Comments on an article subtitled Job Dissatisfaction and High Turnover at the Lima Tire Plant, from Harvard Business Publishing, June 12, 2008, by Skinner and Beckham. This case study was of a tire manufacturing plant in Lima, Ohio and the study focused on the negative working conditions that existed for the line foremen and the […]
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Men’s Wearhouse Case Study
This article discusses a Case Study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business that is subtitled: Success in A Declining Industry. The founder, George Zimmer, opened his first store back in 1973, at a time when competitors were closing their doors. From opening to the time of the article (1997) the Men’s’ Wearhouse enjoyed 30% […]
Harvard Business Review Case Study—The Layoff
This case study presents a fictitious scenario about a company facing the prospect of laying off 10% of its workforce then follows with recommendations from three experts. The 10% workforce reduction was presented as a requirement to “keep profits in line with Wall Street’s expectations”. Should early retirements be forced? Should a performance-based layoff of […]
WSJ Article on Good Leadership and Executive Excellence Article on Servant Leadership
The WSJ article is about an executive who found out his bosses were being unethical and defrauding people. He subsequently quit his job even though it cost him a lot of money to do so and he knew ahead of time that it would. There is a great lesson in this article that money is […]
Wall Street Journal Articles on Lt. Withers and Col. Dowdy
Lt. Withers was the leader of an all-black supply convoy in WWII. He was faced with a dilemma between following the rules and doing the right thing as a human. He found out that his men had taken in and were hiding some young survivors from the Dachau concentration camp. When he found out, he […]
Level 5 Leadership
From an article in the Harvard Business Review, January 2001 by Jim Collins The author conducted a five year research project aimed at answering the question: “What catapults a company form merely good to truly great?” The study started out not as a study of leaders, and even specifically tried to study the company not […]
Dean’s Disease
Comments on an article from the Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2002, vol. 1, No.2, 164-173 This article illustrates an example, from the world of academia, of how power changes us. Although the example is from the college campus, a version of “dean’s disease” (let us call it “boss’s disease”) certainly occurs in the […]
HBS Case Studies: 1) Diamonds in the Data Mine and 2) Gary Loveman and Harrah’s
These two “Best Practice” Case Studies are good examples of “Evidence-Based Management”, as opposed to intuition-based management. Harrah’s was a company that seemed to be focused on the right things and some of the lessons that can be gleaned from these case studies are in the paragraphs that follow. Gary Loveman was a Harvard professor […]
Evidence-Based Management
From an article in the Harvard Business Review, January 2006 by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. In our information-intensive world there is undoubtedly a heck of a lot of information out there. However, many businesses (even including medical professionals, as discussed in the article) don’t use it to make decisions. It is difficult to […]
Good to Great, or Just Good?
In this article Niendorf and Beck, of University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh content that due to two fatal errors, arguably one of the most influential business books ever written, Good to Great, provides no evidence that applying the five principles, of the book, to other firms or time periods will lead to anything other than average […]
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