Latest
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 scienceImprovisations
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 finds himself or herself adrift.)
Watkins has a new book, Your Next Move, which considers how best to handle all sorts of career transitions: promotions, international moves, and more. What do you do, for example, when people who were your peers last week are now reporting to you?
When I write we’ll be interviewing Watkins next week, I really mean we. You have plenty you’d like to know about making the right moves. Here’s a chance to find out from an expert in leadership transitions. Put your questions for Watkins in the comments box below and he’ll answer the best of them. Career transitions are moments of great risk and opportunity. Here’s a chance to ask an expert how best to transition into your next role.
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 of the International Monetary Fund. Together, Reinhart and Rogoff compiled a database looking at financial crises in 66 countries over a period of 800 years.
The biggest surprise that data revealed, according to Rogoff? The universality of financial crises. More specifically, Rogoff in his talk compared the current financial crisis in the U.S. to a number of other post-WW-II financial crises. (Interestingly, he pointed out, there’s little difference in the frequency of banking crises in advanced economies and emerging ones.)
Here are some of the features of the aftermath of a typical post-WW-II financial crisis, according to Rogoff:
• From peak to trough, housing prices go down a historical average of 35.5% in a financial crisis — and the duration of the downturn in housing prices is an average of 6 years.
• Similarly, peak-to-trough real equity prices drop an average of 55.9% — and the average duration of the downturn in equity prices is 3.4 years.
• The unemployment rate in the aftermath of a financial crisis goes up an average of 7 percentage points — and the duration of the employment downturn is an average of 4.8 years.
• In the aftermath of financial crises, central government debt often “explodes” in amount, Rogoff noted. On average, central government debt increases 86%.
Not a cheery picture overall. But Rogoff pointed out that it could be worse. Six to eight months ago, he observed, you could have worried with a straight face that we might have another Great Depression. But, Rogoff indicated, he thinks the chances of that happening now are small.
For more on Rogoff and Reinhart’s findings and analysis, check out this recent segment from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:
Why Twitter Lists Matter
Last week Twitter debuted a new feature that lets you group your followers, Twitter calls it Lists. To learn Twitter List basics, Josh Catone’s Mashable post HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists is a good place to start.
Why do lists of Twitter accounts 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 in your Twitter feed—You don’t have to subscribe to each individual account. You may not want to subscribe to a list with 500 active Twitterers, but take a quick look and you may turn up a handful of interesting, thoughtful people you do think are worth following.
More important, Twitter built Lists into its API, so its users can design new features. Already there are new products and services building on the Lists API, among them Listorious, a directory of “the best Twitter Lists” and TLISTS (currently in private beta), which promises a set of tools to help companies curate their Twitter Lists.
Enabling user-generated innovation and then getting out the way is something Twitter does well, as Eric von Hippel, MIT Sloan’s Professor of Management of Innovation, as points out in Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers:
“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them.’”
Are you using Twitter Lists? What do you think is the most important thing about the new feature? What’s still missing?
Update: via Wilson Raj and Guy Kawasaki, comes this article from Daniel B. Honigman on How brands can use Twitter lists.
Two Talks, Many Provocative Ideas
Last month we reported on the BIF-5 Collaborative Innovation Summit. We noted that videos for the talks would be posted and that happened yesterday. Here are two well worth your time.
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, talked about fixing MBA education so it no longer produces, as The Economist calls them, “jargon-spewing economic vandals.” He spoke in detail about moving the MBA curriculum from shallow to deep, narrow to broad, static to dynamic.
John Maeda, formerly of MIT and now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, talked about how fundamental “hand-based” knowledge is being lost as part of our transition to new technologies and new models.
If these intrigue you, there are plenty more.
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 for only a moment and then you return to your original perspective, that perspective has been changed.
That may have happened to some people at last week’s Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine. One of the speakers was Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, who delivered a variation of his standard talk on sustainable food. In that talk, he dropped this nugget:
“A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.”
