Category Archives: MIT Sloan

Business Insight: More great, free knowledge from MIT Sloan Management Review

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The latest edition of Business Insight is out today and with it, we opened up 21 articles from the MIT SMR archvies. SMR articles normally require registration or paid subscription, they’re yours to read for fee courtesey of Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Business Insight is MIT Sloan Management Review’s collaboration with The Wall Street Journal. The collaboration is now in it’s fourth year, so check out the past issues for articles you may have missed.

(Don’t miss In Praise of Resource Constraints, it’s one of my favorite SMR articles.)

Why Diversity Can Backfire On Company Boards

  • The Changing Face Of Corporate Boards
    Edward E. Lawler III and David L. Finegold
    Boards in the U.S. are undergoing reforms in leadership, mem- bership and performance evalu- ation. But are all the changes for the better?
  • Bridging Faultlines In Diverse Teams
    Lynda Gratton, Andreas Voigt and Tamara J. Erickson
    Project teams can fly or founder on the demographic attributes of team members and the fractures they can create. Here’s how to recognize the potential for division, and how to respond in time when team fractures do arise.
  • How to Resolve Board Disputes More Effectively
    Ralph Hasson
    Companies have a number of internal and external conflict-resolution resources at their disposal. In addition, they should consider creating the new role of board ombudsman to mediate disagreements.

Ambushed!

  • Ambush Marketing: A Threat to Corporate Sponsorship.
    Tony Meenaghan
    Is ambush marketing legal and ethical? How can a legitimate sponsor counteract the effects of an ambusher?
  • A Strategic Perspective on Sales Promotions
    Betsy D. Gelb, Demetra Andrews and Son K. Lam
    How to plan profitable sales promotions by considering the stature of your brand in the marketplace, the message being delivered, and how customers and competitors will react.
  • Viewing Brands in Multiple Dimensions
    Pierre Berthon, Morris B. Holbrook, James M. Hulbert and Leyland Pitt
    The concept of a “brand manifold” helps managers understand that a brand’s impact varies according to who is valuing it, in what context and at what time.

The IT Platform Principle: The First Shall Not Be First

Where Process-Improvement Projects Go Wrong

  • The Art of Making Change Initiatives Stick
    Michael A. Roberto and Lynne C. Levesque
    The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.
  • Process Management and the Future of Six Sigma
    Michael Hammer
    Savvy companies have learned that their Six Sigma initiatives must serve the larger endeavor of process management.
  • Designing Organizations That Are Built to Change
    Christopher G. Worley and Edward E. Lawler III
    Many executives talk about the need for greater flexibility and adaptability from their companies. But most businesses have organized themselves in ways that discourage change.

How Green Should My Tech Be? It Depends on the Tech.

  • Sustainability Through Servicizing
    Sandra Rothenberg
    Suppliers can make their business both more sustainable and more profitable by focusing on services that extend their products’ efficiency and value.
  • The Profit-Making Allure of Product Reconstruction
    John A. Pearce II
    Whether it involves recycling, refurbishing or remanufacturing, product re-construction can offer attractive consumer prices, high-quality goods and a host of profit opportunities.
  • ‘Greening’ Transportation in the Supply Chain
    Susan L. Golicic, Courtney N. Boerstler and Lisa M. Ellram
    Even corporations with clear environmental aims fail to go the distance when it comes to their supply chains. But lessons from a small group of Fortune 500 companies can give them the direction they need.

Advice for Outsourcers: Think Bigger

  • Proven Practices for Effectively Offshoring IT Work
    Joseph W. Rottman and Mary C. Lacity
    It takes a tremendous amount of detailed management on both the client and supplier sides to realize the expected benefits of offshore outsourcing of IT work. Here are 15 best practices that can accelerate learning and make the strategy eminently worthwhile.
  • The Practice of Global Product Development
    Steven D. Eppinger and Anil R. Chitkara
    Senior managers often struggle to tie operations in different countries into a cohesive, unified whole that can efficiently drive growth and innovation. New empirical frameworks may help unlock practices with which managers can deploy well-coordinated global product development strategies.
  • Taking the Measure of Outsourcing Providers
    David Feeny, Mary Lacity and Leslie P. Willcocks
    Successful outsourcing of back-office business functions requires knowing not only your company’s needs but also the 12 core capabilities that are key criteria for screening suppliers.

Let’s Make a Deal

Business Insight “Related” Articles

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Today’s Journal Report contains links to related articles from the MIT Sloan Management Review archives. Below is a handy list of the 24 articles that are currently available (sponsored by SAS).

MIT Sloan Management Review / Wall Street Journal Business Insight

Proactive Environmental Management: Avoiding the Toxic Trap
Managing Technology as a Business Strategy
Hurdle the Cross-Functional Barriers to Strategic Change
A New Strategy Framework for Coping with Turbulence
Do Customer Loyalty Programs Really Work?
Global Sustainability and the Creative Destruction of Industries
Saturn’s Supply-Chain Innovation: High Value in After-Sales Service
Linking Actions to Profits in Strategic Decision Making
The Great Leap: Driving Innovation From the Base of the Pyramid
The Era of Open Innovation
Creating Growth With Services
The Power of Innomediation
Memo to Marketing
The Roots of Sustainability
Discovering “Unk-Unks”
A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise
Four Keys to Managing Emergence
Growing Negative Services
How Management Innovation Happens
Sustainability Through Servicizing
Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution
Institutionalizing Innovation
Should You Build Strategy Like You Build Software?
Integrating Innovation Style and Knowledge Into Strategy

MIT Sloan Managment Review / World Innovation Forum 2009

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Here’s a list of articles that have appeared in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloan Business Insight or SMR blogs. I’m tracking the #wif09 Twitter hashtag to see if other articles we’ve published would be relevant to the #wif09 crowd (on-site or, like me, virtual).

