ... And it’s not just gimmicky phrases and so-called lifehacking: Studies have shown that you can trick your brain into increasing dopamine levels by setting and achieving, you guessed it, micro-goals. Going even further, success begets success. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, researchers reported finding that “ordinary, incremental progress can increase people’s engagement in the work and their happiness during the workday.

Specify Level of Initiative Your employees can exercise five levels of initiative in handling on-the-job problems. From lowest to highest, the levels are: Wait until told what to do. Ask what to do. Recommend an action, then with your approval, implement it. Take independent action but advise you at once. Take independent action and update you at an agreed-on time; for example, your weekly meeting. When an employee brings a problem to you, outlaw use of level 1 or 2. Agree on and assign level 3, 4, or 5 to the monkey. Take no more than 15 minutes to discuss the problem.

But was the Newton a failure? The timing of Newton’s entry into the handheld market was akin to the timing of the Apple II into the desktop market. It was a market-creating, disruptive product targeted at an undefinable set of users whose needs were unknown to either themselves or Apple. On that basis, Newton’s sales should have been a pleasant surprise to Apple’s executives: It outsold the Apple II in its first two years by a factor of more than three to one. But while selling 43,000 units was viewed as an IPO-qualifying triumph in the smaller Apple of 1979, selling 140,000 Newtons was viewed as a failure in the giant Apple of 1994.

Idea in Brief Are you an ethical manager? Most would probably say, “Of course!” The truth is, most of us are not. Most of us believe that we’re ethical and unbiased. We assume that we objectively size up job candidates or venture deals and reach fair and rational conclusions that are in our organization’s best interests. But the truth is, we harbor many unconscious—and unethical—biases that derail our decisions and undermine our work as managers. Hidden biases prevent us from recognizing high-potential workers and retaining talented managers. They stop us from collaborating effectively with partners. They erode our teams’ performance. They can also lead to costly lawsuits.

Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t. Mentoring programs break down in the workplace so often that scholarly research contradicts itself about the value of mentoring at all, and prompts Harvard Business Review articles with titles such as “Why Mentoring Doesn’t Work.” The mentorship slip is illustrated well by family businesses: 70 percent of them fail when passed to the second generation. A business-owner parent is in a perfect spot to mentor his or her child to run a company. And yet, sometime between mentorship and the business handoff, something critical doesn’t stick. One of the most tantalizing ideas about training with a master is that the master can help her protégé skip several steps up the ladder. Sometimes this ends up producing Aristotle. But sometimes it produces Icarus, to whom his father and master craftsman Daedalus of Greek mythology gave wings; Icarus then flew too high too fast and died. Jimmy Fallon’s mentor, one of the best-connected managers Jimmy could have for his SNL dream, served him up on a platter to SNL auditions in a fraction of the expected time it should take a new comedian to get there. But Jimmy didn’t cut it—yet. There was still one more ingredient, the one that makes the difference between rapid-rising protégés who soar and those who melt their wings and crash. III.

What Is Fair Process? The theme of justice has preoccupied writers and philosophers throughout the ages, but the systematic study of fair process emerged only in the mid-1970s, when two social scientists, John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker, combined their interest in the psychology of justice with the study of process. Focusing their attention on legal settings, they sought to understand what makes people trust a legal system so that they will comply with laws without being coerced into doing so. Their research established that people care as much about the fairness of the process through which an outcome is produced as they do about the outcome itself. Subsequent researchers such as Tom R. Tyler and E. Allan Lind demonstrated the power of fair process across diverse cultures and social settings.

Play Fair You’re sure to elicit a threat response if you provide feedback the other person views as unfair or inaccurate. But how do you avoid that, given how subjective perceptions of fairness and accuracy are? David Bradford of the Stanford Graduate School of Business suggests “staying on our side of the net”—that is, focusing our feedback on our feelings about the behavior and avoiding references to the other person’s motives. We’re in safe territory on our side of the net; others may not like what we say when we describe how we feel, but they can’t dispute its accuracy. However, when we make guesses about their motives, we cross over to their side of the net, and even minor inaccuracies can provoke a defensive reaction. For example, when giving critical feedback to someone who’s habitually late, it’s tempting to say something like, “You don’t value my time, and it’s very disrespectful of you.” But these are guesses about the other person’s state of mind, not statements of fact. If we’re even slightly off base, the employee will feel misunderstood and be less receptive to the feedback. A more effective way to make the same point is to say, “When you’re late, I feel devalued and disrespected.” It’s a subtle distinction, but by focusing on the specific behavior and our internal response—by staying on our side of the net—we avoid making an inaccurate, disputable guess. Because motives are often unclear, we constantly cross the net in an effort to make sense of others’ behavior. While this is inevitable, it’s good practice to notice when we’re guessing someone’s motives and get back on our side of the net before offering feedback.

