Advertisement
Improvisations
- Sustainability Poll Results: Organization, Collaboration and Trends
- To Be More Productive, Limit Interruptions
- Self-Awareness: A Key to Better Leadership
- New: Interactive Exploration of Top Trends in Sustainability and Profitability
- How to Identify World-Changing Innovation
Improvisations
Sustainability Poll Results: Organization, Collaboration and Trends
Last month we conducted a brief poll to help us think about some of the questions we are considering for this year’s sustainability research, both the survey and interviews. The polls closed last week, and we’ve got some charts depicting reader responses below.
Question:Where did sustainability initiatives begin in your organization?
Our first question was about where sustainability initiatives originate in organizations. Historically, that’s been EH&S, and the poll bore that out, with almost twice as many people citing that as the next two most popular answers, Operations (18%) and the C-suite (16%). It could be interesting to see how that plays out. Do initiatives which begin in the organization’s C-suite have greater impact, or longevity, than those that begin in, say, operations? Do retailers tend to start in the marketing function, and then move to the supply chain? Cut with demographic data, and looked at over time, this could yield some useful info.
To Be More Productive, Limit Interruptions
Allowing yourself to be interrupted all the time reduces your effectiveness as much as an all-nighter, says Boston University’s Marshall Van Alstyne.
The downside of social media is the same as the downside to collaborative culture and open offices: Interruptions. Lots of interruptions.
“I like the technologies that give me control, and I’m cautious allowing interrupt-driven communication,” said Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, in a recent interview with MIT Sloan Management Review.
“If you allow some of these social technologies like Twitter or Facebook or others to interrupt you constantly, it can dramatically reduce your productivity,” Van Alstyne said.
He cited laboratory experiments conducted by researchers in England with Hewlett-Packard which examined interrupt-driven communications, giving people problems to solve with distractions along the way. Read more »
Self-Awareness: A Key to Better Leadership
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi has said that she benefited from feedback from mentors.
Image courtesy of PepsiCo.
How can leaders recognize and manage their psychological preferences?
In a wide-ranging article for the Spring 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, authors Ginka Toegel, a professor of organizational behavior and leadership at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Jean-Louis Barsoux, a professor of organizational behavior and leadership at IMD, lay out findings from more than 2,000 in-depth conversations with international executives.
In this excerpt from How To Become a Better Leader, the authors examine the role of self-awareness, which they deem crucial for evolving and finding coping strategies for weaknesses: Read more »
New: Interactive Exploration of Top Trends in Sustainability and Profitability
The Sustainability Study Interactive Exploration explores the major trends in sustainability commitment and profitability
A few months ago, when we released our report of the 2011 Sustainability & Innovation Global Executive Study and Research Project, we knew we wanted to make the findings as useful to our audience as possible.
To that end, we’re delighted to present Sustainability Study: Interactive Exploration:
- The new feature presents interactive charts about the major trends in sustainability commitment and profitability.
- Dropdown menus allow users to isolate information about a specific industry.
- Interactive legends focus the information by company size or spending.
- Industry-specific data can be compared to average value over all industries and regions.
- Once data has been filtered by a particular industry, it can be re-sorted on the x-axis.
- The raw data can be downloaded as comma-separated values (CSV) for viewing in Microsoft Excel and other applications.
- Customized views of the data can be saved and shared as an image (png) or a PDF file, or a customized subset of the data as a CSV or text file.
The data visualizations help illustrate what types of companies have developed a proven value proposition for addressing sustainability. They also give a closer look at the companies which make up the 31% percent of respondents who are what we call “Harvesters” — companies that have figured out how to profit from sustainability activities. Read more »
How to Identify World-Changing Innovation
“Forget Apple’s overpraised hardware aesthetic,” writes Wired. “Its greatest contribution to industrial design was to recognize that nobody reads user’s manuals.”
The terrific May Wired story “How to Spot the Future” notes that anyone trying to figure out which kinds of innovation are most worth paying attention to has to come up with ways to “size up ideas and separate the truly world-changing from the merely interesting.”
How do you that? “At Wired, where we constantly endeavor to pinpoint the inventions and trends that will define the future, we have developed our own set of rules,” writes executive editor Thomas Goetz. “We have seen some common themes emerge, patterns that have fostered the most profound innovations of our age.”
Wired lists seven rules for what to look for: Look for cross-pollinators; surf the exponentials; favor the liberators; give points for audacity; bank on openness; demand deep design; and spend time with time wasters.
