Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2011 i Rotman Management

Undiscussables WHETHER YOU WORK FOR A BANK or a hospital, in the field of biotech or design, doing business is fundamentally about conversations – with colleagues, customers and the unknown future emerging around us. What gets talked about – and how it gets talked about – determines what will happen, and what won’t. Unfortunately, what doesn’t get talked about can be even more important than what does. Have you ever wondered why the real conversations often happen in the meeting after the meeting? We have all participated in conversations where we keep ideas, critical information or feelings to ourselves, for a wide variety of reasons. Welcome to the realm of the Undiscussable. Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Chris Argyris coined the term and has written extensively about how well-meaning, intelligent…

Five qualities that we need to bring to an activity in order to do it well are; motivation, knowledge, ability, confidence and authenticity. Likewise, five benefits we may receive from the activity after doing it well are: happiness, reward, meaning, learning and gratitude. Think of a typical day in your life. Pick your important activities and rate yourself on each of the following questions on a scale of 1 to 10; a perfect Mojo score would be 100. You can do this test after a five minute phone call with a customer, a half-hour session to return e-mails, or at the end of a long trip. Professional Mojo: What I bring to this activity 1. Motivation: You want to do a great job in this activity. If you are just…

Left-Hand Column: The LHC helps us monitor thoughts and feelings that we deem unsuitable to share publicly. Used effectively, it helps us process these thoughts and feelings into information that can be useful in a productive conversation. The results: • More information on the table for discussion • Honest discussion of issues (fewer hidden agendas) • Minimized emotional volatility • Suspension of judgment • Healthy mistrust of one’s own thinking • Identification of unchecked assumptions Ladder of Inference: The Ladder of Inference helps us identify what information or facts are being used as the basis for our reasoning process. Used effectively, it enables people to see how each other’s thinking diverges on important issues while remaining focused on discovering the relevant information contained therein. The results: • An improved reasoning…

Every day we are bombarded by news media, commercials, billboards, books and magazines with new reasons to fear for our physical and psychological well-being. Some have even said that we exist in a ‘culture of fear’, studded with warnings about terrorism, international conflict, weakening economies, global warming, crime, infectious disease and other types of threats that sell consumer products and presidential candidates. Fear has shaped human behaviour for a very long time, and it continues to do so today. However, attention to fear in organizational life – how and why it is experienced, and to what effects – has received far less attention than it warrants. As a powerful, evolutionary- based emotion, fear encourages avoidance behaviour, a narrowed perceptual and cognitive focus on perceived threats, and pessimistic judgments about risks…

I believe that stress and its impact on cognitive and emotional abilities provides at least a partial explanation for what I call ‘Catastrophic Leadership Failure’ or CLF. Most people recognize that both cognitive ability (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EI) are required for success at all levels; but recently we have found that when a leader’s stress level is sufficiently elevated – whether it be on the front lines of a manufacturing process, in the emergency room, or in a Boardroom – his or her ability to effectively use IQ and EI in tandem to make effective decisions is significantly impaired. Success in the future will go to those who are best able to control stress at both an individual and an organizational level. You have said that the effect of…

Roger Martin: Microsoft’s customers include most of Canada’s largest and most successful companies. What are they asking of you these days? Is there a consistent pattern? Eric Gales: Having been in this industry for 20-odd years now, the reasons people are interested in IT haven’t really changed much: they are either trying to save money, make money or drive innovation. In general, the recent economic downturn has led to a greater focus on cost control. We lived through a period that was boom-like, and as a consequence, people took their eye off the ball a bit in terms of managing costs. ‘Cloud technology’ is a bit of a ubiquitous term, but one of its big promises is that it can help to reduce administration costs, so people are interested in…

Like reputation, stigma is created subjectively but possessed objectively. A stigmatized entity has been defined as being ‘devalued, spoiled or flawed in the eyes of others’. Thus, stigma is also a social cognition that is created subjectively in the minds of individual stakeholders, but held objectively and collectively. An entity gets ‘stigmatized’ through a process of categorization. In particular, this occurs when it is viewed as a member of a socially-discredited category, whether because of actions taken or because of inherent properties. Since an entity can be associated with multiple categories, it is stigmatized when a negative category dominates audience members’ perceptions of it. This categorization facilitates negative stereotyping because when we slot an entity into a category, we infer additional information about it from the attributes we normally consider…

