Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2009 från Rotman Management

IN NINE SHORT YEARS, it has become abundantly clear that the 21st century will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. As business people – and human beings – the challenges we face are more complex than ever before: enabling constant innovation, protecting the environment and narrowing the gaps between rich and poor, to name a few. Varied as they are, these problems share some key characteristics: each is unique, difficult to define, and often inextricably linked to other issues. Unlike a math problem with a single answer that can be reached through careful reasoning, these puzzles have no ‘stopping rule’ and demand a different approach to problemsolving that recognizes the shifting nature of the problem. We have entered into the realm of what late design theorist Horst…

You believe that we are in the midst of a shift from the Age of Science to the Age of Design. Please explain. In the Age of Science, the job of Science was to describe the universe. Once we had created a good description of the natural world, we could begin to exercise control, and the path was opened for technology – the art of harnessing, controlling and transforming our world. In the last century, organizations have borrowed heavily from the ethos of Science and technology: the goals of ‘management science’ were to describe (or predict) the future and control it. In the Age of Science, facts legitimized decisions – indeed, they were the only acceptable basis for decisions and actions. The goal of problem solving was to find the…

OF ALL INDUSTRIAL COUNTRIES, Sweden is the farthest along in weaning itself from fossil fuels. Today, the country depends on oil for only 30 per cent of its energy, down from 77 per cent in 1970. By contrast, the United States depends on fossil fuels for 85 per cent of its energy. Fifteen per cent of all cars sold in Sweden in 2007 can run on ethanol, up from two per cent in 2000. A car running on ethanol made from sugarcane or cellulose is estimated to emit 85-to-90 per cent less greenhouse gases than a gasoline-powered car. All the major Swedish motor vehicle manufacturers now offer flexible-fuel cars or trucks that run on either ethanol, conventional gasoline or a blend. In 2005, a government-sponsored commission announced its intention to…

WANDER INTO MISSION PIE, a corner café in San Francisco best known for its namesake baked goods, and the place looks familiar enough. The 10 or so wooden tables, all in close proximity, are filled with pie-eating, warm-beverage-sipping customers. Some people chat, while others read leftover newspapers or peck out e-mail messages from their laptops. Swap the pie for bagels, and you could be in another San Francisco café. But stick around awhile, and the peculiarities of Mission Pie become apparent. First off, roughly half of Mission Pie’s 14-person staff is young – really young. But they’re not the usual grad-school Lit majors or aspiring musicians working in so many of the city’s eateries. They’re either current or former students from Mission High, a nearby public high school with 68…

What is ‘strategic intuition’, and how does it work? Strategic intuition describes how strategic ideas actually form in the mind of good strategists. Virtually all strategy methods tell you how to understand and analyze your situation, but they don’t tell you how to take the next step, and actually come up with an idea. Typically, new ideas are generated through brainstorming, where people throw out ideas, but that’s really no method at all. Strategic intuition, on the other hand, is based on science and originally comes from military strategy. It’s a description of how ideas actually form in the mind. Why do good ideas often come to us in the shower or during the drive home rather than in the midst of a brainstorming session? I’ve asked thousands of people…

In our current environment, the basic meaning of a given situation is often up for grabs. What are the repercussions of all this ambiguity? In many situations, people look around and realize that it’s not clear what to do next. When so many changes are taking place, some important signals are visible, while others are not. The implication is that it will take some work to figure out what is truly going on. To complicate matters, not everyone in an organization or industry will make the same interpretations of the situation, because there isn’t necessarily one right answer when attempting to understand the environment. There will always be multiple takes on what’s happening. What is a ‘cognitive frame’? It is basically a lens through which people see the world. That…

Your latest paper (with Harvard’s Katy Milkman and Max Bazerman) states that we have reached the optimal moment to address ‘how to improve decision making’. Please explain. The last few decades have been rich with research that has uncovered systematic patterns in how we make decisions, and those patterns often point to what we describe as ‘decisionmaking errors’. Katy, Max, and I are working on a taxonomy of decision-making errors that represents the range of terrific research that has been done over the past few decades. Our belief is that creating this taxonomy will help our field conceptualize the similarities and differences in our decision making errors, which will better enable us to come up with strategies for improvement. Much of what we know now is derived from Daniel Kahneman…

The mission of the Global Crop Diversity Trust is “to ensure the conservation of crop diversity for food security worldwide.” How do you define ‘food security’? Food security means achieving a state where everyone on Earth has enough to eat at all times. Of course, there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t enjoy that basic human necessity right now, so we understand that there is an important connection between conserving crop diversity and producing food security. We will not be able to produce food security in the future without having access to crop diversity for breeding new varieties of crops; for example, crops that are higher-yielding, that are resilient, and that are adapted to different environments. There is an intimate connection between trying to feed all the earth’s…

