Basketball Hot at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

By Leslie Brokaw – 3/24/12

Basketball was on the minds of many at MIT Sloan’s annual conference, “part ‘Star Trek’ convention, part academic conference, part job fair, part media circus,” says Fast Company.

One of the stars at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, held earlier this month in Boston, was a scholar who has applied his knowledge of geography to the ecosystem, or “court space,” of the basketball court.

Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor in the department of geography at Michigan State University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University, made a splash by stepping out of his main field.

“Goldsberry does health care research,” notes Fast Company in “In Relentless Jocks-Nerds War, Hope For Peace Through Analytics.” “He creates maps that reveal a community’s lack of access to fresh produce, and he publishes his findings in academic publications such as the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition. But it’s Goldsberry’s latest research paper — “CourtVision: New Visual and Spatial Analytics for the NBA” — that has thrust him into the sports geek limelight. ‘I woke up yesterday never having been on national TV or in The New York Times and Sports Illustrated or interviewed by the Wall Street Journal,’ he says, incredulous that all those things have since happened.”

The annual conference has become a big event for what’s estimated to be a $400 billion business. Read more »

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97% of Websites Fail at User Experience, Reports Forrester

By Leslie Brokaw – 3/18/12

With 1,500 Website User Experience Reviews under its belt, Forrester has come out with a jaw-dropping finding, according to a Forrester blog post:

“only 3% of the sites earned a passing score (that’s a total of 45 sites out of the 1,500. Yes, you read that right: 45).”

Websites failed their users most often by being sloppy at the basics including text legibility, use of space, task flow and links to privacy and security policies. Read more »

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Reducing Yogurt’s Carbon Footprint

By Deb Gallagher – 3/16/12

Stonyfield has optimized its business for rail instead of truck transport and worked to reduce “methane-creating cow burps” by using a grass-based rather than a grain-based diet.

Image courtesy of Flickr user paul+photos=moody.

The second in our series of mini Q&As from the virtual panel with MIT Sloan’s Jason Jay, Stonyfield Farm’s Wood Turner and SAP’s Peter Graf. You can watch the archived video panel here.

Do you have examples of how the [Stonyfield sustainability] changes have made the enterprise more sustainable? A gallon of milk has the same carbon footprint as a gallon of gasoline. What actions can materially reduce this footprint?

Turner: Clearly, you’ve just made the case for deep supply chain engagement, which we are very focused on. Simply by virtue of measuring our impact comprehensively, we recognized that we needed to attack enteric emissions on farms – essentially the methane-creating cow burps – and the transportation of finished product to the customer.

Our Greener Cow project, which we started in 2009, has shown very promising results in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions that can result from a diet of feed that’s more appropriate for cows: namely a grass-based rather than a grain-based diet. With the critical pasture requirement for organic milk – Stonyfield only uses organic milk – we’re already in a leadership position here at Stonyfield, but we want to go further to make sure that we can see the full potential of an effort like this.

We also have worked hard to optimize our business for rail, and between 2006 and 2010, we logged over 400,000 miles of rail transport in getting our yogurt to Western markets. Rail uses eleven times less fuel than trucks, so we’re already significantly reducing the impact of getting our products to market. We’ve become incredibly passionate advocates in trying to get other businesses to take advantage of the opportunities we have. It’s real impact and real costs that we’re avoiding. It takes commitment and focus – which as you might imagine scares some companies away – but for us, it’s just how we do business.

Does the SAP software solution provide opportunities for the optimization of total costs, including footprint or other environmental costs, to enhance decision-making around production and sourcing strategies?

Turner: Yes, we already connect our CO2 emissions with costs for energy, fuel and offsets, and we are working toward leveraging the SAP tool to relate to our financials. We already use CO2 data to help make decisions about material usage. Our recent adoption of PLA is a great example of this.

Larger companies are requiring sustainability commitments from their supply chains, and over time even the smallest companies will need to be compliant. How can consultants, accountants and other professionals convince their clients to be proactive in preparing for this?

Turner: Encourage companies to begin tracking their impacts as much as possible and link those results to financial performance. Data on facility energy use, transportation fuel use, water use, etc. are keys to determining our material footprints, and the more a company has this data on hand, the less they have to do when their customers (like us) decide to begin reporting their Scope 3 impacts.

For more about Stonyfield and SAP efforts in sustainability, see our first mini Q&A “Practical Steps for Integrating Sustainability Into the Organization.”

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How Infosys Is Building Its Talent Pipeline in India

By Leslie Brokaw – 3/15/12

Students from around the world are brought to Infosys’ Bangalore, India, campus in an effort to increase the company’s name recognition, improve its brand attraction and fill its talent pipeline.

