Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2016 i MIT Sloan Management Review

THE IMPACT OF digital technology on how businesses design and produce goods, interact with their supply chains, manage internal communication, and connect with customers is a rich topic that has been, and continues to be, broadly addressed in both commercial and academic business media. But as the digital revolution enters its next phase, we find ourselves confronting a new set of questions about the relationship between technology and management. These questions go to the core of the organization: • How will big data inform hiring decisions? • .What happens to marketing when marketers can map consumers’ brain patterns? • .Are new communication technologies really delivering on the promise to empower frontline workers, or are they unleashing organizational chaos? • .What role will algorithms play in creating corporate strategy? • .How…

In the coming years, both business leaders and their employees will face a number of challenges as they deal with changing digital technologies. In particular, they will need to learn three important new skills: (1) how to partner with new digital “colleagues”; (2) how to create a mindful relationship with increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies; and (3) how to develop empathy for the varying technology preferences of their human coworkers. Organizations, for their part, will need to design programs and processes to support these efforts. 1. Partnering With Digital “Colleagues” Employees across a wide spectrum of industries will be working with what are, in effect, “digital coworkers” — algorithms that help them tackle a range of tasks such as answering call-center help desk questions, making financial investment decisions, diagnosing medical…

“.It’s certainly a good and necessary thing for strategists to begin embedding their thinking into cognitive technologies, but they also have to keep their eyes on the broader world. There is a level of sense-making that only a human strategist is capable of — at least for now.” As a society, we are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that machines can make decisions and take actions on their own. We already have semi-autonomous vehicles, high-performing manufacturing robots, and automated decision making in insurance underwriting and bank credit. We have machines that can beat humans at virtually any game that can be programmed. Intelligent systems can recommend cancer cures and diabetes treatments. “Robotic process automation” can perform a wide variety of digital tasks. What we don’t have yet, however, are…

FOR MORE THAN 130 YEARS, managers have, in effect, been trying to get humans to act like robots by structuring, routinizing, and measuring work — all under the guise of organizational efficiency.1 The automation software that is being developed today2 enables a reversal of this process. We are now able to use software robots to amplify and augment distinctive human strengths, enabling large economic gains and more satisfying work. However, given the widespread skepticism and fears about how many types of employment will fare in the future, managers are in a difficult spot. Media headlines such as the “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future”3 and “A World Without Work”4 only serve to fuel the anxiety. Although the term “robot” brings to mind visions of…

“We’re operating without any headquarters, without almost any in-person corporate meetings. Even me. I’ve been digitalized in the form of a hologram for large events.” PIERRE NANTERME, chairman and CEO of the global professional services firm Accenture, has his hands full. He has set an ambitious agenda for his $31 billion enterprise to at once undertake its own digital transformation while also bringing a new set of digital capabilities to market in service of the firm’s thousands of clients. As Nanterme describes it, Accenture is its own case study in digitization. The Accenture chief recently sat down with MIT Sloan Management Review editor in chief Paul Michelman for a conversation about the challenges of digital transformation: for Nanterme’s own organization, for leaders of the organizations he counsels, and for society.…

Embracing a Digital Future As digital technology becomes increasingly integral to the way companies operate, what are executives doing to align their people, processes, and cultures to achieve success? A new report by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte notes that many companies are creating new roles with a digital focus or changing traditional roles to include a digital orientation. The new roles include digital strategists, chief digital officers, digital engagement managers, and digital managers working in key areas like finance, marketing, and supply chains. While nearly 90% of managers surveyed expect their industries to be disrupted either moderately or greatly by digital trends, only 44% said their organizations were preparing adequately. The full report, “Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future,” is online here:…

I’ve been thinking about technology and management for over a decade. In the process, I have written two books describing some of the ways that the practice of management will respond to rapid technological innovations. Looking back, I made four predictions about management and technology. First, it was clear to me that the manager’s role as a coordinator of work would come under increasing pressure. Constant improvements in robotics and machine learning, in conjunction with the automation of routine tasks, make management a more unclear practice. What is a manager, and what is it that managers do? Are we witnessing the end of management? Next, I could see an inevitable shift in which a parent-to-child way of looking at the relationship between the manager and his or her team would…

