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The Sustainability Initiative
- Special Report: The Business of Sustainability
- Interview: Green, Despite the Downturn — Michael S. Hopkins
- Research: For Real, Not Just For Show — Joe Manget, Catherine Roche, and Felix Münnich
Special Report: Design Thinking
Hard skills from a soft scienceBlogs
Michael Watkins Answers Your Questions
Let's start with a turnaround question. The first things a new leader at a company with a turnaround challenge has to do is assess the external and internal environments. What happens if the two aren't aligned? For instance, what if the external market for your products is good but your products are[…]
The Pile for November 22, 2009
Last week it seemed like everyone else was reading the autobiography of a self-styled maverick, while we were keeping up with the work of someone who's been studying business mavericks and corporate innovation for many years, William C. Taylor. In his Acid test of strategy column for the Washington[…]
Is the Global Financial System in a “Doom Loop”?
MIT Sloan Professor Simon Johnson gave a talk here at MIT today -- with the cheery title of "The Next Financial Crisis." Johnson, a former IMF chief economist who blogs about the economy at the Baseline Scenario website, wasn't referring to a specific crisis he sees brewing right at the moment[…]
Jeffrey Hollender Speaks at MIT Sloan
Hollender is the "chief inspired protagonist" of Seventh Generation (some founders get to pick their own titles). As someone whose role at the company revolves around thinking, it's no surprise that he started and ended his talk with words about consciousness in the most basic sense: the decisions you[…]
LinkedIn with MIT Sloan Management Review
We've been on Twitter for some time and we joined Facebook more recently. Now we have a LinkedIn group, too. Please join us there if you're on that network.
The Pile for November 15, 2009
How's your Great Recession coming along? Many publications, including MIT Sloan Management Review, are passing on the word that the real risk during a recession is not investing, and the most recent McKinsey Quarterly goes deep on Using the crisis to create better boards. The research at the heart of[…]
Vivienne Cox on energy challenges and climate change
Interestingly, Cox came not only to speak but also to listen. She spent a portion of the one-hour presentation encouraging the audience who had come to hear her to talk in small groups among themselves, sharing their views about how serious the world's energy and environmental challenges are -- or[…]
Mad Men and Managing
We're wary of using pop culture references to make management points. When you do that, even with pieces of pop culture that are, in part about business and management, like the television series Mad Men, you usually get articles about how to become better managers from thinking hard about a television[…]
Mintzberg on Management
Henry Mintzberg, the management scholar and professor at McGill University, is someone we pay a good deal of attention to here. Our editor Martha Mangelsdorf interviewed him on debunking management myths and let's not forget that he was one of the people who predicted the economic meltdown. And now[…]
The Pile for November 8, 2009
The most useful management reading over the past week comes from Gina Trapani, the founder of the Lifehacker website, over at Harvard Business. In A More Practical Creative Sabbatical, Trapani takes on something that has bothered us and makes sense of it. We're big fans of the work of designer Stefan[…]
Ask Michael Watkins What’s Your Next Move
Next week we're going to be interviewing Michael Watkins. He's a cofounder of Genesis Advisors and he's best-known for The First 90 Days, a primer for making sure that your first three months in a new position work out as well as possible. (We've all seen what happens when someone starts a new job and[…]
How This Financial Crisis Isn’t Different
Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff gave a fascinating guest lecture at MIT earlier this week -- looking at commonalities in a number of financial crises. Rogoff, who recently coauthored a new book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly with Carmen M. Reinhart, is a former chief economist[…]
Why Twitter Lists Matter
Twitter Lists are an efficient way to find Twitter-people that you don't know, but should. Consider this list of 500 entrepreneurs, founders, startups, CEOs, and influential business people put together by Peter Urbanski. When you subscribe to a list like this, the updates of everyone in the list appear[…]
A New Way To Think About Sustainability
Smart managers are wary of epiphanies. "Suddenly, everything looked different" should be the last line of a short story, not a report from the management front. But sometimes, something makes you look at a matteryou've paid a lot of attention to in a different way. Even if you look at everything differently[…]
The Pile: a New Weekly Feature on Improvisations
Welcome to "The Pile." Inspired by Kedrosky, we're going to try something similar here. Every Sunday evening, just as we're putting on our armor for the work week ahead, we'll share the best of what we're reading in our attempt to understand what's new and important in management. (Warning: Some of[…]
The Dangers of Untested Assumptions
Why do established corporations' new ventures often fail? The new issue of Business Insight, MIT Sloan Management Review's collaboration with The Wall Street Journal, includes an interview with Rita Gunther McGrath about problems traditional business planning processes encounter when dealing with[…]
Obama, at MIT, declares clean energy key to global economic leadership
The nations of the world are in a "peaceful competition" to develop the energy technologies that will power the 21st century -- and the nation that wins that competition will be the nation that will lead the global economy, U.S. President Barack Obama told an audience at MIT today. "And I want[…]
President Obama to Speak on Sustainability at MIT — Watch Live
On October 23, President Barack Obama will deliver at MIT "an address about American leadership on clean energy." This blog will cover the talk, of course, and you can watch it live, October 23 at noon. If there is any problem with the stream, as there sometimes are with live events, MIT World will[…]
Design Thinking: What To Read After Our Special Report
The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin is a tough-minded elegant survey of why design thinking shouldn't be considered some soft thing that's nice for business at the edges but not necessary at the core. Martin is the dean of the Rotman School of[…]
How Vulnerable a Leader Should You Be?
