Author Archive for audreyl

Business-School Research: Failure to Launch

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From The Economist

It can be surprisingly hard to tell when an organisation has failed. Businesses have products that never quite got off the ground, investments with ugly returns and once-promising managers languishing ineffectively for years. But when outside observers, including well-intentioned researchers, come calling, companies are not in a hurry to talk about it.

Peter Madsen, of Brigham Young University in Utah, and Vinit Desai, of the University of Colorado at Denver, ran into this problem while trying to investigate how organisations learn from both successful and failed ventures, and how that knowledge is retained over time. Their solution was to examine firms, private and public, that launch rockets designed to place satellites into orbit around the Earth. As the authors explain in a recently-published paper in the Academy of Management Journal, when a satellite fails it is easily identifiable (either the rocket makes into space, or it doesn’t); costly; and “often very loud”.

Moreover, the pair were able to take a large sample: all orbital launch attempts between October 1957 (the deployment of the first Sputnik) and March 2004. They wanted to see how, for any given company, its successes or failures, and those of its rivals, influenced its ability to get subsequent rockets into space. The authors also wanted to measure whether success depended on how long had passed since the previous launch. This, they hoped, would measure of whether the company was retaining the lessons that needed to be learned.

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A Post-Crisis Case Study: The New Dean of Harvard Business School Promises “Radical Innovation”

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From The Economist

Henry Kissinger, who started his career in the killing fields of Harvard before moving to Washington, DC, is said to have quipped that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Schumpeter has no idea whether the contest to succeed Jay Light as dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) was vicious. But he is sure that the stakes were not small.

HBS is hugely influential. The school is a training ground for America’s business elite: a striking number of the top office holders of Fortune 500 companies, including the heads of General Electric and Boeing, sharpened their skills and elbows there. The school is also the apex of the vast global industry devoted to teaching business. It sits on an endowment of $2.1 billion and employs some terrific thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. It developed the “case method”—using case studies to teach students about real-world business problems. It claims to be the source of four-fifths of the case-study materials used in the world’s leading business schools.

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Us Now

From Us Now

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The United Arab Emirates and BlackBerry? Cherchez la server

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From The Economist

The United Arab Emirates announced on August 1st that it had failed to reach an agreement on data traffic with Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and would suspend messenger, e-mail and web-browsing services on BlackBerrys from October 11th. There are lots of smart-phones in the world that handle e-mail and web browsing; why pick on BlackBerry? From the UAE’s telecoms regulator:

BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization. BlackBerry data services are currently the only data services operating in the UAE where this is the case.

Whenever you read about a dispute between a web-based service and a country, you need to ask yourself only one question: where is the server located? The conflict between Google and China came down to the conditions under which Google could locate servers in China. Closer servers offer a faster load-time, but servers on the Chinese mainland fall under Chinese law. WikiLeaks, as well, takes advantage of server law by routing all links through servers in countries with strong protections for whistleblowers and journalists.

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In Search of Serendipity

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From The Economist

Every year, hordes of free spirits gather in the Nevada desert to “breathe art”, feel at one with the cosmos and sample the delights of Bianca’s Smut Shack. The Burning Man festival is radically anti-capitalist, with a strict ban on commerce and an emphasis on “self-reliance”. In short, it is not the sort of place you would associate with corporate schmoozing.

But you would be wrong, argue John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Their new book, “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion”, celebrates unconventional networkers such as Yossi Vardi, the 68-year-old “grandfather” of Israeli venture capital. Mr Vardi attends or hosts some 40 pow-wows a year, including Burning Man. (It’s about art, sex and drugs, he muses, but “I was only involved in art.”) According to “The Power of Pull”, Mr Vardi is a “super-node”, one of the best-connected people in the high-tech industry. More than that, he is a role model: he excels in “managing serendipity”. His avid conference-going, for example, is not just for fun. By mingling with so many strangers, he finds that he often bumps into people who give him valuable information.

