2. • IDEO’s Culture of Helping
by Teresa Amabile,
Colin M. Fisher, and
Julianna Pillemer
• Building a Game-Changing Talent Strategy
by Douglas A. Ready,
Linda A. Hill, and
Robert J. Thomas
• How Netflix Reinvented HR
by Patty McCord
3 Articles from Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2014
3.
IDEO’s Culture of Helping: By making collaborative generosity
the norm, the design firm has unleashed its creativity.
Building a Game-Changing Talent Strategy: The most effective
people policies—like those at BlackRock—drive business
strategy, address concerns across the entire organization, and
add value.
How Netflix Reinvented HR: Trust people, not policies. Reward
candor. And throw away the standard playbook.
5. Executive Summary
Leaders can do few things more important than encouraging helping behavior within their
organizations. In the highest-performing companies, it is a norm that colleagues support one
another’s efforts to do the best work they can. That has always been true for efficiency
reasons, but collaborative helping becomes even more vital in an era of knowledge work, when
positive business outcomes depend on high creativity in often very complex projects.
A help-friendly organization has to be actively nurtured, however, because helpfulness among
colleagues does not arise automatically: Competition, pride, or distrust may get in the way.
The trickiness of this management challenge—to increase a discretionary behavior that by
definition must be inspired— makes all the more impressive what the design firm IDEO has
already achieved. Its help-seeking and help-giving culture is behind the firm’s success. But
how has IDEO managed to make helping the norm? To answer this question, the authors spent
two years observing, interviewing people, and conducting surveys at one office of the firm.
They discovered four keys to building a help-friendly organization that leaders of other
organizations could learn and apply to similar effect.
15. Driven by purpose, Oriented toward performance, and Guided by principles.
16. Executive Summary
When most of the world’s financial services giants were stumbling and retrenching in the
aftermath of the 2008 recession, the asset management firm BlackRock was busy charting a
course for growth. Its revenues, profits, and stock price all performed consistently through this
tumultuous period. The authors looked at BlackRock and other game-changing companies—
the Mumbai-based global conglomerate Tata Group, and Envision, an entrepreneurial
alternative energy company based in China—and found significant commonalities.
These three companies demonstrate the essential attributes of a game-changing organization:
They are driven by purpose, oriented toward performance, and guided by principles. In the
process of conducting interviews with these companies, the authors discovered a fourth thread
that weaves them even more tightly together: Each is supported by a game-changing talent
strategy.
But, they write, the path to such a strategy seems rife with complexity and ambiguity. How
can both strategy and execution be consistently superior? How can they support a collective
culture yet enable high potentials to thrive as individuals? How can the strategy be global and
local at the same time? And how can its policies endure yet be agile and constantly open to
revitalization? BlackRock’s approach provides the answers.
25. 1. My company places ‘purpose’ at the heart of its business model.
2. My company has a high performance culture.
3. Leaders in my company follow well-understood guiding principles.
4. Our people policies help drive our business strategy.
5. Our talent management practices are highly effective.
6. Our leaders are completely committed to excellence in talent management.
7. Our leaders are deeply engaged in and accountable for spotting, tracking, coaching,
and developing the next generation of leaders.
8. Our talent practices are strategically oriented, but they also put a premium on
operational efficiency.
9. Our talent practices engender a strong sense of collective purpose and pride yet
work very well for my career as an individual.
10. Our talent practices strike the right balance between global scale and local
responsiveness.
11. My company has a long-standing commitment to people development, but we are
very open to changing our policies when circumstances dictate.
27. Talent managers should think like businesspeople and innovators first, and
like HR people last.
28. Executive Summary
PowerPoint deck about the organization’s talent management strategies, the document went
viral—it’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. Now one of those executives,
the company’s longtime chief talent officer, goes beyond the bullet points to paint a detailed
picture of how Netflix attracts, retains, and manages stellar employees.
The firm draws on five key tenets:
Hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults. Ask workers to rely on logic and common
sense instead of formal policies, whether the issue is communication, time off, or expenses.
Tell the truth about performance. Scrap formal reviews in favor of informal conversations. Offer
generous severance rather than holding on to workers whose skills no longer fit your needs.
Managers must build great teams. This is their most important task. Don’t rate them on
whether they are good mentors or fill out paperwork on time.
Leaders own the job of creating the company culture. You’ve got to actually model and
encourage the behavior you talk up.
Talent managers should think like businesspeople and innovators first, and like HR people last.
Forget throwing parties and handing out T-shirts; make sure every employee understands
what the company needs most and exactly what’s meant by ‘high performance’.”