Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2020 från MIT Sloan Management Review

What constitutes management and leadership has long been a topic of debate. Some experts blur the line between the two — saying, for instance, that 21st century work calls for hands-on leaders who are closely involved with day-to-day operations. Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg and his coauthor Tricia Gregg make essentially that point in their contribution to our (Re)Learn to Lead series in this issue of MIT SMR. Their analysis shows that the most visionary tech CEOs are those who innovate alongside their employees. For such leaders, Groysberg and Gregg suggest, doing, seeing, and guiding are all part of the same ball of wax. Other experts, like Seth Godin, view leadership and management as distinct activities. Godin casts leadership as the stuff of breakthroughs, best exercised through human connection,…

One hundred and thirty years ago, a jeweler named Willard Bundy changed the world of management: He invented the employee time clock. It was a natural consequence of the times. Management had fueled industrialism (and vice versa). Without management, there was no chance to coordinate the workforce, to be sure the work was getting done, and to ensure quality. Management not only worked to contain the costs of our most expensive input (labor); it created a command-and-control regime that allowed us to increase productivity and quality. Then Frederick Taylor came along and took things to the next level. Taylor was the Madame Curie of industrial management. His breakthrough work on scientific management created a movement that persists to this day. The theory is simple: With a clipboard and a stopwatch,…

It was the kind of bluntness that silences a room. In 2017, John Chambers, then CEO of Cisco Systems, delivered a disquieting message to participants in Harvard Business School’s executive education program for CEOs. “A decade or two ago, CEOs could be in their offices with spreadsheets, executing on strategy,” he said. “Now, if you’re not out listening to the market and catching market transitions, … if you’re not understanding that you need to constantly reinvent yourself every three to five years, you as a CEO will not survive.” During his 20-year tenure at Cisco Systems, Chambers had presided over an era of tremendous growth, during which revenue rose from approximately $1 billion a year to $49 billion.1 In his talk at HBS, he argued that the key to his…

At the 30,000-foot level of the corporate suite, plotting digital change is heady, exciting stuff. Business leaders can almost smell the gains in efficiency and speed and the data-driven increase in customer satisfaction when they think about all the new tools at their disposal and how they might restructure their organizations. As one senior executive at a large telecommunications company recently told me, “Mapping out a new approach to compete in the digital era has been so cool!” But here’s the decidedly less cool, more mundane truth that I’ve learned after 16 years of working on such transformations with more than two dozen companies across eight industries: Success depends less on strategic inspiration than on the way people on the front lines implement new digital tools, and most leaders aren’t…

The authors conducted the research on which this article is based in two phases over the past decade, with two consortia of leading organizations. In the first phase, through organizational network analysis, they assessed collaboration patterns and identified relationship drivers in several dozen global companies across industries. They also mapped the role of trust, purpose, and energy in building relationships and in creating contexts of high employee engagement and low turnover. In the second phase, the authors interviewed 200 leaders (100 women and 100 men) across 20 well-known companies to identify leadership behaviors that foster trust, purpose, and energy in interpersonal interactions.…

As part of their research for their new book, See Sooner, Act Faster, the authors conducted exploratory case studies of vigilant versus vulnerable companies, using published sources as well as their own industry connections. From there, they developed various hypotheses about sensing practices at both the organizational-process and top-management levels. They tested their conceptual framework in a survey of senior leaders of 118 global companies, assessing their capabilities to see sooner and act faster.…

The authors analyzed 260,000 online customer sessions on NerdWallet’s website, including the click-stream data for credit card evaluation and selection. They used state-of-the-art deep learning software to predict the specific cards customers would pick based on demographics and card attributes, and compared the results with traditional analysis via regression. Based on the comparison and a review of the state of the art, the authors forecast the future potential for deep learning in the field of marketing analytics.…

GRETA THUNBERG, the 16-year-old Swede leading the global youth climate crusade, came to New York to speak at the September gathering of the U.N. General Assembly. She arrived from Europe by boat. Thunberg has pledged to never fly on an airplane because of carbon emissions, helping to create a flight shaming movement in Sweden and elsewhere. From Prince Harry to soccer star David Beckham to CEOs planning to attend Davos, people are being asked a tough question: Should we all stop flying? It’s a reasonable inquiry. If climate change is an existential crisis — and I believe it is — shouldn’t we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprints? And should businesses that have already committed to climate action lead the way, in part by slashing airplane travel?…