Wicked Strategies How Companies Conquer Complexity and Confound Competitors by John C. Camillus This book demonstrates how business leaders can profitably capitalize on unknowable futures. The Thoughtful Leader A Model of Integrative Leadership by Jim Fisher This book presents a framework for anyone who is motivated to lead, has the courage to act and is willing to think about their actions to become more effective. Achieving Longevity How Great Firms Prosper Through Entrepreneurial Thinking by Jim Dewald Jim Dewald outlines how businesses can overcome barriers to success and thrive for generations by adopting entrepreneurial thinking.…

Are we designing algorithms, or are algorithms designing us? How sure are you that you are directing your own behavior? Or are your actions a product of a context that has been carefully shaped by data, analysis, and code? Advances in information technology certainly create benefits for how we live. We can access more customized services and recommendations; we can outsource mundane tasks like driving, vacuuming floors, buying groceries, and picking up food. But there are potential costs as well. Concerns over the future of jobs have led to discussions about a universal basic income — in other words, a salary just for being human. Concerns over the changing nature of social interaction have covered topics ranging from how to put your phone down and have a face-to-face conversation with…

Artificial intelligence is about to transform management from an art into a combination of art and science. Not because we’ll be taking commands from science fiction’s robot overlords, but because specialized AI will allow us to apply data science to our human interactions at work in a way that earlier management theorists like Peter Drucker could only imagine. We’ve already seen the power of specialized AI in the form of IBM’s Watson, which trounced the best human players at “Jeopardy,” and Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, which recently defeated one of the world’s top Go players, Lee Sedol, four games to one. These specialized forms of AI can process and manipulate enormous quantities of data at a rate our biological brains can’t match. Therein lies the applicability to management: Within the next…

“.The biggest impact technology will have on societal challenges will be through the radical transparency it enables. New data on supply chains — and generations of workers raised to share everything — will open up everything a company does to public scrutiny.” The next five to 10 years will be a critical time for humanity, in which we can leverage new technologies to address some of our biggest challenges: a dangerously changing climate; pressure on natural resources, especially water and food; and historic levels of inequality. For decades, business leaders considered these systemic challenges as the domain of government and civil society. Companies, they thought, should focus on creating jobs and making money. But no longer. Expectations are rising fast that business should help tackle our societal challenges — and…

SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE of recent attempts at business model innovation, one could be forgiven for believing that success is essentially random. For example, conventional wisdom would suggest that Google Inc., with its Midas touch for innovation, might be more likely to succeed in its business model innovation efforts than a traditional, older, industrial company like the automaker Daimler AG. But that’s not always the case. Google+, which Google launched in 2011, has failed to gain traction as a social network, while at this writing Daimler is building a promising new venture, car2go, which has become one of the world’s leading car-sharing businesses. Are those surprising outcomes simply anomalies, or could they have been predicted? To our eyes, the landscape of failed attempts at business model innovation is crowded — and…

EXECUTIVE: Continuous improvement is the objective of all enterprises, but most larger companies remain mired in inertia. In fact, the bigger they are, the more they are likely to do the same things over and over, and the slower they are to shift with the changing tides of the larger economy. So it is fair to say that inertia is the enemy of agility. More than 50 years ago, W. Edwards Deming—the godfather of the business concept of total quality management (TQM)—introduced the practice of statistical process control, which used process data to expose the drivers of waste and quality. This provided workers with the essential feedback they needed to continuously adjust and improve. The result: Inertia was broken, and continuous improvement was made practical. Deming’s work, however, as well…

The Hard Truth About Business Model Innovation Clayton M. Christensen (Harvard Business School), Thomas Bartman (Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School), and Derek van Bever (Harvard Business School) pp. 31-40 “The landscape of failed attempts at business model innovation is crowded — and becoming more so,” observe authors Clayton M. Christensen, Thomas Bartman, and Derek van Bever. In order to change this, the authors argue, executives need to understand that business models develop through predictable stages over time — and that each business model stage is associated with certain business priorities. Executives should evaluate whether a business model innovation they are considering is consistent with the current priorities of their existing business model. This analysis matters greatly, the authors write, since it drives a whole host of…

THIS YEAR’S Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize goes to the spring 2015 MIT SMR article by Fabian J. Sting, Christoph H. Loch, and Dirk Stempfhuber titled “Accelerating Projects by Encouraging Help.” In this article, the authors examine the difficulties organizations face in project planning and execution and describe a management innovation used by Roto Frank, a German company that produces hardware for windows and doors, to augment its project control system. The company designed a help process that encourages workers to seek and provide mutual assistance. The authors found that the help process led to measurable improvements in the company’s project cycle time without changing formal incentives or other management systems. In their view, the success was largely based on two factors: the psychological safety the process afforded the workers and…

