Katzenbach Foresight newsletter

May 2012

The Katzenbach Center at Booz & Company is proud to present the latest edition of Katzenbach Foresight, where we push beyond best practice boundaries in leadership, organization, culture, and human capital.

This issue features Look Beyond the Team: It’s About the Network, a blog posted on HBR.org, about alternatives to traditional teams, stressing the importance of networking and collaboration. Also included is The Steve Jobs Way, a recent review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, that analyzes Jobs' s leadership style. Finally, the Harvard Business Review article How Many Direct Reports? offers advice to CEOs and key executives on the perennially important topic of structure at the top.

We appreciate your interest in the Katzenbach Center and warmly welcome comments and questions. Please feel free to reach out to us, or to the other authors featured — we are always happy to continue the conversation.

Best regards,

Jon Katzenbach
Senior Partner, Booz & Company

In This Issue

Look Beyond the Team: It's About the Network
by Jon Katzenbach
Teaming has evolved over the last decade. Ten years ago, the conventional wisdom held that the best way to solve a problem was to form a team. However, today, with the ever-increasing necessity of working across organizational and geographical boundaries, more leaders at all levels are finding that it's not always practical — or even best — to put together a team. The blog discusses today’s alternatives, including the potential of focused networks and subgroups, which can work more effectively in different modes than "real teams." read more >

Illustration by Jack Unruh

The Steve Jobs Way
by Jon Katzenbach
Leaders can learn a lot from the late Apple CEO, but not all of it should be emulated. Most business leaders would be thrilled to achieve Steve Jobs’s level of market success, but should they aspire to lead like him? Steve Jobs may have been, as Walter Isaacson says in his eponymous biography, “the greatest business executive of our era,” but he was a mercurial, demanding, and tyrannical one. Applied to the wrong strategy, market, or product, his behaviors could sink a company. In the end, what made Jobs such a successful leader was his much-lauded talent for envisioning and delivering breakthrough products and services. read more >

How Many Direct Reports?
by Gary Neilson and Julie Wulf
This article in Harvard Business Review helps CEOs and other senior executives answer a perennial question: How much should they take on? The authors analyze how the CEO’s span of control logically evolves and offer advice for managers as they progress through their career. download (600kb, PDF) >

Click here to access our span-of-control diagnostic tool that allows you, in just three minutes, to get a sense of the target number of direct reports based on your current leadership situation.