How happy talk can ruin M&As
Businessam Staff
February 26, 2018
LEADERSHIP & ORGANISATIONS Quy Huy, INSEAD Professor of Strategic Management Excessive politeness and positivity can be just as damaging as open conflict. When mergers and acquisitions disappoint – as they do at least 50 percent of the time – a badly managed integration process is often to blame. Even deals with the greatest financial promise can be […]
Big investors call for company attention to social purpose: What next?
Businessam StaffFebruary 23, 2018
RESPONSIBILITY N. Craig Smith, INSEAD Chaired Professor of Ethics and Social Responsibility, and Markus Scholz, Endowed Chair of Corporate Governance and Business Ethics at FHWien & INSEAD Visiting Scholar BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s pro-CSR stance needs clarity and muscle. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how […]
Why family firms lack analyst coverage
Businessam StaffFebruary 21, 2018
FAMILY BUSINESS Xiaowei Rose Luo, INSEAD Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise Widely-held cultural views shape securities analysts’ assessment of family firms. In a way, securities analysts are in the business of predicting the future. As such, they deal with uncertainty. And with uncertainty comes risk. Unsurprisingly, studies on how securities analysts decide which […]
Planning for family business longevity in three steps
Businessam StaffFebruary 21, 2018
FAMILY BUSINESS Morten Bennedsen, INSEAD Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Brian Henry, INSEAD Research Fellow Lessons from the UK’s oldest privately owned bank, which has been in the same family for more than 300 years. In family businesses, family assets are the unique and often intangible contributions that only families can bring to their […]
Business as a force for good: A blue ocean perspective
Businessam StaffFebruary 20, 2018
LEADERSHIP & ORGANISATIONS W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Professors of Strategy and Co-Directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute How to shift from dividing to expanding the economic pie. Disruption is popular. Business leaders are constantly reminded that disruption lurks around every corner, that they must disrupt their industries or even their own companies […]
When winning means losing in negotiations
Businessam StaffFebruary 15, 2018
STRATEGY Horacio Falcão, INSEAD Senior Affiliate Professor of Decision Sciences, and Alena Komaromi, Financial Services Professional (INSEAD MBA ’12D) Be careful about imposing your terms as it may backfire. A common belief is that when we negotiate, we should push hard to get the best possible deal. Indeed, sometimes choosing a power-based strategy and pushing hard […]
Spanning the boundaries that limit organisational innovativeness
Businessam StaffFebruary 13, 2018
STRATEGY Yves Doz, INSEAD Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management Managers must bridge across their firms’ geographic, cultural and institutional diversity to gain a unique competitive advantage. By their very nature, multinational corporations (MNCs) straddle many boundaries, most obviously national, cultural, economic, institutional and organisational. Adding to the challenge is the fact that these boundaries span […]
The surprising link between the economy and personnel evaluations
Businessam StaffFebruary 12, 2018
CAREER Nina Sirola, INSEAD Post-Doctoral Fellow Macroeconomic changes lead to bias in how we assess the work of others. In Outliers, nonfiction writer Malcom Gladwell makes the point that typically success does not result uniquely from hard work or innate smarts. Often, luck, good timing, privilege or some other external circumstance provides the boost to push […]
Do CEOs deserve their pay?
BusinessamFebruary 7, 2018
LEADERSHIP & ORGANISATIONS Manfred Kets de Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Chang The myths that drive the CEO pay bonanza. According to the most recent report of the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the United States has gone down from 286-to-1 (in 2015) to 271-to-1 (in 2016). This […]
Devising an optimal sourcing strategy
Businessam StaffFebruary 6, 2018
OPERATIONS Sameer Hasija, INSEAD Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management How firms can make informed, project-based choices between single- and multi-sourcing. Let’s assume you’re a company scouting for vendors for a variety of business-critical IT projects. Every candidate you approach wants to scoop up as much of your business as possible. Should you try to […]