PROFESSOR ANITA MCGAHAN, a noted expert on issues of competitive advantage, industry evolution and global health, has been awarded a prestigious chaired professorship at the Rotman School. Prof. McGahan will be the inaugural holder of the Rotman Chair in Management, made possible by a generous earlier donation by Sandra and Joseph Rotman. Prof. McGahan joined the Rotman faculty as a professor of Strategic Management in 2007 because she was “inspired by the vision of the School’s faculty, Dean Roger Martin and the Rotman family for developing fundamental new insights about management and the role of business in society.” McGahan has plans to develop new courses and has been collaborating with colleagues to redesign the core MBA course in Strategic Management to deal with the most pressing strategic issues of the…

THE ROTMAN Integrative Thinking Speaker Series kicked off its 8th season on September 24 with David Komlos, whose firm has developed a process for dealing with wicked problems – problems so complex that they cannot be solved through traditional problem-solving methods. There are basically four types of problems, says the CEO of Syntegrity: simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. “Simple and complicated challenges differ from complex and chaotic ones in a few ways,” he says. “When dealing with the former, you can get to the right answers by looking at the facts.” However, with complex challenges, “cause and effect are not readily observable, and it’s hard to understand what is going on because there is so much going on.” What complex challenges have in common, says Komlos, is that each is…

A TRADER with a glum look comes home and tells his wife, “It’s been a tough year. We’re going to have to cut back on some things: if you learned to cook we could fire the chef.” His wife responds, “and if you learned to make love, we could fire the gardener.” With this joke, Warren Buffett kicked off Rotman’s 2008 visit to Omaha. I could scarcely believe that it was actually Mr. Buffett standing before me. His Chairman’s letter was coming out in a few hours, financial markets were in turmoil, and everyone wanted to know his opinion. Yet despite the demands on his time, the richest and most revered investor in the world was spending the day talking and joking with us. For four straight years, Rotman students…

Avinash Abichandani CIBC Raymund Acayan Self-Employed Shama Ahmed TD Bank Financial Group Richard Ahn University of Toronto Jennifer Aiello Coremotive Akinwunmi Alaga Deloitte Sean Alexander Manulife Financial Corporation Kurt Anderson Bank of Montreal Mohammad Ansari Kraft Canada Incorporated Jason Antao Oliver Wyman Group Kristina Au ATI Technologies Michael Bales ZS Associates Daniel Bandurka Johnson & Johnson Family Co Manish Bansal Kraft Canada Incorporated Allan Baril Bluetree Wireless Ilana Bendayan H Sudan & Company Inc Miguel Blanco Matzuno Redknee Inc. Julia Bonin Procter & Gamble Incorporated Michael Brookes Deloitte David Brown Rotman Designworks Heather Buchmann Cambrian Chemicals Christopher Caira Accenture Inc Martha Callum MDS Analytical Technologies John Carinci RBC Financial Group Maria Castro TD Asset Management, Inc Arghya Chakravarty Prithvi Information Solutions Paul Chavez RBC Capital Markets Olga Chernykh Toronto Hydro…

I WAS INSPIRED TO EXAMINE the inner workings of the science and art of business by two occurrences in April of 2007 that framed a tension that I felt needed to be explored. The first was a speech by Martin Baily, former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors and at that time senior adviser to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), which is the think tank of what most would agree is the world’s premier management consulting firm. The speech was on MGI’s annual Ten Trends to Watch, and Trend #9 was, “The rise of scientific management and its triumph over gut instinct and intuition.” Baily waxed eloquent about what an advance this represented for the world of business. Intrigued, the following day I went to the MGI website…

WHILE MANY IMPORTANT TOPICS have been adequately addressed by the field of Strategic Management, we have yet to fully confront – in both our research and teaching – many of the most important strategic problems and opportunities of our time. Examples include credit pricing, financial-system capacity, military services, digital communications, poverty alleviation, drug-resistant disease and climate change. These phenomena are so significant and pervasive in their implications that they almost defy analysis – they are mind-boggling and far-reaching and difficult to take on, both analytically and practically. Each of these issues will not only fundamentally change the course of business over the next 50 years, they will also affect us personally, socially and culturally. These are the defining issues of this century, and our curriculum and research must address them…

