Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2011 från Rotman Management

Use Your Imagination IN ITS 2010 GLOBAL CEO STUDY, IBM asked 1,541 leaders in 60 countries to name the most important leadership competency for modern business, and the trait that ranked first won’t surprise our regular readers: creativity. “Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks,” according to the study, Capitalizing on Complexity (available online). “They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles and committed to upsetting the status quo.” While creativity gets plenty of ink these days, it actually requires a mental process that gets much less attention: imagination. Although imagination is not always creative, when creativity does occur, it necessarily springs from the imagination, and as a result, imagination has moved onto the business agenda. Even the…

Exercise #1: Give Me One Week Without… People go on diets all the time. Why not do the same for your creative health? Take a week off from clutter and distractions, such as... • Mirrors • Clocks • Newspapers • Speaking Exercise #2: Build Up Your Tolerance for Solitude Some people are afraid to be alone. The thought of going into a room to work all by themselves pains them. It’s not the solitude that slays a creative person: it’s all that solitude without a purpose. To build up your tolerance for solitude, you need a goal. Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. Do this for one minute. Anyone can handle one minute of daydreaming; work up to ten minutes a day of…

Your work is driven by a conviction that the imagination is an essential skill that must be nurtured. How did you come to this conclusion? Looking back over my 35 years of work in this area, one thing has become clear to me: what we think is what we see. We tend to interpret new information in ways that bend toward our preconceptions and confirm them, and this tendency shapes how we move through the world as individuals. Unfortunately, this tendency is magnified exponentially when we face each other as different cultural groups, which is why cultivating imagination in an organization or community is no simple matter. The general assumption is that you have to decide to do something before you imagine what it is; but in reality, imagination comes…

Like most design educators, I am excited about the increased interest in creativity in business thinking these days. Yet I worry about what the outcome will be. My fear is that creative types are coming to the table simply to make more fancy do-dads for the top one per cent of the economic pyramid. Will they instead make a more meaningful contribution? Below are just a few promising business models that promote a laudable combination of creativity and social responsibility and hopefully, will prove inspirational. Micro Entrepreneurship: Oorja Stove Micro Entrepreneurship models create jobs for the poor, and one of the most elegant applications of this principle is Oorja Stove. The product is innovative because it helps people who traditionally cook on wood fires-which is bad for health and the…

IN THE 1990S, PROCTER & GAMBLE set its sights on a diamond in the rough. Oil of Olay had joined its portfolio in 1985 when P&G rescued Richardson-Vicks from a hostile takeover by Unilever. A relatively small business with annual sales of $200 million, it had developed a niche international following but had become a stale brand-popularly mocked as "Oil of Old Lady" by young women who, as children, watched their mothers, aunts and grandmothers apply the beauty fluid before going to bed. P&G felt that this brand could shed its oily heritage with a proposition that more widely addressed the needs of modern women. In 2000, it ditched the ’oil’ and relaunched Olay with a breakthrough product, Olay Total Effects. Grounded in insights about how young women identified signs…

Dorje Mundle Global Head of Corporate Citizenship Novartis Our Approach: I’d like to start by making a couple of predictions: first, I foresee some significant opportunities for large corporations to really drive social change by employing socially-entrepreneurial techniques; and second, we will see a significant increase in acceleration of the uptake and deployment of these kinds of initiatives over the next three years. To counter this optimism, I will also predict that the impact achieved through this uptake will fall significantly short of the potential impact that could be achieved if companies were to overcome some of the challenges and obstacles of making this happen on a broader scale. Now for the Novartis story. In 2006, our executive committee was challenged by the late C.K. Prahalad to think about what…

Q & A Most people assume that creativity is separate from other kinds of cognition. What is the more complex truth? The reality is that creativity consists of many different types of cognition. Even though we often refer to it in the singular, it really deserves the plural. The more practical side of this relatively new idea is that we have to do a better job of fine-tuning our thought processes to make sure we’re thinking in the right way, depending on the problem we have in front of us. Some kinds of creative problems require us to increase our attention-to chug a triple espresso and focus on the task-while others demand that we take a long, warm shower or find some other way to relax, in order to increase…

