More from these Authors

• Article | Harvard Business Review | March–April 2019

  The Future of Leadership Development

  Das Narayandas and Mihnea Moldoveanu

  The need for leadership development has never been more urgent. Companies of all sorts realize that to survive in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, they need different leadership skills and organizational capabilities from those that helped them succeed in the past at all levels of the firm. But the leadership development industry is in a state of upheaval. The number of players offering courses to impart the hard and soft skills required of corporate managers has expanded well beyond the traditional business schools, corporate universities, and dedicated consultancies. And yet organizations that spend billions of dollars annually to train current and future executives are growing frustrated with the results. There are three main reasons for the disjointed state of leadership development. The first is a gap in motivations. In executive development, the “customer” is not the “client.” The organization pays for the individual to enhance his or her skills—and résumé—and thereby benefit from participating. The second is the gap between the skills that executive development programs build and the skills that organizations require—particularly the interpersonal skills essential to thriving in today’s flat, networked, increasingly collaborative organizations. The third reason is the skills transfer gap. Simply put, most executives do not seem to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to their jobs. For organizations to develop essential leadership and managerial talent, they will need to bridge these three gaps. The good news is that the growing assortment of online courses, social and interactive platforms, and learning tools from both traditional institutions and upstarts—which we call the personal learning cloud (PLC)—offers a solution. Organizations can select components from the PLC and tailor them to the needs and behaviors of individuals and teams. The PLC is flexible and immediately accessible, and it enables employees to pick up skills in the context in which they must be used. In effect, it’s a 21st-century form of on-the-job learning.

  Keywords: talent management; executive education; Leadership Development; Business Education; Management Skills; Learning; Online Technology;

  Citation:

  Narayandas, Das, and Mihnea Moldoveanu. "The Future of Leadership Development." Harvard Business Review 97, no. 4 (March–April 2019): 40–48. (Spotlight Talent Management.)  View Details

  CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard

  Related

• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

  Intelligent Artificiality: Algorithmic Microfoundations for Strategic Problem Solving

  Mihnea Moldoveanu

  This paper introduces algorithmic micro-foundations for formulating and solving strategic problems. It shows how the languages and disciplines of theoretical computer science, “artificial intelligence,” and computational complexity theory can be used to devise a set of heuristics, blueprints, and procedures that can help strategic managers formulate problems, evaluate their difficulty, define “good enough solutions,” and optimize the ways in which they will solve them in advance of attempting to solve them. The paper introduces both a framework for the analysis of strategic problems in computational terms and a set of prescriptions for strategic problem formulation and problem solving relative to which deviations and counterproductive moves can be specified and measured.

  Keywords: Problems and Challenges; Analysis; Strategy; Framework; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Mathematical Methods;

  Citation:

  Moldoveanu, Mihnea. "Intelligent Artificiality: Algorithmic Microfoundations for Strategic Problem Solving." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-072, January 2019. (Revised February 2019.)  View Details

  CiteView Details Read Now

  Related

• Article | Harvard Business Review | July–August 2018

  How CEOs Manage Time

  Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria

  In 2006 Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria launched a study tracking how large companies’ CEOs spent their time, 24/7, for 13 weeks: where they were, with whom, what they did, and what they were focusing on. To date, Porter and Nohria have gathered 60,000 hours' worth of data on 27 executives, interviewing them—and hundreds of other CEOs—about their schedules. This article presents the findings, offering insights not only into best time-management practices but into the CEO’s role itself. CEOs need to learn to simultaneously manage the seemingly contradictory dualities of the job: integrating direct decision-making with indirect levers like strategy and culture, balancing internal and external constituencies, proactively pursuing an agenda while reacting to unfolding events, exercising leverage while being mindful of constraints, focusing on the tangible impact of actions while recognizing their symbolic significance and combining formal power with legitimacy.

  Keywords: CEOs; Executives; Time Management; Attitudes; Managerial Roles; Leadership; Performance Effectiveness; Strategy; Decision Making; Organizational Culture;

  Citation:

  Porter, Michael E., and Nitin Nohria. "How CEOs Manage Time." Harvard Business Review 96, no. 4 (July–August 2018): 42–51.  View Details

  CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Register to Read

  Related