You have said of the recent financial meltdown: “If such devastation could result from people undertaking ‘reasonable actions’, we have considerable work to do.” Where to begin? There are short-term issues and there are longer-term issues. The short-term issues relate to the nature of risk-taking in the financial sector and the kinds of incentives that have been created there. These are the things we are now trying to fix. Of course, there are differing opinions as to whether this is being approached in the right way, but certainly, we are making progress on these issues. The longer-term issues are much deeper in the sense that they relate to things that we have allowed to fester. For example, the fact that so many Americans don’t have the skill base to participate…

PASSIVE MISTREATMENT IN THE WORKPLACE Visible forms of mistreatment in the workplace – such as bullying or abusive supervision – are pretty hard to miss; but you have found that a more subtle form of mistreatment has an even greater impact. What is it? My colleagues and I have used the broad term ‘ostracism’, but it’s really a constellation of a variety of passive and indirect behaviours. Whereas aggressive forms of mistreatment involve taking action against someone, passive forms of mistreatment involve not taking action against someone. This might include not speaking to them, not helping them or not offering them information that they need to do their job effectively. It can also include talking behind someone’s back, excluding people from decision-making or going out to lunch with a group…

How do you define a ‘fierce’ conversation? The word fierce suggests something menacing, barbarous or threatening, but in Roget’s Thesaurus, the word has the following synonyms: robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, unbridled. The simplest definition of a fierce conversation is, ‘a conversation in which you and I come out from behind ourselves into the conversation and make it real’. Every organization wants to feel it’s having a real conversations with its employees and customers. Real may not sound like such a big deal, but at this very moment, there are millions of people around the world withholding what they really think and feel from someone at work (or at home), and paying the price in some way. We’re very uncomfortable with being real – despite the fact that it’s…

Despite the fact that emotion is discouraged in business, if you scratch the surface of any organization, you find people feeling anxious, angry and misunderstood. What is the result of this paradox? Unfortunately, the result is interpersonal warfare that quietly goes on behind the scenes and that employees and bosses find very difficult to address directly, because it’s not recognized as a valid part of the work experience. Employees can find themselves caught up in turf wars, power grabs and e-mail battles – yet by and large, they don’t possess the tools and tactics to address these problems. What does it mean to be ‘hooked’ by something or someone? This term describes what happens when someone or something triggers a strong negative internal reaction in you. It could be as…

There are two sides to any role: taking on the part by unconsciously enacting a certain set of behaviours; and becoming ‘branded’ as this type of person when the people around you only see you through a specific lens. The Hero: The need to be idolized compels this individual to produce more and perform better than everyone else. The Caretaker: feels responsible for and tries to solve everyone else’s personal problems. The Rebel/Scapegoat: Bends the rules and goes against the grain – even when it jeopardizes his or her career. The Martyr: Wants recognition and praise for sacrifice and suffering on behalf of the company. The Entertainer: Uses jokes and humor to break the tension and keep others happy. The Peacemaker: Does whatever it takes to keep the peace. The…

Despite the strides made, the gender wage gap still hovers around 20 per cent, and half of this cannot be explained by the usual factors that drive wages, such as experience and education. What is responsible for it? From all the research I’ve looked at, five factors stand out. The first is the frequency with which women exit the workforce. The greater the frequency of exiting, the greater the penalty associated with it – particularly if you hit the threshold of three or more exits. The second factor is the length of the absence from the workplace. Most studies looked at absences longer than one year – i.e., longer than maternity leaves. Third is the fact that there is some self-selection that occurs. A study out of the U.S. indicates…

WHAT DO THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR EXPLOSION, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Challenger space shuttle disaster have in common? All three catastrophes were the result of controllable but unexpected malfunctions, and it was human error – the failure to notice and act upon these malfunctions – that led to the disasters. Basically, the individuals operating within these environments embarked on inappropriate courses of action and maintained them, despite clear indications (including warning systems) that their original assessment of the situation was wrong. Human error can result from a wide range of factors, some related to the individual, some situational and/or environmental, and others a combination of the two. For Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Challenger and a range of other disasters, the errors were a direct consequence of one factor: sleepiness.…

