Subject :
HI 3031: Trends in the Global Business EnvironmentRead the attached 2 articles, then write 2000 words report, requirementas below:The articles selected as the ‘gateway’ to the literature on the various topics are nominated in the attached Lecture/Tutorial Schedule. Choose one of these articles as your
core article.1. Provide a brief summary of the core article enough to identify
four key questions arising from that article
which you will research. Identifying keywords in the article will also assist your further research.
2.
Using
Proquest,
do a literature search identifying at least one article relevant to each of the four key questions that you have identified. Then summarise each of the articles you have linked to the four key questions and demonstrate its link to the question you have identified in the core article.
3. In so doing, you are constructing a mini-Literature Review. You must complete it with a Bibliography in Harvard referencing style.
Thanks
1.pdf (p.1-7) 2.pdf (p.8) ARTWORK Yayoi Kusama, The Obliteration Room 2002, furniture, white paint, dot stickers Dimensions variable SPOTLIGHT 74 Harvard Business Review March 2015 SPOTLIGHT ON WHERE STRATEGY STUMBLES Heidi K. Gardner is a distinguished fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. She was previously on the Organizational Behavior faculty at Harvard Business School. When Senior Managers Won’t Collaborate Lessons from professional services firms by Heidi K. Gardner Today’s professional services firms face a conundrum. As clients have globalized and confronted more-sophisticated technological, regulatory, economic, and environmental demands, they’ve sought help on increasingly complex problems. To keep up, most top-tier firms have created or acquired nar-rowly defined practice areas and en-couraged partners to specialize. As a result, their collective expertise has been distributed across more and more people, places, and practice groups. The only way to ad- dress clients’ most complex issues, then, is for specialists to work together across the boundaries of their expertise. When they do, my research shows, their firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, and gain a competitive edge. But for the professionals involved, the financial benefits of collaboration accrue slowly, and other advantages are hard to HBR.ORG March 2015 Harvard Business Review 75 quantify. That makes it difficult to decide whether the investment in learning to collaborate will pay off. Even if they value the camaraderie of collabora- tive work, many partners are hard-pressed to spend time and energy on cross-specialty ventures when they could be building their own practices instead. And no wonder. This kind of collaboration is dif- ficult. It’s different from mere assembly (in which experts make individual contributions and someone pulls them all together) and from sequential, inter- dependent projects (in which a professional adds to a piece of work and then hands it over to the next person to work on). It’s much harder than simply delegating to junior staffers. It’s also not the same as cross-selling, when partner A introduces partner B to her own client so that B can provide additional ser- vices. True multidisciplinary collaboration requires people to combine their perspectives and exper- tise and tailor them to the client’s needs so that the outcome is more than the sum of the participating individuals’ knowledge. If professionals better understood the trade-offs, and if firms lowered the organizational barriers to collaboration, then not only clients but also the professionals themselves and their firms would ben- efit handsomely. My research examines these trade- offs through quantitative analyses of a decade’s worth of detailed financial and time-sheet records at three global law firms and one accounting firm, case studies of professional services incumbents and new entrants, and surveys and interviews with hundreds of professionals in a range of sectors, including con- sulting, law, accounting, engineering, real estate brokerage, architecture, and executive search. (For more details, see the sidebar “About the Research.”) My findings show how the benefits of collaboration play out. They paint a realistic picture of the barri- ers that often prevent professionals from working together. And they suggest changes that both in- dividuals and firms can make to reap more of the advantages and avoid more of the drawbacks. The Benefits to the Firm For a firm, the financial benefits of multidisciplinary collaboration are unambiguous. Simply put, the more disciplines that are involved in a client en- gagement, the greater the annual average revenue the client generates, my research shows. That’s in part because cross-specialty work is likely to be less subject to price-based competition. Whereas clients view an engagement involving single-specialty ex- pertise (about a basic tax issue, for instance) as a commodity that can be awarded to the lowest bid- der, they know that cross-specialty work is complex and harder. As additional practice groups serve a client, the firm can bill a higher amount, and each group earns more, on average. This suggests that the practice groups are collaborating to create ad- ditional value, not merely cross-selling discrete services. My research at one global law firm showed rising revenue per client even as five, six, and seven disciplines became involved. (See the exhibit “More Collaborators, More Revenue.”) I also found that client projects involving offices in several countries are significantly more lucrative than single-office