Here are details on just one of the rules: #6, Demand Deep Design. Read more »
Why A Little Pessimism Is a Good Thing
Even naturally sunny personalities can take advantage of dark moods and pessimistic moments.
“It’s gotten to the point where people really feel pressure to think and talk in an optimistic way,” said B. Cade Massey, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management in a article last fall in Psychology Today.
“Massey’s research shows that, when asked to forecast the outcomes of events like a financial investment or a surgical procedure, study subjects make predictions that they know are overly optimistic,” says the article. “Yet they also say they wish to be even more optimistic than they already are.”
Notes Aaron Sackett, a psychologist at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis: “In America, optimism has become almost like a cult.”
Many people put themselves into one of two camps: optimists or pessimists, people who tend to approach the world in either a consistently upbeat or a mostly skeptical manner. But researchers are now looking at the ways people mix and match their approaches, calling this “strategic optimism and pessimism.” Read more »
Big Data Lessons at MIT
Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program
Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business
Companies are now amassing so much data with such variety, so quickly, that they are able to peek beneath their organizational skin, much as biologists in the 17th century used microscopes to acquaint themselves with the (then) unknown multicellular denizens of pond water. What can companies see with all of this new data?
By describing our world at a much finer level of detail, Big Data is improving our ability to ask new questions, to solve old problems and to innovate. It is also enabling higher levels of corporate productivity. Perhaps, most importantly, it is forcing us to make trade-offs about the kind of world we want to live in.
These are some of the messages that MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Alex (Sandy) Pentland drove home in a thought-provoking two-day seminar called Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler, held near the MIT campus last month.
Brynjolfsson is director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business and co-author of Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and also advises the World Economic Forum, Nissan Motor Corporation, and a variety of start-up companies. Read more »
Strategies for Selling to Underserved “Next Billion” Consumers
Xerox set up a research center in India to network with external inventors and use in-house R&D and marketing capabilities.
Image courtesy of Xerox.
In 2005, the World Resources Institute’s Markets & Enterprise Program came up with the term “next billion” to identify the next billion people who would enter the middle class from the so-called “base of the economic pyramid” worldwide.
Of course, “next billion” also is short hand for the profits that can be made in coming up with business models that figure out how to integrate low-income consumers into formal economies (see NextBillion.net for more).
In their article “Mobilizing for Growth in Emerging Markets” in the Spring 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, authors Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu detail how multinational companies need to approach this massive market by creating networks of local partners. Here are statistical and thematic highlights from their article: Read more »
Papers from Collective Intelligence 2012 Conference Now Online
Dhiraj Murthy, an assistant professor of sociology and founder/director of the Social Network Innovation Lab at Bowdoin College, was among the presenters at last week’s Collective Intelligence 2012 conference.
Image courtesy of Bowdoin College’s Social Network Innovation Lab.
Familiar examples of collective intelligence such as the vastness of user-generated Wikipedia and the way Google has collected web pages to answer user queries “are not the end of the story but just the beginning” writes MIT Sloan’s Thomas Malone.
Malone co-chaired the Collective Intelligence 2012 conference, which was held last week at MIT. His co-chair was Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor in School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. The goal of the conference was to review papers about behavior that is both collective and intelligent and to lay the groundwork for forming a new interdisciplinary field to explore these kinds of intelligence. Malone is director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
Presenters and attendees tweeted about the events at Twitter hashtag #ci2012, noting that 104 papers were submitted for consideration and 18 selected for presentation. Additional papers were listed as poster papers and plenary abstracts. Full text of all the papers went online during the conference.
Here are the titles and authors of the papers that were presented: Read more »
The Value of Leadership “Marked by Humility and Intuition”
Valérie Gauthier’s management approach of savoir-relier helps managers build relationships between different and even antagonistic entities to encourage diversity and innovation.
Where does irrational and erratic managerial behavior come from?
One source is the “tension between the need for agility to move in this fast-paced and changing world, and the quest for purpose, direction, and meaning,” writes Valérie Gauthier, MIT Sloan visiting associate professor and an associate professor at HEC Paris. “Leaders must accept that they are unable to control everything.”