Viney Kaushal (MBA ’94) APAC Alliances Overall Lead and Senior Director, Accenture Lives and works in: Singapore MY BIGGEST CHALLENGE: I moved to Singapore in November 2010 on an expat assignment for three years. My main challenge is dealing with a team that is scattered in 12 different countries and is made up of diverse cultures. MOST IMPORTANT SKILLS FOR MY JOB: Team building; relationship management; knowledge of cutting- edge technologies (cloud computing, open source, etc.) PROUDEST MOMENT: Watching my daughter get married in 2009. THE WORDS THAT BEST DESCRIBE ME: People advocate. HOW I RELAX: Spending quality time with family. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING MY MBA TAUGHT ME: How to manage people and balance time as well as priorities. WORDS OF WISDOM: Network extensively; you never know who you…

Springtime at last! Final preparations are being made for our 13th annual Life-Long Learning conference – a bit earlier than in previous years: Friday, May 6th will see hundreds of business leaders gather at the brand-new Ritz Carlton Hotel for this year’s conference, titled Get Your Business Back to Reality. See the ad on the back cover, or visit the Rotman events page, at rotman.utoronto.ca/events. Spring also means Reunions: this year’s honoured classes (ending in 1 or 6) have made their plans – see some of the details below and/or visit our reunion page, rotman.utoronto.ca/alumni/reunion/. Very soon (late May) a whole new batch of fresh-faced alumni – the classes of 2011 – will join the network, over 400 of them! Don’t worry – there’s lots of room. And speaking of…

The road has been rocky for business leaders of late, and it shows: in Gallup’s 2010 rating of the perceived ethical standards of people in different professions, executives polled just a few notches above car salesmen and beneath lawyers. Just 15 per cent of respondents rated their honesty and ethical standards as ‘high’ or ‘very high’. Of course, this hardly comes as a surprise. In the past decade we have witnessed three massive, blowout scandals: the accounting corruption that ensnared Enron, WorldCom and others (2001–2002); the options backdating scandal that included scores of Silicon Valley firms (2005–2006) and the subprime mortgage scandal that devastated both Wall Street and Main Street (2008–2009). This ongoing display of illegal and unethical behaviour suggests that something is seriously out of whack in the corporate…

By understanding the impact and interaction of the following four elements, you can begin to alter your own Mojo – both at work and in your personal life. 1. Identity: Who do you think you are? Taking everyone else out of the equation, including the opinions of your spouse, family and closest friends, how do you perceive yourself? Without a firm handle on our identity, we may never be able to understand why we gain – or lose – our Mojo. 2. Achievement: What have you done lately? These are the accomplishments that have meaning and impact. If you’re a salesperson, it might be landing a big account; if you’re a creative type, it could be coming up with a breakthrough idea. We often underrate or overrate our achievements based…

How do you define a ‘difficult conversation’? These tend to be conversations with high stakes – where there is money or emotional well-being or a relationship on the line. In business, common examples include giving negative feedback, managing a dysfunctional team, making tough decisions where the stakeholders have strongly divergent views, and giving bad news. These discussions can keep even the most experienced executive up at night, wondering how – or even whether – to have the conversation. However, getting really skilled at having these conversations gives a leader – and an organization – a huge competitive edge. You have found that difficult conversations are actually three conversations; please explain. Think for a moment about classical music or jazz. You can analyze it from the perspective of melody, but there…

‘COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE WORK BEHAVIOUR’ is an umbrella term that refers to intentional behaviour by employees that harms or intends to harm an organization or the people in it, including employees and customers. It can run the gamut from nasty interpersonal behaviour (insulting or yelling at someone) to behaviour directed toward inanimate objects (sabotage and theft) to purposely doing work incorrectly or withdrawing from an organization via absence or lateness. While some aspects of ‘CWB’ have been studied for decades, its emergence as a broad class of behaviours is only a recent development. The research to date suggests that a combination of individual differences and environmental conditions lead to CWB, and that it is helpful to divide these behaviours by target, differentiating instances where the organization is targeted (subsequently referred to as…

