Management

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The first and most important difference between the two types of firms is access to the equity market, that is, liquidity. Public firms can always generate liquidity with a stock offering. Even if their stock tanks – as Citigroup’s famously did, sinking from more than US$40 pre-crash to about $1 – they can still issue more stocks to raise cash. Private firms don’t have this luxury.

The High Cost of Being Private

By: EBR | Thursday, July 11, 2019

Privately held companies need to understand that cost of debt is higher for them, but they can adapt to alleviate it

How brands can stay relevant in the digital age

By: EBR | Tuesday, October 23, 2018

The brands that mean the most to consumers aren’t always the ones you’d expect

How to coach a CEO

By: EBR | Thursday, August 30, 2018

Successful coaching involves working with – not against – an individual’s resistance

«We do see that inclusiveness, adaptability, non-hierarchical organisation and a willingness to work to find good compromise solutions or innovative and different approached rather than dictated outcomes or weak consensus are so important for the changing dynamic of the environment we all work in today», she stated in a previous interview at EBR magazine.

FTI's Julia Harrison to receive SABRE Award for Individual Achievement

By: EBR | Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Creative, passionate for her work and extremely ambitious, Julia Harrison is the epitome of inspirational leadership and professionalism. For this reason, she will be honored with the prestigious SABRE Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a special ceremony in Amsterdam on 23th May

How do you set others free to do their Extreme best? It starts with what you don’t do. The opposite of bringing out the Extreme in others is making them afraid. If only one person starts making others feel that risk-taking will be punished, that the boss is running out of patience, or that old procedures must be followed to the letter, then the crucial collaboration between leaders and followers starts to fall apart. It happens in corporations the world over. The entire place seizes up with fear.

Can great leaders be both tough and nurturing?

By: EBR | Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Some employees go to work to do what they’re told. Some know their company’s vision and try to follow it

Leadership is a constant exchange between leader and follower. It is both verbal and non-verbal. The strength of the relationship depends on each party’s capacity to support the other. Being a good leader involves knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses. It requires being able to listen and follow a subordinate, should their unique expertise afford them a temporary leadership role.

5 ways leaders are different to managers

By: EBR | Friday, February 9, 2018

The first time President John F. Kennedy visited NASA’s headquarters, he met a janitor mopping the floor. President Kennedy asked him what he was doing

The persuasive power of transparency

By: EBR | Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Cost transparency can be a compelling strategic choice in both marketing and negotiation

The idea of finding a way to embody an overall mission as a more concrete objective is related to an essential insight in management. Management practice often centres on “fluffy” performances such as missions, speeches, goal statements, and quick tours and interactions. None of this fluff helps if it is disconnected from the activities and meaning of all members of the organisation. Mission and goal statements contribute to success if they are oriented toward the embodiment of concrete activities that people can use to choose their own actions and construct meaning.

How great leaders make work meaningful

By: EBR | Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Mired in day-to-day tasks, people easily lose sight of their work’s higher purpose. That’s where great communicators come in

Combining two effortful tasks is harder than completing them separately. Switching tasks increases cognitive load. Most of what we call multi-tasking is actually the prefrontal cortex - a region toward the front of our brain - acting as a policeman directing traffic at a busy intersection, switching between the various neural networks required for the flow of processes associated with each task.

Multi-tasking eats 40% of your day. Here’s how to fight back

By: EBR | Friday, October 6, 2017

We are accelerating into the age of "connected everything". There are almost three million apps in one of the world’s leading app stores, many of us check our smart-phones once every 6 minutes and most of us carry our digital devices for 22 hours per day

In its mildest form, identification with the aggressor can be seen as a healthy defence mechanism and may serve an evolutionary purpose. It allows people to adjust to situations perceived as threatening. However, as illustrated in the opening example, chronic identification with the aggressor can lead victims to become aggressors themselves. In particular, children who have been exposed to highly dysfunctional childhood practices are in adulthood more likely to adopt the same negative behaviour patterns as a survival strategy.

The bad influence of aggressive bosses

By: EBR | Monday, October 2, 2017

Identifying with an aggressor is a basic strategy for human survival. It’s time to call it out in the workplace

Thinking in real terms is convenient, but what happens if inflation turns out to be 5 percent per annum instead of 2 percent? Inflation plays a key role as it is the link between salary (and hence saving capacity), asset market returns and valuations, the value of other assets (like property) and perhaps most importantly, spending in retirement. In short, it is so integral to the problem of retirement that it needs to be carefully modelled – and very clearly explained. Failing to adequately address it may render the advice misleading at best, leaving the user to reach retirement woefully underfunded.