Image courtesy of Flickr user theqspeaks.

Attracting talent sometimes means marketing the corporation to the people who might one day take a job there.

For Infosys, a global technology services company headquartered in Bangalore, India, that has meant taking “significant steps to increase its name recognition, improve its brand attraction and fill its talent pipeline by combining global branding activities with efforts in local communities,” according to the authors of “Six Principles of Effective Global Talent Management,” in the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Among Infosys’ steps, according to the article:

• A “Catch Them Young” program in India that exposes high school students to information technology during school breaks. Students are trained for a month and then invited to work for Infosys on a two-month project.
• Computer awareness programs in rural areas in local languages, to help children become more comfortable with high-tech equipment. “Although not initially directed at recruitment and branding,” says the article, “the program has been an effective strategy for enlarging the pool of IT-literate and Infosys-devoted students in India, which may eventually make it easier to find talented software engineers.”
• A global internship program called InStep, which invites students from top universities internationally to the company’s Bangalore campus. The three month stay “is part of an ongoing effort to make the company more attractive to potential candidates outside of India and to tap into the worldwide talent pool,” says the article.

Read more »

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IKEA: Hiring on Values As Well as Skills

By Leslie Brokaw – 3/12/12

IKEA’s standard job questionnaire downplays skills, experience or academic credentials, focusing instead on applicants’ values and beliefs.

Image courtesy of Flickr user 5thLuna.

Many successful companies, such as IKEA, consider corporate culture part of their competitive edge.

For those companies, that means hiring in a different way.

Culture-focused companies “make deliberate efforts to integrate their stated core values and business principles into talent management processes such as hiring methods, leadership development activities, performance management systems, and compensation and benefits programs” says the article “Six Principles of Effective Global Talent Management,” in the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Instead of looking just at job-related skills and experience when deciding who to hire, culture-focused companies “expanded their selection criteria to include cultural fit,” assessing applicants’ personalities and values. The assumption is that “skills are easier to develop than personality traits, attitudes and values,” says the article, which is based on a multiyear collaborative research project.

Case in point: IKEA, the Sweden-based furniture retailer: Read more »

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A Future of Uncontrolled Decline?

By Nina Kruschwitz – 3/8/12

Dennis Meadows, one of the original authors of the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, thinks it is far too late to achieve sustainable development as that term is commonly understood.

The Limits to Growth, one of the first scholarly works to recognize that the world was approaching its sustainable limits, turns 40 this year.

Speaking at a joint symposium in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Club of Rome and the Smithsonian Institution, Meadows told the audience that we are following the “Collapse” scenario, one of the 10 outlined in the book. This scenario includes a precipitous decline in resource and energy use over the next few decades, the consequences of unfettered economic growth and policies that don’t recognize resource limits or the carrying capacity of the planet.

Meadows made the case that our focus should now be on resiliency, rather than on sustainability. “It is too late to avoid what is coming,” he told the audience, “but we can still adopt policies that will reduce the negative impacts on the values that are most important to us as a society.”

Jørgen Randers, another co-author of Limits to Growth, quoted GE CEO Jeff Immelt when he said, “We know the solution, but we don’t like it.” Randers, a professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School, believes that the problems of planetary limitations are solvable technically — and at a relatively low cost. The challenge is that capitalism’s focus on the short-term results of investments, and democratic society’s focus on legislation that promotes short-term benefits, render us unable to make the decisions that would allow us to, as fellow presenter professor Richard Alley put it, “learn before we burn.”
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Social tools improve service, research, collaboration

By David Kiron – 3/6/12

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

New Q&A: Social Business at Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente uses Twitter to gauge customer reaction to specific initiatives, such as valet parking.

Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have helped Kaiser Permanente — the nation’s largest nonprofit health care provider — grow its positive media mentions close to 500% in the last five years, says Vince Golla, who oversees the organization’s external digital reputation. From counseling the people behind more than 100 Kaiser Permanente Twitter accounts to using social media to see what customers are happy and angry about, the foundation of Golla’s work is to “help folks understand that when they are engaging in a social media conversation on behalf of our brand, it is intergalactic and travels at the speed of light.”

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Why the Best Coach for a Senior Exec Could Be a Subordinate

By Leslie Brokaw – 3/6/12

Executives become isolated if they don’t get on-point coaching and honest feedback.

Image courtesy of Flickr user loufi.

One of the biggest risks for senior executives is isolation. One of the smartest solutions is coaching — from subordinates.

