Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2018 från MIT Sloan Management Review

At MIT SMR, we have published — and will continue to publish — volumes of content extolling the importance of digital transformation, with much of it focusing on the good that new technologies stand to deliver to both business and broader society. I, myself, am a techno-optimist. But there are also times when we need to step back, take stock, and seize just a bit more control over how our world is evolving. Lately, many of us have been suffering a period of particular disquiet. Even by recent standards, the wave of technological and political disorder in 2018 has been unnerving, as disruptions in one arena feed turmoil in others. How we choose to live our own lives is at stake as well. We have become public citizens almost by…

Our research draws on more than 200 semistructured interviews we conducted with R&D and innovation executives from more than 60 foreign companies operating in China. The representatives were largely from European and U.S. companies (in almost equal numbers), but they also included executives from Japanese and Canadian companies. The companies came from a wide range of industries, including energy, materials, capital goods, transportation, automobiles, machine tools, consumer durables, retail, food and beverage, health care, finance, software, and telecommunications. Our interviews were conducted primarily in Beijing and Shanghai. In our interviews, we explored how rising Chinese innovation capabilities are posing new challenges to foreign R&D management. We discovered five new challenges to managing R&D in China.…

Over the past 15 years, we have studied how companies create value from alliances, ecosystems, and innovation. We have looked at what factors drive innovation and performance in a variety of industries — including investment banking, high fashion, renewable energy, information technology, automobile manufacturing, and many others. We’ve spent the past three years in particular examining how companies operating within clearly defined industries — such as finance, telecommunications, retail, consumer electronics, or automobile manufacturing — bridge the divide between their current states and their radical-innovation futures. In this article, we draw on the foundational principles from this research, which involved more than 50 interviews with leaders of Samsung, Cisco, Lowe’s, Mastercard, and Galeries Lafayette, as well as partner companies including Google, Singularity, DHL, Airbus, Caterpillar, and Nike. We also used…

ONE OF THE MOST REVEALING questions leaders can ask themselves is “Whom do I serve?” Their answers to that question say more about their style of leadership and field of influence than their personality traits or emotional intelligence does. And if they make that choice thoughtfully, it snaps their efforts into focus, helping them put together better teams, avoid disasters, and create lasting impact within the organization and beyond. In recent years, we have interviewed leaders from more than 80 organizations in a variety of industries. (See “About the Research,” p. 78.) Based on those conversations and drawing from research in both cognitive leadership1,2 and developmental psychology,3 we have identified six leadership mindsets: We call them the Sociopath, the Egoist, the Chameleon, the Dynamo, the Builder, and the Transcender. Each…

WE MAKE HEROES of entrepreneurial innovators. According to a recent YouGov survey, Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the most admired man on the planet; Alibaba founder Jack Ma placed 10th. A 2016 Wired profile credited augmented-reality pioneer and Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz with nothing less than “invent[ing] a superpower.” Indeed, the cultural narrative that celebrates entrepreneurial inventiveness often views this creativity as happening in bubbles outside of the mainstream corporate world. The business press ascribes a level of magic to companies created by iconic founders, such as Amazon, Apple, and Pixar, holding them up as special and somehow different from other corporations. But is it really the spark of genius that distinguishes these organizations? Or does their repeated success in developing wildly popular new products and services have more…

Making the Open Office Work As more and more companies adopt open-office designs, reports are mixed on whether the new configurations are all they’re cracked up to be. On the positive side, organizations like to say that eliminating fixed offices can foster teamwork, create opportunities for casual idea sharing, and reduce the need for formal meetings. But employees often complain that there can be too much noise and distraction, making it difficult to get things done. A recent article in Bloomberg, “Everyone Hates the Open-Plan Office. It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” (May 1, 2018), contains practical suggestions on how organizations can make the new offices feel like pleasant, productive places to work. One opportunity companies sometimes miss, according to writer Atossa Abrahamian, is to showcase the amenities the…

THE FIELD OF performance management has been in turmoil lately. Employees are getting confused. Leaders are getting frustrated. Consultants are getting rich. Why the upheaval? A small number of high-profile companies (including Adobe, GE, and Accenture)1 have abandoned traditional performance management in favor of less formal and quantifiable approaches that prioritize ongoing conversation over annual ratings. Elsewhere, human resources (HR) executives have dashed to follow suit, assuming what is best for these industry leaders will be best for their organizations, too. The problem is that there is little evidence to support these new approaches. We are not specifically arguing in favor of traditional ratings, nor do we believe most legacy performance and feedback systems are built to address today’s talent management challenges. But we are arguing for a pause before…

This research was conducted over four and a half years and involved both inductive and deductive methods. First, we conducted 12 structured in-person interviews with current and former CEOs in various industries (including semiconductors, biotechnology, finance, construction, and government). The companies included National Semiconductor Corp., Archstone Partnerships, Carnival Corp., Micron Technology Inc., Analog Devices Inc., and Odebrecht Organization. From these interviews, we developed a preliminary set of leadership mindsets. We then refined our model in two ways. First, based on case studies derived from the first phase of research, we discussed the general framework and ideas with approximately 155 executives during executive leadership development programs at Florida International University, the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Columbia Business School. Second, we collected validation data from…

