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by Wolfgang Ulaga and Christoph Senn

Companies must secure “killer marketing and sales skills” in a dynamic landscape where commercial competencies rapidly become obsolete.

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by John Coleman

Organizational culture is a remarkable competitive advantage. McKinsey & Company, for example, has found that top quartile cultures outperform median cultures by 60% — and bottom quartile cultures by 200% — and that those company’s cultures are both difficult for competitors to replicate and allow the organization to better adapt to changing circumstances. These findings are echoed in the research of Alex Edmans of London Business School, who found similar outperformance among companies with exceptional cultures.

Great corporate cultures are not just good for performance, but for the flourishing and engagement of the people who work in them. In my own work, I focus frequently on the need for strong culture, its components, and how to craft an organization’s culture to deliver greater meaning and purpose. But oft overlooked is the central role that curiosity plays in shaping these norms. To unlock the potential of their institutions and the people within them, great leaders need to demonstrate consistent curiosity about their employees, customers, their own roles, and the changes occurring in their institutions over time.

Curiosity about employees

Leaders must be curious about the values and motivations of their employees in shaping and maintaining a corporate culture. Organizations are a collection of the mindsets, attitudes, and values of the people that work within them. Founders and leaders have great influence on the types of people who join an organization and the values they bring with them. But by tapping the collective intelligence of the group, organizations can seek to be truly distinctive. That requires even brilliant leaders to display curiosity toward those with whom they work.

In the early days of Whole Foods, for example, founder John Mackey elected to engage his entire company in shaping their mission and values — an effort spurred by his desire to tap the collective intelligence of his people and build a “flat” organization where everyone was engaged. The document that resulted in 1985, their “Declaration of Interdependence,” survives to this day and was fundamentally shaped by employees from top to bottom. Similarly, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio famously created the principles by which Bridgewater is managed through an open-source document that allowed employees to challenge existing precepts, offer up new ones, and collectively codify their model of success (a process I experienced while working there one summer).

Whether through walking the halls and talking to people directly, formally surveying employees, or engaging them in focus groups about the tenets of culture, every leader has the same opportunity to display curiosity in shaping mission, vision, and values.

Curiosity about customers

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by Diane Brady

People quit their bosses. They quit for plenty of other reasons, too, but feelings matter, and work is personal. That’s been true for years, but the importance of developing great managers has become more urgent as workforce participation in the U.S. remains below pre-pandemic levels, with only 62.7% of the working-age population currently in the labor force, while the need for employees to be engaged and constantly learning has increased.

The problem? Good bosses—and the people they manage—are getting less help than ever, as the practice of developing capable leaders gets less focus in a changing world of work.

“The basic conditions for the American employee are that this doesn’t work,” says Bill Schaninger, an author, consultant and senior partner emeritus at McKinsey & Co. He spoke with Forbes in the video above about the value of middle managers and the book he co-authored with two McKinsey colleagues, Power To The Middle.

Too often, companies focus on the wrong levers in trying to boost employee engagement. A raise isn’t enough, especially when higher wages often coincide with higher inflation. Flexibility can help—but disengaged workers can feel even less connected to their companies if they work from home. The nature of the work matters, but doing data entry or dancing for Beyonce is typically decided at the time you’re hired.

Investing in Leadership?
What is critical and controllable is the quality of leadership, Schaninger says, from those for whom managing someone is a new muscle to veteran managers trying to inspire people in a new world. These are the carriers of culture, the coaches, the critics, the often unsung catalysts for success. “Good leaders also help people see their purpose,” he says. “They understand the vision. They know how to communicate it. And they know how to help the individuals come together as a team.”

Their value is sometimes lost on leaders who may think success is self-made. Over the past year, the value of “managers” have incurred the wrath of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and others—ridiculed as bureaucrats and soft-skills peddlers who do little for the bottom line. Continue reading →

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Senior Vice President, 

Healthcare Business Unit Leader

We are seeking an individual who has:

• Experience building and leading a Healthcare BU (Payor/Provider/LS/Med Tech) …. Practice today is ~$20M and need to grow to over $100M in next couple of years
• Strategy:  Evaluate and define “go to market” strategy
• Team Build:  Evaluate and build team: Go to market / BD / Sales and Delivery
• Organic and M&A:  Build via leveraging existing MSA’s , capture new clients and identify / acquire “tuck in” acquisitions
• Builder with strong sales orientation
• Location:  East Coast (NJ preference)

If you are interested or know someone who might be interested, please let me know.

Thank you!

Larry Janis

Managing Partner I Integrated Search Solutions Group

P-516-767-3030

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By Deborah Lovich, Sebastian Ullrich, Nick South, Ádám Kotsis, and Katie Lavoie

This is our second Future of Work—Global Employer Survey, which we conducted to better understand how employers are preparing for the changing workplace. The first survey was conducted in 2022.

Organizations have been focusing on new ways of working since the pandemic, and they have successfully instituted various tactical initiatives. But leaders are still struggling to implement the strategic and people-focused changes that would ready their workforce and enterprise for the future.

Given the fast-evolving workplace, organizations need to overcome the barriers to change and make their workplace more effective for their people. Investing in modifying employee behavior, improving the talent proposition, and supporting distributed teams are just a few ways that organizations can continue making strides and building a better workplace.

The State of the Workforce
To better understand organizations’ efforts to adapt and the challenges they face, BCG surveyed executives worldwide about their views on the future of work. Across 12 dimensions in four categories, we asked executives which dimensions they consider most important and how prepared their company is on each. We then looked at the differences between organizations with mostly office-based workers and those with primarily frontline workers who need to be physically present for their jobs. (See “The Survey.”) Continue reading →