TrendWatchers

The 21st century is fast becoming what could be termed the “Age of the Brain.” The management world is flooded with ideas about winning talent wars, managing knowledge workers, and boosting innovation, but most of this boils down to a single aspiration: gaining a competitive advantage by...

It’s no longer enough to be a team player. To succeed in today’s highly dynamic and networked world, you’ve got to master the art of collaboration. And so does your organization as a whole.Why collaboration? Because we live in an era when knowledge workers tend to specialize and so...

Employers should be scouting pools of young talent today because the demand for such talent could grow much stronger in the near future.The race to attract these younger adults is already on in many U.S. metropolitan areas. They are scrambling to entice what some experts call the “young and...

A mere 3% of respondents to a new global survey said their organizations are “very successful” at executing strategies. The survey, which included responses from 1,526 business professionals, was conducted by the Human Resource Institute and commissioned by the American Management...

For top leaders, it’s not enough to dream up brilliant business strategies. They’ve got to be able to execute those plans as well, and they know it. A global survey of more than 650 CEOs by The Conference Board (2005) showed that the execution of strategy was ranked third out of 91...

Retaliation has been much in the news recently as businesses across the U.S. struggle to understand the effect of last June’s unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White.The case arose when rail yard worker Sheila White sued...

Any organization still seeking that one silver bullet that will revitalize its performance management (PM) system should forget about it, suggests analysis of a recent survey conducted by the Human Resource Institute (HRI) in conjunction with HR.com. That bullet doesn’t exist. That is, there...

From a global perspective, the role of unions in training is inconsistent. Unions increasingly serve as useful training partners in some nations, but in others their role is minimal.England is an example of a nation where the role of unions in training is growing stronger. Several new learning...

Attempts to apply complexity theory – also known as complexity science – to management is one of those long-term trends that never gains huge headlines but never quite goes away, either. This year, Management Decision magazine published a series of articles on the subject. Among the more...

When CEOs of major corporations are talking about how it pays to be green, you know that the term is no longer being relegated to the tree-hugging fringe. Yet, despite the fact that “going green” is becoming a key business strategy for some organizations, few experts so far are talking...