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Useful Research

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  • The Wells Fargo Debacle: How Proper Reward Practices Can Remedy A Toxic Culture

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    The Wells Fargo Debacle: How Proper Reward Practices Can Remedy A Toxic Culture

    Financial incentives can be a terrific motivator of performance, but if the negative unintended ripple consequences of extreme targeted goals are ignored, they will yield predictable disasters.

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    April 19, 2017

  • Organizations Should Put Talent First In 2017

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Organizations Should Put Talent First In 2017

    It is time to move beyond saying that talent is an organization’s most important asset. Organizations need to behave in ways that recognize the strategic importance of talent, and to make design and strategy decisions based on their ability to attract and manage talent.

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    April 19, 2017

  • Thank You, Wells Fargo

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Thank You, Wells Fargo

    Wells Fargo, the largest U.S. bank, has provided us with a great example of the power of pay as a motivator. Its incentive program, which provided payouts to managers, employees and executives for opening new accounts, resulted in millions of new, falsely opened accounts.

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    September 30, 2016

  • Pay Changes: Making Sense Of The Nonsense

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Pay Changes: Making Sense Of The Nonsense

    It looks like 2017 will be another year when employees will get small “merit” pay increases.

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    August 31, 2016

  • What Should HR Leaders Focus On In 2016?

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    What Should HR Leaders Focus On In 2016?

    One more time, even though I know it is dangerous to look back at predictions and prescriptions you make, I recently looked at a blog I posted in 2014. Much to my surprise and pleasure, what I said organizations should do in 2014 look on target for 2016! The main focus [...]

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    April 12, 2016

  • Benefits Gone Wild

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Benefits Gone Wild

    Corporation after corporation is adding benefits and perks to their employee reward packages. There was a time when there was a standard list of benefits and forms of cash compensation that most companies used. Today, things have changed. Thanks in part to the “creativity” of Silicon Valley firm...

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    April 12, 2016

  • More Time Off Is Not The Answer

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    More Time Off Is Not The Answer

    There recently has been a plethora of articles suggesting that many employees are overworked and that they need more time off. Firms that have unlimited vacation schedules and various types of leave programs are praised in these articles as exemplars of good management practice. I think it is im...

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    November 19, 2015

  • HR: From Criticism To Destruction

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    HR: From Criticism To Destruction

    For decades, HR has been criticized for being bureaucratic, dysfunctional, and out-of-touch with the reality of what businesses need to do in order to be successful. The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review now goes one step further and calls for “blowing up HR!” I believe that change is ...

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    October 7, 2015

  • Corporate Stewardship

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Corporate Stewardship

    Corporate leaders are becoming more concerned about the challenges facing our planet and its inhabitants. Many are now convinced they must fundamentally change how their companies operate in order to be sustainably effective.  Climate change, water shortages, decreasing biodiversity, unequal dis...

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    October 7, 2015

  • Rethinking Employee Turnover

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Rethinking Employee Turnover

    For decades, experts in talent management have emphasized the costs that are produced by turnover. It is usually said that depending upon the complexity of the job and the level of management, the cost of turnover can equal anywhere from one month’s to several years’ salary for a departing emplo...

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    July 29, 2015

  • Rethinking Corporate Purpose

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Rethinking Corporate Purpose

    During the last year I have been fortunate to attend a number of conferences on talent management and corporate performance. Most recently I was on a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference which examined this issue. The panel consisted of a mixture of academic and corporate executives. ...

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    June 24, 2015

  • Talent Analytics: Old Wine In New Bottles?

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Talent Analytics: Old Wine In New Bottles?

    A day does not pass without my receiving multiple emails announcing webinars, publications, and workshops focused on talent analytics. Talent analytics has become an important area in both consulting firms and corporations. Most of the discussion of analytics emphasizes how much can be gained by...

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    May 20, 2015

  • Performance Management: The Three Important Features You're Forgetting

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Performance Management: The Three Important Features You're Forgetting

    More and more organizations are changing their performance management systems. There are a number of reasons for this, including the difficulty of doing performance management effectively. More importantly, effective talent management is becoming increasingly important and effective performance m...

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    April 15, 2015

  • CSR Programs Are Not The Answer

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    CSR Programs Are Not The Answer

    Corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs are becoming increasingly popular in corporate America. There is no doubt that most make positive contributions to society and in some cases, make the sponsoring corporations more profitable. These programs may help organizations attract and retain e...

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    March 11, 2015

  • Remote Working: Who's Right?

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Remote Working: Who's Right?

    Recently there has been a considerable amount of discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of remote working. It began when Yahoo! ended its program. Best Buy followed rather quickly with the announcement that it too was ending its program. Both Yahoo! And Best Buy were criticized by nume...

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    March 6, 2015

  • Netflix: We Got It Right!

