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Improvisations
- How To Make the Chinese Supply Chain Safer
- Six Ways to Tweet Smarter
- Announcing Plans May Kill Motivation, Productivity
- Personal Approach Not Always Best in Viral Marketing
- Five Questions To Separate “The Next Big Thing” From the Lemon
Improvisations
How To Make the Chinese Supply Chain Safer
Multinational firms need to incentivize Chinese suppliers to look for and disclose manufacturing deficiencies themselves, say the authors of a new MIT SMR article.
Are multinational companies giving their Chinese suppliers the incentives necessary to comply with standards in environmental and health safety?
In the new Winter issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, authors Erica Plambeck, Hau L. Lee and Pamela Yatsko explore this question in “Improving Environmental Performance in Your Chinese Supply Chain.”
“Given how much of the world’s manufacturing takes place in China and the damage it has wrought on that country’s environment,” starts the article, “most analysts expect that multinational brands’ supply chains will face increasing scrutiny in the coming years.”
And how. Today’s New York Times, for instance, has a 5,207-word investigative piece about manufacturing conditions in Apple’s Chinese supply chain. “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, is based, the authors say, on “interviews with more than three dozen current or former employees and contractors, including a half-dozen current or former executives with firsthand knowledge of Apple’s supplier responsibility group, as well as others within the technology industry.”
The Times authors write that the Chinese workers assembling iPhones and iPads “work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.” As well, “Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.” Read more »
Six Ways to Tweet Smarter
Want to build a better tweet? Think short, punchy and newsy.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa.
No question, the ability of companies to market themselves effectively through the low-cost forum of Twitter has emerged as a top marketing innovation.
Recent research into the Twitter practices of 47 companies including Whole Foods, Starbucks, Nokia, and JetBlue, detailed in “How to Get Your Messages Retweeted,” in our new Winter 2012 issue, notes that savvy companies in the medium focus on getting tweets passed along and validated by followers.
Here are some of the findings of what works best:
- Tweet 70 characters, maximum. Shorter tweets are passed along as retweets nearly twice as often as longer tweets, the authors found. Shorter tweets also leave room for followers to add their own comments.
- Use attention words. Words like WOW and TODAY ONLY grab the eye and are retweeted as much as 40% more often than other tweets.
- Make tweets personal. Personal can mean funny: tweets with jokes are retweeted as much as 70% more frequently. Personal humanizes the brand.
- Provide news people can use. Content that educates followers instead of just pushing a brand is 51% more likely to be retweeted.
- Offer a deal. Tweets with deals are retweeted 16% more than those without.
- Tweet about upcoming events. Notices that create a sense of anticipation, such as news about an upcoming sale or report, are 24% more likely to be retweeted.
See the full article for more ideas from authors Arvind Malhotra, Claudia Kubowicz Malhotra and Alan See.
Announcing Plans May Kill Motivation, Productivity
Talking about goals instead of keeping them private may derail your drive to pursue them.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
Are you inadvertently undermining your productivity by talking about your plans?
Research says yes, sometimes — that when you talk about intentions you could be taking the fizz out your motivation to move forward. Why? Because voicing plans runs the risk of creating a “premature sense of completeness.”
That term comes from Peter Gollwitzer, a psychology professor at New York University who studies the ways that plans affect behavior.
In experiments to test how making resolutions affects behavior, Gollwitzer “found that law students who had made a public commitment to working harder (by discussing their commitment to hard work with a psychologist) actually quit working earlier than students who had kept their commitments private,” according to a recent article in the Boston Globe about new year’s resolutions.
Notes the Globe: “Conventional wisdom, of course, would have predicted the opposite result: By making a resolution and telling other people about it, we think we’re putting pressure on ourselves to follow through.” Instead, sharing our goals too often lets us simply “congratulate ourselves just for making the resolution.” Read more »
Personal Approach Not Always Best in Viral Marketing
Researchers Sinan Aral (above) and Dylan Walker found that passive-broadcast messages are surprisingly influential.
Image courtesy of Aral’s faculty page at NYU Stern.
Conventional wisdom among marketers seeking to reach consumers through social networks is that personal recommendations from friends are the most effective viral messages for promoting “product contagion.”
But research published recently in the journal Management Science indicates that’s not always the case.
Researchers Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker designed an experiment involving a Facebook application that tested two kinds of product contagion messages against each other.
The first was personalized and active: users actively selected a subset of their social network to receive personal referrals from them. The second was an automated broadcast: when the user engaged the product, his or her actions were broadcast to all of his or her contacts.
Previous research had indicated that personalized and active messages tend to go to a person’s closer and more strongly related contacts, and that we tend to trust information from close and trusted sources more, and therefore respond more often to them.