TODAY’S LEADERS WORK in a pressure-cooker atmosphere where two kinds of tension are always present. One is the natural tension that exists among top teams, in which talented, driven people who have to work together are also competing with one another – for results, power and stature. The other kind is performance tension that all large organizations must deal with: profitability versus growth, the short term versus the long term, and the success of the organization as a whole versus that of its individual parts. Over the years, we have worked with hundreds of leaders as they confronted difficult situations in different industries, and we have observed that the most successful executives are the ones who get these tensions right. They have an uncanny ability to turn conflict, dissent and…

HOW ETHICAL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, compared to the other people reading this magazine? On a scale of 0 to 100, rate yourself relative to them: if you believe you are amongst the most ethical in the group, give yourself a score near 100; if you consider yourself average, give yourself a score of 50. Now, rate your organization: on a scale of 0 to 100, how ethical is it compared to others? If you’re like most of the people we’ve asked, both of your scores will be higher than 50. If we averaged the scores of all the people reading this, we guess that it would be around 75. Yet that can’t actually be the case: the average score would have to be 50. Some of you must…

HAVING SPENT THE PAST FIVE YEARS working closely with the boards of some of the world’s leading organizations, we have come to a simple conclusion: boards need to become more diverse – not just demographically, but also in terms of the backgrounds, competencies and interests of their members. Of course, we aren’t alone in this belief; the recent financial crisis only highlighted the demand for greater board diversity. The breakdown in risk management at UBS – the biggest European victim of the credit crisis – provides a dramatic illustration that it is no longer sufficient to have a board of respected (or even admired) generalists. Increasing boardroom diversity won’t be easy, because like other elite groups, boards have a tendency to self-reproduce. As a result, regulators sometimes feel obliged to…

Fault line #1: Domestic political stresses, particularly in the U.S. The top one per cent of households accounted for only 8.9 per cent of income in 1976, but this grew to 23.5 per cent of the total income generated in the U.S. in 2007. In 2007, hedge fund manager John Paulson earned $3.7 billion, about 74,000 times the median household income in the U.S. Fault line #2: Trade imbalances between countries stemming from prior patterns of growth. Through the late 1990s and the 2000s, a significant portion of the increase in U.S. household demand was met from abroad, from countries such as Germany, Japan and increasingly, China. Their ability to meet this demand reflects a serious weakness in the growth path they have followed: excessive dependence on the foreign consumer.…

Q&A Your work has shown that firms like General Electric and Procter & Gamble groom their leaders to be ‘Good Bosses’. How do you define this term? There is a large body of research on what it takes to be a Good Boss, and the definition includes being competent and treating your employees with respect. It also means being able to inspire your employees, and structuring tasks in a way that produces results. This definition of being a good boss applies to everything from baseball teams to the top management teams of Fortune 500 firms. A. G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, is an exemplar of effective management. His former colleagues and reports still talk about how patient, persistent and supportive he was during the decade that…

Team Conversations engage individuals and teams in frictionless debates that interrogate reality and ignite dialogue around clarifying goals, solving problems, evaluating opportunities and designing strategies. Coaching Conversations engage individuals and teams in conversations which increase clarity, improve understanding and provide impetus for change, resulting in professional development, the advancement of projects and accelerated results. Delegation Conversations clarify responsibilities and raise the level of personal accountability, ensuring that each employee has a clear path of development, action plans are implemented, deadlines are met and leaders are free to take on more complex responsibilities. Confrontation Conversations engage individuals and teams in conversations which successfully resolve attitudinal, performance or behavioural issues by naming and addressing tough challenges, provoking learning and enriching relationships.…

• You constantly rehearse what you want to say to this person in your mind, in your car, and in your sleep. • You find yourself talking about the relationship with friends, family – anyone who will listen. • When you anticipate any interaction with this person you feel anxious, worried or uneasy. • Conversations with this individual leave you feeling jittery, wound up, overheated or otherwise unhinged. • You feel trapped in a no-win situation.…