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Netflix: We Got It Right!

    There is no doubt that organizations need to be more agile given the rapidly changing business environment that they face. In our 2012 book, Management Reset, Chris Worley and I argue that one key to making the human capital side of organizations more agile is adopting what we call a [...]

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    March 6, 2015

  • Make Performance Appraisals Change Friendly

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Make Performance Appraisals Change Friendly

    As the world changes at an increasingly rapid rate, organizations need to be more agile and change friendly. In the minds of many critics of performance management systems, this is one more reason why organizations should abandon performance appraisals. They are said to be one of the many parts o...

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    March 6, 2015

  • Go Bonus: It's More Important Now Than Ever

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Go Bonus: It's More Important Now Than Ever

    There is no doubt that pay-for-performance can be an important contributor to organizational effectiveness. It can be a significant motivator of performance and can attract and retain the best performers. But in order to accomplish these important objectives, significant amounts of pay need to be...

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    March 6, 2015

  • Individualizing Organizations: What It Takes

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Individualizing Organizations: What It Takes

    Forty years ago, I wrote an article arguing that organizations could be more effective and provide a better quality of life for their employees if they would individualize their relationship with their employees. The argument presented was simple. People differ, and as a result, no common treatme...

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    March 6, 2015

  • What Should HR Leaders Focus On In 2014?

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    What Should HR Leaders Focus On In 2014?

    The main focus for most organizations in 2014 should be on talent management and talent development, particularly the managerial and technical roles that are the difference makers.  One of the major reasons to focus on talent is that it is a great way to get the HR function into a [...]

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    March 6, 2015

  • HR Should Own Organizational Effectiveness

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    HR Should Own Organizational Effectiveness

    What should the role of HR be in a corporation? It many respects, the answer is obvious and simple. It should take primary responsibility for providing input, advice, direction, and execution with respect to organization effectiveness. Increasingly, what makes organizations effectiveness is how t...

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    March 6, 2015

  • Eliminating Performance Appraisals

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Eliminating Performance Appraisals

    Should organizations stop doing performance appraisals? The argument in favor of eliminating them is that they frequently do more damage than good. Among the damage that they are said to do, the least troublesome is wasting time, and the most troublesome is the alienation of employees and creatin...

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    March 6, 2015

  • The Quadruple Bottom Line: Its Time Has Come

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    The Quadruple Bottom Line: Its Time Has Come

    What is an effective organization?  Organizations should not be judged just on their financial performance.  They do need to perform at an above average level financially in order to be considered successful, and they do need to do it over a substantial period of time, not just a few years. Above...

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    March 6, 2015

  • Corporate Boards Fail Again!

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Corporate Boards Fail Again!

    Once again the results are in and once again they show that executive compensation in the U.S. has escalated dramatically. It has gone up more than corporate earnings, inflation, the stock market, and the pay of almost everyone in the country, not to mention the world. Who is responsible for [...]

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    March 6, 2015

  • The Agility Factor

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    The Agility Factor

    The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band changed the way people think about music; it is regarded as one of the most pivotal music releases of all time. Pop star Phil Collins said that it opened a door and showed people a new room. But the door had already been [...]

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    March 6, 2015

  • What Makes High Profits Sustainable?

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    What Makes High Profits Sustainable?

    It is true that the best predictor of a corporation’s future profitability is its current profitability. High levels of profitability are more often than not followed by high profits. But, this is less and less likely to happen. A significant number of corporations fail to fit the pattern of bein...

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    March 6, 2015

  • John Wooden's Contribution to Organization Agility

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    John Wooden's Contribution to Organization Agility

    I have been writing about organization effectiveness for a long time. My colleague and co-author, Chris Worley (see Built to Change, Management Reset, and our most recent book The Agility Factor), who leads the agility research program at the Center for Effective Organizations, and I have had som...

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    March 6, 2015

  • Pay Fairness Requires Pay Openness

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Pay Fairness Requires Pay Openness

    When corporations are left to decide on pay amounts without any public accountability, all too often they make decisions that are simply not defensible, ethical, nor fair.

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    March 6, 2015

  • Why Pay Secrecy Needs To End

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Why Pay Secrecy Needs To End

    It has finally happened. Someone has hacked the pay data of an organization and made the pay data of thousands of employees public. It is still unknown who attacked Sony Pictures, but the suspected hacker is the North Korean government. The biggest surprise for me is not that it happened, [...]

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    March 6, 2015

  • Creating Talent Agility

    Ed Lawler posted a blog post

    Creating Talent Agility

    The world of business is changing faster and faster. Yesterday’s performance is no longer good enough. In today’s competitive environment, what organizations used to do is no longer good enough. Organizations must be increasingly agile in ways that allow them to change what they do and how well t...

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    March 6, 2015

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