Automated broadcasts, on the other hand, build awareness among friends of new activities or products a user is adopting or engaging with, and can encourage, in a more passive way, those friends to eventually adopt the product themselves.
Surprisingly, the research found that passive-broadcast viral features produced a 246% increase in peer influence and social contagion, whereas adding active-personalized viral features resulted in only an additional 98% increase. Why? Read more »
Five Questions To Separate “The Next Big Thing” From the Lemon
Managers are faced with so many new types of hardware and software that it’s hard to separate the good ones from the losers.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Darwin Bell.
Are you an early adaptor of new technology? Or do you take a wait-and-see attitude?
Business managers see or hear about new hardware and software nearly every day. The challenge is figuring out which IT innovations to invest time in and which to wait out because they might end up being lemons.
In the new Winter 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, E. Burton Swanson, director of the Information Systems Research Program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, offers some help with “The Manager’s Guide to IT Innovation Waves.”
Swanson’s guide includes five questions to consider when weighing whether to pursue a technology or pass for now. The questions and his comments are excerpted here: Read more »
The Big, Insidious Business of Social Network Fakes
Online postings written for hire pose “a concrete threat to online communities” says a new paper.
The Internet is full of fakes. Specifically, fake profiles of people using fake names.
While some are people with real opinions who just want to be anonymous, these fake profiles are increasingly part of organized, for-pay efforts that hire people to create accounts under false names and use those accounts to post positive or negative online reviews, push a company brand or political message or make an online site look popular.
The challenge for companies is that the issue is big, and it’s only going to get worse.
According the November 2011 paper “Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit,” by researchers in the department of computer science at the University of California Santa Barbara, “campaigns on these systems are highly effective at reaching users, and their continuing growth poses a concrete threat to online communities such as social networks, both in the US and elsewhere.”
The term “crowdturfing” is a new one. It’s a combination of “crowd sourcing” (using the brainpower of the masses to help with a task) and “astroturfing” (informational campaigns that look like grassroots efforts but really are sponsored by organizations). Read more »
Leveraging Your Employees’ Social Networks
Featured this month in the Social Business Hub:
Uncover hidden talent with employee social networks
Job design and talent management are typically based on individual accountability, and tend to focus on individual competencies and experiences. However, new research reveals that an employee’s social networks are a critical component of employee effectiveness.
Employee Profiling That Works: How IDEO Uncovers Hidden Talent
The design company IDEO, whose IDEO Method Cards are pictured here, uses a social platform to facilitate staffing of projects.
Image courtesy of IDEO.
IDEO, the global design firm, is known for the innovation it brings to its clients, from nifty swivel classroom chairs made in collaboration with Steelcase to a revamped in-store environment for GE Money Bank’s outlets in Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic.
But according to authors Margaret Schweer, Dimitris Assimakopoulos, Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas, writing in “Building a Well-Networked Organization,” IDEO is equally adept at bringing innovation to its internal operations. The company has 550 employees at its locations in the U.S., London, Munich, Shanghai and Singapore.
Specifically, IDEO excels at using talent networks and social networks to be smarter about internal staffing. Read more »
Is There a Tweaker Driving Innovation On Your Team?
Samuel Crompton’s 1779 spinning mule was improved by “tweakers” who were equally innovative.
Innovators aren’t just the geniuses who come up with completely original ideas. More often than not, they’re the people who tweak the ideas already around them, making new things that are more useable or beautiful.
In a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research last spring, economists Ralf Meisenzahl, of the Federal Reserve, and Joel Mokyr, of Northwestern University highlighted the historic value of “tweakers.” They argued that the Industrial Revolution took hold in Britain because of “the supply of highly skilled, mechanically able craftsmen who were able to adapt, implement, improve, and tweak new technologies and who provided the micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”
Take, for instance, the spinning mule. Invented by Samuel Crompton in 1779, it was tinkered with by others who added metal rollers, better ways to smooth its acceleration and deceleration, water power and automation – resulting in a machine that efficiently mechanized the manufacturing of cotton.
In “The Tweaker,” a New Yorker story from November 2011, author Malcolm Gladwell argues that Apple founder Steve Jobs, as described in Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), was “the greatest tweaker of his generation.” Read more »
7 Reasons On-Site Health Care Works For SAS
On-site doctors and nurses have saved SAS more than $1.50 for every $1 spent.
Image courtesy of Flickr user libertyandvigilance.
Software company SAS has a great reputation as a good place to work — Fortune, for instance, named it the best company to work for in the U.S. in both 2011 and 2010.
One of its biggest perks: an on-site, full-service health-care center for employees and their families, staffed by 55 people, including four physicians and 10 nurse practitioners.
