Improvisations

X
A Blog From MIT Sloan Management Review

Design Thinking: What To Read After Our Special Report

Design Think Special Report cover imageA 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:
  1. Does it work yet?
  2. Is it special?
  3. Who cares?
  4. What do I have and who do I know?
  5. 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)

BIF-5 logoI 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.

Saul KaplanIt’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

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

fall 09 cover 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.”

Debating Offshoring’s Impact

Too often, discussions of contemporary economic issues end up either overly simplified for popular consumption — or too jargony and technical to be followed by anyone but economists. A new book, Offshoring of American Jobs: What Response from U.S. Economic Policy? avoids both extremes — and instead finds an informative, nuanced middle ground on an important issue. This brief but thought-provoking book offers insights into economists’ thinking about offshoring.

In the book, edited by Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard and published by MIT Press, two prominent economists –Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University and Alan Blinder of Princeton — debate the impact that the offshoring of jobs (particularly white-collar jobs, such as computer programming) will have on the American economy. (The book includes commentary from other economists, as well.)

Bhagwati complains of ”episodes of media frenzy” despite economists’ consensus about the benefits of free trade, while Blinder worries about the impact of offshoring of service jobs on the American populace and American politics. Here’s a small sample of what each has to say in Offshoring of American Jobs:

BHAGWATI: “In an op-ed titled ‘Technology, not Globalisation, Is Driving Wages Down’ in the Financial Times (January 4, 2007), I argued that the vast numbers of empirical studies…had shown that trade with poor countries had a negligible impact on our workers’ absolute real wages (as against the relative wages of the skilled and the unskilled)….The New Democrats who continue to believe nonetheless in this imaginary downside of free trade are not doing anyone any good.”

BLINDER: “I can’t help believing — and this is what makes me a worrywart rather than a relaxed, business-as-usual guy — that the gross job losses [from offshoring] in the rich, English-speaking countries will a) continue for decades, b) eventually be huge, c) pose a variety of difficult adjustment problems and d) dominate the political landscape for years.”

Whatever your own views on offshoring and its economic and political impact, chances are good you’ll learn something from the discussion presented in this book.

Bank Bashing, Courtesy of a Banker

Lawrence K. FishTwo of us at MIT Sloan Management Review grabbed good seats at yesterday’s MIT Sloan campus-event headliner: a downwind reflection on fallout from the financial crisis. Featured attraction: a high-level round of bank bashing, with a high-level banker on hand to help do it. OK, it wasn’t only banks that were bashed. Ungenerous attention was paid to politicians, insurance firms, mortgage companies, and the general ethical standards of business people, as well. The usual suspects, in other words.

Simon JohnsonBut the hall was overstuffed because the two speakers were not usual: a candid Lawrence K. Fish, longtime (now former) Citizen’s Bank CEO, and, as his interlocutor, MIT Sloan prof Simon Johnson, the former IMF chief economist and co-founder of acclaimed global economy blog The Baseline Scenario. The conversation was part of the Dean’s Innovative Leader Series. Along with heat, it generated a fair quotient of light. Plus some activist heckling.

We’ll post an edited version of the entire chat in weeks ahead, but for now, some brief highlights:

ON “JUST HOW BAD” THE FINANCIAL CRISIS WAS:

Note, first, the past tense. “It was really bad,” said Fish, “but we’re coming out of it.” TARP has actually helped, and the government will end up ahead, he said. “The returns will probably mean that the government will make money.”

Will a crisis happen again? “Yes.”

ON REGULATORY REFORM (OR NON-):

“I’m worried we’ll overreact,” Fish said. “We need better regulation, not more regulation.” Two big risks: “One, competitiveness globally [of the U.S. financial services industry]; and two, we may protect consumers so well that consumers can’t borrow.”

Johnson argued for aggressive reforms (see his blog), but Fish thinks that’s a nonstarter. “Profound regulatory reform—of the kind Simon is talking about—is probably a political unreality” because the financial services lobbies are too good and donate too much money to be countered.

ON ETHICS, LACK OF:

“There are no B-pluses in ethics, it’s pass/fail,” said Fish. And it’s not hard to assess the grade. “You know what’s right. You know.”

He added for illustration: “It makes me crazy that someone gets a $100 million bonus.” (He mentioned, more than once during the hour, the “platinum trader” who gets a bonus that’s 50% of the $200 million in trading revenues he or she generates.) “Who needs that much?” he said, rhetorically—begging the question of just how much is the right reward in a market economy where incentives are created to produce outcomes.

If not $100 million, then what should be the reward for producing $200 million in trading revenues? Fifty million? One million? Five thousand dollars and a good steak?

We joke, but not entirely. We can all decry the “obscene” bonus (though some wouldn’t), but naming the “right” amount is less easy. Where’s the line?

We’ll ask Fish, and get back to you. And, if you want more Fish while you’re waiting, see his MIT World talk.

Management by Kindle?

