When four friends met in business school and discovered they shared a common problem — an aversion to paying hundreds of dollars for eyeglasses — they realized there was a business opportunity in it. The group founded Warby Parker, an innovative startup that aims to revolutionize how people buy eyeglasses. Warby sells directly to the public, via their website, allowing them to bypass retailers and sell their frames and lenses for $95.

Check out our interview with Dave Gilboa, Warby Parker’s co-founder and co-CEO and learn how the company is disrupting the eyewear industry, similar to the way Netflix crashed the video rental market. Dave also talks about some of the company’s early growing pains, including having to put 20,000 customers on a waiting list and why Google shut down his company’s email servers.  View video…

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

…

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple’s manufacturing decisions exemplify the altered circumstances of high-technology commodity production in the contemporary world. The article describes the situation, but not the solution for regions and nations wishing to insure stable and remunerative work for their people. Note especially the conditions of daily life for product assembly workers sketched out in the article. The industrial revolution appears to be repeating itself yet again with similarities of both triumph and tragedy.

To read the article…

The latest issue of  The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management includes:

• Sailing: Organizational Change: Forms and Hibrydisms of Post-bureaucratic Organizations by Pierfranco Malizia.
• Influencing Skills for Records Managers: An Exploration of the Opportunity to Engage with Business by Rod Dilnutt.
• Transformational Leadership, Perceived Organizational Support, and Employee Engagement as Predictors of Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment by Prabhakar Venugopal Gantasala and Ram Padmakumar.
• A 21st Century Vision for a Globally Sustainable Organization by Catherine Cook, Diane Deaton, Frank DeCaro and Nicole DeCaro.
• The One Hundred Fifty Years of Change in the Music Recording Industry: An Historical and Social Network Analysis by Peter Spang Goodrich, Stan Renard and Nancy Rossiter.
• The Systematic Deployment of a Leadership Inventory to an Employee Population by Rick Muller and Margo Karsten.

Organizational Culture, Learning, and Knowledge Management 

We live in an increasingly hyper-competitive global marketplace, where firms are fighting to stay lean and flexible in an effort to satisfy increasingly diverse and specialized consumer demand around the world. Additionally, with the shifting global economy in recent decades and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organizations, how do organizations effectively foster a continuous learning and innovation culture? What can organizational leaders do to promote ongoing organizational learning that will have a measurable impact on increased firm effectiveness and employee productivity? How can organizations more successfully manage organizational knowledge to achieve strategic organizational goals and add value to all organizational stakeholders? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today.

This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to organizational culture, learning, and knowledge management and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to management academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professionals of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to create organizational systems and culture to promote ongoing organizational learning and innovation to drive firm effectiveness in an increasingly competitive global economy.

From J.L.H.D., The Economist…

Assuming you have largely recovered from holiday celebrating, you are now free to contemplate the coming of 2012 by mulling over this newspaper’s predictions. Granted, it does not make for the happiest of reading. “The world won’t end in 2012,” writes our editor. “But at times it will feel as if it is about to.” The fate of the euro is still in doubt; America, France, Russia, and China all face potential changes at the top; business confidence is down; and it may be best not to think too much about climate change, given the potential for collective inaction. As the song goes, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

Perhaps fortunately, change comes more slowly to academia, and so the business-school world as a whole should see less upheaval. Applications will probably remain down, as potential students see less hope of studying out the recession and worry more about the loans required to take an MBA. Executive-education budgets will also suffer, with only the occasional CEO able to indulge in a high-ticket course. Expect a few curriculum reworkings along the lines of Harvard’s, and, in the wake of the Occupy movement, the incorporation of income inequality and taxation into discussions of corporate social responsibility. On a lighter note, the 2012 Olympics in London will provide the excuse—er, background—for many a discussion of the business of sport. More…

Volume 11, Issue 1 contains:

• Fashioning the Fur Industry in Montreal: Forging a New Production Paradigm or Recasting the Old? by Norma Rantisi.
• Differentiating the Effects of Culture from Societal and Economic Factors in International Collaborations between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Businesses by Tina Barnes.
• The Classroom Performance System: Best Teaching Strategy in College-Level Anatomy and Physiology Classes by Mohamad Hani Termos.
• Importance of Location in Successful Retailing by Ravindra P. Saxena and Balqees Al Hashemi.
• Knowledge Transfer Partnership: A Case Study from the Building Industry by Paul Crowther.
• Critical Analysis of Teachers’ Practice in Order to Improve Student Learning Outcomes: Quality Teaching Model by Janette Long.