In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”…. Here is a way to frame the investments that we make in the strategy that becomes our lives: we have resources – which include personal time, energy, talent and wealth – and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives… How should we devote our resources to these pursuits? Unless you manage it mindfully, your personal resource allocation process will decide investments for you according to the “default” criteria that essentially are wired into your brain and your heart. As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process –and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize. But it’s a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what’s important to you, it’s still difficult to know which are the right choices. If you have an extra ounce of energy or a spare 30 minutes, there are a lot of people pushing you to spend them here rather than there. With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course… The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments… How you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.

In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women

In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1. In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate. The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.

When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?

value, I can do three things,” he says. “I can improve the algorithm itself, make it more sophisticated. I can throw more and better data at the algorithm so that the existing code produces better results. And I can change the speed of experimentation to get more results faster. “We focused on data and speed, not on a better algorithm.” Candela describes this decision as “dramatic” and “hard.” Computer scientists, especially academic-minded ones, are rewarded for inventing new algorithms or improving existing ones. A better statistical model is the goal. Getting cited in a journal is validation. Wowing your peers gives you cred. It requires a shift in thinking to get those engineers to focus on business impact before optimal statistical model. He thinks many companies are making the mistake of structuring their efforts around building the best algorithms, or hiring developers who claim to have the best algorithms, because that’s how many AI developers think.

having a good understanding of what the exponential mindset looks like. In a piece for the Harvard Business Review, Mark Bonchek, founder and chief epiphany officer of Shift Thinking, describes the linear mindset as a line appearing on a graph that rises gradually over time. He then juxtaposes this with a second line that curves upward, slowly at first, and then shooting over the other line before heading far off the graph. This is his visual depiction of the exponential mindset.

This came into play recently in a partnership between an Australian supermarket and an auto insurance company. Combining data from the supermarket’s loyalty card program with auto claims information revealed interesting correlations. The data showed that people who buy red meat and milk are good car insurance risks while people who buy pasta and spirits and who fuel their cars at night are poor risks. Though this statistical relationship could be an indicator of risky behaviors (driving

Discovery-Driven Planning,” a best-selling article in Harvard Business Review that has since become a staple of entrepreneurship and innovation courses.

Decision making becomes more political - less about authority and more about influence. That isn't good or bad; it's simply inevitable.

En un artículo de la revista Harvard Business Review titulado “Déficit de sueño: el asesino del desempeño”, Charles A. Czeisler, profesor de medicina del sueño en la Escuela de Medicina de Harvard, explica de qué manera la privación de sueño disminuye el alto rendimiento. Él equipara el déficit de sueño con beber demasiado alcohol y explica que no dormir en toda la noche (es decir, pasar veinticuatro horas sin dormir) o tener una semana en la que sólo se duerme de cuatro a cinco horas por noche, de hecho, “induce una disfunción equivalente a un nivel de alcohol de 0.1 por ciento.

But if you can blend huge, intangible aspirations with simple, tangible catalytic mechanisms, then you’ll have the magic combination from which sustained excellence grows.

Warren Buffett didn’t take his rejection by Harvard Business School to heart because, as he says, ‘I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.’ Don’t assume that other people are right about you and you are wrong; only you know what you’re truly capable of. Luckily Fred Astaire had already learned to think positively and ignore the negative when he received this famously unfavourable review of a screen test, ‘Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.

In a study published in the Harvard Business Review (“Laughing All the Way to the Bank”), Fabio Sala compiled more than four decades of humor research and found, “Humor, used skillfully, greases the management wheels. It reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages.”6

Traditional, corrective feedback has its place, of course; every organization must filter out failing employees and ensure that everyone performs at an expected level of competence. But too much emphasis on problem areas prevents companies from reaping the best from their people. After all, it’s a rare baseball player who is equally good at every position. Why should a natural third baseman labor to develop his skills as a right fielder?

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people—especially most teachers and most organizations—concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.

Let’s meet Wednesday to see how you’re progressing and discuss any problems

escuchas, que les entiendes y que pueden confiar en ti.

Praise the effort, not the skill.

Mind-field Kata Read mathematics. Read philosophy. Read The Economist. Read Cosmopolitan . Read about projects. Read about Korean entrepreneurs. Subscribe to Harvard Business Review and to Fast Company . Subscribe to Engineering News Record and to Wired . Watch a TED video once a week for nine months. Talk to people about what you are reading and watching. Visit other businesses. Create a mind-field.

