CEB Blogs: The Top 10 Posts of 2015

Our coverage of the thorniest problems facing functional managers and some of the best ideas for overcoming them, as well as looking at big business trends and what they mean for those in corporate roles, has crossed a lot of ground this year.

Thanks to our readers, 2015 saw some record readership highs and, thanks to our writers, some great content. Below are the 10 most popular posts of last year. We wish you a successful, productive, and thoughtful 2016.

10 of the Best

1. Sales: 3 Lessons from Baseball’s ‘Moneyball’ Phenomenon: For the uninitiated, Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” describes how the Oakland Athletics achieved a spectacular winning record while having the smallest player payroll of any Major League Baseball team.

   But what’s most interesting about the Moneyball phenomenon is that it shows that while experience is important, data can go a long way to disproving long-held truths or providing a better outcome than a simple “gut” decision. This is just as true of sales – and most of the rest of business – as it is of baseball.

2. Why B2B Demand Generation Managers Might Be Doing More Harm than Good: In today’s B2B marketplace, personalizing a sales pitch to a specific customer can actually make a sale less likely. This is because it’s not a single individual that makes the decision to buy B2B products and services, but groups of people.

   And group behavior tends to make humans settle for the least confrontational conclusion, the one that requires the least change from the status quo, if any at all. The problem is that personalization strategies will only make the individuals in those groups believe more strongly in their own point of view, and less willing to compromise on anything but the least radical course of action. And that is unlikely to result in any kind of big purchase decision.

3. IT: 5 Characteristics of Strategic Thinkers: Analysis of the decision-making behavior of more than 10,000 employees showed the ability to make good decisions varies substantially across employees, even within the same organization. Conventional thinking says that organizational tenure or a prestigious degree are good determinants of strategic decision-making skills. This analysis begs to differ.

4. Want to Be the Boss? Do This, Don’t Do That: A long tenure can sometimes lead to worse, not better, decisions. It can make you think you know more about a situation than you actually do.

   Being the boss requires surrounding yourself with intelligent, independent leaders – and, importantly, leaders who differ from you in perspective and work style. The hard part here is not the cliché of “hiring people smarter than you” (although, leaders should definitely do that) but “hiring people who are differently smart than you.” And that means requires sufficient self-knowledge.

5. Why Slowness Will Be 2016’s Biggest Business Challenge: Circumstances have conspired to slow decision making at the world’s companies just when it needs to speed up. Executives across all of a company’s corporate functions find themselves in a painful – and unsustainable – situation. On one side, internal and external customers want them to move more quickly and respond more readily.

   On the other, executives’ ability to get things done quickly is slowed by the complexity of large “matrixed” organizations (where employees report to multiple managers from different teams), by leaders made risk averse by market uncertainty, and by far more information on every aspect of a company’s markets and operations than has ever existed before.

6. B2B Marketing: Why You Need Mobilizers and Customer Consensus: Marketing and selling products to B2B customers has become far more complex in recent years. The group buying dynamic (see post 2 above) will scupper a deal if it doesn’t meet a wide range of specific needs. Sales and marketing teams need someone inside the customer organization able to encourage change and build consensus. CEB’s work labels that individual a “mobilizer.” And in a world of consensus-buying their role is absolutely crucial.

7. IT: The 7 Attributes All Strategic Plans Should Have: A well-written IT strategic plan points the function in the right direction and ensures that the firm’s technology investments are well-spent.

   The problem is that most managers outside IT think this doesn’t happen very often: less than a quarter of business leaders think IT strategic planning is effective or clear. In reviewing hundreds of IT strategic plans, CEB identified seven attributes that make for a good one.

8. Workforce Trends: Employees Happy with Leaders, Not About Jobs: CEB’s quarterly survey of more than 20,000 employees showed that they are slightly more confident than not about business conditions, and have even more confidence in their senior managers to steer the right course.

   They are also more active in their search for new jobs, even if they don’t think their prospects have changed all that much in the past 12 months. Even with economic fluctuations in Europe, particularly Greece this year, employees perceive job availability and job quality to be more or less equal to the previous year.

9. Overhead Cost Management: 5 Common Mistakes, And How to Avoid Them: Managing general and administrative (G&A), or overhead costs, is a perennial challenge. But it’s getting harder; today, 73% of companies feel pressure to curtail the rise in G&A costs. Traditional “cost-cutting solutions” are attractive, but cheapest doesn’t always equal best.

   If companies focus solely on cost, they may do so at the expense of value creation. Outsourcing has been a common way to cut costs and/or even improve performance. But recent data show there is no relationship between outsourcing and lower costs or better performance.

10. Risk Heat Maps: 7 Hot Tips: A survey of enterprise risk management (ERM) teams at more than 50 companies in over 20 global industries showed that heat maps are the most common way to explain the risks a company is facing.

    In fact, 82% of teams said they use heat maps in board-level reports (76% in executive-level reports) and only 51% said they use risk dashboards, the next most common method. That’s because a well-designed heat map will help an audience understand the multiple variables that combine to threaten a company’s performance or even existence.