Business schools, she writes in an essay on “Teaching savoir-relier or ‘relational intelligence’,” need to “help aspiring managers strike a better balance between the rational and the sensitive.” Schools also must train established managers “to combine analytical and intuitive ways of thinking.” She writes:
I’ve developed a management approach called savoir-relier(TM), roughly translated as relational intelligence. Savior-relier is defined as the capacity and resolve to build sensible, positive, and trustworthy relationships between entities — people, ideas, jobs, cultures, generations — that are inherently different, opposite or antagonistic. Unlike egocentric, charismatic leadership models, savoir-relier is a category of leadership that is marked by humility and intuition.
Gauthier cites Ben Verwaayen, the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, as a model for this type of leadership style. Read more »
How To Work a Room Like a Pro
Networking in person is different than it is online, and is a skill that takes practice.
“Today’s social media options make it easy to avoid getting out there and interacting with others in face-to-face situations,” notes the story “How To Work a Room and Make Lasting Connections,” in The Boston Globe.
Maybe make that too easy. Many people feel like their social skills are better online – where they’re protected by a screen, and where they can wait a few moments to come up with a good quip in the course of a conversation.
But being able to walk into a room of strangers, carry yourself with composure, have conversations that are meaningful and walk out with contacts is a skill that takes practice.
Here are some tips offered by Ellen Keiley, a member of the international law firm K&L Gates, and Richard J. DeAgazio, the former president of Boston Capital Securities, Inc., in their Globe story: Read more »
Three Questions on Sustainability
We are conducting a quick poll to get a sense of how you, our readers, are thinking about sustainability. Your answers will help inform the design of the next sustainability and innovation survey we’re planning in collaboration with knowledge partner The Boston Consulting Group, due out this June.
While we will be asking some of the same questions we ask each year to help us gauge what is changing in organizations, we’ll also be diving in to some new material. Take the poll and vote!
Read more »
Transportation and Young Adults: Driving is Down, Biking and Public Transport Way Up
Biking and the use of public transportation are up significantly among 16 to 34-year-olds in the U.S., while driving has dropped.
New research shows that young people in the U.S., Canada, Germany, South Korea, and other countries are driving less, and, in the U.S., biking more and using public transportation in significantly higher numbers.
“Transportation and the New Generation: Why Young People are Driving Less and What it Means for Transportation Policy,” [pdf] a report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and the Frontier Group, includes these statistics:
- Driving is down: The number of vehicle miles traveled by 16 to 34-year-olds in the U.S. dropped 23% between 2001 and 2009. As well, the share of 14 to 34-year-olds without driver’s licenses grew between 2001 and 2010 from 21% to 26%.
- Biking is up: In 2009, 16 to 34-year-olds in the U.S. took 24% more bike trips than in 2001 – even with that age group shrinking in size by 2%.
- Public Transport is up: Public transport use by that same group also rose in the same period — passenger miles traveled are up by a huge 40%.
The report says that reductions in driving are “a phenomenon becoming characteristic of developed countries.” Read more »
Sustainability Report Gets White House Attention
The MIT SMR – BCG 2012 Sustainability and Innovation research report “Sustainability Nears a Tipping Point” prompted an invitation to participate in a White House Sustainable Supply Chain Dialogue on March 30 in Washington, DC.
Organized by the U.S. General Services Administration, the event brought together leaders from the federal government, industry, academia and nonprofits to discuss how the launch of a sustainable supply chain community of practice can help “assure a secure and sustainable supply chain” which is “essential to both industry and government.”
Knut Haanaes, coauthor of the report and head of The Boston Consulting Group’s global sustainability practice, as well as Edgar Blanco, of MIT’s Center for Transportation Logistics, both attended. Read more »
What You Wear Can Influence How You Perform
Researchers have found that wearing a doctor’s lab coat — generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness — increases performance on attention-related tasks.
New research suggests that clothing can have an effect on our behavior if that clothing has a symbolic meaning and if we have the physical experience of wearing the clothes.
Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University call this “enclothed cognition,” which they describe as “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.”
An abstract of the researchers’ report in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology says:
“. . .we propose that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors — the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them. As a first test of our enclothed cognition perspective, the current research explored the effects of wearing a lab coat. A pretest found that a lab coat is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness. We therefore predicted that wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks.”
In the first experiment, the researchers found that wearing a lab coat identified as a doctor’s coat did, in fact, increase subjects’ selective attention. Read more »
Your Social Network: Who Has the Best Information?
Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:
Why strong ties matter more in a fast-changing environment
It has become accepted wisdom that weak ties — your acquaintances, distant colleagues — can provide more novel information than close ties. But new research by Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, suggests that in some cases strong ties are better.