It’s unlikely that Pollan’s talk will drive meat eaters to the tofu aisle in the supermarket; it’s even more unlikely that it will make a Prius driver feel comfortable making a guilt-free move to a Hummer. But what Pollan did was frame the sustainability question in a new way, a way most of his audience (both in Camden and on the Internet) had not considered. At the least, it may make Prius driver feel a little less smug about their auto choice. At most, it may help viewers (managers among them) understand that sustainability is more complicated than a few consumer choices. It’s complicated stuff; that’s why we produced a special report on the business of sustainability.
Interested in seeing more of Pollan’s talk (and excerpts from other Pop!Tech talks)?
The Pile: a New Weekly Feature on Improvisations
One of the few pleasures of going on the Internet on a Sunday is reading Paul Kedrosky’s “Weekend Reading.” In his column, Kedrosky regularly summarizes the business week past, hints at the news to come in the coming week, and lists articles to read to explain what it all means.
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 these web links may require you to register or pay to read them.) Here’s what’s on our minds, our screens, and our night tables this weekend:
It’s been hard to read Fortune lately. It’s thin, the masthead continues to shrink, and too many times it seems like the strategy of the magazine is to replicate the gee-whiz attitude of its departed younger sibling Business 2.0. But the most recent issue has two fantastic pieces. In one, Steve Rattner’s The Auto Bailout: How We Did It, the head of the Obama Administration’s auto task force delivers a standard first-person tale, but Rattner is a former journalist, so his descriptions are particularly sharp. Here’s what he noted about the GM management style: “At GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).”
Also in the current Fortune, Richard Siklos has another tale of management gone terrible awry, The Fight Over Michael’s Millions, with the Michael in question being the late singer Michael Jackson. It’s a tale of collossally bad money and talent decisions, the most poignant being the hiring of a $100,000-per-month personal physician. As Siklos concludes, “when it comes to the big financial questions, it’s a good bet that Jackson’s executors will not be asking themselves, ‘What would Michael do?’” (Disclosure: I’ve both edited and been edited by Siklos.)
Two recent pieces in The Economist deserve your attention, too. In Yum! Brands’ New Corporate Culture: Taking the Hill Less Climbed, the magazine reports on how the parent company, parent company of several second-tier U.S. fast food chains, is working with John O’Keefe, once a Procter & Gamble exec and now marketing himself as a “master of triangular thinking and triangular action” to advance the corporate culture.
Contrarians will appreciate last week’s The Three Habits of Highly Irritating Management Gurus, which applies a baseball bat to the theories of Stephen Covey. And if you have time for more on management consulting, perhaps like us you’re a few weeks behind on your stack of New Yorkers and you’re ready to read Jill Lepore’s Not So Fast, which considers how scientific management started as a way to work and has become a way of life. Turns out today’s GTD-style attempts to be as efficient as possible has a rich historical basis.
And finally, just off our night table is something that has been there for a long time and we’re relieved to have the space back: the 1,167-page Master of the Senate, the third volume of Robert Caro’s ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson. There are many, many aspects of Johnson’s leadership style that were, frankly, repulsive, but Caro’s book describes, in what feels like subatomic detail, how the politician wielded power with sureness and ingenuity. It’s a fascinating, cautionary tale of how power is taken and managed. We’re not sure how many of our readers can commit to an 1,167-page bio, but almost every page has a vivid example of how an ambitious manager should — or shouldn’t — behave.
Back to reading …
The Dangers of Untested Assumptions
Rita Gunther McGrath (Photo credit: Lisa Berg)
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 uncertain new ventures.
McGrath, an associate professor at Columbia Business School, explains that one pitfall is to “take the untested assumptions that underlie the [business] plan and treat them as facts” — and then make expensive business decisions based on those assumptions.
What’s the alternative? McGrath recommends writing down your assumptions when you write a business plan — so you remember what assumptions you made and can check them. Then figure out ways to test and evaluate your assumptions inexpensively as the business progresses.