AS THE 21ST CENTURY UNFOLDS, lone creators of new ideas are increasingly rare, as teams and larger groups within organizations become the dominant mode through which progress is made in much of the world. Appropriately, management scholars have been turning their attention to organizational creativity in recent years. Research on creativity began in the psychological domain, with the traditional view of the creative process stemming from Graham Wallas’s seminal work The Art of Thought. In it, he proposed four distinct stages of creativity: 1. Preparation, in which the problem to be solved is detected, and relevant data are identified; 2. Incubation, in which the problem is ‘left alone’ for a time while the unconscious mind works on it; 3. Illumination, in which the idea or solution suddenly appears; and 4.…

IN THE ACADEMIC LITERATURE, the phenomenon of strategy formulation has often been studied using the vocabulary of ‘information-processing’. Within this framework, the organization is represented as processing information from its environment in such a way as to produce adaptive patterns of behaviour whose realization and success are constrained by the rationality of its managers. The resulting view of the organization is that of a large device for registering new information and carrying out computations that solve problems. The question is, where do these problems come from? Relatively scant attention has been devoted to the questions of problem selection or formulation. If a problem statement – i.e. a mismatch between an identified state of the world and a desired state of the world, coupled with a desire to get to the…

In what sense is climate change an ethical issue? To mitigate climate change, the current generation of more affluent members of our society – that is, of the rich nations of the world – are going to have to make sacrifices largely for the sake of future generations, principally for relatively poor people. Why should we, the more fortunate people on earth, do that? There really isn’t any reason for sacrificing part of our luxury and well-being, apart from morality. It’s a moral responsibility that we have to the less-affluent people of the future. From the beginning, therefore, acting to mitigate climate change is an ethical question, though it’s not often thought of in that way. Politicians don’t usually like to appeal to people’s morality, and economists often think they…

Design has been described as a missing ‘third area’ of education, one that is just in its infancy compared to education in the Sciences, Arts or Humanities. Why is it important to understand the particular way that designers approach problems? The way designers approach and solve problems is an overlooked field. ‘Designerly’ ways of thinking have been fairly neglected by general education, both at the elementary school level and in higher education, at least in any kind of non-specialized, non-professional training. That’s probably because most of those who work in education themselves come from the Sciences or the Humanities – they don’t come from a design background. If you’re teaching in general education, you need to understand the intrinsic values of the subject area you’re teaching: what is valuable about…

AS JET AIRWAYS FLIGHT 501 DESCENDED OVER the Kathmandu valley, I looked out across the terraced rice paddies. It was early May, and through the morning haze, I could pick out the brightly-coloured clothing of women trekking along hill tracks under massive loads. In the distance, the sun touched the jagged white peaks of the Himalayas. I was here to learn about a new medical school based in Kathmandu and to make a short promotional film about it. Going in, I was aware that starting a medical school in Nepal would be a wicked problem; I did not realize how difficult shooting a movie would be. When the plane touched down I was plunged into the chaos of Kathmandu: the eye-irritating smog, the potholed streets clogged with mopeds, roaming cattle…

WHEN I WAS JUST STARTING OUT AFTER UNIVERSITY, I had no idea whether my life would someday be relevant to anyone else’s. In the mid-1970s, out of frustration with the terrible economic situation in Bangladesh, I decided to see if I could make myself useful to one poor person a day in the village next to the university campus where I was teaching. I found myself in an unfamiliar situation, and out of necessity I had to find a way out. Since I did not have a road-map, I had to fall back on my basic instincts. At any moment I could have withdrawn myself from this uncertain path, but I did not. I stubbornly went on to find my own way. Luckily, I found it, and the result was…

EIGHT NEW FACULTY MEMBERS joined the Rotman School at the start of the 2008/09 academic year, strengthening teaching and research components in five academic areas: Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Operations Management and Strategic Management. David Soberman joins the School as a professor of Marketing. His teaching, research and consulting focus is on industrial marketing, distribution channels for consumer packaged goods, and retailing with direct involvement in the beer industry, the market research industry and markets for durable goods. Since 1996, he has taught in INSEAD’s PhD program and in MBA and executive education programs at INSEAD’s campuses in France and Singapore. Ron Borkovsky joins Rotman as an assistant professor of Marketing. He is completing his PhD at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His research interests include quantitative marketing, industrial organization,…

In your view, is the Rotman Expansion Project a ‘wicked problem’? Bruce Kuwabara: Yes, and it is a splendid one. The issues we’re tackling range from ‘how should a classroom of the 21st century work, look and feel?’ to ‘how should the School engage with the world?’ Such a project requires broad thinking and a heavy dose of flexibility in order to respond to and integrate the range of issues and challenges. What the School needs is a strong creative platform upon which it can be globally successful and sustainable for a very long time. This project is obviously about growth, but it is also about a new direction: it is about building the stage from which the School will connect with the world as it grows and moves forward.…