What It Means to Be a Tech Company WeWork’s rapid reversal in fortune in September caught some analysts by surprise. The high-flying office-sharing company, then favored by gig workers and the tech elite, was gearing up for an initial public offering that was widely expected to raise upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, within a few days it became a poster child for investor herd mentality gone amok and was scrambling for cash. WeWork’s free fall (the company’s valuation has dropped more than 80% since January 2019) has fed a spirited discussion over what it means to be a young “tech company.” Although WeWork’s core business model — renting empty offices in bulk and turning them into coworking spaces with amenities such as yoga classes and kombucha for…

Most leaders today are trying to do the same things: help their organizations become more agile, more innovative, more digitally savvy, and more customer-centric. Sooner or later, though, they come up against entrenched values and behaviors, and progress stalls. That’s particularly true with digital transformation. Experts concur that traditional mindsets and “ways of doing things around here” — the lay definition of culture — are the primary culprits hindering the fundamental transformation that emerging technologies are meant to enable.1 But organizational culture is hard to change. It’s intangible; there are no direct levers for controlling it. As MIT’s Ed Schein has noted,2 what an organization’s leaders pay close attention to and shower with time — not what they say — will provide the best clues about its culture. Think about…

If you read the news stories about them, you might get the idea that inventor-CEOs become dilettantes as time goes on — that, once they reach the top of their industry, they’re mostly interested in buying newspapers and going to space. To test this notion, we studied what types of inventions our research subjects were personally involved in by conducting word-frequency analyses on the abstracts of their patents. The correlation between the words used most often to describe the CEOs’ patenting work and their companies’ core activities is plain. BEZOS 1. User 2. System 3. Device 4. Transaction 5. Information BRIN 1. Search 2. Query 3. System 4. User 5. Associated GATES 1. Data 2. User 3. System 4. Stored 5. Information JOBS 1. User 2. Device 3. Media 4.…

THE PERFORMANCE MYTH: New technologies have immediate and direct effects on performance. REALITY CHECK: New technologies usually have, at best, an indirect effect on organizational performance. They change the way employees perform their tasks, which alters people’s roles, which alters the networks of people who work together on tasks. Ultimately, these changes in roles and social networks are what drive improvement in key performance metrics. THE NOT-MY-JOB MYTH: Implementing new technologies is the IT department’s job. REALITY CHECK: Implementation is a job for business leaders. Most IT departments are accustomed to managing support applications, like Microsoft Office and CRM software. But today’s powerful digital tools allow users to manipulate and analyze data in ways that can reinvent an organization. Rolling them out requires keen business insight and management skills. Senior…

Organizational network analysis (ONA) can illuminate the quality of interpersonal collaborations by offering leaders insights regarding how influence is dispersed among group members within and across organizational boundaries, hierarchical levels, and job functions. It is a sort of MRI that can reveal where interpersonal collaboration is healthy or ailing, and who is responsible for its condition. ONA can identify a variety of collaboration builders, including connectors, who link people together; experts, whose knowledge and skills support others; brokers, who span boundaries and integrate subcultures; and energizers, who instill passion and excitement in others. It also can identify collaboration destroyers: de-energizers, fearmongers, and other hobgoblins who spread cynicism and slow momentum, often in subtle ways.…

Although many companies display heightened concern for the well-being of their employees, not everyone is convinced that efforts to create and maintain a positive workplace actually pay off. However, to Sigal Barsade, the evidence is clear: Companies that want more satisfied employees and stronger performance need to invest in understanding what motivates people in their work lives and pay attention to the emotional side of organizational culture. As an undergraduate at UCLA, Barsade, the Joseph Frank Bernstein Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, considered a career in clinical psychology before determining that she was most interested in having an impact on people’s well-being through organizational behavior. Over the past two decades she has studied a variety of topics, including group affect, emotional contagion, and loneliness in…

In this note, we describe the differences between deep learning and traditional methods in more technical terms and outline how gains in accuracy can be monetized. Here, we assume that the reader has a rudimentary understanding of statistics. Traditionally, consumer response has been modeled by single-equation models relating sales (outcome variable) linearly to the price/promotion, advertising, and distribution measures (explanatory variables). The state of the art today uses choice data (buy, not buy, how much) in a single equation (logistic) model, where outcome variables are choices made by individual consumers. Explanatory variables include a range of marketing measures such as exposure to ads on the internet, search efforts, traditional demographics, loyalty, price, advertising and promotion spending, distribution, and product attributes. Data is used to find the model parameters that best…