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 America to be that nation. It’s that simple,” Obama added.
Obama visited the MIT campus to deliver an address about American leadership on clean energy. In his speech about the topic, Obama evoked the pioneer history of the U.S., noting that the American people have always sought new frontiers. Todays’ pioneers, he suggested, include entrepreneurs, inventors and researchers. As a nation, Obama said “we have always been about innovation. We have always been about discovery.”
Obama noted that the stimulus bill represented the largest single boost in scientific research in history. He discussed the need to transform our energy system into one that’s far cleaner and more efficient – and said that transformation will be made as swiftly and carefully as possible. Obama said that the Pentagon has declared dependence on fossil fuels a security threat.
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 post a video by 3 p.m.
While you’re waiting for Obama’s address on sustainability to start, read our special report on the business of sustainability.
Design Thinking: What To Read After Our Special Report
A while back we published a special report on design thinking in which design luminaries such as Edward Tufte, Donald Norman, and Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds gave practical advice on how managers can do their jobs better by thinking like designers.
Our interest in the topic didn’t end when we published the report; we still aim to keep up with the latest in thinking about design thinking and share it with you. Here are three new books pushing the field forward:
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 Management at the University of Toronto (he’s written eloquently on why business schools need to change). His brief but comprehensive volume is full of examples from the usual suspects (Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, the folks who make BlackBerrys), but he finds new wrinkles in old stories and perspectives others have missed. If you ever thought analytical thinking alone was enough to run your business, Martin will set you straight. (For more, Martin summarizes his arguments in the current BusinessWeek.)
Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko is an underground classic. It was published independently in 2007; its 1000-copy print run sold out quickly and photocopies have been passed around samizdat-style. Kolko is an associate creative director for the innovative consultancy frog design (the company also publishes one of our favorite interdisciplinary magazines, design mind). In this book, he collects essays (by himself and others) that capture the state of interaction design and give such designers, his primary audience, the tools necessary to explain the value of what they do to the businesspeople on your team. Managers: give yourself a competitive edge by knowing this before the designers on your team have to tell you.
Streams, Walls, and Feeds: 107 Design Guidelines for Improving Notifications, Messages, and Alerts Sent Through Social Networks and RSS by Janelle Estes, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen is the most tactical of the three new volumes. The Nielsen Norman Group, which produced this report, is a leader in usability research and consulting; its reliance on original research is what makes it such a successful consultancy. In its latest report, the company evaluates how companies communicate via some of the most popular and cutting edge social media. As it usually does, Nielsen Norman finds most companies wanting. This report shows why satisfaction levels of most people who interact with companies via social networks are so low and what companies can do to improve them. The link at the beginning of this paragraph leads to a summary of the report. The full thing, 209 pages long, is expensive and outlined here. Like the other books here, it emphasizes how important design thinking is to maximizing your business operations.
How Vulnerable a Leader Should You Be?
With its reporting of how political power is wielded in Washington, the only leadership lessons you’re likely to get from The Washington Post most of the time are case studies of what not to do. But the website’s video interviews with business leaders occasionally offer some positive models, too.
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 to fail and to do so openly, should be a core competency for many leaders, but it is often taken as a sign of weakness.
That’s where the Washington Post video comes in. In it, Paul Schmitz, CEO of the nonprofit Public Allies, discusses how admitting to failings makes you a better leader, not a weaker one. (Warning: there is a brief ad at the beginning of the video.)
What do you think? How vulnerable should a leader be?
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 website. Some highlights:
One of the most baffling results from your survey is that while 92% of respondents said their company was “addressing sustainability in some way,” 70% said they still had not developed a clear business case for it.
That is the contradiction that gets to the heart of the issue, and as we continue with the second round of the survey that is probably where we’re going to do the most digging. It’s one thing for an executive to understand that sustainability is going to have a major impact. It doesn’t mean they understand how to make a case for investing in products that will capitalize on it.