EIGHT YEARS AGO I WROTE A PIECE for Rotman Magazine on "The Responsibility Cycle." My argument was straightforward: there are three basic stages to the business cycle. Stage 1 is the recession, when firms downsize. This is when firms cut costs, mainly period not production costs, and they lower their break-even point. Mergers and acquisition activity drops off, and firms focus on survival. This is when the press is full of stories about ’hollowing out’, downsizing and outsourcing. Stage 2 is when the inevitable recovery sets in and firms get a quick boost in profits, since they have lowered their break-even point, so that earnings dramatically increase even with minimal top-line growth. Stage 3 is the danger zone, when the quick earnings boost drops away and firms have to rely…

THE TERM ’DESIGN THINKING’ has lost some of its lustre of late, especially in business publications. This is the natural result of throwing around a new term with a little too much enthusiasm and not quite enough understanding. This is truly unfortunate, because the qualities it describes have never been more important. The core of design thinking’s problem could be that it’s so difficult to pin down. While its effects are fairly clear-a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning that leads to an unusually-pragmatic strain of creativity-thinking of any sort is a human activity, and humans are hard to figure out. Discussions about design thinking tend to focus on companies that employ it and the successes they achieve, rather than the people who actually do it. This poses a problem…

WITH THE RAPID PACE OF CHANGE in the global economy, the governance of long-horizon investment institutions has never been more important. A new program aims to improve and enhance the board effectiveness and governance of pension funds, national reserve funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowment funds: the Board Effectiveness Program for Pension and Other Long-Horizon Investment Institutions is being offered by the Rotman International Centre for Pension Management (ICPM) and Rotman Executive Programs. "Not surprisingly, the governance and management of pension and other long-horizon institutions has become increasingly complex as many have grown into financial giants," says Keith Ambachtsheer, ICPM director and academic director of the new program. Ambachtsheer recently received the CFA Institute’s 2011 Award for Professional Excellence, which is presented periodically to someone whose exemplary achievements and leadership…

A LEADER IN HEALTH SECTOR and corporate strategy has joined the Rotman faculty. Will Mitchell comes to Toronto from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He will be a visiting professor of Strategic Management during the 2011-12 academic year and will hold the Anthony S. Fell Chair in New Technologies and Commercialization for the duration of his visit. Prof. Mitchell’s appointment will greatly strengthen the capabilities of the Rotman Centre for Health Sector Strategy and expand course offerings in the School’s MBA and Executive Education programs. Since 2003, the Rotman MBA has offered a major in Health Sector Management and offers numerous Executive Programs for healthcare professionals. The Rotman School is the leading provider of senior leadership development programs for hospitals in Ontario. Prof. Mitchell will teach new elective courses…

IN 2005, in response to a request from members of the U.S. Congress and Senate, the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine published a seminal report titled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future." In the report, the academies made the case that the United States was facing a global competitive threat and warned that, "without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position." In essence, the report warned of a growing innovation gap, with America on the wrong side of it. Fortunately, the report’s writers had a prescription for renewing America’s competitive edge: not surprisingly, given their backgrounds, they urged a greater emphasis on…

WHEN DESIGNER HUGH DUBBERLY asked Tim Brennan of Apple’s Creative Services group to define design for his book, How Do You Design?, Brennan drew the following picture: Design, this drawing asserts, is simply magic-a mysterious no-man’s land where only the brave dare tread. Such a definition mocks the idea that a formal process could possibly exist for navigating its many hairpin turns. Our advice: don’t be put off by Brennan’s view of design. Design has many different meanings, and the approach we will describe here is more akin to Dorothy’s ruby slippers than to a magic wand: you’ve already got the power; you just need to figure out how to use it. Can the average manager be transformed into the next Jonathan Ive? No more than your local golf pro…

Arts education pioneer Maxine Greene has been Philosopher in Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute since 1976. Following are some highlights of her thinking on the links between the Arts and the imagination. "Our interest at LCI is in the connection between imagination-the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise-and the arts. Our view is based on the belief that the more we can come to understand, say, the patterns of movement in The Goldberg Variations or the reciprocity between bodies in motion and music, the more our imagination is likely to be activated. When that happens, the dance performance (or musical piece) is transformed into an event in our consciousness. More images become visible; more meanings emerge, and our shared world becomes strangely more intelligible.…