The problem for senior executives is that the people who give them feedback don’t usually see them in action. Robert S. Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, writes that senior executives “may be ‘overseen’ by a board of directors or very senior boss,” but those superiors are probably not closely watching their daily behavior.

“One of the first questions I ask senior executives is, ‘Who is your coach?’ Many respond with a list of mentors who are outside the company or perhaps on the board of directors.” But these mentors have huge blind spots and only know the narrative they’re provided, Kaplan says.

In McKinsey Quarterly, Kaplan offers a counterintuitive suggestion: Seek out feedback and coaching from direct reports. Read more »

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Social Business Survey: How Fast to Mainstream?

By Nina Kruschwitz – 3/5/12

The recent survey on social business that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte clearly indicates the growing importance of social business across all industries over the next three years. The survey asked respondents whether social business was unimportant, somewhat unimportant, neutral, somewhat important, or important to their business. The following chart shows just those who answered “important,” cut by industry type.

Read more »

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You’ve Got Eight Words To Sell Yourself

By Leslie Brokaw – 3/2/12

Will your opening sentence get people to pay attention?

Image courtesy of Flickr user batmoo.

“Within the first 8 words, I’ve decided whether or not to keep listening.”

That’s venture capitalist David Wells of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and that’s what he told Allison M. Shapira of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Communication Program about what he’s thinking when he hears a start-up pitch.

In a story in the Boston Globe, Shapira writes: “I asked, ‘What are you looking for in those first 8 words?’ He replied (and I’m paraphrasing), ‘The core innovation. If it’s not in the first 8 words, it’s probably not there. That’s when I either stop listening or interrupt the speaker to ask.’”

Shapira offers two great pieces of advice for creating an attention-getting opening. Read more »

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Practical Steps For Integrating Sustainability Into the Organization

By Deb Gallagher – 3/1/12

Hundreds of viewers joined us on February 16 as MIT Sloan’s Jason Jay talked about sustainability and the product lifecycle with Stonyfield Farm’s Wood Turner and SAP’s Peter Graf.

You can watch the archived video panel. As well, we asked Turner and Graf to answer some of the thoughtful questions submitted by viewers. Below, the first of what will be a series of mini Q&As.

What has the process of integrating sustainability throughout the whole organization been like? What are the most important challenges?

Turner: At Stonyfield, it’s an incredibly exciting time for us in terms of employee engagement. Our environmental leadership is now nearly three decades old, our formal Mission Action Program (MAP) has just hit the five-year mark and it’s time to move beyond a relatively small environmental team to a true company-wide green team.

We’re now embedding key environmental functions deeper into the organization, not just within a “sustainability” silo. Our manufacturing organization is energized by lean manufacturing principles, and so we’ve realized that our MAP program – our environmental impact reduction efforts – align perfectly with those existing efforts. We are working to develop advocates and leaders within the organization who are motivated to help us continually set a higher bar for our sustainability leadership. I would say that we’re at a point in the maturation of MAP when the really lasting impact of the program will become clear.

I think there are two primary challenges. The first is that we believe strongly that the sustainability function at the company should support – but not drive – our commitment to sustainability leadership. To make sustainability sustainable, if you will, it must be recognized and prioritized by the business. At Stonyfield, we’ve had that because our sustainability program has created real value for the company in the avoidance of costs associated with waste. But vigilance is key. Priorities for a company are always in flux, so it’s important in that context to ensure that the opportunities sustainability creates continue to have a profile in the management decision-making process.

Graf: The most important challenge by far is internal change management – changing people’s attitudes that their own individual actions can make a difference at their company.  They understand the impact on their personal lives, but translating to how they help a large company is more complex to them.

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Information Equals Power: Nokia’s SMS Services For Farmers

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/28/12

University of Cambridge’s Navi Radjou (top) and Jaideep Prabhu explore how companies combine in-house innovation expertise with external partner capabilities to build tools for the world’s poor.

Since 2009, the cell phone company Nokia has worked to use cell phone technology both to empower and to target the world’s rural poor.

It’s a big market: for instance, almost 70% of India’s 1.2 billion people live in rural areas, but only an estimated 23% of the rural population have cell phones (according to Deloitte, as reported in Indian Express).

Nokia’s service is called Nokia Life Tools, which delivers to farmers agricultural information via SMS. The program started in India and has been brought to China, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Navi Radjou, a fellow at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and Jaideep Prabhu, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise and director of the Centre for India & Global Business at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, write in the upcoming Spring issue of MIT Sloan Management Review that “Nokia believes that its technology-enabled solutions can help accelerate agricultural sector growth by providing farmers with the right information at the right time.”