engagements. (See the exhibit “More Countries, More Revenue.”) That’s because cross-border work is often especially complex and demanding—think, for example, of issues that arise when multinational companies merge or of the mul- tiple jurisdictions that can be involved in litigation resulting from an oil spill. Delivering seamless ser- vice across national boundaries can be an important differentiator for firms. MORE COLLABORATORS, MORE REVENUE As more practice groups collaborate to serve a client, the average annual revenue from the client increases, over and above what each practice would have earned from selling discrete services. NUMBER OF PRACTICE GROUPS SERVING A CLIENT SOURCE HEIDI K. GARDNER, DATA FROM A GLOBAL LAW FIRM PR EV IO US S PR EA D: © YA YO I K US AM A. C O UR TE SY O F DA VI D ZW IR N ER , V IC TO RI A M IR O GA LL ER Y, O TA F IN E AR TS , K US AM A EN TE RP RI SE 800 600 400 200 71 2 3 4 5 6 AVERAGE ANNUAL REVENUE PER CLIENT (US$ THOUSANDS) REVENUE FROM SELLING DISCRETE SERVICES REVENUE FROM SELLING INTEGRATED SERVICES 76 Harvard Business Review March 2015 SPOTLIGHT ON WHERE STRATEGY STUMBLES Moreover, moving beyond siloed services to complex, interdependent engagements allows a professional services firm to work for more-senior executives in a client’s organization, who have a greater span of responsibility and greater authority and budget to hire external advisers. In the long term, engaging these executives through multidisciplinary projects builds loyalty by creating switching barri- ers. As the general counsel of a Fortune 100 company explained, “I could find a decent tax lawyer in most firms. But when a tax lawyer successfully teamed up with an intellectual property lawyer, a regulatory lawyer, and ultimately a litigator to handle my thorn- iest patent issues, I knew I could never replace that whole team in another firm.” From an organizational perspective, the more partners who serve a given client, the more likely that client is to become “institutionalized”—owned, as it were, by the firm rather than controlled by one part- ner—reducing the risk that a departing professional will take that client with her. What’s more, partners’ ability to see their colleagues’ work lowers the risk of illicit rogue behavior (something that is admittedly rare but can be fatal). How Individuals Benefit The benefits of collaboration to individuals are equally quantifiable, if less intuitive. My research clearly shows that professionals who contribute to colleagues’ client work sell more services to their own clients. Why? When you team up with colleagues, they better understand what you have to offer, and that knowledge makes them more likely to refer work to you down the road. Because referrals are a more-efficient way to generate work than prospecting on your own, they make it easier to reach revenue targets. In one law firm I studied, a single work referral typically generated about $50,000 of extra revenue for the partner who received it. Of course, not all colleagues who come to appre- ciate your capabilities will send you work immedi- ately; they must wait until their clients require your expertise. On average, partners in my study got a new client referral within a year from one in every six colleagues they teamed up with. But even when teammates don’t send work themselves, they are likely to spread word of your expertise to colleagues who need it. At the law firm, it took working with just two extra teammates to generate a referral from someone who had never sent work to that individual before. That might not seem like much, but the compounded effect of word of mouth is powerful: As colleagues recommend your work to others in the firm, your reputation is likely to grow significantly over time. Collaboration raises a partner’s profile not only with colleagues but also in the wider mar- ket. Professional services are notoriously opaque: It’s hard for clients to judge their value, even after the fact. At least in the near term, it’s nearly im- possible to answer with any certainty questions like “Did the consultant’s recommendation lead to our bankruptcy?” “Did the executive search firm place the absolute best candidate in the role?” or “What risks would we have faced without the vast legal expenditure?” That uncertainty means that clients rely heavily on a professional’s reputation, gleaned from word-of-mouth recommendations, when making hiring decisions. Those recommen- dations carry a lot of weight; they lead not only to more work but also to more-sophisticated and more-lucrative work. At the law firm, the more cross- discipline projects partners worked on, and the more complex each one was, the more partners could charge for their work in subsequent years. Idea in Brief THE PROBLEM Professional services firms can gain a powerful competitive edge if they do complex work for clients that involves partners from multiple specialties. But collaboration’s downsides are immediate, while the benefits accrue slowly, making individuals reluctant to engage in it. THE RESEARCH Research shows that as more practice groups work together on a client engagement, the average annual revenue from the client increases. And as professionals engage in more cross-specialty projects, the more work they will subsequently get and the more they’ll be able to charge for it. THE IMPLICATIONS Both individuals and leaders can lower the barriers to collaboration—and land high-value work—by de-emphasizing inputs like billable hours and focusing more on outcomes such as greater revenue per client. AVERAGE REVENUE PER PROJECT 541 2 3 MORE COUNTRIES, MORE