In 1990, two business academics, C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, teamed to write one of the Harvard Business Review's most influential articles on the nature of the modern firm and, by extension, outsourcing. They introduced the concept of core competence, which they called the “most powerful way to prevail” in global commerce.
Paul J. Zak is answering age-old questions about the evolutionary and scientific - actually neuroscientific - basis for identifying and establishing trust. For example, why do people trust each other in the first place? Is there a natural inclination to trust? Does location and/or ethnicity matter when it comes to trust? What does this mean for businesses and their employee relations?
Professor Horacio Falcão, a Senior Affiliate Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD, warns companies should not start – nor necessarily end – on “price” when it comes to negotiations.
Falcão has written on the concept of value for several years and his work includes the 2010 book Value Negotiation: How to Finally Get the Win-Win Right.
Europe is in turmoil after Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Those who now claim to know what will happen now – in outsourcing or in other areas – will make two big mistakes: First, they will show that they don’t understand what Brexit is. Brexit is, to use the words of author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a “black swan”: an unexpected event with largely unforeseeable consequences, just like 9/11 or the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing. Second, they will simply be wrong.
For the first time, last year’s US workforce had more millennials (aged 18-30) than Baby Boomers. This generation of workers has arrived in full force. In fact, by 2020, they are projected to make up half the global workforce.
“Eat or be eaten” – for centuries, this “law of the jungle” was the law of the business world, too. Beating the competition delivered power, money and influence. From the Square Mile to Wall Street, survival of the fittest meant there was only room for one victor at the top. The digital revolution changed this. Measuring success in today’s business world is no longer by the job or task performed for money. We value successful leaders for their contributions to the world as a whole and the manner of its making. What we do and how we do it matters.
Business leaders and technology executives are deluged by the rhetoric about disruptive digital technologies coming of age, companies and whole industries going digital.
Maturing and new technology tools, combined with rapidly changing technology usage patterns of businesses and consumers, are forcing a rethink, even a re-imagination of what companies can do. Obviously there are leaders and there are followers, with every success story probably preceded by unsung failures.
If cooperation in client and outsourcer relationships is so highly prized, why is it so difficult to achieve?
Stewart Macaulay – Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Wisconsin Law School – occupies a unique place in the evolution, awareness and acceptance of relational contracting. In fact one might safely argue that he helped set relational contract theory in motion in 1957, with the publication of his famous article, ‘Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study.’ He was 26.
The tricky question that most if not all companies face on a constant basis is how to get their suppliers fully engaged and committed to – and even be instrumental in driving – innovation.
While the importance of innovation is a given that dates back more than 50 years to the teachings of Peter Drucker in The Practice of Management (1954), it has only been fairly recently that academics and organisations have been studying how to make innovation go from idea to reality. John W. Henke Jr. and Chun Zhang are two such academics.
Clay Shirky, New York University professor, author, and a leading thinker on the effects of the internet on society, delves into the disruptive power of technology and collaboration on how people live and work.
