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Improvisations
- Is Your Information Diet Full of Junk Food?
- GE Talent Management: Aligning Hiring With Strategy
- How to Trigger CEO Interest in Social Networking
- Social Business Survey: Social Software and Employee Development
- Should More Stores Charge Admission?
Improvisations
Is Your Information Diet Full of Junk Food?
Food companies sell cheap calories by loading on salt, fat and sugar. Media companies sell cheap ideas by loading on affirmation, writes Clay Johnson.
Do you have a healthy information diet? Or one that slows you down with the equivalent of too much fast food?
That’s the question posed by Clay Johnson, who argues that “much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance — ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it.”
Johnson’s new book, The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption (O’Reilly Media, 2012), is described in The Atlantic as “an intelligent manifesto for optimizing the 11 hours we spend consuming information on any given day in a way that serves our intellectual, creative, and psychological well-being.”
Johnson developed his ideas about how we consume information in the course of his work in media. He co-founded the new media consulting agency Blue State Digital, which lists on its web site a long collection of political, nonprofit, and brand clients including AT&T, Obama for America and Vogue magazine. He was director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, an organization dedicated to “making government transparent and accountable,” where he “built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data,” according to his bio. Read more »
GE Talent Management: Aligning Hiring With Strategy
GE moved more engineers into its senior executive band in response to the CEO’s concern that tech-oriented managers were underrepresented in senior management ranks.
New research into the challenge of how to hire the best people and hold on to them says that there are six key principles to success:
- Aligning recruiting efforts with strategy;
- Making sure the company’s talent management practices fit with each other;
- Making deliberate effort to embed corporate culture into talent management processes such as hiring methods and leadership development;
- Getting involvement by managers at all levels, including the CEO;
- Figuring out the best balance of the company’s global and local needs; and
- Finding ways to differentiate the company from its competitors.
One company that’s especially good at that first principle — alignment with strategy — is General Electric. Read more »
How to Trigger CEO Interest in Social Networking
Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:
McAfee Q&A: What Sells CEOs on Social Networking
In 2006, MIT Sloan’s Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″ as a shorthand for what collaboration and sharing tools such as blogging and wikis (and, today, Twitter) would mean for enterprises. Now, in a new interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, McAfee looks back at the past six years and reveals what he’s learned about the triggers that generate CEO interest in social networking, what he misread and why the idea of controlling information flows is becoming obsolete. Read more »
MORE ON “ENTERPRISE 2.0″: Read McAfee’s seminal 2006 article “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” in the MIT SMR archives.
Social Business Survey: Social Software and Employee Development
A recent survey on social business that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte asked how important social software is to an organization’s activities in a number of internally oriented areas, including employee development. MIT SMR and Deloitte have sorted the nearly 3,500 responses by respondents’ roles in their organizations and noticed some interesting differences:
One of the more intriguing findings was that 23% of IT staff believe that social software is important to employee development, while only 10% of CIOs do.
We’ll be looking at this and other questions more closely as MIT SMR and Deloitte continue to analyze data and conduct interviews in preparation for our research report release this spring.
Should More Stores Charge Admission?
Customers will pay for access if their incentive is strong enough.
Don Peppers, owner and partner of the consulting firm Peppers & Rogers Group, in Stamford, California, recently posed this question:
“How will you make a profit when your customers know everything about your costs and pricing and have more or less instant access to your strongest competitors, anywhere in the physical world?”
He offers one intriguing suggestion: Charge admission.
“Don’t laugh, this is exactly what warehouse stores like Sam’s Club and Costco do,” Peppers writes Read more »
“Mapping the TV Genome” at Bluefin Labs and Big Data’s Big Stats
Tom Thai of Bluefin Labs, which is “mapping the TV genome” through “social TV analytics.”
Image courtesy of Bluefin Labs.
Some new stats from a recent Boston Globe story on “big data,” also known as analytics, also known here at MIT Sloan Management Review as the New Intelligent Enterprise, and all meaning the ways that companies are using the huge amounts of information they’re generating:
- The data and analytics marketplace is now worth $64 billion, according to a McKinsey Global Institute estimate.
- “Venture capital firms invested almost $1 billion in data companies from 2008 through 2010, according to 451 Research.”
- “Ninety percent of the data stored on hard drives, on Internet servers, or in big databases has been collected in just the past two years, according to IBM.”
- Software engineers who understand analytics algorithms are in huge demand, and “65% percent of data professionals expect a deficit in expertise in the field over the next five years, according to a report from EMC Corp.”
That’s all from the Globe story “Mass. firms see riches, jobs in charting oceans of data.” The story says that Massachusetts, with 100 companies that focus on analytics, is “fast becoming a hub” for this kind of work.
One start-up in the field is Bluefin Labs Inc., which says at its website that it’s in the business of “social TV analytics” and “mapping the TV genome.” Read more »
The Power of Introverts, the Power of Quiet
“‘Quiet leadership’ is not an oxymoron” is one of 16 points on author Susan Cain’s manifesto about the power of introverts.
“Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”
So wrote Susan Cain in a New York Times opinion piece earlier this month. Her first book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Crown Publishers, 2012), was released last week.
In the Times essay, Cain argues that “the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist.” Csikszentmihalyi is a professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University and Feist is an associate professor of psychology at San Jose State University.
Cain, a corporate lawyer turned author, rues the lack of quiet in our lives and the toll it can take on our productivity and innovation:
The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.”
The big safety net for introverts in the workplace? Group interactions that occur digitally. “The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work,” Cain writes. Read more »
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 »
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?