WHEN OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR. SAID, "I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity," he might well have been referring to the Zen aesthetic ideal of shibumi. This Japanese word is reserved for objects and experiences that exhibit all at once the very best of everything and nothing: elegant simplicity; effortless effectiveness; beautiful imperfection. I first came upon this concept over 30 years ago through the bestselling spy novel Shibumi, by the late author Trevanian (the nom de plume of Dr. Rodney William Whitaker). Trevanian’s view paralleled Holmes’s thoughts on ’simplicity beyond complexity’: "Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances." Little did I know at the time that this…

IT IS SEPTEMBER, 1974. At the tender age of 21, I don the only suit I own-a brown pinstripe with bell bottom pants-a blue shirt with a white collar and a paisley-patterned tie, and trim my mutton-chop sideburns. It is my first day at work as a brand assistant at Lever Bros. in London. My new boss, Chris-the lanky, congenial brand manager of a laundry detergent named Radiant-greets me cordially at the reception desk and brings me to his office. While he has been greeting me, his boss has left a note on his desk. It reads, I look forward to your analysis showing that Radiant advertising is worthwhile. G. (his initial). That is it. "Hmm", says Chris, apparently somewhat bemused by the note. "I wonder how we’ll do that?"…

Q & A GE’s infrastructure, finance and media businesses operate collectively under the ’imagination at work’ banner. Why did you decide to make imagination so synonymous with your brand? To create a strong brand, you need to focus on something that is broad enough that it can resonate in different industries and with various different kinds of customers and employees-a unifying theme that pulls everyone together. About a decade ago, right after 9/11, we started asking, ’Where is our company going? What is the mission ahead of us?’ I don’t think we ever could have predicted what unfolded in the first decade of the 21st century, but we knew that things were going to be different, and that GE needed to be different, too. Thomas Edison was one of our…

IF THE GOAL OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM is to train problem solvers for the world-and not just specialized thinkers and speakers of tongues, jargons and dialects-then the very nature of human intelligence has to be reappraised, because the problems of the world, great or small, have no respect for disciplines. This is true not only of problems that have distinct social and human components-which clearly require the interpersonally adaptive deployment of multiple patterns of thinking-but also of problems that are patently technical in nature. Discipline-based education, nonetheless, continues to shape our current view of intelligence, which has led to a chasm between the problems we need to solve and the kinds of thinkers we are training to tackle those problems. This chasm threatens to make Peter Drucker’s admonishment that ‘The…

Q & A How important is an active imagination to thriving in today’s world? Very. We are designed to want to find out about the world, but that’s not our most important gift; for human beings, the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you’re sitting in right now: every object in it started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone’s mind. And this is even more true of people. Everything that I am-a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist-all of these kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas, too. That is what our minds do best: take the imaginary and make it real. And at a time when innovation and change are so critical for our society, the ability…

Q & A The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation’s projects are focused around three areas: Redesigning Practice, Community Health Transformation and Care-at-a-Distance. Which currently contains the greatest challenges? All three hold uniquely different challenges, but I would say Redesigning the Practice has the greatest amount of scrutiny around it. That’s because there is an existing practice model in place and everyone who works here is highly invested in it. As you can imagine, any group that has been tasked with possibly undoing some of that is going attract a lot of attention. It’s been quite challenging to foster the divergent exploration from which we hope the disruptive model may emerge. The Community Health Platform is something Mayo has less experience in. Historically, we have operated very much as a ’destination…

IN MAY, ROTMAN EXECUTIVE PROGRAMS placed first globally in the New Skills and Learning category among international executive education open enrolment programs ranked by the Financial Times. High marks in several program content and design categories raised the School’s overall ranking four places from 2010, to 24th worldwide. Other categories for which the School received top ten scores included: the degree to which student expectations were met; course flexibility; and the appropriateness of class size, structure and design. Rotman programs were ranked third worldwide for the participant selection process and the provision of advanced information on course content. Rotman Executive Programs’ unique curricula are grounded in Integrative Thinking, an innovative approach to solving business problems that enables the creation of new solutions instead of choosing between existing models. To determine…

