MIT Sloan Management Review

“We have a very long-tenured board member who said to me, ‘Every company has a culture, whether they know it or not. Very, very few companies have an intentional culture,’” says Marvin Boakye, the chief human resources officer at Cummins. Few companies are more intentional than Cummins about building and maintaining the corporate culture. The multinational has been producing diesel engines and integrated power systems for over a century, ranks in the top 150 of the Fortune 500, and has generated significantly higher returns on invested capital than its industry peers for the past five years. In our research, Cummins ranked first among 39 large industrial companies in terms of how employees rated its culture and values on Glassdoor. Continue reading what Marvin Boakye had to say about company culture: https://mitsmr.com/3YYLJsh

This tool provides marketers with a framework for solving customer experience challenges with data and analytics. Download the canvas worksheet (PDF). Downloadable framework: https://bit.ly/3rO5GSq

Implementing a corporate purpose begins with two requisites: top management commitment and a purpose-based business strategy: https://mitsmr.com/3NpSnzB

The eight dimensions of design thinking capture important differences in how managers and designers perform their work and make decisions. ?? https://mitsmr.com/3wZwpgl

How replaceable are the core skill sets? And how much of a shift is there in the way value is delivered? https://mitsmr.com/2BFEsok

Sustainability has become a powerful driver of consumer behavior. People are changing what they consume, how they consume, and how they lead their day-to-day lives, motivated by a concern for sustainability. Our research has identified a consumer-driven megatrend that holds tremendous strategic opportunity for companies if they change how they think of consumer preferences for sustainable options. The belief that there is only one type of sustainable consumer fails to recognize the diversity of consumer preferences. The stereotypical sustainable consumer who has an intense passion for all things sustainable and a high willingness to pay for sustainable goods and services across all categories accounts for only a small portion of the world’s consumers. Sustainability is now a present and influential factor in how most consumers make their lifestyle and purchasing decisions. But the influence of sustainability on consumers is not uniform, neither in its intensity nor its extent. To understand these differences and make them actionable, we conducted two core studies on consumers in North America and Europe and segmented them by performing a cluster analysis based on two dimensions. Keep reading to discover how businesses can effectively market sustainable products by understanding the various types of consumers. https://mitsmr.com/3YPFpSt

“The disasters involving Boeing’s 737 Max 8 airliner, which claimed hundreds of lives, and the company’s ongoing business struggles offer a stark lesson: Poor organization of expertise can have severe consequences.” Pedro Monteiro, an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School, learned many lessons as he examined FAA studies on Boeing and did an in-depth field study at another aeronautical organization. His research informs pragmatic advice about how organizations of all kinds should organize in-house experts to avoid dangers and drive maximum results. For example, is your organization matching expertise to tasks well enough? Has deep domain expertise grown too separate from the leadership ranks? Organizing experts has critical implications in industries of many kinds. Read the full article by Monteiro below.

Employee engagement — the measure of individual commitment to organizational success — positively correlates with discretionary effort and meaningfully impacts every individual and organizational performance metric that matters. However, despite significant investments across most industries, leading engagement studies have never found more than 36% of employees engaged at work. The Gallup Q12 survey tool, which some consider the gold standard for measuring employee engagement, assesses what it considers to be the 12 most powerful predictors of discretionary effort. Ten of the 12 focus on human relationships, dynamics, or exchanges. Engagement and discretionary effort, then, are driven by healthy and productive human connection. That can be achieved only on a team-by-team basis. Continue reading Jordan Birnbaum's article on how to build human connections in a remote world: https://mitsmr.com/40L4Kzv

To drive strategy execution, leaders should set goals that are F.A.S.T.: Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, and Transparent. https://mitsmr.com/2xGR7Wa

When it comes to maximizing growth and revenue, you may be missing something — something big. It’s the harnessing of predictive AI to enhance and deploy sales performance management (SPM). Companies with sizable sales forces — whether in the technology, medical device, pharmaceutical, industrial, or consumer goods industry or some other sector — must consider adopting AI-driven SPM. This article will argue for integrating AI-driven SPM into sales strategies and processes, highlighting five priorities organizations must set to make this work. While Joel Shapiro focuses on a medical device business example, the ideas and advice in this article are relevant to any sales-focused business. https://mitsmr.com/3YLLgIv