One reason for this contradiction is this enormous gap between experts, or “thought leaders,” and novices. Novices recognize sustainability is going to have a big impact, but they are stuck in the “green” silo. To them, sustainability can seem like a cost rather than a benefit. Unfortunately, that’s not going to drive company behavior.
Thought leaders see sustainability in system-wide terms. Improving products, motivating employees, lowering costs, and improving relationships with governments, the public, the capital markets — even competitors. They think about many, many different things — it’s a bigger way to think. Suddenly opportunities to create value seem much more obvious.
According to your survey, improving company reputation seems to be the major driver of sustainability. Do you see this as a weakness, going forward?
I can see it cutting both ways, both for good and for ill. Depending on how well we do in ferreting out green-washing. For the typical company, reputation is the reason they think they’re doing sustainability, so if they got away with making false claims, that would be bad. And yet as a driver of activity, what’s wrong with reputation being a good return loop, a good feedback loop?
Reputation is very complex when it comes to sustainability. One of the examples is Nike. They have made amazing progress in improving the sustainability of their products, by redesigning them to use fewer materials, for example. But they are really in a quandary because they don’t feel they can promote that fact, because they worry it stands in direct contrast with what their customers want them to do.
Nike fears that by going out and saying look what we’ve done — and it’s really win win — customers will say “wait, I thought you created your product solely to make sure I got the best performance out of it. Sustainability has to compromise your other goal.” Nike is really worried about it, and as a result, they’re quite decidedly not pushing it.
I think reputation benefit is driver now, but will greatly diminish. As time passes, reputation will just be table stakes. Already seeing that in certain parts of the food industry: almost becomes difficult to find a product that is environmentally sound because they all claim that they are.
How is sustainability changing the way companies operate?
When you talk to people that are trying to do sustainability initiatives in companies, it’s a completely different business process, because it requires collaboration across all different boundaries, both inside and outside the firm. Inside firms, sustainability often requires collaboration across divisions and departments that don’t have to deal with each other. Outside, it requires collaboration with governments, NGOs, communities, citizen groups, and competitors about standards and practices. It requires an ability to collaborate that is unprecedented. Most execs don’t have it, or don’t know how to do it.
It also means companies will have to find ways to be more transparent about their practices and activities. People want to collaborate with people they can trust. If Company A runs their operation in a way that allows me to see inside it, then I’m more likely to collaborate with them. Certain things about management, like accounting and financial reporting, have to change.
It’s the same with the greening the supply chain, where suppliers are being asked to go into detail about manufacturing processes, materials, etc. Of course, some suppliers say “thanks, but no thanks” we’re not going to share that information with you. Herman Miller’s response is, well then we’re going elsewhere. Plenty of people would rather hold their cards close to their chest, but it is going to be less beneficial to do so, and more beneficial to be more transparent.
Sustainability issues are going to drive management harder towards transparency than almost any other challenge we’ve seen.
Sounds like a tall order — I’m thinking of companies trying to survive in a highly competitive market. Why risk being more transparent?
The risks far outweigh the rewards. Like for instance, protecting patents. A lot of companies don’t care about patents at all. Patents aren’t going to protect them, if [competitors] know what they do and how they work, by the time they copy it they’re on to the next thing. Companies need to think about service.
Also, companies will begin to see that in an age where it’s harder to get capital than it used to be, if you can be the kind of company to make outside providers of capital more comfortable, you’re going to attract more capital.
There are a lot of green companies that are glad about the widespread mistrust of sustainability – they realize that “because these other folks are too scared, I have a competitive advantage. My competitors are in the stone age.”
One would think that, during the current downturn, sustainability initiatives would be the first programs cut, but your survey shows fewer than 25% of respondents had cut their sustainability initiatives recently.