“.The great management challenge of the next few decades will be understanding how to get the best out of both humans and machines, and understanding the ins and outs of who manages whom.” Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” You don’t need to wait five years to see how technology will change the practice of management. You just need to study companies that are already living in the future that remains around the corner for everyone else. You must also reframe what you see so that you aren’t blinded by what you already know. Consider Google, Facebook, Amazon.com, or a host of more recent Silicon Valley startups. They employ tens of thousands of workers. If you think with…

Workers on the factory floor have suddenly gathered at a point along the production line. Some are scratching their heads. Others are gesticulating wildly. Most stand with their hands in their pockets. Something is wrong, and no one has thought to call management. In the near future, scenes like this one will be obsolete. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), managers will be alerted to workplace anomalies as soon they occur. Unusual behaviors will be identified in real time by cameras and image-processing software that continuously analyze and comprehend scenes across the enterprise. The hunch-based bets of the past already are giving way to far more reliable data-informed decisions. But AI will take this further. By analyzing new types of data, including real-time video and a range of other…

If you watch movies or television, you’ve likely seen Stefan Sonnenfeld’s work. It’s on display in “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens,” three “Mission Impossible” movies, four “Transformer” movies, the “Cold Case” TV series, and dozens more. In a 2007 article, Entertainment Weeklylisted him alongside creative luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep as one of the “50 Smartest People in Hollywood.” Unlike some others on the list, however, Sonnenfeld’s creativity is digitally enabled. Sonnenfeld is a “digital intermediate colorist.” He uses computers to alter the colors in movies and TV shows until they look spectacular. Without the technology, his artistry would not be possible. Nor would the profits that Sonnenfeld and the company he cofounded, Company 3, have generated for its parent companies, Ascent Media (from 2000…

In today’s economy, we are seeing companies, business models, products, and processes undergoing major transformation. Enterprises and governments are rapidly “becoming digital” as they seek to capture the cost savings, agility, and collaboration enabled by cloud, analytics, mobile, and social technologies. However, digital is not the destination. Rather, it is laying the foundation for a much more profound transformation to come. Within five years, I believe all major business decisions will be enhanced by cognitive technologies. I sensed the magnitude of the transition for the first time in 2011, when I watched IBM’s Watson system win on “Jeopardy!”At the time, I felt that I was watching history in the making: The technology known as artificial intelligence (AI) was finally moving from the lab into the world. Why are we seeing…

SCHOLAR: Certain companies continually deliver more value to the market, with greater speed and ease than their rivals, even when they lack the classic elements of strategic advantage. Absent such advantages as locked-in customers, dependent suppliers and barriers that keep competitors at bay, you would expect parity. But some companies regularly outscore the competition: Toyota, Intel, Apple and many lesser known but no less disproportionally successful ventures. The source of uneven outcomes on otherwise level playing fields? Learning, at which the very best organizations excel. They are far faster and better at discovering what to do and how to do it, as well as at refreshing the set of problems to be solved and solutions to be delivered faster than the ecosystem can render their relevance obsolete. For sure, learning…

SINCE ITS INITIAL public offering in 2010, the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors Inc. has had some substantial successes. For example, in the summer of 2016, the company boasted a market capitalization of around $30 billion, an appreciation of more than 800% over its initial public offering price in 2010. Tesla’s leading executives (including cofounder and CEO Elon Musk, chief designer Franz von Holzhausen, and cofounder and chief technical officer J.B. Straubel) deserve much of the credit for this. However, it’s also important to recognize the role played by Tesla’s strategy of creating alliances with larger, more established companies. Two key strategic alliances in particular — one with Daimler AG and the other with Toyota Motor Corp. — were crucial to Tesla’s early success. The Daimler partnership provided a much-needed…

THE MOST FREQUENT question I get asked by executives is: “What should our strategy be?”I tell most questioners — to their surprise — that they shouldn’t be asking me. And, frankly, neither should they rely on answers from anyone outside their organization. There certainly is no shortage of high-priced consultants willing to answer the big questions of strategy. And advice about the“best”strategy can also be found in any number of management books. But managers should be skeptical consumers of external strategy advice. External strategy advice can be costly — and wrong. At worst, such advice can consist of little more than generic platitudes about “leveraging core competencies” or “synergies.” Increasingly, the best sources of insight about strategy — specifically, strategy for your company — lie dormant within the company itself,…