clair015

It’s not easy being an HR executive. Just when you are about to applaud the cultural compatibility of a proposed merger someone starts talking about upstream synergies in the value chain. Or you unveil an innovative executive training programmed and boardroom colleagues question its net present value and pay-back time calculation. Or there is a crisis and the company needs to cut costs, so your desk is their first stop, since surely training, recruitment and work-life programmers are easily expendable? Such attitudes are common, but they are also evidence of startling business naivety. A company’s real, sustainable competitive advantage is almost always based on the softer, intangible parts that HR executives care about – and very seldom on the hard stuff that’s easier to capture in numbers, such as production capacity, cash reserves or even brand recognition. The hard stuff is often also the easiest to imitate. Production capacity, stock and sales points are things money can buy. A sk...

The world of business is still rife with discrimination. Women get paid less than men, people who are physically attractive earn more and are more likely to be seen as suitable leaders, and race determines chances of promotion. The business world in that sense is no different than other walks of life. And the latter category – obesity – seems one of the nastier ones. Where discrimination based on race, religion or gender are at least generally looked upon as despicable, it seems much more socially acceptable to look different upon people based on their weight. Obesity and income Various studies have shown that overweight people are seen as less conscientious, less agreeable, less emotionally stable, less productive, lazy, lacking in self-discipline, and even dishonest, sloppy, ugly, socially unattractive, and sexually unskilled; the list goes on and on.* The stereotypes run so deep that even obese people hold these same discriminatory beliefs about other obese people. Therefore, it may...

Big companies are thought to rarely be the real innovators in an industry. Usually, radical change – whether a new technology or an entirely new business model – comes from outside the industry, and is introduced by an entrant into the field. On average that is true – research confirms it – and there are various reasons for that. It pertains to a phenomenon I called “ collective inertia ”; established players often seem paralysed when significant, paradigm-busting change is sweeping through their business. Why big firms are often slow to adapt That is because those existing players usually do not see an interest in destroying their own business and competitive advantage; newspapers were reluctant to move into on-line media because it cannabilised their existing business, traditional airlines were reluctant to embrace the low-cost model, and steel companies shunned away from minimill technology. These new technologies and business models ate into their current business and therefore the...

The so-called “Yerkes-Dodson law”, not surprisingly, is named after two people called Yerkes and Dodson. Robert Yerkes and John Dodson worked as psychobiologists in the beginning of the previous century. They studied animal behaviour, among others, to try and understand the behaviour of humans. Rats and electrical shocks In one of their experiments – in 1908 – they placed a bunch of rats in a cage in order for them to explore one of two passages. One passage, labeled with a white card, contained a reward while the other one, labeled with a black card, led to an electrical shock. They wanted to test how quickly the rats figured out that white was a good thing, while black passages were to be avoided. The one thing they varied was the voltage of the shock. Some rats received a mild shock which was not much more than a tickle, others were subjected to a shock of an intermediate level, while the third group was nearly fried to death each time the poor suckers merely sniffed at the black pa...