• Sailing: Organizational Change: Forms and Hibrydisms of Post-bureaucratic Organizations by Pierfranco Malizia.
• Influencing Skills for Records Managers: An Exploration of the Opportunity to Engage with Business by Rod Dilnutt.
• Transformational Leadership, Perceived Organizational Support, and Employee Engagement as Predictors of Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment by Prabhakar Venugopal Gantasala and Ram Padmakumar.
• A 21st Century Vision for a Globally Sustainable Organization by Catherine Cook, Diane Deaton, Frank DeCaro and Nicole DeCaro.
• The One Hundred Fifty Years of Change in the Music Recording Industry: An Historical and Social Network Analysis by Peter Spang Goodrich, Stan Renard and Nancy Rossiter.
• The Systematic Deployment of a Leadership Inventory to an Employee Population by Rick Muller and Margo Karsten.

Creative Leadership expert Anthony Lake unravels the mystery of the creative employee by using simple yet elegant cases in business and the arts to frame this practical guide for Leading the Creative Mind. Born from his executive work with arts organizations, his consulting, and his leadership research, Lake creates a series of exercises designed to strengthen skills for leading creative individuals. The focus is on four key pillars for success:

1. Reflecting and Engaging Sensitively with Creative People
2. Designing Effective Creativity Teams
3. Developing and Addressing Real Challenges
4. Fixing Ailing Work Groups

This is a guide for keeping inspired, balancing innovation with effective communication, and collaborating from a position of leadership.

Users’ demands that they be allowed to use technologies of their own choosing isn’t a fad that will fade. CIOs can’t squelch these demands—nor should they. The consumerization of IT is a symptom of a shift in workplace expectations that has been brewing for years and is now reaching an inflection point.

From the time of the Hollerith’s punched cards, information technology has been changing the way business is done. It has enabled larger-sized enterprises, more agile enterprises, and has also made possible stunning and catastrophic mistakes. The introduction of personal computers, as this report emphasizes, was a particularly disruptive event. Contemporary mobile computing in tandem with cloud services and social network systems promises to have at least as large an impact as the placement of a PC on every desk in the office.

To download the report...

(Credit: Reuters)

From The Economist…

Young mums shopping in the Copley Mall in downtown Boston last month found themselves being questioned about their use of soap by students from Harvard Business School. The students were not doing odd jobs to earn beer money. They were preparing to help a firm in Brazil launch an antibacterial cleanser.

Fieldwork—ie, going out and talking to people—is a big change for HBS. Its students used to sit in a classroom and discuss case studies written by professors. Now they may also work in a developing country and launch a start-up. “Learning by doing” will become the norm, if a radical overhaul of the MBA curriculum succeeds.

The 900 students arriving in Boston this summer for their two-year course were told they would be guinea pigs. The new practical addition to HBS’s curriculum is known as “FIELD” (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development). Not all the staff and students are overjoyed to be experimented on. But the man responsible, Nitin Nohria, who became dean of HBS in July 2010, says that “if it works, the FIELD method could become an equal partner to the case method.” More…

(Alamy)

From Andrew Pollen, a first-year MBA student at ESADE in Barcelona, at The Economist…

A couple of weeks ago, my economics professor introduced a new case study for us to mull over. It was dense and packed with historical background. We were split into groups and most of the class had only just finished reading it when we reconvened to wrap up the session. The professor explained some fine points for the case and suggested which tactics we should employ. Then he said he was very disappointed in us.

“I wanted you to work on the case in groups,” he said, “and instead you read the case individually. If you had worked together, I think you would have noticed that the first 10 pages of the case were absolute nonsense that you do not need to answer the questions.”

It was a powerful pedagogic lesson in using teamwork to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. I think ESADE emphasises the teaching ability of its faculty because it has never been a top research institution; faculty come from industry or consulting rather than academia. They view teaching as their motivation rather than an unpleasant side effect to their appointment. On the first day of my statistics class, the professor thanked the students and said, “Your being here allows me to do something that I love.” I felt that sentiment a lot less often during my time at a top American business school. More…