Enjoy!

Clayton Christensen

How Hard Times Can Drive Innovation

An interview with Clayton M. Christensen
December 14, 2008

Sure, the economy’s bad. But it’s a good time to innovate, according to Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who focuses on innovation. He is the author or co-author of a number of books on the subject, from “The Innovator’s Dilemma” to a book due out next month on health care, “The Innovator’s Prescription.”

Good Days for Disruptors

An interview with Clayton M. Christensen
April 1, 2009 (registration required)

In the minds of many, the financial crisis has given innovation a black eye. Disruption theorist Clayton Christensen disagrees.

Finding the Right Job For Your Product

By Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Gerald Berstell and Denise Nitterhouse
April 1, 2007 (purchase: 6.50 or subscribe)

This article has three purposes: The first is to describe the benefits that executives can reap when they segment their markets by job. The second is to describe the methods that those involved in marketing and new-product development can use to identify the job-based structure of a market. And, finally, the third is to show how the details of business plans become coherent when innovators understand the job to be done.

The Great Leap: Driving Innovation From the Base of the Pyramid

By Stuart L. Hart and Clayton M. Christensen
October 15, 2002 (purchase: 6.50 or subscribe)

Billions of poor people aspire to join the world’s economy. Disruptive innovation can pave the way, helping companies combine sustainable corporate growth with social responsibility.

C.K. Prahalad

The New Frontier of Experience Innovation

By C. K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy
July 15, 2003 (purchase: 6.50 or subscribe)

The next practices of innovation must shift the focus away from products and services and onto experience environments — supported by a network of companies and consumer communities — to co-create unique value for individual customers.

Dan Ariely

The Irrationalities of Product Pricing

An interview with Dan Ariely
September 22, 2008

This Business Insight piece is a shorter version of the interview published in MIT Sloan Management Review (see below).

A Manager’s Guide to Human Irrationalities

An Interview with Dan Ariely
January 7, 2009 (registration, purchase/6.50 or subscribe)

People aren’t stupid – they just often act that way. Noted behavioral economist Dan Ariely explains what that should mean for strategists.

3 MIT-inspired landing page strategies – Post-Click Marketing Blog – ion interactive

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With the release of our book, Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers, I’ve been reflecting back on the start of the post-click marketing movement.

Our vision for post-click marketing as a new discipline — elevating the concept of landing pages into a more a holistic and strategic online marketing practice — was born in the spring of 2005. At the same time, I began a graduate program at MIT Sloan, and over the subsequent 2 years, interwove many of the latest management and marketing ideas from MIT’s best professors into our post-click marketing best practices.

Here are my top 3 “landing page secrets from MIT”, and who inspired them:

Read the full article “3 MIT-inspired landing page strategies – Post-Click Marketing Blog – ion interactive.”

Thanks to @MITSloanExecEd for the tip.

Business Insight article downloads from MIT Sloan Management Review

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MIT Sloan Management Review (where I work) jointly produces a special report in the Wall Street Journal called “Business Insight”. It’s published in print and on WSJ.com & MIT SMR’s site.

For further reading on topics raised in Business Insight articles we include links to work SMR has published in the past. As part of the partnership, we “unlock” these articles and make them freely available PDF downloads (for a period of time).

Below is a list of the 17 articles from the archives that are currently available as free downloads.

Many thanks to this edition’s sponsor, MIT Sloan Executive Education, the authors and WSJ.com.

It’s dangerous for you to be here

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Some thread-pulling on my part to weave together the thoughts whirling around in my head.

In the movie “My Blue Heaven,” Steve Martin’s character (Vinnie) says to Shaldeen (Carol Kane):

“You know, it’s dangerous for you to be here in the frozen food section.”

Shaldeen: Why is that?

Vinnie: Because you could melt all this stuff.

Today at TED, there’s been a lot of chatter today about Ray Anderson’s talk which was summarized (and prominently “Re-tweeted”) by Tim O’Reilly: “The new civilization = more happiness with less stuff.” (I’m not at TED and I haven’t seen the talk, so this whole post could be grabbing at straws imitating thread-pulling)

More with less.

John Sterman, head of MIT Sloan’s System Dynamics Group, explores how to get people to think for real on sustainability saying: “As long as everybody in the world wants more, there’s no solution.”

Sterman’s take on “more with less” is a systems outlook—Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics has somethings to say about this too. He speaks in this interview with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Michael Hopkins about “opportunities to begin to operate at the no-growth….”

In an excerpt from Art Klein’s book “Age of Heritics,” Dana Meadows, Sterman’s Mentor and Forrester’s student, concludes with this: “What we are growing for? For whom? For how long? And at what cost?” — in 1971!

So my question is, how do we responsibly encourage global development and raise the living standard for billions of people? How do we prevent the meltdown(s)?

What is the right balance of “more with less?” What aisle should we be in?

TED 2009 & MIT Sloan Management Review

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Jimmy Guterman, Executive Editor of MIT Sloan Management Review is covering TED 2009 for our magazine and on his blog, “Jewels and Binoculars.”

Eluding the snows of New England, Jimmy posted this first dispatch from TED, saying: “the best new ideas helps make good managers better.”

Keep an eye out this week on sloanreview.mit.edu, the Twitter hashtags #ted or #ted09 and TED.com this week and to find out about how new ideas like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis’s, “Singularity University,” can could change your future.