Honestly, I don’t understand it. I have posited a thesis to others which is that in some measure, especially early on in the trajectory, sustainability is often about savings and waste, and so there are ways in which a downturn can push a company to invest more in efficiency. “If we use less materials and cut emissions, we know it can save us money.” There is a menu of sustainable activities that look more attractive when you’re in a downturn.
Could it be that sustainability is a “growth industry,” and thus immune to the downturn?
I am hesitant to say its because it’s a growth industry, because I think the typical business person is still an novice, and I don’t think they believe it’s a big enough business opportunity yet. But, that 92% [who believe it is important] number is huge, and that fact plays into this. People really do believe they’re likely to keep paying attention to it because they don’t want to be blindsided.
Lessons from the Startup Bootcamp at MIT
There was lots of entepreneurial energy in the room at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium today — as a sizable crowd gathered in the morning for a free daylong “Startup Bootcamp” full of lessons from technology entrepreneurs. Here are some insights from just a few of the day’s speakers:
- MIT’s Ken Zolot offered a set of questions to ask about an invention when you’re thinking about starting a business around it:
- Does it work yet?
- Is it special?
- Who cares?
- What do I have and who do I know?
- Who can help?
- 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 ask you things, they aren’t asking dumb questions,” she explained. “You should hone your idea and the way you express it and move forward.”
- Adam Smith, founder of Xobni, mentioned the importance of staying small until you achieve product market fit — i.e., you have a product that people want. When you achieve that, you can scale up, according to Smith — and then it’s more about execution.
- Daniel Theobald, founder and CTO of Vecna, recommended avoiding taking “other people’s money” as investments if you can — particularly if you have a socially responsible business model as a vision. Vecna, he said, allows employees to spend up to 10% of their work time on community service projects — and the company’s model wouldn’t have worked if the company had taken outside investors’ money. Instead, he said, the company used IT consulting to bootstrap its startup stage — structuring its consulting agreements so that Vecna retained the intellectual property.
- More than one speaker alluded to the need for start-up entrepreneurs to experiment and iterate quickly until they get to a successful business model. But that process isn’t necessarily easy for entrepreneurs — as Kyle Vogt, one of the founders of Justin.TV, vividly described. Vogt spoke of stages Web start-ups go through – including the “Trough of Sorrow” that occurs after the initial product has launched but before the company has reached a stage Vogt calls “Acquisition of Loyalty.” While in the “Trough of Sorrow,” Vogt said, entrepreneurs may face tough questions from family, friends — and from themselves. However, according to Vogt, if you stick to it long enough and try enough times, you’ll probably find something people will like. Justin.TV, which began by providing live video coverage from the life of a guy named Justin, now includes a wide range of live video, such as coverage from the Startup Bootcamp — including this excerpt from Robin Chase’s presentation:
Listening in on the Real-Time Web
Your customers are talking about you. Can you hear them? Trust Agents, a new book by noted bloggers and social media consultants Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, is a practical guide to learning how to improve your business using the web in its 2.0, real-time form.
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 these social-media platforms have experienced in the past year.
Brogan and Smith emphasize that, to be effective, businesses and individuals need to build trust and social capital through open interactions on the real-time web. How to start? By building a “listening station,” a way to find out what people are saying about you, your company, industry, competitors, etc.
How-To
- Download or sign up for an RSS newsreader, an efficient means to review new information posted to multiple websites and blogs within one program or web service. If you’re new to RSS newsreaders, try the web-based Google Reader.
- Go to Technorati and search for your company name. On the search results page, find the orange RSS icon, copy the link, and add it to your newsreader. Now, whenever someone writes a blog post and mentions your company name, it will appear in your newsreader. Repeat this step for abbreviations of your company name, your own name, industry, competitors, etc.
- Do the same at Google’s blog search (you’ll get some duplicates but Google finds some mentions that Technorati doesn’t include).
- Repeat once more, this time with Twitter.
We’ll return soon with recommendations about joining the conversation. For now, start listening. You may be surprised by what you hear.