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Profiting From Non-Profits

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From The Economist

The members of the Village People, a pop group founded in the 1970s, are dismayed that the organisation that inspired their greatest hit is to change its name after 166 years. The American branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, known to arm-waving disco mavens as the YMCA, announced on July 12th that it would become plain “The Y”. This is part of what the outfit describes as a “major brand revitalisation” intended to make it seem warmer and more welcoming. It may turn out to be a misguided rebranding exercise on a par with Coca-Cola’s launch of New Coke and British Airways dropping the Union Jack from the tails of its aircraft.

Non-profit organisations such as the one formerly known as the YMCA are commonly advised to become more like for-profit businesses. Management experts and consultants view them as horribly inefficient due to the absence of the concentrating power of the profit motive. The negative reaction to the Y’s rebranding suggests that non-profit outfits are not all that good at emulating business even when they try. There has been barely any reciprocal pressure on for-profit firms to learn from the non-profits. Yet this is what Nancy Lublin, one of America’s most successful non-profit leaders, proposes in a new book, “Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business.”

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Soul Searching, not Soul Stirring

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From Matthew Reiez, Times Higher Education

Mission statements form a major part of how many institutions present themselves to the world - and, at least in theory, how they see themselves.

Although the precise terms differ, it is now common for universities to make the effort to define their basic purpose (mission), major longer-term aspirations (vision) and underlying values. There is fun to be had in comparing the self-descriptions that appear in their corporate advertising (see quiz, page 40). Yet mission statements present a far more considered picture, often based on extensive consultation and debate. What is the point of them, and can they justify their cost, especially at times of financial constraint?

Universities are willing to invest considerable amounts of money in getting their mission statements right, as the example of the University of Nottingham indicates (see box, below). Certainly, words that genuinely inspire people are worth paying for. The Conservative Party must have handed Saatchi & Saatchi a small fortune for the phrase “Labour isn’t working”, but it is generally agreed to have played a major role in helping the Tories win the 1979 election. Given the sums universities must spend on developing declarations of their missions, one would hope that the results read like the products of top-class copywriters. So are they genuinely inspirational, banal or positively leaden?

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Things Fall Apart

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From Omar Malik, Times Higher Education

Philosophers have long pondered the big question: why is life such a bugger? Lesser orders have similarly wondered why life is just one damn thing after another. Why do things always go wrong? The answer is short and simple: the laws of nature.

Some like to believe that we are the highest form of life, blessed with free will. Maybe. But as far as nature is concerned, we are just another of her countless products and, like the rest of them, serve sentence under her laws.

Francis Bacon said that we cannot command nature except by obeying her; sadly, he omitted to say that to obey her, we must first understand her. In macro terms that is surprisingly easy: all we have to do is identify her laws. The micro task of combating them is much more difficult, well beyond the scope of libraries of regulations, however vast.

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Voices of Experience

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From Times Higher Education,

In a chilly economic climate, business schools’ ability to deliver research with real-world relevance is essential. Tracey Hudson asks whether they can find the right academics to deliver those goals

“Because of this shortage, many business schools are adopting a model of education that de-emphasises the role of research professors and substitutes others who are not primarily researcher-teachers. Until PhD programmes increase in number and output, this worldwide trend will continue,” he says.

One of the biggest challenges faced by higher education institutions around the globe is the continuing shortage not of academics, but of the right kind of academics. And nowhere is the challenge greater than in one of the fastest-growing areas of the academic world - the international business school community.

According to Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, “there is a continuing shortage of PhD-trained professors, which is causing cost escalation for the very best”.

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The Eleventh International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organizations

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Please continue to check the Management Newsletter for news and information about the 2011 Management Conference. We will announce the dates and location soon.

Management Conference–Share Your Photos

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To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Management Conference in Montreal, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!

Join our Management Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.

For information on sharing photos with Flickr, please read more here.

Drucker in the Dug-Out: A Japanese Book about Peter Drucker and Baseball is an Unlikely Hit

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From The Economist

Zoff, a maker of cheap, chic glasses in Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku district, is hardly a place you would expect to find dedicated followers of management theory. But one day its boss, 38-year-old Takeshi Ueno, came into a staff meeting waving a book about baseball with the picture of a gamine schoolgirl on the cover. It had the clunky title: “What if the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team read Drucker’s ‘Management’”. Mr Ueno told his staff to read it. Satoko Osanai, his sales manager, did.