AS COMPANIES STRIVE to innovate in the face of disruption, many turn to external partners for support with efforts such as accelerators and innovation labs. Others promote internal entrepreneurship, also known as intrapreneurship. One approach has a manager-with-entrepreneur focus, the other a manager-as-entrepreneur emphasis. But which is more effective? While it’s important to prioritize tactics to suit available resources, it’s a mistake to treat intrapreneurship programs and external partnerships as purely an either/or choice. The problem is more common than you’d think. Innovation options aren’t mutually exclusive, and viewing them as such limits an organization’s potential to discover and pursue new ideas. Managers can take the following steps to effectively deploy people, resources, and capabilities — and avoid missing opportunities. Empower intrapreneurs to drive startup engagement. Over the past decade,…

For years now, everyone has been talking about VUCA, the U.S. military’s acronym for the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world we live in. However, we now have VUCA on steroids as we try to keep up with the increasing speed of change in a business environment where the amount of data generated doubles every two years, reflecting a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020.1 To thrive in this landscape, organizations that have long been siloed and bureaucratic must become nimble and customer-centric, and command-and-control models must give way to distributed leadership. However, many leaders fear letting go. They don’t want to lose power, which is integral to their identity in an organization. They also worry that chaos will ensue if they loosen the reins. And they tend to shy…

Shortly after the turn of the century, I left Wall Street to work from home. My husband had finished his Ph.D., and his best job opportunity was in Boston, not New York City. Well established in my career as an investment analyst, with an Institutional Investor ranking, I wanted to continue to work for Merrill Lynch and was able to persuade my boss to let me work from our new home in Boston. This doesn’t sound especially exotic today, but it definitely was then. Relatively few people were working remotely; fewer still were working for large, fast-paced, team-collaborative companies that way. The technology was available, of course, but compared with the tools of today, it was primitive. A tech specialist from Merrill Lynch had to come to my home and…

S TRATEGIZING ABOUT DIGITAL CHANGE in your organization won’t get you anywhere unless you’re making plans and setting goals that people will actually execute. But most senior executives struggle to establish realistic expectations, largely because they don’t have a clear sense of how or why employees on the front lines adopt new tools. Those are problems you can fix, says Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the opening article of this special report. By understanding the six phases of digital adoption, Leonardi explains, leaders can strategize in reverse. That entails knowing what the tools can achieve in local performance gains — and then working your way back to define meaningful company objectives and secure what’s needed to get things rolling in…

Consider these two companies: The first is a retail chain with hundreds of locations globally — innovative, but basically a sales platform. The second is a hospital that treats the world’s most devastating cancers. Which do you think has a more engaged workforce? If you chose the latter, in light of its quest to save lives, you wouldn’t be alone. Yet, when we spent time with both organizations, we discovered that the working environment in the hospital was rife with fear, workforce morale was low, and employee turnover was high. At the retail chain, on the other hand, there was a palpable spirit of camaraderie, employees were energetic and enthusiastic, and customers were very pleased with the service. The retailer had the more engaged workforce by a long shot. It’s…

10 TRUST-BUILDING BEHAVIORS • I make others want to turn to me for transparent, credible expertise. • I acknowledge areas in which I am not an expert. • I create rich interactions at key points in projects. • I actively encourage others to critique and improve my ideas. • I offer time, resources, information, referrals, insights, and other assistance before I ask for help and without expectation of benefit. • I connect with people off-task, seeking to understand their backgrounds, interests, and aspirations. • I consistently communicate my values and priorities. • I do what I say I am going to do and follow through on commitments I make to people. • I am committed to principles and goals that are larger than my own self-interests. • I keep confidential…

Deep learning is delivering impressive results in AI applications. Apple’s Siri, for example, translates the human voice into computer commands that allow iPhone owners to get answers to questions, send messages, and navigate their way to and from obscure locations. Automated driving enables people today to go hands-free on expressways, and it will eventually do the same on city streets. In biology, researchers are creating new molecules for DNA-based pharmaceuticals. Given all this activity with deep learning, many wonder how the underlying methods will alter the future of marketing. To what extent will they help companies design profitable new products and services to meet the needs of customers? The technology that underpins deep learning is becoming increasingly capable of analyzing big databases for patterns and insights. It isn’t difficult to…

Estimating sales response to marketing inputs can be a relatively straightforward analytics exercise. Many organizations use a variety of classic statistical methods and tools to simulate the effects of things like price changes and shifts in advertising, promotions, and distribution. It’s common for brand managers to track their progress with simple models and online dashboards. In some cases, they use A/B testing: If you have a statistical sense of how customers are likely to react to a marketing offer, you can look for ways to adjust the variables to improve the outcomes. Deep learning offers distinct advantages over traditional statistical modeling for predicting customer attitude changes and shopping and purchasing behavior, which can lead to improved profit opportunities. • The first advantage is that it enables companies to look at…