Research indicates that higher quality disclosure and more transparency lead to higher firm values. Why, then, is there still such great variation in disclosure quality? Theory would suggest that firms should reveal all information to the market, and that this should lead to higher stock prices. In addition, as managers want to maximize shareholder value, there should be an incentive to reveal as much as possible. However, one of the reasons we see a lot of variation is because there are other stakeholders in the market who can use disclosed information to ‘extract rents’, or take profits away from a firm. The classic example is that of a competitor: if you reveal too much about how your business works, your competitor can use that information to take market share away…

• The Canadian workplace may be experiencing a topping out of female participation among the core working age group (25-44), which is the feeder pool into higher level positions. • The gender wage gap is largely tied to motherhood: women appear to be incurring larger wage penalties unrelated to their skills, education and experience. Evidence suggests that labour force ‘intermittency’ is the main culprit. • From the employee perspective, women incur far less financial penalty the more experience they are able to build before temporarily exiting the workforce. • Returning to the same employer lends itself to a lower wage penalty, as networks and firm-specific skills remain better preserved.…

• Managers spend, on average, fewer than seven hours asleep at night, and this amount decreases as job seniority increases. • Over 80% of individuals wake up at least once during the night, taking approximately 15 minutes to fall back to sleep. • The length of time taken to fall back to sleep once awake increases with job seniority – CEOs take an average of 30 minutes to fall asleep after each time they wake. • 50% of the sample felt tense when trying to fall asleep and 30% reported feeling ‘bad’ when they wake up in the morning. • 72% of managers noted that they found it difficult to concentrate on tasks.…

WHEN I DECIDED TO RETURN TO THE CLASSROOM to obtain a Rotman MBA, there was one particular class I couldn’t wait to take: Value Investing. Learning more about Ben Graham (the father of value investing) and searching for undervalued businesses would be a joy in itself – especially for students like me, who already have a passion for investing. The icing on the cake came last November, when, along with 25 of my fellow second-year students, I was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Omaha, Nebraska to meet value investing legend Warren Buffetta. It would not have been possible to have higher expectations for a trip; but I have to say, my expectations were blown away. Exploring the city of Omaha was great – it is a city with…

Complete details are available at rotman.utoronto.ca/events June 07, 6:00-8:00pm, New York Big Ideas Speaker Series Topic: Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL Speakers: Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief, HBR Chrystia Freeland, Global Editor-at-Large, Reuters Prof. Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School June 20, 6:00-8:00pm, San Francisco Artistry in the Workplace Experts Speaker Series Topic: Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life Speakers: Dr. Hilary Austen, Adjunct Professor, Rotman School Prof. Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School Diego Rodriguez, Partner, IDEO Udaya Patnaik, Partner, Jump Associates Gentry Underwood, Co-Founder, Orchestra June 21, 5:00-6:15pm, Toronto Career Management Experts Speaker Series Topic: How Best To Organize Your Second Career After Completing the First Speaker: Prof. Emeritus Shlomo Maital, Senior Research Associate, S. Neaman Institute for National Policy Research, Technion…

You believe that two things differentiate truly successful people from everyone else. What are they? I’ve led sessions where I have successful people talk about their lives, and five things tend to really matter to them: the first is health, which of course is critically important; the second is wealth, but that doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Studies show that after about $65,000 to $80,000 a year, there is zero correlation between wealth and happiness. Third is relationships; it’s very important to have positive relationships in your life with people that you love. So assuming that you’re healthy, you have a middle-class income and you have good personal relationships, what else differentiates successful people from others? Happiness and meaning. Truly successful people spend a great deal of…

While innovation, ingenuity and thinking ‘outside the box’ are often cited as hallmarks of successful organizations, in practice their occurrence is all-too-rare. More likely, the ‘way things are done around here’ involves a litany of missed deadlines, low morale, strained relationships and inept problem solving. It’s not as if people sit around saying, “Okay, here’s our plan for lowering morale,” or, “What can we do to run this project into the ground?” Most people want to foster creativity and competency and value the dignity of work. Yet we find ourselves being ineffective, settling for less, and caught in escalating cycles of unproductive behaviour towards each other. How does this happen? This article is intended to help sort out these puzzles of human behaviour. My inspiration is the work of Harvard…