Like many young businesswomen across Japan this year, Ms Osanai became an instant fan—not of baseball, but of the late management guru, Peter Drucker. After reading the book, she says, she started treating colleagues and customers differently. As news of the novel travelled from office to café to home, its sales topped 1m. According to the publisher, the cutesy manga cover was aimed more at attracting salarymen than women. Yet almost half of the buyers have been female. What’s more, sales for Drucker’s original works, such as “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices”, published in 1973, have soared. Some 300,000 copies of the book have sold in the past six months, compared with 100,000 copies in the previous 26 years.

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We’re all Global Now

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From The Economist

The internationalisation of business education in recent years has given prospective students a wider choice of where to take an MBA than ever before. As a consequence it seems that business schools now spend almost as much time promoting their cultural, social and sporting advantages as they do the quality of their teaching or position in the rankings. So are students really free to select a location based on such self-indulgences as good weather, good food and handy ski slopes? Or can place have a deeper significance for the potential entrepreneur or corporate leader?

When INSEAD had just the one campus, in Fontainebleau, its answer to that question would have been a clear no. Back in those days its location in France was deemed to be an irrelevance to what was marketed as a truly international school. But its decision in 2000 to open a second campus in Singapore, specifically designed to target Asia and the Pacific Rim proves that even INSEAD called into question such lofty ideas.

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Growth on the Cheap: The OECD Tells Governments how to Unleash Business’s Creative Potential

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From The Economist

Windy talk about innovation is mind-numbingly abundant. Unusually, however, the grandees taking part in a conference in Paris this week organized by the OECD received some pointed advice. The rich-country think-tank has unveiled a thoughtful new report on how governments can do better at spurring and measuring innovation.

The grandees were also unusually attentive. Many governments are facing not only slow economic growth but also big deficits and heavy debts. At the same time, problems such as global warming and rising prices for natural resources demand their attention. Innovation, the OECD argues, offers a way out. It is already the chief engine of productivity in the rich world, and thus holds out the tantalising prospect of sustaining economic growth on the cheap. It could also provide affordable fixes to the thorniest global problems, argues John Kao, the founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, which advocates the use of prizes and contests to encourage breakthroughs on social ills.

Nazhat Jafri to speak at Management Conference in Montreal

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Nuzhat Jafri became the first executive director of the Office of the Fairness Commissioner in September 2007.

She has wide leadership experience in both public and private sectors. She directed diversity initiatives at Scotiabank and previously at the Bank of Montreal, where she delivered awardwinning leading-edge programs. In the Ontario government, Ms. Jafri developed a cultural policy framework at the Ministry of Culture. She oversaw the passage of amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act and the development and implementation of key regulations. Earlier, she was a director at the former Employment Equity Commission. Most recently, Ms. Jafri was the manager of Global Experience Ontario, the information and referral centre for internationally trained persons at the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.

The Office of the Fairness Commissioner is an independent agency of the government of Ontario. Its goal is to make sure that people are treated fairly when they apply to become licensed professionals in one of Ontario’s regulated professions, no matter where they were trained. This goal is widely supported in Ontario, and reflects the principles and core values of its people. www.fairnesscommissioner.ca

Outside Directors and Children First: Do Outside Directors Leave Just as Companies Need Them Most?

From The Economist201018wbp503

Ruth Simmons  joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown University in Rhode Island. For the rest of the decade she apparently juggled both roles (as well as several other directorships) without attracting much criticism. But by the end of 2009 Ms Simmons was under fire from students and alumni for having sat on Goldman’s compensation committee; how could she have let those enormous bonus payouts pass unremarked? By February Ms Simmons had left the board. The position was just taking up too much time, she said.

Ms Simmons’s decision to leave makes perfect sense, according to research conducted by Rüdiger Fahlenbrach at the École Polytechnique Féderale in Lausanne, Angie Low of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and René Stulz of The Ohio State University. The three are co-authors of a new working paper suggesting that when trouble looms for a firm, outside directors have more incentives to quit than to stay.

