More from these Authors

• Book | 2020

  Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations about Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy

  Michael Beer

  Is Silence Killing Your Strategy?
  In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior leaders don't hear what they need to hear about their company's fitness to compete, and employees lose trust in those leaders and become less committed to change.
  In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence—principles and a time-tested innovative process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization. Used by over eight hundred organizations across the globe, the strategic fitness process has helped leaders in a diverse range of industries—including medical technology, information technology, banking, restaurant chains, and pharmaceuticals—hear the raw but necessary truth about the sources of misalignment between their strategies and their organizations.
  In addition to step-by-step instructions, Beer offers detailed and illustrative case studies of companies that have conducted honest conversations to great effect. He also shows how to apply the process more broadly to a variety of strategic challenges and at multiple levels throughout the organization. Practical, enlightening, and comprehensive, Fit to Compete is the book you should turn to if you want to create winning strategies that your entire company will rally behind.

  Keywords: honesty; Communication; Organizational Culture; Trust; Strategy; Performance Effectiveness;

  Citation:

  Beer, Michael. Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations about Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2019 (Revised October 2019)

  The Predictive Index

  Lynda M. Applegate and James Weber

  Mike Zani and Daniel Muzquiz needed to decide next steps to create a new category in the human resources consulting industry and scale their company. Zani and Muzquiz, serial entrepreneurs, acquired Predictive Index in 2014. Previously, as clients of the 65-year-old Predictive Index, they had used its behavioral assessment tool to help them hire staff and build teams and they strongly believed in its value. They also believed, however, that Predictive Index had the potential to be something more. After acquiring the company, they invested in technology and people to modernize the business, and Predictive Index earned recognition as a “best place to work.” In 2018, they developed a Talent Optimization platform, an offering that had the potential to transform the industry by helping companies align their business strategies with their human capital and leadership development strategies. In late 2019, as they prepared a broad rollout of Talent Optimization, and planned to scale their business by an order of magnitude, the pair wondered what hurdles they might face along the way and what other steps they should take to reach their goals.

  Keywords: Human Resources; Selection and Staffing; Talent and Talent Management; Recruitment; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Change Management; Disruptive Innovation; Market Platforms; Consulting Industry; Service Industry; United States;

  Citation:

  Applegate, Lynda M., and James Weber. "The Predictive Index." Harvard Business School Case 820-034, October 2019. (Revised October 2019.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2019

  Regtech at HSBC

  Aiyesha Dey, Jonas Heese and James Weber

  Mark Cooke, Global Head of Operational Risk, needed to decide between a traditional regulatory control system and a new regtech system to manage non-financial risks. Non-financial risks failures such as money laundering and tax evasion had cost HSBC billions of dollars in fines and settlements over the previous decade. In response, HSBC had hired thousands of risk and compliance staff and invested billions in traditional control systems. Cooke, however, could not be sure HSBC’s traditional methods were sufficient and he was worried they were not sustainable. Cooke recently ran a pilot test of a regtech solution that promised to warn of problem areas in advance, and do so at a much lower cost than traditional systems. The regtech solution provider was a small startup and the technology was not fully developed. Cooke wondered how much he could trust a technology from a startup company with a handful of employees and almost no revenue to meet the needs of a world-leading bank with global operations.

  Keywords: Risk Management; Banks and Banking; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Banking Industry; Information Technology Industry; United Kingdom; United States;

  Citation:

  Dey, Aiyesha, Jonas Heese, and James Weber. "Regtech at HSBC." Harvard Business School Case 120-046, October 2019.  View Details

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