MIT Sloan Management Review

Nick Folland of Kingfisher, one of Europe’s largest home-improvement retailers, discusses the company’s aspirations to create a net positive impact on the environment. Kingfisher was the first business of its size to receive full certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Folland, the group corporate affairs director of Net Positive, is leading the company’s groundbreaking collaborative effort to reduce consumption and introduce “closed-loop” products.

R. “Ray” Wang has been a highly respected analyst of social business in enterprises for years. Here he discusses how social business evolves in more socially developed businesses, how uses are growing in the area of service and support and hire to retire on the on-boarding side, and innovation and ideation. He also examines the critical role of leadership, gamification and how social business is changing the future of work. Wang lays out the specific signposts that a business can look for as it moves from step to step along the path of being a more fully socially enabled enterprise.

One of the largest health insurers in the United States, WellPoint, is using technology to change its business model. Lori Beer, WellPoint’s executive vice president of specialty businesses and information technology, talks about how technology is helping doctors and nurses be more efficient and effective and lowering costs. Beer explains how WellPoint, which is the first commercial adopter of IBM’s Watson technology, is using analytics to help health-care providers work more efficiently.

There are 52 million Latinos in the United States, with $1.5 trillion of purchasing power.

Entravision Communications Corporation a Spanish-language media company, reaches about 96% of that U.S. Latino audience through its numerous television and radio stations and digital platforms. It uses that extraordinary reach to provide media solutions to marketers interested in tapping into the Latino consumer market.

In a highly regulated area like pharmaceuticals, companies need to tread carefully when it comes to dealing directly with customers via social media. In this interview, Dr. Ed Tucker of Janssen Research & Development LLC, a Johnson and Johnson company, explains how social media platforms offer benefits, but also describes the requirements and obligations firms in his industry must comply with when it comes to patient safety reporting, privacy, and other sensitive matters.

Starbucks chief digital officer Adam Brotman and chief information officer Curt Garner explain how they collaborate closely. The two constantly seek to improve customer experience through technology and to unify marketing efforts across channels. Their partnership has forged a fast-paced rollout of new digital efforts, from faster payment processing to mobile ordering, across Starbucks’ 17,000 stores.

It’s only natural that a beer company would be concerned about water. It takes five liters of water, on average, to manufacture one liter of beer. When SABMiller mapped its water footprint and found that it took 45 liters of water to produce one liter of its beer in the Czech Republic, and 155 liters in South Africa, the company changed its water practices to make its beer more sustainable. An interview with SABMiller’s senior vice president of sustainable development explains how they did it.

Becoming an elite athlete — or coaching a team of this rarified breed — has as much to do with talent and skill as it does with experience and intuition (not to mention some serious hard work). And data is increasingly part of that mix at the highest echelon of sports: the Olympic Games. At Team GB analytics are used to both monitor the performance of athletes and to predict how well a team will perform. But what could the future hold? Evidence-based coaching — and training.

In communities where residents can join networks to share cars, people save money, emissions go down, parking spaces free up, and companies doing the coordinating make money. In this conversation with former Zipcar CEO Robin Chase she talks about her new venture, Buzzcar, another car-sharing business. The company calls this peer-to-peer car rental, and has taglines that include “Borrow the car next door” and “fewer cars, more options & the money stays in the ‘hood.’”

Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, says that the company’s strong focus on sustainability is paying off in cost savings and long-term brand image — even if customers don’t yet pay attention to whether phones themselves are green.

Five years ago Cisco created its digital social educational platform, Learning@Cisco, which today has over 2 million global participants. People in IT sector go to the site to get Cisco certifications, to find industry jobs, for tips on finding work and to share information. This network has helped Cisco grow its industry, create loyalty to the company, recruit and become a key source for strategic marketing information.

Fortune 500 companies are rushing to make big data investments. Who is leading this charge? What are they doing? What are best practices and which practices should be avoided? A recent survey of C-level and function heads from Fortune 500 companies offers a unique glimpse into how the captains of industry are thinking about big data and how their companies are changing because of new insights gleaned from big data analyses.

As Kimberly-Clark began down the path toward sustainability, it was confronted with layers of miscommunication between itself and environmental activists–not to mention a lack of real understanding among many of its customers and suppliers. Tom Falk, chairman and CEO of K-C, says that all that began to change as the company got better at listening.

Vala Afshar, Chief Marketing Officer at Enterasys Networks Inc. in Andover, MA says social tools created an open, flatter culture where the best ideas, not people with the highest titles are recognized. By adding Salesforce.com’s Chatter social network, it created closer connections with customers and a more positive work environment. It enhanced its call center and created a system that translates machine language to Tweets, so now its social network is populated both by people and machines.

GE believes companies will boost productivity and profits by using intelligent sensors and analytics to predict when parts and manufacturing lines will fail. This will smooth operations and accelerate product development. GE is investing in its operational use of intelligent sensors and hiring software developers to create better algorithms for analyzing huge amounts of data. William Ruh, head of GE’s global software development center, discusses the reasons behind GE’s investment in new technologies and why it thinks these will transform the global economy.

Companies are realizing that data analytics are now at the center of their organization, rather than the edge. That’s having an impact, according to Bruno Aziza of SiSense.

At AT&T, John Schulz, a director of sustainability operations, had to make the company’s energy and water use data visible before the company could formulate a plan to reduce those numbers. The company’s definition has now broadened and evolved to include the social perspective on sustainability.

“If you engage customers,” says V. Kumar, “they go and they get their friends” to try out a product, too. Kumar, of the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, explains how companies can find their most influential online customers and enlist them to help promote their brands.

Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, talks about the big data revolution with Tom Davenport, who helped get that revolution started with his seminal article “Competing on Analytics.” Their discussion illuminates what’s different about big data and how big data is changing management and the way businesses run.

Top data scientists often share three characteristics: they are creative, they are curious and they are competitive. Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, a company that hosts data prediction competitions, has figured out how to tap all three of these characteristics to help companies crowdsource their analytics problems.