FEATURES
Managing organizations
Stop the Meeting Madness
Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley,and Eunice Eun | page 070
“Meetings don’t have to be a trap; they can be a conduit for change.”
Many executives feel overwhelmed bymeetings, and no wonder: On average, they spend nearly 23 hours a week in them,up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What’s more, the meetings are oftenpoorly timed, badly run, or both.
We can all joke about how painful they are,say the authors, but that pain has real consequences for teams andorganizations. Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into solo workthat’s essential for creativity and efficiency. Chopped-up schedules interruptdeep thinking, so people come to work early, stay late, or use weekends forquiet time to concentrate. And dysfunctional meeting behaviors are associatedwith lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability.
The authors have found that realimprovement requires systemic change, not discrete fixes. They describe afive-step process for that—along with the diagnostic work you’ll need to do inadvance.
HBR Reprint R1704C
FEATURES
Leading Teams
Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, andBeijing
Erin Meyer | page 078
When misunderstandings arise among membersof global teams, it’s often because managers conflate attitudes towardauthority and attitudes toward decision making. However, the two are differentdimensions of leadership culture, says the author, who has extensive researchand consulting experience with global companies.
Attitudes toward authority range fromstrongly hierarchical to strongly egalitarian. Approaches to decision makingvary from top-down to consensual. The author explores both dimensions andclassifies selected countries according to their position on both scales. TheJapanese, for example, are hierarchical in their views towardauthority—deferential to the boss and accustomed to waiting for instructionsrather than taking the initiative—but they are consensual decision makers whoget buy-in before they set a course of action.
The author describes the four culturaltypes—consensual and egalitarian; consensual and hierarchical; top-down andhierarchical; and top-down and egalitarian—and the corresponding expectationsabout leadership in each environment. If you keep those in mind, you’ll be moresuccessful in your cross-cultural interactions.
HBR Reprint R1704D
FEATURES
Strategy
Finding the Platform in Your Product
Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth J. Altman page 094
Five of the 10 most valuable companies inthe world today—Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—derive much oftheir worth from their multisided platforms, which facilitate interactions ortransactions between parties. Many MSPs are more valuable than companies in thesame industries that provide only products or services: For instance, Airbnb isnow worth more than Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain. However,companies that weren’t born as platform businesses rarely realize that theycan—at least partially—turn their offerings into one, say the authors. And evenif they do realize it, they often wander in the dark searching for a strategyto achieve this transformation.
In this article, Hagiu and Altman provide aframework for doing so. They lay out four specific ways in which products andservices can be turned into platforms and examine the strategic advantages andpitfalls of each: (1) opening the door to third parties; (2) connectingcustomers; (3) connecting products to connect customers; and (4) becoming asupplier to a multisided platform. These ideas can be used by physical as wellas online businesses.
HBR Reprint R1704G