WHILE AZERBAIJAN tends to fly below the radar, this beautiful and intriguing land has been a major trading route for centuries, and has always had strategic importance in international politics due to its oil reserves and location on the Caspian Sea. In spite of the wealth provided by oil revenues, power outages, 20 per cent inflation and 28 per cent interest rates make life a struggle for the average citizen. Modern Azerbaijan is a dichotomy of two cultures: the nouveau riche and the lower class. There is a stark contrast between ‘new’ money – Azeri’s sipping lattes and driving imported cars – and the blue collar workers shuttling to work on public transit and living in Sovietera apartment blocks. There is a feeling that Stalin’s influence is still very much…

January 14, 5:00-6:15pm Merchandising Experts Speaker Series Speakers:Mark Foote, President and CEO, Zellers and Tim McGuire, Director, McKinsey & Company January 19, 5:00-6:15pm Leading Change Speaker Series Topic: “How Culture Change Transformed Canadian National Into an Even Stronger, More Profitable Company” Speakers: Les Dakens, Partner, Pineridge Consulting and Peter Edwards, VP – Human Resources, Canadian National January 20, 5:00-6:15pm Operations Strategy Experts Speaker Series Speaker: Art Defehr, CEO, Palliser Furniture January 20, 5:00-6:15pm Women and Leadership Experts Speaker Series Topic: “How We Lead Matters” Speaker:Marilyn Carlson, Chair and CEO, Carlson (Minneapolis); Author January 21, 8:30am - 3:30pm Rotman School Symposium on Measuring the Impact of Doing Good January 21, 5:30-6:30pm Business History Experts Speaker Series Speaker: Peter C. Newman, Columnist, Maclean’s and Best-Selling Author Topic: “The Passionate Life and Turbulent…

The Commission on Growth and Development recently released its inaugural study, The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development. Of all the world’s wicked problems, why did you choose to focus on growth? The Commission was brought together by a belief that the world's challenges – poverty, the environment, misunderstandings between nations, vast differences in living standards within and across countries – are best met in conditions of rising prosperity and expanding economic opportunities. We focus on growth not because it is the final goal, but because it enables so many things that people care about: poverty reduction, productive employment, education, health and the opportunity to be creative. You really can’t reduce poverty or achieve any of the other Millennium Development Goals without growth, but we felt that…

OVER THE PAST 15 YEARS, I have studied how companies create strategy – the single most important responsibility of senior executives. Many corporations, I find, have replaced the annual topdown planning ritual, based on macroeconomic forecasts, with more sophisticated processes. They crunch vast amounts of consumer data, hold planning sessions frequently, and use techniques such as ‘competency modeling’ and ‘real-options analysis’ to develop strategy. This type of approach is an improvement because it is customer- and capability-focused and enables companies to modify their strategies quickly, but it still misses the mark a lot of the time. Companies tend to ignore one complication along the way: they can’t develop models of the increasingly complex environment in which they operate, and as a result, contemporary strategic-planning processes don’t help them cope with…

INDUSTRIAL AGE THINKING has delivered some dazzling capabilities, including the power to churn out high-quality products at affordable prices. Yet it has also trapped us in a tangle of what design theorist Horst Rittel labeled ‘wicked problems’ – problems so persistent, pervasive or slippery that they seem insoluble. Unlike the relatively tame problems found in mathematics, chess, and cost accounting, wicked problems tend to shift disconcertingly with every attempt to solve them. Moreover, the solutions are never right or wrong, just better or worse. The world’s wicked problems crowd us like piranha. You know the list: pollution, overpopulation, dwindling natural resources, global warming, technological warfare, and a lopsided distribution of power that has failed to address third-world hunger. In the world of business, managers face a subset of these problems:…

WE EXPECT TO FIND ARTISTRY IN THE FINE ARTS – in painting, dance, photography, music, sculpture and the like. However, artistry does escape these boundaries, and most of us recognize it when we encounter it. We can see it in an athlete’s performance, we can taste it in the dishes of a great chef, and we can hear it in the words of an accomplished leader. This recognition often generates a curiosity about how such exceptional and apparently effortless performance is accomplished. Intuitively, we know that artistry involves expertise, focus and control, because the people who achieve it demonstrate mastery in what they do. At the same time, we know that it involves creativity, spontaneity and imagination, because the people who achieve it create original, often surprising, results, products and…