J. Acimovic and S.C. Graves, “Making Better Fulfillment Decisions on the Fly in an Online Retail Environment,” Manufacturing and Service Operations Management 17, no. 1 (winter 2015): 34-51. https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2014.0505 . J. Acimovic and S.C. Graves, “Mitigating Spillover in Online Retailing via Replenishment,” Manufacturing and Service Operations Management 19, no. 3 (summer 2017): 419-436. https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2016.0614 . M.K. Lim, H.-Y. Mak, and Z.-J.M. Shen, “Agility and Proximity Considerations in Supply Chain Design,” Management Science 63, no. 4 (April 2017): 1026-1041. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2380 .…

THE ART OF bian lian — or “face changing” — is integral to Sichuan opera: A main character changes masks to avoid capture by foes. The transformation is quick and surprising, the new face clearly different. In the theater of business, Chinese performers are undergoing a rapid transformation of their own as they seek to evolve from backroom producers to the world’s leading face of innovation. Over the past five years, domestic Chinese companies have been innovating unlike ever before. In 2016, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, unveiled the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer, with 10.65 million CPU cores. Meanwhile, Chinese company Ehang Inc., based in Guangzhou, launched the world’s first aerial passenger drone, the Ehang 184, capable of autonomously transporting a person in the air…

This article is based on more than 50 Harvard Business School case studies developed between 2009 and 2017 about the semiconductor industry, the LCD flat-panel display industry, the LED industry, and other technology-intensive industrial product companies in the consumer, automotive, and aerospace sectors. Some of the cases focused on the development or loss of competitive advantage for very specific capabilities or focused on design tools that raised the level of abstraction. I also interviewed dozens more companies and visited the production facilities of many other organizations that had a high dependence on sophisticated production and design tools and were able to document specific examples of know-how transfer. The article also draws on many years in industry, during which I witnessed the struggle to control the diffusion of proprietary knowledge in…

WHEN MARKETS BECOME disrupted by new technologies and competitors, many legacy companies struggle to keep up. They are often simply ill-prepared to develop new products and services in the midst of the uncertainty. Rather than attempting to go it alone in such circumstances, some companies reach out to partners with an eye toward building a broader ecosystem that will boost their competitive strength. But what types of ecosystems will work best in a dynamic environment? Perhaps the most common forms of ecosystems are centralized, where the company functions as the “hub.” These tend to work well in stable environments where the key issues have already been worked out. In Amazon.com Inc.’s ecosystem for ebooks, for example, the online retailer works with the maker of its Kindle tablets and an array…

IN THE TIME you’ve set aside to read this article, you’re likely to check your phone. You’ll probably see notifications for emails or text messages pop up on your lock screen. You won’t resist. Once you’ve started thumbing through your apps, you’ll check Twitter, too. If you use Twitter as your media feed, you may click through to an article about blockchain or vacations in Barbados. I’ll be lucky if you make it back here. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, would have you believe that your behavior is a serious problem, that the ephemera of the internet are hijacking your ability to concentrate and think.1 I disagree — or rather, I’d argue that, in today’s workplace, the seductive clamor of the…

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Apple Inc. and Corning Inc. is like a marriage. Corning makes Gorilla Glass, which is in the screen of every iPhone, and the two companies have been together since the iPhone’s introduction in 2007. Each has made extensive commitments to the other. Corning commercialized the glass, which is strengthened with potassium ions, at the urging of Steve Jobs. When Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, initially hesitated, saying the Corning, New York-based company didn’t have the capability, the notoriously demanding Jobs responded: “Don’t be afraid. … You can do it.” Six months later, Corning delivered. Just last year, Apple responded in kind by making a $200 million research-and-development investment in Corning and its plant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, that specializes in making cutting-edge glass. Long-term relationships like the one between…

The Changing Face of Innovation in China Dan Prud’homme (University of Oxford) and Max von Zedtwitz (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania, and GLORAD Center for Global R&D and Innovation) pp. 24-32 Over the past five years, domestic Chinese companies have been innovating like never before. But unlike previous periods, China’s new approach to innovation presents a serious threat for Western companies, note authors Dan Prud’homme and Max von Zedtwitz. Until recently, foreign innovation in China was driven by competition among foreign companies and imitative threats from local Chinese companies. Chinese companies operated in lower-end market segments, often competing only indirectly with foreign R&D, and many doubted the ability of China’s political, cultural, educational, and financial institutions to foster genuine innovation. But those doubts are dissipating. Years of foreign investments have…

WE ARE LIVING through a grand transition in the way people work. Constant and extraordinary innovation in machine learning and robotics is reshaping our professional lives. Some tasks will be replaced. Others will be augmented. No one — not even the highly skilled — will be untouched. Meanwhile, as people live longer and their working lives expand, they are moving from the traditions of the three-stage life — full-time education leading to full-time work leading to full-time retirement — to something a great deal more fluid, flexible, and multistaged. And as more women work and more partnerships are built on “career plus career”rather than“career plus carer,” technological and demographic forces are further altering the relationship employees and their families have with the workplace. My interest here is what all this…