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Redesigned Newsletter: Launched Today

Today the Management Newsletter will be re-launched – marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Management Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.

It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Management Community.

If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to theorganisation.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.

If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@ theorganisation.com.

Tenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organizations

The 2010 Management Conference will be held at HEC Montreal in Montreal Canada from 26-28 July.

Plenary Speakers

  • Nuzhat Jafri, Executive Director, Office of the Fairness Commissioner
  • Mildred Schwartz, Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
  • Emma Stenstrom, Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Frank Habermann, Managing Director, Becota, The Berlin Consulting & Management Association, Berlin, Germany
  • Alain Senteni, Dean, School of e-Education,  Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Management Conference, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/register/.

Themes
http://theorganisation.com/ideas/themes/

Conference Dinner & Tours

http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/

Accommodation
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/accommodation/

The Guru of the Bottom of the Pyramid

From The Economist201017wbd000

Oimbatore Krisnarao Prahalad, universally known as C.K., was the most creative management thinker of his generation. He revolutionised thinking on two big subjects, business strategy and economic development, and made a significant contribution to a third, innovation. His admirers were legion, including bosses of some of the world’s biggest companies, heads of NGOs and founders of scrappy start-ups.

Mr Prahalad burst onto the management scene with two path-breaking articles in the Harvard Business Review, “Strategic Intent” (1989) and “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (1990), and a bestselling book, “Competing for the Future” (1996), all co-written with his former pupil, Gary Hamel. “Core competence” remains one of the most frequently reprinted articles ever published by Harvard Business Review.

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The Economist Manifesto

From Amartya Sen, NewStateman20100421_201016smith_w

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith’s first book, was published in early 1759. Smith, then a young professor at the University of Glasgow, had some understandable anxiety about the public reception of the book, which was based on his quite progressive lectures. On 12 April, Smith heard from his friend David Hume in London about how the book was doing. If Smith was, Hume told him, prepared for “the worst”, then he must now be given “the melancholy news” that unfortunately “the public seem disposed to applaud [your book] extremely”. “It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises.” This light-hearted intimation of the early success of Smith’s first book was followed by serious critical acclaim for what is one of the truly outstanding books in the intellectual history of the world.

After its immediate success, Moral Sentiments went into something of an eclipse from the beginning of the 19th century, and Smith was increasingly seen almost exclusively as the author of his second book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which, published in 1776, transformed the subject of economics. The neglect of Moral Sentiments, which lasted through the 19th and 20th centuries, has had two rather unfortunate effects.

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The Imitation Economy: Innovation is Overrated. It’s Time to Appreciate the Power of the Copycat.

From Drake Bennett, Boston.com

Two weeks after it went on sale, the iPad is still the toast of the tech world, with its image gracing magazine covers, market analysts speculating about whether it will transform the worlds of publishing and entertainment, and consumers buying the gadget at a healthy clip. This at a cost of at least $500 each, at a time when Americans are still cautious about large nonessential purchases, and for a device that remains difficult to succinctly describe, much less figure out the purpose of.

It’s early yet, but it looks like another success for a company that, more than any other consumer brand, is synonymous with the new. Apple has forged a unique and lucrative reputation for creating irresistible, intuitive objects of techno-desire, shaping along the way how we work, communicate, and procrastinate, and the look and feel of the electronic gadgetry that increasingly fills our lives.

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Risk: The Story of America’s Greatest Idea

From John Dickerson, Slate

Risk has taken a beating recently, thanks to the financial crisis. Risk is supposed to be about choice and consequence. You take a chance and you win or you lose. But then banks and insurance companies found ways to pervert this. They devised ever more esoteric ways to pass risk on to others, so there was, in fact, no risk to them at all. In this distortion, insurance techniques, created to limit risk, exposed millions to it. The laws of probability, originally devised to solve a moral dilemma—how to equitably distribute winnings in a game of chance—wound up inequitably distributing losses to people who didn’t even know they were at the table. The architects of these gambles left their jobs with enormous bonuses, and companies that helped cripple the financial system were repaid by the government bailout. They took a chance, and lost—but they still won.