The role of digital in financial planning

By: EBR | Friday, August 4, 2017

Retirement planning, riddled with uncertainty and consumer biases as it is, may be best handled with a mix of digital and face-to-face advice

While in external negotiations there are times that if you do not reach a deal, you can just move on to your alternative or best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA),but in internal negotiations this is a much harder thing to do. Your organisation is unlikely to have two departments responsible for the same resource so that if you are denied that resource, there is nowhere left to turn. This lack of alternatives increases the internal negotiation tension and causes mini-monopolies to emerge inside a firm. Not only do such monopolies have a higher temptation to use their power, because the counterparty cannot walk away, they also have rules and regulations that diminish the incentives to find creative solutions. It is important not to act like a monopoly but to lead by example.

Four reasons why internal negotiations are harder than external ones

By: EBR | Thursday, July 20, 2017

Jessica thought it would be easy to borrow two members of David’s team for a four-month project she’d been asked to undertake on behalf of the board

Once the implicit assumptions are out in the open, ask your team to reflect on whether they’re helping your company or hindering it. For example, in our consulting with a newly merged, international telecoms company, we conducted a simple exercise to help the newly merged entities to describe their cultural norms and those of the other parties. It quickly generated truths and myths that could be discussed and used to iron out blockages as they rolled out their distribution and cable network – the key to capturing subscribers and business operational success.

Tools for leaders to leverage organisational politics

By: EBR | Monday, June 26, 2017

Many CEOs enter organisations with ambitious plans to change strategies or processes. But they often find themselves up against organisational politics. Historical divisions and entrenched power structures can quickly hobble change

It is unlikely that the average person is willing to settle for such a sharp drop in their lifestyle. Based on current spending levels, the reality is that Singaporeans’ monthly retirement stipend will need to be closer to US$3,300 to maintain their current living standards. Most Singaporeans will draw US$550 per month from the Singaporean retirement income scheme for the elderly, the Central Provident Fund (CPF) LIFE. Contrary to popular wisdom, household spending does not decline significantly during retirement. This is often referred to as the retirement income puzzle.

Why your financial planner should be a robot

By: EBR | Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Retirement planning requires more data and less human involvement to nudge customers to a more comfortable future

You can also argue that a separate group or task force needs to be set up to examine an issue or bridge silos. It creates a ‘working space’ outside of the habitual structures, norms and routines of the organisation. It’s vital for innovation and change. For instance, a public agency was hampered because of slow structures and formalised steps to stop potential fraud. It meant that millions in tax revenues were not collected at the end of the year. Senior leaders decided to set up a dedicated task force outside of the formal organisational structure to solve the problem.

Tools for leaders to leverage organisational politics

By: EBR | Thursday, June 1, 2017

Navigating four typical domains of organisational politics can help leaders overcome barriers to strategy execution

Keen-eyed observers might point out that people’s extent of foreign experiences is roughly in step with their social class. At first glance, our results might seem to be a rehash of past research showing a higher prevalence of immoral behaviour at the upper reaches of the social scale. But they remained robust even after explicitly controlling for education and income, suggesting that participants’ foreign travel—rather than their social status—was responsible for the increase in immorality.

Watch out for the well-travelled

By: EBR | Monday, May 29, 2017

Sampling a wide array of cultural norms can blur people’s moral vision

Top restaurants’ identities are substantially wedded to their chefs’ in the areas of creativity, innovation and external image. However, the day-to-day customer experience outcome is delivered through a coordinated organisational effort of several individuals in the kitchen and the front-of- house who face many challenges in real time. In customer-facing operations, the connection between the organisation and the customer is crucial. Organisational excellence can be highly impacted by a combination of three main factors: leadership effectiveness, team effectiveness and workplace environment.

How to lead like a top chef

By: EBR | Tuesday, May 2, 2017

World-class chefs confront many leadership challenges shared by corporate leaders and entrepreneurs

We urge the G20 to formally accept the recommendations of the TCFD and send a strong signal that government leaders desire more transparency from business regarding the financial implications of climate change on their short and long-term strategy and operations. We welcome the current TCFD recommendations, and will actively support their successful implementation.

Global CEOs call for greater disclosure of climate risks and opportunities

By: EBR | Friday, April 28, 2017

Global business leaders representing companies with US$4.9 trillion in assets under management and US$700 billion in revenue have joined together to urge G20 governments to formally accept and act on the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures

The irony is that technological progress is only exacerbating this crisis. Historically, society has been able to afford more bullshit jobs precisely because our robots kept getting better. As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed. Call it the paradox of progress: the richer we become, the more room we have to waste our time. It’s like Brad Pitt says in Fight Club: too often, we’re “working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

A growing number of people think their job is useless

By: EBR | Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Time to rethink the meaning of work

My main lesson is that everything happens for a reason, and as long as you work your hardest and have the best intentions (and rarely is this driven by making the most money) the results will follow. It’s never an easy road, and it’ll be full of trials and tribulations, but the satisfaction of bringing your vision to reality is priceless, so enjoy the ride!

3 entrepreneurs share their biggest mistakes – and what they learned from them

By: EBR | Friday, April 7, 2017

When you hear the stories behind some of today’s most successful companies, it can be easy to forget just how hard it is to set up and scale a business