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Strategy and leadership guru, Sydney Finkelstein believes that “regenerating the talent pool is the single most important thing that any leader can do” to help his or her organization to “survive and prosper.” His new book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), studies “those few individuals” in any given industry who “grow human capital better than anyone else.”

Strategy & Leadership contributing editor Brian Leavy asks Prof. Finkelstein what can managers learn from these exceptional talent developers that might be more widely emulated?

According to Prof. Finkelstein, “The superboss playbook is not about being nice or empathic. It’s about giving proteges the motivation, guidance, wisdom, creative licence, and other elements they need to learn and grow”

Prof. Finkelstein notes, “While many businesses today focus on getting closer to the customer, superbosses are very much focused on getting closer to their employees or team members.”

Prof. Finkelstein asserts, “Superbosses have cracked the code on how to make organizations work better by designing a playbook that helps people accomplish more than they ever thought possible in their careers, or their lives. By studying the superbosses and what they do, we now know how genuinely unusual talent comes to populate an organization.?

What is strategy? Countless books, MBA programs, executive education initiatives, and consultants are available to answer this question in excruciating detail. But let’s cut to the chase. Strategy is what a company does, or doesn’t do, to fulfill its vision in a competitive marketplace.

It may be that it's the new economy firms, not the old standbys, that “just don't get it.”

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of misleading experiences, and how decision‐makers' experience can sometimes lead them to think they are right when they are really wrong.

Literature was reviewed in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and decision theory on how people make decisions and what decision‐making biases influence thinking. A total of 83 strategic decisions were studied to understand what potential biases existed and how those biases affected the quality of decision making.

Decision making is more often an emotional than rational process, in large part because of how our brains are wired. This process works most of the time, but not always. As a result, it is critical to identify those red flag conditions where our decisions are most vulnerable to error, with misleading experiences being one of the most central of these red flags. The paper discusses how to identify whether misleading experiences are potentially dangerous.

While the paper relies on multiple literatures and the authors' own original empirical work, a topic as complex as how our brains make decisions clearly cannot lead to definitive conclusions. Future research might investigate more of the contingency situations where misleading experiences might be dangerous.

This study is the first that highlights how central misleading experiences can be to mistaken decision making. It is based on significant original research, and has implications that are clearly practical for business leaders.

This paper aims to introduce a strategic visioning method called vision by design and to use the example of Harley‐Davidson's corporate regeneration to illustrate how the method works in practice. This approach conceives visioning as a practical tool of management whose power stems from the facilitation of strategic conversations among stakeholders and the reflexive engagement of business leaders in past‐present‐future thinking.

The paper presents a four‐dimensional visioning model that facilitates exploration of both the internal and external contexts of the business. The advantage of the approach lies in breaking down vision into its component parts, lending simplicity and structure to the visioning process. The study employs a case study of the turnaround of Harley‐Davidson to illustrate this method.

The paper finds that, in undertaking corporate regeneration, Harley‐Davidson's senior management recognized the need for a vision that was comprehensive, inclusive and dynamic, but also realistic and grounded in the history and present circumstances of the business. The visioning process at the company was transformational because it ignited a strategic conversation that went beyond the boardroom to include employees, customers, partners and financiers.

The vision by design method adds value by simplifying the visioning process and focusing on a series of transitions, whereby the emerging vision is rooted squarely in business realities. As the picture of a regenerated enterprise is built up, both internal and external contexts are scrutinized, ensuring that the future vision is consistent and complete, attractive externally and deliverable internally.

You’re on your way home and have been in Marks & Spencer’s for a pair of socks and a bottle of wine. On your way to the car, your Motorola phone rings and you’re asked to visit a supermarket for a pair of Levi’s and some groceries. “Get some Guinness, too, and a couple of Kit Kats,” is the message, and “Don’t forget you’re helping the children build things with their Lego later.” All’s well with the world and you’re eager to get home to the bosom of your family. Don’t those brand names we all know help create a comfortable feeling – a sort of security blanket that protects us from the dangers that lie in change and unfamiliarity?

This study sheds new light on the personality trait and provides evidence regarding the relation between narcissism and desirable accounting practices, specifically the impact of CEO narcissism on accounting conservatism.

The authors test the relation between CEO narcissism and accounting conservatism for a sample of 907 US companies and their corresponding CEOs for the period between 2010 and 2018. The authors apply three established models of accounting conservatism and measure executives' narcissism using a non-intrusive approach ubiquitous in the literature.

The authors find that CEO narcissism is associated with speculative accounting practices in the form of timely recognition of positive news and more prudent financial reporting of anticipated negative news. The authors provide the first empirical evidence that, despite its well-known negative effects on corporate financial reporting, executive narcissism can also produce positive outcomes.

While managerial overconfidence has received much attention, the effects of executives' narcissism are still widely unexplored (Chatterjee and Hambrick, 2007). The authors thus contribute to the literature by investigating the relationship between CEOs' narcissism and accounting conservatism. The authors conjecture CEO narcissism should have a twofold effect on prudent financial reporting. On the one hand, CEOs' narcissism should be associated with low levels of unconditional conservatism due to excessively fast good news recognition. On the other hand, narcissistic executives should be associated with early recognition of negative news and hence with higher levels of conditional conservatism.