FOR THE 39TH CONSECUTIVE YEAR, five Rotman MBA students are working together to find creative solutions to complex problems for clients as partners in the Impact Consulting Group. Each partner brings their own professional experience and industry knowledge to client work and can tackle a range of consulting projects for clients large and small. While they tap the resources of the Rotman School, including the School’s award winning faculty and research facilities, the Impact Consulting Group operates as an independent, client-centric organization. "Impact looks for challenging engagements where we can add significant, measurable value for our clients", says Ashwini (Asha) Srikantiah (MBA ’12). "This can range from developing innovative marketing strategies, to improving or evaluating almost any aspect of a business." MBA students founded the Impact Consulting Group in 1972.…

You have said that "In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative." Please explain. Being creative is a full-time job, with its own daily patterns. Think about it this way: we stretch before we jog, we practice the violin before we play-and it’s no different for our minds. Anyone who has been successful in a creative profession has their own routine for preparing for their work, whether it’s a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory. The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration-maybe more. Igor Stravinski always did the same thing each morning when he entered his studio: he sat at the…

When groups want to generate new ideas, brainstorming is often their first course of action. When this technique is effective, participants draw on each others’ pre-existing knowledge to create new combinations of ideas not previously considered. But brainstorming can fail in at least as many ways as it can succeed. Over the past eight years I have worked closely with designers who take brainstorming very seriously and together, we have added a new technique to the brainstorming mix: improvisation. Like brainstorming, improvisation is a creative collaboration between people with a common goal of developing engaging ideas within a prescribed amount of time. To date, I have taught improvisation techniques to approximately 60 practitioners, 170 undergraduate and graduate students and 80 faculty members at Stanford and Northwestern Universities. Early on, participants…

WHILE HEALTHCARE CHALLENGES ABOUND in every society on earth, there is an overriding demand for improved services for the 2.6 billion people who are living on less than $2 a day. Not surprisingly, this group faces considerable barriers, including limited health insurance, low health literacy and residence in slums or remote areas that are frequently underserved. Such barriers must be carefully considered in the design of any product or service created for this group. Due in part to significant gaps in the availability of public health services, the presence of private providers in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) has become significant. Recent estimates suggest that the poor seek care in the private sector for up to 95 per cent of cases of childhood illnesses across a wide range of countries. Of…

FEW PEOPLE WILL BE SURPRISED TO HEAR that the number-one reason for customer complaints these days is poor service: long wait times, impersonal delivery, inconvenient hours and locations-the list goes on. Perhaps this is because everything from marketing slogans ("have it your way," "affordable luxury") to new technologies ("always-on," "on demand") has led people to believe that the customer is always right, no matter what. The same technologies that have led us to expect instant gratification from service providers have also enabled businesses to develop innovative, efficient models for accommodating customers’ intensified demands. Emerging web-based healthcare provider Hello Health is a prime example. By some accounts, the platform has become the new business model for primary care, one that helps physicians get paid for everything they do (whether they practice…

IN 1982, JAY DOBLIN AND LARRY KEELEY walked into a meeting with the top executives at Xerox, including newly-appointed CEO David Kearns and co-founder C. Peter McColough. These were serious guys who were pioneering incredible advances in Physics, Optics and Engineering. Xerox was the undisputed king of copiers. Yet Jay had sacrilege in his hands: the Canon PC10. Xerox’s leaders were distinctly unimpressed by this chugging machine, which laboriously churned out a series of fairly poor quality copies right there in the boardroom. As Larry tells the story today, their scowls said it all: "We are busy people. Why are you showing us such an inferior product?" They were right, the copier was inferior-and yet, as we know from disruptive innovation theory, the Canon design heralded the end of Xerox’s…