Some of the program’s characteristics, according to Radjou and Prabhu:

• Nokia Life Tools uses SMS text-messaging technology on cell phones to provide farmers with current information on weather, advice about crop cycles, general farming tips and techniques, and market prices for crops, seeds and fertilizers.
• Information is delivered in the recipient’s native language.
• Indian farmers using Nokia Life Tools during the pilot project in early 2009 reported that they felt empowered, with the information giving them greater confidence in negotiating with intermediaries — who had previously controlled the information.
• Subscription cost to farmers is 60 rupees (about $1.20) per month.

Radjou and Prabhu write that to develop and deploy this service, “Nokia tapped into an extensive array of partners, including information service provider Thomson Reuters, agricultural domain expert Syngenta, weather expert Skymet and leading telecom carriers Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications and Tata DOCOMO.” Read more »

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Why Customers Who Love You Still Might Leave You (If You Hold Them Too Tight)

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/24/12

Research by University of Alberta’s Gerald Häubl (top) and Kyle B. Murray suggests that consumers will turn away from products and services they like if they feel restricted by choice.

Psychological reactance is a term for the “force that motivates people to act against perceived constraints on their freedom of choice.”

It’s an important concept for companies to understand because it means that even if a consumer likes your product, she may pull away from it simply because she feels hemmed in by your company.

Kyle B. Murray, associate professor of marketing at the University of Alberta, and Gerald Häubl, Canada Research Chair in Behavioral Science and Electronic Commerce and professor of marketing at the University of Alberta, explore this concept in “Why Dominant Companies Are Vulnerable” in the Winter 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

They explain psychological reactance this way: “As people learn to use a particular electronic interface associated with information search or online shopping, for example, they often become locked in and develop extremely high levels of loyalty even when otherwise equivalent competitors are available; the cost of switching outweighs the benefit of using another product. However, our research indicates that the depth of loyalty weakens when consumers feel that their freedom to choose is restricted.”

Murray and Häubl tested this phenomenon by creating a set of news websites and running “a series of experiments to examine the extent to which consumers’ preferences were affected by interface-specific experience.” Some were allowed to choose their website; others were assigned a site.

One result: 51% of the people who had initially not been given a choice switched as soon as there were allowed to, while only 23% who had free choice made a switch — even when presented with an option that was easier to use, more fun and more efficient. That’s one powerful effect.

Murray and Häubl’s article for MIT SMR provides additional details about their research and its implications for market leaders and smaller competitors.

Further details are also in their article “Freedom of Choice, Ease of Use and the Formation of Interface Preferences,” in MIT Quarterly 35, no. 4 (December 2011): 955-976.

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Skills That Will Remain in Demand In a Computer-Rich World

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/16/12

For teen girls, negotiating skills like the ones practiced in earning the Girl Scouts Cadette badge “Finding Common Ground” can open up future job prospects.

Image courtesy of Girl Scouts of the USA.

How do we win the “man-vs.-machine” battle?

The key is not to compete, but to partner — to develop new ways of combining human skills with ever-more-powerful technology to create value.

Another key, on a more personal level, is to work on skills that help you couple the best of human creativity with computer power. These kinds of jobs are where many of the best future opportunities will lie.

That’s one of the messages in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s article “Winning the Race With Ever-Smarter Machines,” in the Winter 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

“Computers are getting much better at pattern recognition, complex communication and many other skills,” they write. “That may be good for businesses — but it’s not always good for individual employees, who may not be able to adapt as quickly as technology is advancing. How can you prepare yourself — and, perhaps, your children — for careers in a fast-changing economy filled with ever-faster, ever-smarter computers?”

Go creative, they say. Computers aren’t creative — “they can’t think ‘outside the box.’ And they’re not very empathic.” (Not even Siri.)

Here are skills that Brynjolfsson and McAfee see a good future in. Read more »

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Is Your Information Diet Full of Junk Food?

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/13/12

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 »

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GE Talent Management: Aligning Hiring With Strategy

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/9/12

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.

Image courtesy of GE.

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 »

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How to Trigger CEO Interest in Social Networking

By David Kiron – 2/7/12

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

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Social Business Survey: Social Software and Employee Development

By Nina Kruschwitz – 2/7/12

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.

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Should More Stores Charge Admission?

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/6/12

Customers will pay for access if their incentive is strong enough.

Image courtesy of Flickr user srqpix.

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 »

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“Mapping the TV Genome” at Bluefin Labs and Big Data’s Big Stats

By Leslie Brokaw – 2/2/12

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 »

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