When we reported on the BIF-5 Collaboration Innovation Summit earlier this month, we noted how struck we were by a comment from Saul Kaplan, the event’s “founder and chief catalyst,” who said “innovation requires a vulnerability most people are not comfortable with.” Vulnerability, the willingness[…]
The Business of Sustainability: Our Editor Speaks
Next month, MIT Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins will speak at the Opportunity Green business conference at UCLA. He'll be expanding on our recent special report on the business of sustainability. For a hint of what he'll discuss, there's an interview with him on the conference[…]
Lessons from the Startup Bootcamp at MIT
When you're in those early stages of developing your idea, Robin Chase, founder of the car-sharing company Zipcar, advised entrepreneurs to think of every person you meet as a free consultant -- and pay attention to the questions they ask you about your idea when you explain it to them. "When people[…]
Listening in on the Real-Time Web
The real-time web encompasses social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook: sites that feature an unending stream of messages, status updates, and news alerts. The flow of this conversation has captured attention for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the rapid adoption and expansion[…]
A Great Day for Ideas (#BIF5)
I had the great pleasure of attending the first day of the BIF-5 Collaborative Innovation Summit, held in Providence, Rhode Island, by the Business Innovation Factory. That's a lot of jargon for just the names of a conference and its sponsoring organization, but more to the point is the tag line for[…]
Why Some Companies Benefit More from IT Investments than Others
On average, investments in information technology are associated with greater productivity for companies -- but why do some companies get greater productivity benefits from IT than others? That was one of the questions MIT Sloan Professor Erik Brynjolfsson addressed at a presentation at the MIT Center[…]
The Management Lessons of Las Vegas
In 1972, our neighbors at MIT Press published Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour. It was a can of gasoline thrown on modernism in architecture, arguing that what "common" people like is more important than the elevated tastes and predilections of architects[…]
Design Thinking About Sustainability
There was other Tim Brown-related news yesterday that's relevant to two of our favorite subjects here: design thinking and sustainability. Turns out Brown's firm, IDEO, launched Living Climate Change, which hopes to be "a clearinghouse for design thinking about the environment." The site is just getting[…]
The Financial Crisis Fallout Explained — on Video
But for a dive into the ethics questions we mentioned, jump to 45:20. There, Fish reads the ethics oath that some Harvard Business School students wrote and more signed, with wide publicity, this past spring. Fish's observation? "I found it fascinating that half of the people didn't sign it! There was[…]
Debating Offshoring’s Impact
Too often, discussions of contemporary economic issues end up either overly simplified for popular consumption -- or too jargony and technical to be followed by anyone but economists. A new book, Offshoring of American Jobs: What Response from U.S. Economic Policy? avoids both extremes -- and instead[…]
Bank Bashing, Courtesy of a Banker
Two of us at MIT Sloan Management Review grabbed good seats at yesterday’s MIT Sloan campus-event headliner: a downwind reflection on fallout from the financial crisis. Featured attraction: a high-level round of bank bashing, with a high-level banker on hand to help do it. OK, it wasn't only banks[…]
Management by Kindle?
cooked." I wish I had the version he seems to have. In mine, which seems to be the standard model, the screen isn't bright enough, the lack of a touch screen makes it quite unbooklike, you can't download any Saul Bellow, and don't get me started on the digital rights restrictions it locks you into.[…]
We read The Economist so you don’t have to
We here at MIT Sloan Management Review are voracious readers. After all, part of our service is to read management literature so you don't have to read all of it. But it's not only academic journals that are full of smart management ideas you can act on. This week's issue of The Economist has a pair[…]
Customers and service innovation
A new working paper looks at customers' role in innovation in a service industry: banking.
California’s green legal battleground
The New York Times reports that the US Chamber of Commerce and National Automobile Dealers Association is trying to block the state from regulating its greenhouse gas emissions.
Cell phone ratings from an unusual source
Companies face reviews and critiques all the time -- but in the case of cell phones, an environmental group is raising the bar by rating cell phones based on radiation emissions.
A new look at older technologies
Conventional wisdom has it that companies whose markets are being transformed by disruptive new technologies need to figure out how to switch to the new dominant technology. But two researchers argue that an alternative strategy --one that involves rethinking opportunities for the old technology --[…]
China pumps up green development
A new report says that China leads in the race to go green, with government supporting Chinese businesses in low carbon vehicles, energy efficiency, renewable energy and low carbon buildings.
Explore Ideas
Zipcar technological change Jagdish Bhagwati technology entrepreneurs Erik Brynolfsson Alan Blinder offshoring of service jobs high-tech startups Robin Chase clean energy Xobni Baseline Scenario Pedro Oliveira business plans Ron Adner technology startups Benjamin M. Friedman Ken Zolot Daniel Snow corporate new ventures Adam Saunders Startup Bootcamp customer innovation corporate planning Tuck School of Business