WHEN IT COMES TO WICKED PROBLEMS, health care is certainly high on the list. Like all such problems, it involves a series of moving parts: a complex system of stakeholders, care networks, financial concerns, clinical standards and protocols, public relations and government regulations, amongst other considerations. Further complicating matters, every disease and condition comes with its own subset of complexities. The wicked nature of health care problems can leave decision makers feeling powerless to solve them, leading them to either give up on the big picture or focus in on a single point in the chain that will not necessarily create meaningful value to the entire system – or the patient. At Rotman Designworks, we have found that design can play an important role in providing frameworks and guidelines for…

As the inaugural Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, what is your mandate? My job is to bring together some of the practices and theories from the world of design with practices and theories in management and organizing. My teaching is primarily in the MBA program and in executive education, and my research looks at design-led innovation and in particular, service design – an emerging area of research in service innovation. My elective on Design Leadership introduces students to some of the most important ideas in design and design management, looks at the roles that design can play in organizations, and explores the ways that managers can organize to make use of the particular qualities of design approaches. It has been said that every important social…

You and your colleague Nicolas Krauss conducted the first empirical analysis investigating the systemic risk of microfinance. What were your key findings? Our main finding was that returns on microfinance portfolios have relatively low correlations with other investment categories such as the local economy and the local banking sector, as well as with standard international indexes such as the major equity sectors. Our study was motivated by our belief that microfinance is semi-detached from the local economy, and certainly from the global economy. In boom periods, microfinance borrowers do better, but not as well as the mainstream part of the local economy, and during recessionary periods the same applies – they do worse, but not as badly as the mainstream. Effectively, this is a key foundation for defining a separate…

School Launches $200-Million Campaign A NEW $200-MILLION FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN for the Rotman School of Management – the largest in Canadian business school history – was announced on October 29 at a special event held at the School. The campaign, which will end in 2012, will raise funds for the School’s previously-announced expansion and will be invested in attracting and supporting the world’s best business academics and graduate students. Of the total campaign goal, $140 million will be raised from private donations. As previously announced, the Government of Ontario has committed $50 million towards the construction of a new facility for the School. An additional $10 million in government support has since been allocated to the expansion project. “With this campaign, the future of business education has never been brighter at…

THE ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT has partnered with the University of Toronto Press to create Rotman/UTP Publishing, a new imprint devoted to publishing actionable business information of exceptional quality. “In recent years the Rotman School has earned a global reputation for thought leadership,” says Dean Roger Martin. “Our faculty’s research ranks in the top 20 worldwide, and individual areas and professors rank even higher. This new partnership with UTP will allow us to further our reputation for offering the latest in business thinking.” On October 30, Rotman/UTP Publishing launched its inaugural title, Bruce Little’s Fixing the Future: How Canada’s Usually Fractious Governments Worked Together to Rescue the Canada Pension Plan. The book explains how the CPP was overhauled from 1993 to 1998 and shows why it stands as one of…

Elias Bardouniotis (MBA ’07) Manager, MaRS Venture Group Lives and works in: Toronto BEST THING ABOUT MY JOB: The clients. MY BIGGEST CHALLENGE: Time management. MOST IMPORTANT SKILLS FOR MY JOB: The ability to take self-initiative with projects; problem solving; analytical skills; and communication. PROUDEST MOMENT: The purchase of my first home. THE WORD THAT BEST DESCRIBES ME: Unrelenting. HOW I RELAX: Steak dinner with a double-‘Bombay 7’ on the side; a late-night game of poker with the ‘boys’; going to the gym. MOST IMPORTANT THING MY MBA TAUGHT ME: Teamwork. WORDS OF WISDOM: Nothing in life worth having comes easy. A ‘WICKED’ PROBLEM I’VE HAD TO TACKLE: Working with clients to overcome the systemic challenges they face in commercializing innovations. Francesca Birks (MBA ’03) Foresight Analyst, Arup Lives and…

Rotman Alumni Network MBA / MCom / DBA Full & Part-Time 1956 Born in Fargo, North Dakota, Neil Bryson was born in Fargo moved to Estevan, Saskatchewan at a very early age, where his parents became homesteaders on a large grain farm. His education began in a oneroom school with eight grades, one teacher and 30 mischievous students. Since most kids rode horses to school, the highlight of recess was horse races in the schoolyard. He left home to attend the University of Saskatchewan, graduating with a degree in Engineering followed by a four year night-time MBA. He then joined Westinghouse on a two-year apprentice program, graduating as a design engineer in 1950. He then moved on to positions in manufacturing management and ultimately became vice president of Westinghouse Canada,…