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 the event: “A good story can change the world.” Those are strong words, but, at its best, the packed Trinity Rep in Providence worked hard to live up to them.
I’m embarrassed that such a strong conference takes place almost in the backyard of MIT Sloan Management Review and I didn’t know about it until year five, but “BIF,” as the organizers call it, is full of ambition and purpose. Like similar conferences TED and PopTech, BIF offers what it hopes are world-changing ideas. But, unlike TED and PopTech, which celebrate a wide variety of disciplines and are as intent on entertaining as educating, BIF is all business.
It’s a wide definition of business knowledge. Last week in this spot, I mused on leadership lessons from unlikely places. BIF was all about inspiration from unlikely places, with reports from the frontlines of freelance diplomacy and someone whose job it is to figure out what would happen if a pirate fought a knight. But more than unexpected sources, BIF was about unexpected attitude. Late in the first day of the conference, Saul Kaplan, the event’s “founder and chief catalyst,” said “innovation requires a vulnerability most people are not comfortable with.” Like many good stories, the ones told on the stage of BIF were ones in which the principals revealed their vulnerabilities and then revealed what they learned from them.
The whole day was filmed. These talks will find their way onto the net and we’ll point to them. For now, here are a handful of the highlights from a long, deep day:
- The New York Times recently argued that the term “curator” is being overused, but Museum of Modern Arts senior curator Paola Antonelli made a compelling case for curating, in its widest sense, as the activity in which all knowledge workers will engage. “Curating is no more than sifting,” she said, “sifting, so people can organize information in the best way.”
- Harvard Berkman’s Ethan Zuckerman, introduced as “the geek’s geek,” talked about building cultural bridges, with examples ranging from Paul Simon’s Graceland to the videogame World of Warcraft, and used a not-new term that the business thinkers in the room marvelled over: “xenophilia.”
- Author Don Tapscott gave a variation of his usual talk about digital natives, but added a telling wrinkle. He told of his son building a Facebook group for one of his books and the self-organizing community quickly growing and feeling its oats. One member of that Facebook group asked pointedly, “And how exactly will Mr. Tapscott be contributing to our community?” It was a trenchant note regarding how much ownership community members can feel.
- Helmut Traitler, vice president of innovation partnerships at Nestle, discussed the nuts and bolts of managing open innovation projects. Some companies “give out problems in a disguised way,” he said, “but you have to give out openly to get back more.”
- Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, talked about fixing MBA education so it no longer produces, as The Economist calls them, “jargon-spewing economic vandals.” He spoke in detail about moving the MBA curriculum from shallow to deep, narrow to broad, static to dynamic. Similarly, ex-MITer John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, talked about how fundamental “hand-based” knowledge is being lost as part of our transition to new technologies and new models.
In a small, packed room, it felt like these notables were, with minimal dressing, simply sharing what they were thinking about lately and telling stories that illuminated their ideas. Early in the day, Kaplan talked about what everyone seems to talk about these days: Twitter. He talked glowingly about its applicability to sharing ideas early on. “It lets you get stuff off white board and on to the ground,” he said. A good conference can do that, too.
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 for Digital Business today. (Brynjolfsson and Wharton’s Adam Saunders have a new book out, Wired for Innovation, that addresses this topic and others related to IT, innovation and productivity.)
Erik Brynjolfsson
As part of his presentation today, Brynjolfsson discussed findings from research that involved studying 1167 large firms over 10 years — and that concluded that business performance depends on both IT and organizational capital. The researchers found that there is a very measurably different set of management practices that are much more common in IT-intensive companies than in others. What’s more, these practices — which Brynolfsson calls practices of “the digital organization” — are correlated with generally higher productivity and higher market value in the companies that implement them.
The downside? It’s possible to “spend a lot on IT without getting much of a return,” if you invest in IT without adopting digital organization practices, Brynjolfsson commented. A similar problem, he noted, can occur if you change a company’s work practices to adopt digital organization practices — but don’t make the corresponding IT investments.