There’s actually some very persuasive leadership research that supports the idea that asking for support is critical, and that vulnerability and courage are contagious. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, Peter Fuda and Richard Badham use a series of metaphors to explore how leaders spark and sustain change. One of the metaphors is the snowball. The snowball starts rolling when a leader is willing to be vulnerable with his or her subordinates. Their research shows that this act of vulnerability is predictably perceived as courageous by team members and inspires others to follow suit.

Getting Started Aligning an organization is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First, you need to be clear on whether your destination (the mission and goals) and your route (the strategy) are the right ones.

(the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts.

Institute after-action reviews, document lessons learned from major decisions or milestones (including the termination of a failing project), and broadly communicate the resulting insights.

Of course I’m tired. Between work and the kids, it’s impossible to turn off or get any real rest.

My productivity isn’t anywhere near what it used to be. Maybe that new calendar or organizational system will help . . . or maybe I just need to push myself more.

The advice and encouragement you’ll find here are truly evergreen.

imagination is more important than knowledge.

Begin each morning with a quick preview of the coming day’s events. For each one, ask yourself how you can use it to develop as a manager and in particular how you can work on your specific learning goals. Consider delegating a task you would normally take on yourself and think about how you might do that—to whom, what questions you should ask, what boundaries or limits you should set, what preliminary coaching you might provide. Apply the same thinking during the day when a problem comes up unexpectedly. Before taking any action, step back and consider how it might help you become better. Stretch yourself. If you don’t move outside familiar patterns and practice new approaches, you’re unlikely to learn.

cuanta más información tengas sobre la forma de trabajar de tu equipo, más consciente serás de las diferencias entre tú y tu interlocutor.

Harvard Business Review article called “Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer,” Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has explained how sleep deprivation undermines high performance. He likens sleep deficit to drinking too much alcohol,

The more we act a certain way—be it happy, depressed, or cranky—the more the behavior becomes ingrained in our brain circuitry, and the more we will continue to feel and act that way.

Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so, the more you show up and perform habits, the more you cast votes for being a certain type of person, the more you build up this body of evidence—the likelier you are to realize that, “Hey, this is who I actually am.

Internet platforms such as Substack, Flipboard, and Steemit enable individuals not only to create content but also to become independent producers and brand managers of their work.

What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Harvard Business Review calls the extreme job: a job that involves “physical presence at [the] workplace [for] at least ten hours a day,” a “large amount of travel,” “availability to clients 24/7,” “work-related events outside [of] regular work hours,” and an “inordinate scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job.

Jane Hyun and Douglas Conant in their Harvard Business Review article “3 Ways to Improve Your Cultural Fluency” state

According to a report in Harvard Business Review, research shows that “Reflection gives the brain an opportunity to Pause amidst the chaos, untangle and sort through observations and experiences, consider multiple possible interpretations, and create meaning.”2 If we can create that Pause in the chaos, we can make more thoughtful decisions.

Humanize your company. Educate about change. Assure stability. Revolutionize offerings. Tackle the future. These strategies make up what we call the HEART framework of sustained crisis communication.

companies facing Covid-19 need to create temporal ambidexterity: the ability to switch and apply different problem-solving styles over time. First,

opportunities in the new post-Covid reality, using visionary and shaping styles.

Leaders become “real” in difficult times, not only when they steel people with resolve and purpose but also when they inspire people to experiment and learn through the crisis, turning adversity into opportunity.

When in the midst of [outer] turmoil and calamity you seek the inner strength that helps you not only to endure but to overcome, do not look for what you can get,” he told his audience. “Look rather for what you have been given, and for what you can give.” When we help others, even in the smallest ways, our fear ebbs and our focus sharpens.

es bastante importante que los directivos tengan la autoconciencia necesaria para asegurarse de que son capaces de ver las situaciones desde la perspectiva de sus colaboradores

«Tienes que distanciarte y controlar tu propia respuesta emocional porque, si actúas movido por la implicación emocional, tu forma de abordar el problema no será meditada.

equipo, es decir, el personal que sacará adelante el proyecto y las empresas externas que proporcionarán los recursos necesarios para ello. La oportunidad, el perfil del negocio: qué venderá esa empresa y a quién, cuál es su capacidad de crecimiento, su rentabilidad esperada y qué obstáculos pueden presentarse. El contexto o panorama general: el marco regulador, los tipos de interés, las tendencias demográficas, la inflación, etc. Es decir, los factores externos y variables que no pueden controlarse. El riesgo y el beneficio, una evaluación de todo lo que puede ir bien o mal, así como una reflexión sobre cómo responderá el equipo ante diversos escenarios.

Focus simply means energy concentrated in the service of a particular goal.