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Bursting a Balloon:Using the Myth of Talent as a Smokescreen for Corporate Plunder

From David Bolchover, The Economist

In these times, the overpaid fat-cat in the corner office makes a barn door of a target. Particularly in the financial services sector, where even at those companies bailed out by the taxpayer, senior executives have been quick to return to obscene bonuses, often coupled with poor performance. To add insult, such behaviour is justified by the alleged need to “let the markets decide” or to ensure that talent is “justly rewarded”.201016wbp505_290

Typically, sanctimoniousness at the top comes with a veiled threat to pack up and head abroad if the government even thinks about reining them in. Understandable, then, that many feel fury at such a sense of entitlement and enrichment, and that sensible discussion tends to evaporate in a flare of mass indignation.

Understandable but ultimately unsustainable. Such populist anger risks taking down innocent entrepreneurs and financial firms as the blunt instrument of regulation is wielded. More reasoned debate about the issue of excessive executive pay is needed. This is David Bolchover’s ambition in his highly readable and punchy polemic.

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Indecision-Making

From Virginia Postrel, The New York Times

Sheena Iyengar is the psychologist responsible for the famous jam experiment. You may have heard about it: At a luxury food store in Menlo Park, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes, there were six different flavors to choose from. At other times, there were 24. (In both cases, popular flavors like strawberry were left out.) Shoppers were more likely to stop by the table with more flavors. But after the taste test, those who chose from the smaller number were 10 times more likely to actually buy jam: 30 percent versus 3 percent. Having too many options, it seems, made it harder to settle on a single selection.postrel-t_ca0-articlelarge

Wherever she goes, people tell Iyengar about her own experiment. The head of Fidelity Research explained it to her, as did a McKinsey & Company executive and a random woman sitting next to her on a plane. A colleague told her he had heard Rush Limbaugh denounce it on the radio. That rant was probably a reaction to Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2004), who often cites the jam study in antimarket polemics lamenting the abundance of consumer choice. In Schwartz’s ideal world, stores wouldn’t offer such ridiculous, brain-­taxing plenitude. Who needs two dozen types of jam?

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Belgians in Beijing Reginald Hubbard, an MBA Student at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, Learns the Theory of Doing Business in China

From The Economist

Last Friday morning my MBA class was sitting in a classroom at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School in Belgium taking an exam in operations management. A couple of days later we were in China, visiting a pork-processing plant, a dairy and a jelly producer, seeing whether all of the theory we had learned manifests itself in the real-life business of each food producer. 201016wbp504

Before coming to China, we were divided up to research a specific business situation in China, about which we could advise potential clients. Cases ranged from seeking ways to introduce a cutting-edge technology for soil pollution to creating incentive structures for the local workforce. Each project aimed to bring together different aspects of personnel, strategic and cultural management that business leaders must be aware of when seeking to do business across cultures.

Our instruction began with an introduction to Confucian ideals which, we learned, form the foundation of Chinese culture and are in many ways inseparable from the way the Chinese do business. We were taught about guanxi too: the importance of building and maintaining relationships with family, friends and colleagues. Also on the agenda was the significance of group harmony, collectivism and courtesy. I am an American attending an MBA programme in western Europe. Both of these cultures tend to be more individualistic and direct than in China. When doing business in here, we learned, efforts must be made to foster relationships and to avoid aggression in advancing an agenda. Failure to appreciate the cultural foundation of Chinese business can lead to wasted time and capital.

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The Sounds of Silence: Consumers Cue on Corporations’ Crisis Communications

Kellogg Insight

“We are unable to comment on this tragic accident until all the facts are known,” read a statement Toyota issued in response to the accident that killed off-duty California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor. The crash of Saylor’s dealer-loaned Lexus would touch off a series of investigations and product recalls that would undermine the storied Japanese automaker’s reputation for safety and quality.