Step 1: Walk Through the Three Conversations Sort out What Happened: where does your story come from (information, past experience, rules)? Theirs? What impact has this situation had on you? What might their intentions have been? What have you each contributed to the problem? Understand Emotions: explore your emotional footprint and the bundle of emotions you experience. Ground your Identity: what’s at stake for you about you? What do you need to accept to be better grounded? Step 2: Check Your Purposes and Decide Whether to Raise the Issue • Purposes: What do you hope to accomplish by having this conversation? If necessary, shift your stance to support learning, sharing and problem-solving. • Deciding: Is this the best way to address the issue and achieve your purposes? Is the issue…

Withdrawal. This can take the form of psychological withdrawal, lateness, absence and actual turnover. Traditionally, measuring the consequences of withdrawal focuses primarily on the financial costs associated with the loss in productivity of the absent employee. However, recent research has considered a wider range of consequences. The indirect costs associated with how the behaviour affects co-workers and their propensity to engage in similar forms of withdrawal have been considered along with the indirect costs that arise when the behaviour escalates to other more serious forms of withdrawal and eventually, to turnover. One study computed the total combined cost of different forms of withdrawal across employees in a medium-sized Israeli high tech company and reported an estimate of US$2.8 million. This estimate includes the costs of turnover, absence, lateness, replacement costs,…

1. How much time in your meetings is going toward the right tensions? (1=little time, 5=majority of the time) 2. How well are performance tensions being addressed by your strategy? (1=not addressed, 5=very well addressed) 3. How well do dissent, different views, and competing ideas surface, get discussed, and get productively decided? (1=tensions not surfaced or not productively decided, 5=competing ideas surface all the time and are decided very productively) 4. How good is your team’s alignment? Is it strong enough and focused enough to support the right fights, fought right? (1=weak, 5=strong) If your total score is less than 15, or if any one score is less than 3, take action now.…

RETAILING GIANT Wal-Mart, video card manufacturer ATI and domain name registrar VeriSign have been publicly accused, respectively, of surreptitiously fudging benchmark tests, hiring illegal immigrants and using deceptive marketing practices. Yet somehow, even in the face of negative publicity, compelling evidence and ongoing criticism from various stakeholder groups, these organizations have thrived, and it would be difficult to find indicators that they were considered any less reputable than their peers. How can this be? Most people would assume that firms caught engaging in activity that violates social, moral or legal codes would automatically suffer a loss of reputation. This assumption is supported by cognitive processing research indicating that people weigh bad news far more heavily than good news. That is, people perceive negative actions to be more diagnostic of negative…

The challenge of developing both trust and robust debate is especially acute for boards, whose interactions are complicated by several distinctive features: • Boards are made up of successful leaders – people with strong intellect, ego and drive who are not easy to manage; • Because they attract people with forceful personalities, boards are more exposed to labeling than most workgroups; • Most directors also have ‘day jobs’, often including other board memberships, setting up competing demands on their time; • Directors don’t meet up very often, so there are fewer opportunities to develop bonds or to iron out emerging tensions; • When they do meet, it is often in a very formal context, making self-censorship more likely; • There may be wide differences in authority, tenure and reputation that…

Q&A You have come to believe that an organization’s success or failure turns on the quality of its most important relationships. What led you to this conclusion? Over 30 years of working with senior leadership teams, I’ve been struck by how often relationships affect leaders’ ability to make good decisions. Indeed, how well and how quickly teams make decisions, inspire innovation, tackle performance problems or learn from mistakes depends on the strength of relationships within the team. Some relationships give teams the courage to face tough truths and make bold changes, while others kill every new idea or initiative within their reach. Once a relationship is in trouble, it can be very difficult to reverse it. We’re so riveted by the other person – on divining their motives or avoiding…

INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS in cognitive ability have long been known to relate strongly to a number of important life criteria, including performance at school and at work. However, research now indicates that there is also important variation between people in terms of their emotional capabilities. In particular, we are finding that the ability to regulate one’s emotions has significant implications for success, both in life and at work. While few of us give it any thought, we regulate our emotions multiple times on a daily basis, usually by modifying the expression of emotion in our face, voice and posture. This regulation of expressive behaviour includes both ‘up-regulation’ (amplifying expressive behaviour) and ‘down regulation’ (reducing expressive behaviour). In my research, I have been exploring the links between the ability to regulate one’s…

1. Master the courage to interrogate reality. No plan survives its collision with reality, and reality has a habit of shifting, both at work and at home. 2. Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real. While many fear ‘real’, it is the unreal conversation that should scare us to death. You will accomplish your goals in large part by making every conversation you have as real as possible. 3. Be here, prepared to be nowhere else. Our work, our relationships and our lives succeed or fail one conversation at a time. Speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have with this person. It could be. 4. Tackle your toughest challenge today. The problem named is the problem solved.…

As Susan and Tracy sit at their weekly team meeting, Tracy proudly takes credit for Susan’s brilliant promotion idea. Susan feels herself reacting – the surge of heat through her body, her face reddening. She realizes, ‘I just got hooked’. What Susan needs to do is unhook – to change her reaction to Tracy’s behaviour: 1. Unhook physically: Susan breathes deeply to calm herself down, release her anger and check back into the meeting. 2. Unhook mentally: Susan tells herself not to be intimidated by Tracy’s behaviour: she can find a way to be heard. 3. Unhook verbally: Susan speaks up: “When I first ran this idea by Tracy, we both got excited about it.” 4. Unhook with a business tool: Susan writes and distributes an e-mail summarizing the results…

In “Employee Ownership and Firm Disclosure”, Professor Bova along with his Rotman colleagues Ole Kristian Hope, the Deloitte Professor of Accounting, and PhD candidate Yiwei Dou, provide evidence supporting the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: There is a positive relation between employee ownership and the level of a firm’s voluntary disclosure. Hypothesis 2: There is a negative relation between the union density of a firm’s industry and a firm’s voluntary disclosure. Hypothesis 3: The positive relation between employee ownership and the level of a firm’s voluntary disclosure is larger for firm’s in industries with higher union density. Read the complete paper at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1687108…

WHEN SIR MICHAEL MARMOT examined the mortality from heart disease among British civil servants, he noticed an interesting fact: the lower the rank of the employee, the higher the age-adjusted mortality risk. Of course, many things co-vary with one’s position in an organizational hierarchy, including the incidence of smoking, dietary habits and so forth. However, Marmot and his colleagues found that only about a quarter of the observed variation in death rate could be accounted for by differences in smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, obesity and physical activity. They found that what did matter was power and status – things that provided people with greater control over their work environments. Whether we like to admit it or not, consciously seeking power is related to both managerial performance and career success. In…

SPRING 2011 The Rotman Expansion: A Mid-Point Update THE OFFICIAL OPENING of the Rotman School’s new building in September 2012 – part of an ambitious $200-million capital, research and education campaign – will provide the School with a home worthy of its ambition to become a global leader in innovative business education. The opening of the new building will also mark a homecoming of sorts, as most of the School’s programs and activities – currently dispersed across six buildings – will once again be brought under one roof. The new $91.8-million structure will be fully integrated with the current building at 105 St. George Street and the heritage home at 97 St. George Street. Designed to meet the exacting standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Canada…

RED EARTH lines the Northumberland Strait between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island on Canada’s eastern coast. As a child, it stained my skin leaving me with ruddy soled feet by summer’s end. Malawi is a red earth place, too. I spent two months there in 2010 conducting field work for my PhD. Like the Nova Scotian clay, Malawi’s red winter dust leaves its mark. I am among the steady stream of people walking along the dusty roadside. I walk past life and I walk with life. Women with babies wrapped to their backs with brightly coloured chitenjes carrying all manner of things on their heads. Men in shirts and ties. Men wheeling bicycles laden with wood, or mops, or sugarcane, or chickens tied by their feet to the handlebars.…