What are the practices that characterize the “digital organization”? In Wired for Innovation, Brynjolfsson and Saunders write that digital organizations:
- move from analog to digital processes
- open information access
- empower the employees
- use performance-based incentives
- invest in corporate culture
- recruit the right people
- invest in human capital.
IT-intensive firms, Brynjolfsson observed in his presentation today, tended to put more effort into hiring and, once they hired, into training.
The Management Lessons of Las Vegas
Where do you find inspiration? From great management thinkers like Peter Drucker? Political or military leaders? Great artists or musicians? Or, maybe, a gaudy wedding chapel on the strip in Las Vegas?
That last one probably doesn’t rank high on your list. But maybe it should.
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. It made not only an economic argument for the lowbrow, but an aesthetic one as well. What is considered ordinary or ugly by elites, they lay out, may be more useful and lasting than the designs their contemporaries considered heroic and original. The book nudged architecture into post-modernism. It is still influential and relevant. Last year MIT Press published a new volume of essays on the book and its impact.
But you’re a manager, not an architect. What does this have to do with managing? Here at MIT Sloan Management Review, we’re firm believers that the future of management is, in part, built on discovering new ideas and seeing how they fit into the work we do on a daily basis. What is most exciting about Learning from Las Vegas and why it’s so inspirational even to us non-architects is that it’s an example of a bunch of smart, committed people looking at the mainstream of their field and shouting, “No! You’re looking at this the wrong way!” Especially in uncertain economic times, when even the acknowledged experts don’t know what’s coming next, it’s important to think twice about what everyone else takes for granted. That’s a profound management lesson. Look around. You never know where you’ll find inspiration for your next great idea.
Fall 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review
Today we’re publishing the fall issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. We lead with our special report on sustainability as a competitive advantage, which includes these elements:
Like it or not, it’s changing management. Here’s how
Five companies, five strategies, five transformations
How Ray Anderson became the leading sustainability CEO
Findings from the first annual Business of Sustainability Global Survey
Amory Lovins on what executives don’t get
And the issue includes more on a variety of other topics:
Making Innovation Less Risky: A New Tool Shows Which Efforts Will Pay Off
Forget Leadership. It’s Management That Matters
Why Your Failing Business Model Is So Hard to Leave
Have to Downsize? Here’s the Right Way for Your Company
The New Economics of Information: What Managers Need to Know
Read the full table of contents and explore the new issue.
Design Thinking About Sustainability
Yesterday on our Twitter feed, we directed readers to our special report on design thinking and noted that a TEDtalk by design thinking icon Tim Brown had just been posted.
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 started; right now it’s just a showcase for selected designers. But the site makes a promise:
Living Climate Change is a place where the most defining challenge of our time is explored through design thinking. It’s also a place to show, discuss, and share compelling and provocative thoughts and ideas about the future.
If the site really attempts to keep this promise, it should be, at the least, a fascinating experiment.
The Financial Crisis Fallout Explained — on Video
Friday we offered selected pearls from a great conversation between banking honcho Larry Fish and MIT Sloan economist (and leading financial crisis commentator) Simon Johnson.
Now we can share full sound and video.
As noted Friday, there’s provocative matter here about what needs changing in the banking system — and what changes are likely to happen instead — as well as explorations of what caused the financial crisis and why some countries escaped its worst consequences.
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 a big thing about how many did. I found it far more interesting how many didn’t.”
The MIT SMR Store
From The Magazine
Fall 2009
Special Report: Sustainability
8 Reasons That Sustainability Will Change Management
Michael S. HopkinsTransparency, accidental innovation, trust, collaboration — as sustainability affects how the world works, so will it affect how business works in the world.
Intelligence: Management
Debunking Management Myths
Martha E. MangelsdorfIn this interview, Henry Mintzberg questions some of the conventional wisdom about managerial work.