“No comment” is a typical response for a company in Toyota’s position. But where executives see “no comment” as a safe and middle-of-the-road statement, the public hears a company trying to deny guilt and shirk responsibility. In fact, there may be little discernable difference in public reaction between “no comment” and a defensive approach to a crisis, according to new research by Adam Galinsky, professor of management and organizations, and Daniel Diermeier, professor of managerial economics and decision sciences, both at the Kellogg School of Management. Galinsky and Diermeier found that companies are perceived positively when they respond to crises in engaged and empathetic ways. Companies that offer “no comment” or react defensively not only may be harming their brand, they could be driving consumers away from their products in ways they never imagined.

“There can be a spillover from one side to another—a different part of the business. That means, for example, that a crisis that may be a sexual harassment case may have consequences for how a corporate logo is evaluated,” Diermeier says. In their experiments, Galinsky, Diermeier, and their colleagues also noticed that people rate their experiences with a product—bottled water in one case—lower and consume less of it when a company involved in a crisis does not respond in an engaging and empathetic way.

To Read More…

Accelerating into Trouble: The Company’s Problems Sharply Illustrate the Failings of Japanese Corporate Governance

From The Economist

It is201007ldp003 hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.

But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.

To Read More…

News from the Schools, January 2010: Rolling News from the Business Campuses

From The Economist

London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.images

• Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.

• No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.

To Read More….

The Silence of Mammon: Business People Should Stand up for Themselves

From The Economist

Henry Hazlitt, one of the great popularisers of free-market thinking, once said that good ideas have to be relearned in every generation. This is certainly true of good ideas about business. A generation ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did an excellent job of making the case in favour of business. Today it looks as though the case needs to be made all over again.d5109wb0

It is hardly surprising that business has fallen from grace in recent years. The credit crunch almost plunged the world into depression. The new century began with the implosion of Enron and other prominent firms. Some bosses pay themselves like princes while preaching austerity to their workers. Business titans who once graced the covers of magazines have been hauled before congressional committees or carted off to prison.

Business people have been at pains to point out that it is unfair to judge all of their kind by the misdeeds of a few. The credit crunch was the handiwork of bankers (who lent too much money) and policymakers (who fooled themselves into thinking that they had abolished boom and bust). Corporate criminals like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Denis Kozlowski were imprisoned for their crimes. Avaricious bosses like Angelo Mozilo, who pocketed more than $550m during his inglorious reign at Countrywide, are exceptions. The average American boss is actually paid less today than he was in 2000.

To Read More…

The Incomparable Economist

From Paul Krugman, Vox.

There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas.

With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

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The Rise of the Hybrid Company

From The Economist

Sometimes confusion can be as instructive as precision. The travails of Dubai Inc have left commentators struggling for the right phrase to describe Dubai World and its various siblings. They have come up with various formulations—state-controlled, state-supported, quasi-state, parastatal—without ever quite capturing what they are talking about. And Dubai is not the only place that is challenging the business vocabulary in this way.company

Wherever you look you can see the proliferation of hybrid organisations that blur the line between the public and private sector. These are neither old-fashioned nationalised companies, designed to manage chunks of the economy, nor classic private-sector firms that sink or swim according to their own strength. Instead they are confusing entities that seem to flit between one world and another to suit their own purposes.

To Read More…

Is AOL Trading One Obsolete Business Model for Another?

From, Matt Pressman Vanity Fair.

AOL went from pioneering powerhouse to laughed-at laggard when changing technologies made their business model of charging people for e-mail accounts and Internet access obsolete. So now they are remaking the company with an entirely different strategy: selling ads against original content produced by an army of well-paid professional journalists. Unfortunately, that’s the same business model that has driven America’s newspapers to the brink of ruin.

When most people think of AOL, they think of it as the e-mail provider for people who aren’t with it enough to switch to a free service such as Gmail. But while the bulk of AOL’s revenue still comes from its old-school subscribers, the company’s future is in the content business (with a sideline in social networking). In advance of its long-awaited split from Time Warner, which will occur next month, AOL has been on a hiring-and-acquisition spree. It now owns upward of 75 niche blogs and news sites, including DailyFinance.com, Engadget.com, and Fanhouse.com, staffed in large part by reporters who used to work in print. C.E.O. Tim Armstrong said at a conference last month that AOL employs more than 3,000 journalists.

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