MIT Sloan Management Review

A lot of the literature about trust supports commonsense notions for individual leaders. But building organizational trust turns out to be different from building interpersonal trust — and less intuitive. “A new model is required to understand how to manage trust in large, complex organizations operating in highly diverse global environments,” write the authors. Once trust is broken, repair requires understanding the systemic causes of the failure and confronting deeply embedded mindsets.

Researchers are now looking at the values of pessimism as well as optimism, and the uses of “strategic optimism and pessimism.” Even naturally sunny personalities can take advantage of dark moods and instincts to plan for the worst.

Research from the London School of Business looks at the role a company’s distinctive beliefs play in strategy and how to mine that “uncommon sense.”

Most strategy making begins in the wrong place. Many companies rely on frameworks and models from the strategist’s toolbox, including industry analysis, market segmentation, benchmarking and outsourcing. As a result, they short-circuit the real work of strategy and miss out on finding new insights into the preferences or behaviors of current or potential customers. Few companies develop original strategies by formulating hypotheses and then testing them in a competitive setting.

“When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution,” writes psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in a new book.

John Shook’s prize-winning article on NUMMI explains how, if you want to change a company’s culture, you have to change people’s behavior first.

Want a more efficient, happier office -- but don't have a big budget to invest in improvements? According to a fascinating article in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, new research suggests that simply letting employees decorate their own office space yields quite significant benefits in productivity and employee well-being.

NUMMI, deconstructed
Catching up on podcasts of “This American Life,” the weekly public radio program, I finally listened to an episode from last March about the NUMMI car plant in Fremont, California.

Could BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill been prevented if workers on the oil rig had felt more empowered to report problems? That's a question raised by Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, in an interesting column recently published by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Many managers think they’ve committed their organizations to evidence-based decision making — but have instead, without realizing it, committed to decision-based evidence making. Is that all bad? What can be done to fix it?

Sexual harassment — and how to deal with it — is well understood by most companies. But now new dangers are being recognized in the ways an office romance affects the people around it. “Hostile work environment” claims, and their financial costs, are just the start.

GM and Toyota launched their joint auto plant where GM’s work force had been at its worst. Here’s what happened next. And why.

When downsizing is unavoidable, smart managers look for opportunities to improve flexibility, innovation and internal communication to improve trust between managers and employees.

Insiders often find their opinions carry very little weight. Even data from competitors can seem superior.

It often seems that changes and threats come out of nowhere – until we learn later that the signals were there all along and we just didn”t read them correctly. One step toward reading them better is understanding why we misinterpret them in the first place.

Joe Fox’s strategic ideas look big — he’s disrupted both the securities and real estate industries. But he claims his best innovations are the smallest ones.

How can you avoid the agony of putting your company through a massive restructuring? Simple: Learn how to make sure it never needs one.

Why are some employees adept at getting the information they need while others struggle to locate the right in-house experts?

Awareness of peer influence helps managers orchestrate the actions of others — and interpret their own behaviors.

Many large multinational corporations are hardly a model of organizational efficiency, with the right hand frequently not knowing what the left is doing. A valuable solution developed at one location fails to spread to other sites struggling with a similar problem, so they continually have to reinvent the wheel.