Remove Sports Remove Strategy Remove Talent
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Stop Comparing Management to Sports

Harvard Business

Often, when I’m asked to give a speech on strategy at some company event or conference, I find that one of the other speakers is a former professional sports player. Although there is nothing wrong with commitment and perseverance, I, however, think sport (much less war) is often an unhelpful analogy.

Sports 70
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How Scientific Thinking Won the Women’s World Cup Title

Markovitz Consulting

Coach Jill Ellis noticed that Sweden employed a fundamentally different strategy than she expected. Critics assailed Ellis for not knowing what she was doing, and making the most talented team in the world look bad. To add to the problem, many of her key players were getting older. She needed to make changes. But what changes?

Sports 180
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Why Sports Are a Terrible Metaphor for Business

Harvard Business

The buzz around the biggest game in America’s biggest sport is, as always, about more than football. Even as high-minded a publication as The Economist gets caught up every so often in the connections between sports and business. Here’s what’s wrong with making analogies between sports and business.

Sports 70
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Recruiting Strategies for a Tight Talent Market

Harvard Business

If any story demonstrates how far employers will go in today’s fierce war for talent, the tale of Snapchat’s geofilter recruiting campaign is it. These days, I advise Fortune 500 executives to treat talent as they would customers: Understand their behavior, and design recruiting strategies that meet them where they are.

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Walmart Won’t Stay on Top If Its Strategy Is “Copy Amazon”

Harvard Business

Walmart does need to shore up its e-commerce capabilities, but its attempts to out-Amazon Amazon aren’t a winning strategy. Amazon will likely continue adding Prime benefits to the mix, potentially including the holy grail of entertainment: live sports. Lore himself described free shipping as table stakes.

Strategy 132
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Is Your Company Actually Set Up to Support Your Strategy?

Harvard Business

For every company wrestling with evolutions in its strategy, success depends as much on matching the operating model to those evolutions as it does on the soundness of the strategy itself. But exactly how do today’s companies create or update an operating model to match adaptations or wholesale changes in strategy?

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Motivating Your Most Creative Employees

Harvard Business

Whether in sports, music, or regular office jobs, creatives will thrive if they are part of a team that is able to turn their ideas into actual products and services, freeing them up from implementation. The ability to successfully manage and retain creative talent is therefore critical.

Talent 132