Appliances: ENERGY STAR qualified dishwashers, clothes washers, refrigerators and high efficiency water heaters Aviation: True Course Flight Management System; GEnx Aircraft Engine Commercial Finance: Environmental Performance Services with Telematics Consumer Finance: Australia Eco Mastercard; Energy-efficient Home Improvement Loans Energy: Jenbacher Biogas Engine; Solar energy; Wind energy; Zonal combustion tuning for coal-fired boilers Energy Financial Services: Greenhouse Gas Services, LLC (a GE AES Venture) Healthcare: Centricity Enterprise Electronic Medical Records; Digital mammography; Digital X-ray; High Efficiency CT (Computed Tomography) Systems; High Efficiency MR (Magnetic Resonance) Systems Lighting: EMERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent lighting; High Efficiency Evolve LED Fixtures for general lighting; High Efficiency Halogen Lamps Transportation: 1033 Locomotive Emission Kits; China Mainline Evolution Locomotive; PowerHaul Engine; SmartBurn technology; Trip Optimizer Software Water: Advanced Biological Metals Removal system; Desalination; DusTreat Control Treatment…

Q & A Movie producer Peter Guber has brought to life dozens of our best-loved stories, from Rain Man to Terminator 2 and Groundhog Day. Despite roles including studio chief at Columbia Pictures and chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, he says that for the first four decades of his career, he didn’t understand what he was doing. "It took me 37 years to figure out what I was," he says. "And then I realized: Oh my God-I’m a storyteller!" He explains to Mathew Budman You argue that "The heart is always the first target in storytelling," much more so than the head or the wallet. Is that true, even at a time when everyone is thinking hard about their wallets? Absolutely. It doesn’t mean that economic considerations aren’t…

In your research, you study the differences between marketing ’really new products’ (RNPs) and ’incrementally-new products’ (INPs). How do you define these terms? RNPs are products that include new benefits and entail a high learning cost. For example, the iPad. The primary product type we studied was technology-based RNPs, but our definition also includes other types of products and services whose benefits and costs are not understood for individual consumer groups. For example, a baby stroller isn’t typically thought of as an RNP, but for new parents who have no prior experience with them, the benefits and learning costs of a stroller may not be easily understood, making it a RNP for this group. Like RNPs, INPs also include new benefits, but they do not include a high learning cost,…

Q & A You believe that the best designs address three parts of our brains: the new brain, the mid brain and the old brain. Please explain how they differ. The ’new brain’ is the part of the brain that evolved most recently-it’s the conscious part that we’re used to focusing on. But there are two other parts of the brain, and for simplification purposes I call them the ’mid’ and the ’old’. The mid brain is the part that deals with emotional processing, social interaction processing and the processing of images. This part of the brain is extremely important as it has a huge effect on our decisions. The ’old’ part of the brain is the part that evolved the earliest, and it remains focused on our survival. It…

A PROFESSOR EMERITUS at the Rotman School of Management has honoured four former faculty members who were pivotal in the establishment of the Rotman PhD Program by creating four separate fellowships for doctoral students. Professor Emeritus William Waters (MBA ’62) has committed up to $1,000,000 in matching funds towards fellowships in honour of the late Myron J. Gordon, professor emeritus of Finance; the late Warren Main, professor emeritus of Economics and former Dean of the Faculty of Management; the late James Poapst, a professor emeritus of Finance; and Robert J. House, Joseph Frank Bernstein Professor of Organizational Studies and Professor of Management, Wharton School of Business. Funds raised for these fellowships will also be matched by the University of Toronto, tripling each donor’s investment. Prof. Waters joined the School in…

Complete details are available at rotman.utoronto.ca/events September 19, 5:00-6:00pm, Toronto Startup Experts Speaker Series Topic: The Lean Startup: The Radical New Approach Savvy Entrepreneurs Use to Unleash Creativity, Work Smarter and Get Products to Market Sooner Speaker: Eric Ries, Author, Startup Lessons Learned Blog; Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Harvard Business School September 20, 6:00-8:00pm, London, UK Big Ideas Speaker Series Topic: Fixing the Game: How Runaway Expectations Broke the Economy and How to Get Back to Reality Panelists: Prof. Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School; Stefan Stern, Director of Strategy, Edelman; Contributing Editor, Management Today; Visiting Professor of Management Practice, Cass Business School; Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor and ’Schumpeter’ Columnist, The Economist; Author Moderator: Ravi Mattu, Editor-Business Life, Financial Times September 26, 5:00-6:00pm, Toronto Economics Experts Speaker Series Topic: Foreign Ownership of Canadian Industry Speaker: Prof. Ed Safarian,…