In a new interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, Van Alstyne explains how some of his new research challenges the existing theory about the value of strong ties versus weak ties. Also, why we should beware of “interrupt-driven communication.” Read the interview »
Collaborating with customer communities: Lessons from the Lego Group
Adult Lego fans have uploaded more than 300,000 of their own Lego creations onto MOCpages.com (one of the many Lego fan sites), posted more than 4.5 million photos, drawings and instructions online and shared thousands of Lego-inspired movies on YouTube. By tapping into the knowledge and enthusiasm of these users of its products, Lego has been able to enhance its product offerings — without increasing long-term fixed costs. Read more »
Size Matters in Social Business Adoption
In the recent survey on social business that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte, respondents were asked whether social business was unimportant, somewhat unimportant, neutral, somewhat important, or important to their business. The following chart shows those who answered “important,” cut by company size.
Clearly, size matters. The largest and smallest companies tend to perceive much more value from social tools than mid-sized companies. One reason may be that social tools enable smaller organizations to appear bigger, and larger companies to appear “smaller” — more accessible, responsive, and nimble. Read more »
The Decline of the HPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
Many established companies still practice “decision making by HPPO” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), according to Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business. But McAfee says that the next wave of Enterprise 2.0, a term he coined, will see companies managing decision making and knowledge in decidedly new ways.
During a recent interview, McAfee spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review editorial director Martha E. Mangelsdorf. He was asked about the changing thinking around Enterprise 2.0, six years after he first started writing about it:
“The central change with Enterprise 2.0 and ideas of managing knowledge [is] not managing knowledge anymore — get out of the way, let people do what they want to do, and harvest the stuff that emerges from it because good stuff will emerge. So, it’s been a fairly deep shift in thinking about how to capture and organize and manage knowledge in an organization.”
The idea that the best minds and the best solutions are often outside our organizations is central to this new mindset, McAfee says. Read more »
Seven Steps To Find Your “Uncommon Sense”
Research from the London School of Business looks at the role a company’s distinctive beliefs play in strategy and how to mine that “uncommon sense.”
How do you go about challenging the “sacred cow” beliefs that your company — or you yourself — hold?
In “Uncommon Sense: How to Turn Distinctive Beliefs Into Action,” a new article in the Spring 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review authors Jules Goddard, Julian Birkinshaw and Tony Eccles from the London School of Business argue that winning strategies are grounded in distinctive beliefs that ring truer with customers and prospective customers than those of rival companies.
Being consistently and distinctively different means understanding your beliefs — or what the authors call your “uncommon sense.”
“In our experience working with companies, there are structured ways for rethinking your basic assumptions and beliefs, and for identifying potential new directions,” they write.
Here are seven steps the authors have used to start the process. The text is verbatim from their article. Read more »
Basketball Hot at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
Basketball was on the minds of many at MIT Sloan’s annual conference, “part ‘Star Trek’ convention, part academic conference, part job fair, part media circus,” says Fast Company.
One of the stars at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, held earlier this month in Boston, was a scholar who has applied his knowledge of geography to the ecosystem, or “court space,” of the basketball court.
Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor in the department of geography at Michigan State University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University, made a splash by stepping out of his main field.
“Goldsberry does health care research,” notes Fast Company in “In Relentless Jocks-Nerds War, Hope For Peace Through Analytics.” “He creates maps that reveal a community’s lack of access to fresh produce, and he publishes his findings in academic publications such as the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition. But it’s Goldsberry’s latest research paper — “CourtVision: New Visual and Spatial Analytics for the NBA” — that has thrust him into the sports geek limelight. ‘I woke up yesterday never having been on national TV or in The New York Times and Sports Illustrated or interviewed by the Wall Street Journal,’ he says, incredulous that all those things have since happened.”
The annual conference has become a big event for what’s estimated to be a $400 billion business. Read more »
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Spring 2012: Cover Story
Innovation
Achieving Successful Strategic Transformation
How companies successfully make major changes — without sacrificing financial performance.
Browse Special Collections »
SloanSelect Collections provide an array of perspectives and insights to help meet perennial management challenges.
Get Reprints & Permissions »
Distribute any MIT SMR article, research report, chart or figure to students, colleagues or clients.
Browse Research Reports »
Get the latest findings from our Innovation Hub global surveys, including charts, interviews and case studies.
