March
2007
Following a drought and a disastrous harvest, farmer cooperative Auglaize Provico saw profits plummet. The losses were devastating and possibly fatal. But under the leadership of a persistent and visionary CEO, Larry Hammond, the co-op turned calamity into victory, and profits rebounded substantially. In fact, Hammond's small co-op, a remnant of 19th-century farming, achieved things that global mega-companies and trillion-dollar governments fail to do all the time. Here's how.
It's often said that the only constant in life is change. Business leaders certainly know this. But what does that statement actually mean to executives? How are you supposed to act on it? And how do you know if you're making the right changes in the right way at the right time? Management expert John Fleming, Ph.D., tackles these and other questions in a probing interview. Fleming -- who has analyzed change efforts at dozens of companies -- warns that unless your business is prepared to make a transformational change, you're probably wasting your time.
In the six years since the release of Now, Discover Your Strengths, more than two million people have taken the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment. But Gallup has learned a tremendous amount about people's talents and strengths since the publication of that book. So much so, in fact, that bestselling author Tom Rath has written a new book on the subject, StrengthsFinder 2.0. Rath reveals, among other things, what more there is to discover about your talents, and why it's bad to focus on your employees' weaknesses, but simply cruel to ignore them completely.
A manager at Owens Corning's Rio Claro, Brazil, facility knows that equipping his employees with what they need leads to many benefits, not the least of which is worker safety, comfort, and productivity. But it also instills team spirit. In fact, the Rio Claro facility is emblematic of one of the key elements revealed in the recently published New York Times bestseller, 12: The Elements of Great Managing.
Cornell mathematician Jon Kleinberg's research centers on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other online media. In other words, Kleinberg can map the invisible world of information sprawl -- a heady notion in an information economy. Here, Kleinberg discusses how to control the spread of information, how to design viral marketing that works, why Web sites like MySpace are so successful, and even how to nip office gossip in the bud.