This is a story from the latest version of UNC Business magazine. To read the entire issue, download the iPad app. By Heather Harreld Empowering leadership — the practice of sharing power with subordinates and allowing them to collectively make decisions — has long been touted as better for performance than a more directive approach. But is an empowering leadership style always better when managing teams? It depends on the nature and timeline of the project, according to new research from Matthew Pearsall, assistant professor of organizational behavior at UNC Kenan-Flagler. While researchers have looked at the effects of both empowering and directive leadership styles separately, Pearsall wanted to directly compare the approaches at the same time. He studied 60 Read More
Category Archives: On Leadership
Insights into Innovation: How companies can improve innovation
Chris Bingham is associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at UNC Kenan-Flagler . He is also professor of strategy and entrepreneurship. Below, read his Insight into Innovation, the fourth in a five-part servies. Previous posts touched on innovation versus entrepreneurship, the importance of failing fast and often and detailed why organizations must innovate. Why do so many organizations find innovation so hard? I think there are a number of reasons that innovation is challenging and difficult in organizations. The first one is pretty simple – most new ideas are bad. If you look at stats about product failure, you’re going to see studies citing between 60 to 95 percent of new products failing. For the very simple reason that most new Read More
The Big Data Talent Gap
The following is an excerpt from a white paper from UNC Executive Development. By Stan Ahalt, director of the Renaissance Computing Institue (RENCI) and Kip Kelly, director of UNC Executive Development Big data—the massive amounts of information companies collect through web crawlers, social media feeds, server logs, customer service databases, and other sources—is quickly becoming big business in today’s competitive marketplace, and if business leaders haven’t added big data to their strategic agendas yet, they will be compelled to in the near future. Few organizations, however, have the talent with the expertise needed to collect, organize, and analyze the data and to provide meaningful insights. Even fewer organizations have business leaders with the knowledge and experience needed to create value from Read More
Insights into Innovation: Innovation v. Entrepreneurship
Atul Nerkar is associate dean of UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Executive MBA programs. He is also professor of strategy and entrepreneurship. Below, read his Insight into Innovation, the third in a five-part servies. Previous posts touched on the importance of failing fast and often and detailed why organizations must innovate. Why is it important for an organization to master innovation? We live in a world in which innovation is the buzzword. Everywhere you look, innovation is a buzzword. Why is innovation important? Most will come up with an answer like, “It’s important for competitor advantage,” or “We get stale, we get inert,” or “It’s good for society.” All those reasons are valid. I think the most important reason why innovation is important Read More
Consulting alum emphasizes importance of big data in branding
Michael Stutts (BSBA ’02), principal at The Boston Consulting Group, delivered the first lecture of UNC Kenan-Flagler’s new Consulting Speaker Series earlier this year. Stutts, who focuses on BCG’s consumer, marketing and sales practice areas, shared his experience working on a project with a top hotel company in his presentation, “Getting Out of the Arms Race: Branding a Loyalty Program.” While branding has traditionally been ruled by emotion and “what feels right,” Stutts says that consulting in this area is beginning to take a much more data- driven approach. “What used to be marketers sitting in a room, squeezing toys, throwing out ideas and brainstorming has now become a very quantitative process that we really pioneered,” said Stutts. “We do Read More
Insights into Innovation: Fail Fast and Often
Arvind Malhotra is UNC Kenan-Flagler’s T. W. Lewis Scholar and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship. Below, read his insight into innovation, the second in a five-part series with UNC Kenan-Flagler professors. Why is it important for an organization to master innovation? In many ways that’s what kept most organizations going into pattern differentiation. Innovation is a good buzz word, but to me it’s also about saying, “How can you sustainably differentiate yourself in the marketplace?” with sustainably meaning over time having an edge over your competition and being seen as superior to your competition. It’s really critical because it’s not a one shot game. It’s over and over and over and over again trumping your competition. That is the only way to Read More
Fours ways to bolster your onboarding program
“Just be yourself” may sound cliché, but for managers looking to train more effective employees, it’s a piece of advice worth incorporating into the orientation process. UNC Kenan-Flagler assistant professor Bradley Staats studies the onboarding process, the period of orientation and socialization that occurs during a new hire’s first few days on the job. During this time companies typically focus on skills training and building pride in the organization. However, Staats’ latest research has revealed that emphasizing self-expression and personal, rather than organizational, identities may create more beneficial outcomes for firms. Orientation programs with a more individualized approach result in lower turnover rates, greater job satisfaction and improved operational performance down the road. “By following these four principles of personal Read More
Insights Into Innovation: Why Organizations Must Innovate
Sridhar Balasubramanian – also known as “Dr. B.” – is associate dean of the MBA Program, the Roy & Alice H. Richards Bicentennial Distinguished Scholar and professor of marketing at UNC Kenan-Flagler. He is a widely published and cited researcher. Below, read his insight into innovation, the first in a five-part series with UNC Kenan-Flagler professors. Why is it important for an organization to master innovation? There are multiple reasons why it is important for organizations to master innovation. First of all, the world is becoming increasingly competitive. Fifty years back you only talked about competition from your local region. Today, you produce a product, you try to patent it, but within about six months somebody … some company in Read More
How leaders can succeed in an increasingly volatile, complex landscape
The below is an excerpt of a white paper by Kirk Lawrence, program director at UNC Executive Development. In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman notes that the rate of change today is much different than in the past. “Whenever civilization has gone through one of these disruptive, dislocating technical revolutions—like Gutenberg’s introduction of the printing press—the whole world has changed in profound ways,” he writes. “But there is something different about the flattening of the world that is going to be qualitatively different from other such profound changes: the speed and breadth with which it is taking hold….This flattening process is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touching a lot more people on the planet at once. The Read More
Knowledge & Leadership: Alum launches burn center from business school plan
Scott Hultman (MD, FACS, MBA ’08) graduated from UNC Kenan-Flagler with a ready-to-implement business plan that served as the foundation for the new UNC Burn Reconstruction and Aesthetic Center. The center, which opened in the fall of 2012, has created a space for UNC Health Care to conduct cutting-edge burn reconstruction research and develop new burn scar treatments that are giving patients life-changing results. Hultman, who has been a practicing plastic surgeon at UNC for 13 years, said that there was a strong interest in creating an aesthetic surgery center at the university as early as 2001. However, an original marketing analysis for the project predicted a whopping $20-million price tag that neither the UNC School of Medicine nor UNC Read More