Whitepapers

To engage employees effectively, businesses need to understand what makes them tick, and to boost leaders’ emotional intelligence, says Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic   Scientific data clearly indicate that employee engagement drives organisational profitability; nonetheless, only a minority of employees in most organizations are engaged. Indeed, the evidence suggests that disengagement…

A quick search for the word engagement yields more than 6 million websites, thousands of books, and myriad articles. Yet, a Gallup poll showed that more than 71% of American employees are disengaged at their jobs, indicating that although most companies recognize employee engagement as important, many still struggle to understand it. Dr. Robert Hogan discusses the concept of engagement, work-life…

To err is truly human and mistakes are truly inevitable. Paul Nutt, an Ohio State University business school researcher, provides data showing that half of all decisions made in business organizations fail. In his book, Why Decisions Fail, he shows that decisions mostly fail because the deciders ignore feedback. The lesson is clear, decision making in business is a random walk—no one is any…

Although we live in an age that glorifies innovation, there is a big difference between theoretically advocating for it and being able (or willing) to actually implement it. None of this is really new. From Schumpeter’s classic definition of innovation as “creative destruction” to recent portrayals of innovators as disruptors or constructive nonconformist, we have known for years…

In his brilliant 1950 film, Rashomon, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa depicts the story of a rape and murder four times, from the perspectives of four characters. The message is clear: Different people can see the same events in dramatically different ways. In the workplace this phenomenon is particularly evident when it comes to underperformance and failure. An outcome that an employee…