KindleA tech research firm CEO recently tweeted: “After six months with my Kindle I can now report that the damn thing is indispensible. This Amazon toast was perfectly
cooked.” I wish I had the version he seems to have. In mine, which seems to be the standard model, the screen isn’t bright enough, the lack of a touch screen makes it quite unbooklike, you can’t download any Saul Bellow, and don’t get me started on the digital rights restrictions it locks you into. For personal use, the latest version of the Kindle is decidedly undercooked, useful mostly when you’re traveling and want a lighter load. As Nicholson Baker noted in The New Yorker, reading Kindle books on an iPhone is a much more pleasant experience. There are, though, plenty of business purposes for the Kindle and similar competing devices, ranging from easy access to documentation of complex items (you try walking around the Boeing factory with a 30-pound aircraft manual) to relatively lightweight distribution of PDFs (as long as they’re mostly text).

But what about the Kindle as management tool? New devices, be they PCs in the 1980s or BlackBerrys right about now, rise to prominence in business when they are effective ways for managers to communicate and get work done. It’s no accident that business purchases of iPhones took off after Apple made it easier to connect to Exchange-based office systems. Anyone who has paid attention to the book business in recent years knows that a $300 device devoted solely to books is unlikely to be a blockbuster. You can read Kindle books on an iPhone, but it’s surely not the main reason anyone buys one. It’s unclear where Amazon wants to go next with the Kindle. A $500 large-screen version seems focused on reaching academic and periodical-reading markets, although I suspect that getting people already abandoning newspapers to buy a $500 device to read them will not reverse that slide.

What is clear is that the device won’t be a success among managers in its current incarnation. The device is great at selling books (it’s from Amazon; what did you expect?) but it’s not very good for reading or communication. Consider the web browser. There is one built into the Kindle, but it’s hidden in an “experimental” menu and it’s not very good. There’s no incentive now for Amazon to improve it, since the primary purpose of the device’s free connectivity is to download books and Amazon eats the bandwidth cost. Fixing the web browser will require software improvements (more self-evident controls), hardware improvements (touch screen, at the very least), and a business-model improvement: a subscription model. By making the software and hardware improvements, Amazon can make the Kindle more useful to managers. And by making the Kindle a subsidized device with a regular, reliable income stream, like a phone, Amazon can sell the Kindle to businesses in ways businesses understand. Without business buy-in, a decade from now we’ll be talking about the Kindle the way we now consider the Apple Newton.

Do you have a Kindle? Are you getting some management use out of it? Let us know what you’re doing in the comments.

We read The Economist so you don’t have to

Economist coverWe here at MIT Sloan Management Review are voracious readers. After all, part of our service is to read management literature so you don’t have to read all of it. But it’s not only academic journals that are full of smart management ideas you can act on. This week’s issue of The Economist has a pair of articles in particular that hit the spot:

In “Creative Tension,” the magazine looks at ways Google is trying to make sure that the inevitable bureaucracy that comes with having 20,000 employees doesn’t stifle innovation. The example in question is Google Wave, a still-in-development mix of email, chat, and file-sharing that some think might unseat Microsoft’s SharePoint. How different was the development of Wave from what the company does usually? Quite a bit. “Some Googlers felt this was a betrayal of the firm’s open culture.”

“A Maket for Ideas” looks at how the Eli Lilly startup Innocentive has created an “innovation marketplace.” “Seekers” post problems and quote a fee; “solvers” compete to answer them. It’s turning out to be a successful model, even as the parent Eli Lilly is cutting jobs.

Finally, the magazine also debuted a new column on business and management that it’s calling “Schumpeter.” As you might expect, the column kicks off with an entry on why it is named after Joseph Schumpeter, who the column identifies as “one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight.” We’re curious to see how this new page tries to do the same.

Customers and service innovation

A new working paper looks at customers' role in innovation in a service industry: banking. Read more »

A new look at older technologies

Conventional wisdom has it that companies whose markets are being transformed by disruptive new technologies need to figure out how to switch to the new dominant technology. But two researchers argue that an alternative strategy --one that involves rethinking opportunities for the old technology -- can sometimes make sense. Read more »

Developing an optimal innovation strategy

If one innovation approach is helpful, you might think using more than one approach to innovation would be even more productive. Not necessarily, write Frank T. Rothaermel and Andrew M. Hess in the new issue of Business Insight, MIT Sloan Management Review's collaboration with The Wall Street Journal. Read more »

Overcoming innovation hurdles

What's one of the challenges to successful management or process innovation in an existing business? The array of organizational structures that are designed to keep current processes running smoothly. Read more »

Asia, the U.S., and innovation

There's plenty of optimism to be heard about Asia's innovation future -- but less optimism about the U.S.'s ability to maintain its historical innovation leadership in the 21st century. Read more »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

From The Magazine

Fall 2009

Special Report: Sustainability

8 Reasons That Sustainability Will Change Management

Michael S. Hopkins

Transparency, 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. Mangelsdorf

In this interview, Henry Mintzberg questions some of the conventional wisdom about managerial work.