Closing the Alignment Gap - Strategy and Operations in the Enterprise

A new study by Forbes Insight, in associatioin with SAP show executives clearly agree that aligning strategy and operations is essential to their companies’ success, but many organizations still face significant barriers that may prevent them from achieving this. Executives on both sides of the strategy/operations aisle are concerned that strategic priorities may be out of sync with operational realities, in particular in critical areas such as risk management and talent allocation and retention. Intensifying this split are the sudden shifts companies have had to make to deal with the impact of the global recession and resulting economic volatility.

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How to encourage big ideas - from MIT Sloan's School of Management

A new study suggests certain types of funding — which provide more freedom and focus less on near-term results — lead to more innovative and influential research. Scientists are much more likely to produce innovative research when using long-term grants that allow them exceptional freedom in the lab, according to a new study co-written by MIT economists. The work shows that biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures wind up producing about twice as many highly influential papers as some peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets. “If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an author of the study. “The researcher has to believe that short-term failure will not be punished.” The results are contained in a working paper released this fall

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Vikram Pandit on risk management

Vikram Pandit is the CEO of Citigroup Source