Charge for services: zero. Co-pay: zero.
In ““Do-It-Yourself” Employee Health Care” in the new Winter 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, authors Leonard L. Berry, Gale Adcock and Ann M. Mirabito acknowledge how, “In an era of soaring health-care costs, it may seem unreal that SAS can offer health care free of charge to employees and their families and actually save money.”
And yet, they note:
in 2010, efficiency enabled SAS to directly generate in health-plan savings alone more than $1.50 for every dollar it spent to operate its health-care center. Effectiveness and quality drive more than 75% of the 4,700 employees at the company’s Cary, North Carolina, headquarters to choose the center for their primary care even though the health plan allows them to use external providers.
How does SAS do it? Berry, Adcock and Mirabito highlight these health service features: Read more »
Why Our Minds Swap Out Hard Questions For Easy Ones
“When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution,” writes Kahneman.
Why do we keep making irrational decisions?
Consider this. There’s an experiment that shows how judgment is often informed by partially reliable or even totally insignificant information – what psychologists call “the anchoring effort.” It goes like this:
Subjects are shown a wheel of fortune. Unbeknownst to them, the wheel only stops on numbers 10 and 65. After the wheel is spun, subjects are asked a totally unrelated question: What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN? The average estimate of people who have just seen the number 10 is 25%. The average estimate of people who have just seen the number 65 is 45%. The answers are anchored by the previous information, even when there was no link between them.
“We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly,” writes Michael Lewis in the December 2011 issue of Vanity Fair. “It’s unsettling to know that your judgment can be so heavily influenced by some random number and disturbing to realize it is probably happening all the time.”
Lewis’s article “The King of Human Error” profiles psychologist Daniel Kahneman, 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and professor of psychology emeritus at the same school. Kahneman is author of the new Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which includes a passage on the wheel of fortune test. Read more »
Do Annual Reviews Do More Harm Than Good?
Performance reviews are all about intimidation and authority and create too much tension, says UCLA’s Culbert.
Image courtesy of Flickr user privatenobby.
As we near the end of the calendar year, it’s worth revisiting a provocative point of view from our archives: A few years ago, Samuel Culbert, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, wrote that the annual performance review “is little more than a dysfunctional pretense.”
“It’s a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work,” he wrote. “Managers can talk until they are blue in the face about the importance of positive team play at every level of the organization, but the team play that’s most critical to ensuring that an organization runs effectively is the one-on-one relationship between a boss and each of his or her subordinates.” The performance review, he says, “undermines that relationship.”
Culbert made his comments in “Get Rid of the Performance Review!,” an essay that appeared in a 2008 section of The Wall Street Journal that was produced in collaboration with MIT Sloan Management Review. Culbert also is author of a book of the same name.
About 1% of companies are considering doing away with performance reviews altogether says Corporate Executive Board, according to “Work Reviews Losing Steam,” in today’s Wall Street Journal. Read more »
How Much Improvement Can We Process At Once?
Image courtesy of Professor Chakravorty’s faculty page.
Companies’ use of sophisticated Six Sigma tools and similar improvement activities often creates information overload for workers, writes Satya S. Chakravorty, the Caraustar Professor of Operations Management at the Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.
Chakravorty’s article “The Trouble With Too Much Information,” in the Fall 2011 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, gives a particularly vivid example from one company, where people had to process all this material at once:
- new product designs and an accompanying 47 pages of instructions and drawings;
- implementation of a total productive maintenance program, with 69 pages of text;
- an 23-page updated safety manual from HR;
- a 42-page plan and 31-slide PowerPoint training program for a new sustainability program; and
- an enterprise resource planning implementation manual — complete with over 200 pages of instructions and reports.
This amount of change is dizzying. Read more »
Nine Ways To Get Retweeted
Featured this month in the Social Business Hub:
Nine ways to get your messages retweeted
The follower who passes along your tweet is not only amplifying the message (by sending it to more people) but also validating it by sharing it with his followers. Retweeting is a form of social advocacy in which followers become advocates of the brand within their own personal social networks. Posting tweets most likely to get retweeted is an obvious way for marketers to spread and enhance their brand messages.
A new analysis of tweets from almost 50 large social marketers identifies the factors that do — and do not — encourage retweeting. Contests, hashtags and links don’t help, interestingly, while personality, topicality and just plain asking nicely do. Read the 9 ways to get retweeted »
Social media poll results
In October, we asked our readers to tell us who is getting the most value out of social media in their organization, how social media tools will change the way they communicate and what their greatest fears are about social media adoption. See the results »
Social Media Poll Results: Fear of Losing Control Still an Issue
When we launched our Social Business hub in October 2011, we asked visitors to take three polls. Each poll received a reply from 65, 66 or 67 visitors. We found that most people believe marketing and sales are getting the most from social business tools; social media tools will replace email within the next 10 years; and, management’s number one fear about social media use is losing control of their brand reputation.
