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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…

From Susanna Kiim at ABC News Business blog…

You’ve got mail–not. Employees of tech company Atos will be banned from sending emails under the company’s new “zero email” policy.

CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam.  That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.

Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, told ABC News the goal is focused on internal emails rather than external emails with clients and partners. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months.

When asked how employees have responded to the policy, Crouch told ABC News the overall response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.” More…

Image: Haeel via Wikimedia Commons

From Scott D. Anthony and Clayton M. Christensen in Technology Review:

It has been a long time since anyone considered Xerox an innovation powerhouse. On the contrary, Xerox typically serves as a cautionary tale of opportunity lost: many obituaries of Steve Jobs described how a fateful visit by Jobs to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 inspired many of the breakthroughs that Apple built into its Macintosh computer. Back then, Xerox dominated the photocopier market and was understandably focused on improving and sustaining its high-margin products. The company’s Connecticut headquarters became the place where inventions in its Silicon Valley lab went to die. Inevitably, simpler and cheaper copiers from Canon and other rivals cut down Xerox in its core market. It is a classic story of the “innovator’s dilemma.” Xerox struggled to defend against threats at the low end of its business, failed to create growth in new markets, and found itself on the brink of irrelevance, if not extinction.

But now Xerox is turning things around. ….

Under [new CEO, Ursula] Burns, Xerox was now redefining its mission. “I kept asking people: What is it that we do?” she said in a recent speech at the Churchill Club. “The answer was always: ‘We’re a copier company, a printer company, a document company.’ ‘No, that’s not what we do,’ I said. ‘We help companies transform very complex and burdensome business processes.’”

Changing a frame of reference or the shape of an idea can bring about transformative change.

For more…

Photo by Andrew Medichini from the AP

From msnbc.com with contributions from Reuters and the Associate Press

Italian borrowing costs reached a breaking point on Wednesday after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s promise to resign failed to raise optimism about the country’s ability to deliver on long-promised economic reforms.

Italy’s president moved swiftly to reassure anxious markets, promising that Berlusconi would soon be vacating the premier’s office and unexpectedly lavishing praise on economist Mario Monti, who might lead the debt-plagued country’s next government.

The former European competition commissioner is widely considered to be a top contender to be the next Italian premier, now that Berlusconi has pledged to resign as soon as urgently demanded economic reforms are approved by Parliament.

President Giorgio Napolitano’s office announced he had named Monti, who now runs the prestigious Bocconi University in Milan, as a senator-for-life. Senators-for-life include notable figures outside of politics and have voting privileges in the Senate. The honor could reinforce Monti’s widely viewed status as a respectable figure above party politics.

To Read More…

Image by Brett Ryder

From The Economist

“AS THOUSANDS have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain—but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.”

The letter is a spoof, penned by Andy Borowitz, a comedian. Goldman Sachs and its peers would of course be failing in their duty to investors if they did not find opportunities in the current global turmoil. But they should also be thinking much harder about the risk posed to their business by the protests.

To Read More…