Here are the three poll questions and their results: Read more »
Could ‘Citizen Science’ Be Better Than Academy Science?
A team of volunteer scientists with the FoldIt project recently deciphered the folding of a protein important in AIDS research.
Crowdsourcing — drawing from many people’s brains, often from all over the world, to solve a puzzle — has made its way into science research. In the process, it is “breaking down some of the old divisions between the highly educated mandarins of the academy and the curious amateurs out in the world.”
That’s according to Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who writes for The Boston Globe.
In the recent column “How crowdsourcing is changing science,” Cook writes: “Science is, for the most part, a closed society organized into little fiefdoms of highly trained specialists, which means only a few minds engage with any given problem.” But this “new approach to the conduct of modern scholarship, called crowd science or citizen science” has, in the last few years, “generated notable contributions to fields as disparate as ecology, AIDS research, and astronomy.”
This new approach, Cook adds, is challenging traditional ideas about where scientific innovation will come from: Read more »
Using Social Media For Peer-to-Peer Collaboration: The Xilinx Example
Image courtesy of Flickr user jolieodell.
Social media is good for a lot more than marketing. Smart companies are figuring out how to use it internally to supercharge peer-to-peer collaboration. And results at one company include an increase in engineer productivity by about 25%.
In the recent MIT Sloan Management Review interview “The Amplified Enterprise: Using Social Media To Expand Organizational Capabilities,” Anthony Bradley, group vice president in Gartner Research, and Mark McDonald, group vice president with Gartner Executive Programs, explain how it worked at Xilinx: Read more »
Amazon’s Bezos: ‘If You’re Going to Invent, You’re Going to Disrupt’
Fortune magazine may think that the big online war is “Facebook vs. Google! BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF THE WEB” (that’s the cover line of its November 21, 2011 issue). But over at Wired magazine, the editors have seen the future of the Internet, and it’s dominated by a little Seattle company named Amazon.
In the December 2011 cover story, “Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think,” author Steven Levy makes the case that “Bezos may well be the premier technologist in America.”
Levy cites the online retailer’s entry into the tablet market, its cloud services arm and its expansion into even a movie-making project, studios.amazon.com.
One of the most engaging parts of a wide-ranging Q&A with Bezos, who has a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, is a section on how Amazon as a company and Bezos as its CEO embrace disruption: Read more »
Should ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ Mean ‘Creating Jobs for Average Workers’?
We need more jobs for average workers, argue Brynjolfsson and McAfee.
Screenshot from Apple’s “1984″ commercial.
An annual event called “Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford,” which took place earlier this month, featured a debate at the Oxford Union on this motion:
“This house believes that the average worker is being left behind by advances in technology.”
The concept of “Silicon Valley community” is a geographically loose one, because helping make the argument were MIT Sloan’s Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the center.
It was logical that the two were invited: their new book, Race Against the Machine (Digital Frontier Press, 2011), is on exactly that theme. (Here’s our blog post about the book.)
McAfee’s opening statement, which he posted at his blog, includes this challenge for how we might rethink the meaning of “corporate responsibility”: Read more »
Five Ways That Sustainability Commitment Is Up — Dramatically
Forty percent say their organizations have changed business models.
How much traction is sustainability gaining in the corporate world?
For three years in a row, MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group have conducted an annual Sustainability & Innovation Global Executive Study to examine that question and more.
This winter, we’ll be publishing the full results of the survey, which was conducted during June and July.
Five first look highlights of what we’ve heard:
- 68% of respondents say their organizations increased their commitment to sustainability in the past year. That’s a dramatic increase from 2009, when only 25% of respondents said that.
- 74% say they expect their organization’s commitment to sustainability to grow in the year ahead — also a big increase since the 2009 survey.
- 67% say that sustainability strategies are necessary to be competitive. That’s a 12 percentage point increase from last year.
- 40% of respondents say their organization has changed its business model as a result of sustainability.
- Sustainability is increasingly important to top management, survey respondents say: 28% percent believe it’s a permanent and core strategic consideration, and 42% say that although it’s not a core consideration, it is nonetheless on the agenda to stay.
Additional details and charts are published in the Fall 2011 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. The article was written by Nina Kruschwitz, managing editor and special projects manager of MIT SMR, and Knut Haanaes, a partner and managing director of the Boston Consulting Group and the global leader of BCG’s Sustainability Initiative.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Winter 2012: Cover Story
Winning the Race with Ever-Smarter Machines
Recent progress in information technology has been both rapid and dramatic. Is your company ready?
