Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2014 från Rotman Management

MOST OF OUR READERS ARE AWARE that the Rotman School’s goal is to train creative problem solvers who can tackle today’s most complex problems, and that this focus is shared by our magazine. As a result, this issue is the third in a series: we published Thinking about Thinking in Winter 2008, and Thinking about Thinking II in Winter 2011. With this issue, we pick up the mantle once again in an effort to provide you with the very latest tools and methods to help you develop into a world-class thinker and problem solver. We could have called this ‘The Metacognition Issue’, but the term might have scared some people off. While it sounds lofty, metacognition simply means ‘thinking about thinking’, and our ability to do this is one of…

WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD ‘CREATIVITY’, what do you think of next? If you are like many people, your mind immediately leaps to artistic endeavours like sculpture, drawing, music or dance. You may believe that architects and designers are paid to be creative thinkers, but CEOs, lawyers and doctors are not. Or you may feel that being creative is a fixed trait, like having brown eyes — either you’re born with creative genes or you’re not. As brothers who have worked together for 30 years at the forefront of innovation, we have come to see this set of misconceptions as ‘the creativity myth.’ Our latest book — Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All — is about the opposite of that myth: it’s about what we call ‘creative…

IMAGINE IF YOU WORKED for a company where, every Monday morning at 9am, an all-staff e-mail arrived in your inbox from the CEO with the following subject line: Our Company’s New Strategy. After a few weeks of this, surely nobody would get any work done, in anticipation of the next announcement of a change in direction. While this is an extreme example, the fact is, any idea or strategy must be temporarily ‘frozen in time’ if you want to make anything significant happen. The problem is, our world is not frozen at all: change continues apace, and the gap between your strategy and the world around you is continually shifting (and usually, increasing). If it hasn’t already happened at your organization, the day will come when a new strategy will…

“WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS,” yells the president and CEO of a business-to-business plastics manufacturer. “Of course we do,” agrees the sales director. “We deal with them every single minute of every day. We couldn’t sell a dime otherwise.” The company’s senior managers are gathered for an allday meeting to discuss the findings of an external survey on how the firm uses market information. The survey was requested by the general manager following growing concerns that the company was simply catering to clients’ everyday needs without actually putting together a clear, organization-wide, customerbased strategy. Needless to say, emotions in the meeting are running high, as many of the board members reject the survey’s findings. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that they call into question the market information systems…

MANY YEARS AGO, Peter Drucker warned that the most dangerous thing in times of turbulence and change is not the change itself, but operating with yesterday’s logic. Today, we increasingly hear the alarm siren signaling that organizations can no longer survive — much less thrive — by continuing to use frameworks developed during the Industrial Revolution. Clearly, new operating logic and corresponding frameworks are required. One framework that has emerged in recent years to illuminate how networked systems function optimally centers on ecological thinking and its application to organizations. The implication is that an ‘organizational ecosystem’ functions much as a biological ecosystem does, exhibiting both desirable and undesirable properties that are similar to what we see in nature. In this article we will discuss the meaningful similarities and fundamental differences…

Your recent research looks at emotionally-intelligent decision making. How do you define ‘emotional intelligence’? Some of the most critical skills of emotional intelligence (‘EI’) include empathy, which is the ability to understand how other people feel; emotion understanding, which entails identifying the reasons for your own and other people’s emotions; and regulating your emotions, which involves coping with stress, modifying undesirable emotions and generating desired emotions. Getting rid of anger, for instance, and generating enthusiasm. We can now measure emotional intelligence, and we know that some people have developed these skills to a greater degree than others. In my research I’m interested in how variations on different aspects of EI relate to how people behave in the workplace. In the case of this particular research, we looked at how EI…

FAILURE IS AN INEVITABLE outcome of operating in an uncertain environment, which is why so many attempts at innovation go awry these days. However, some of the most successful organizations have embraced this fact — and the opportunity to learn from failure, thereby improving their innovation track records. Leading organizations, from Apple to Google and beyond, have learned from early-stage failures. A classic example is Apple’s Newton PDA tablet in the 1990s, a flop whose core concept eventually found its way into the iPad. Or the predictable user furor over nearly any new Facebook feature, which eventually gets re-cast by the company as ‘market research’ or ‘design validation’. Learning from failure isn’t a new idea. A decade ago, when Henry Chesbrough of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley…

What was the genesis of the Rotman Self-Development Lab? I was working on my post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School, under the supervision of Associate Dean Mihnea Moldoveanu. Mihnea had this vision of providing students with a place where they could develop interpersonal and interactive skills, and the self-awareness that comes along with those skills. Most people now recognize that ‘soft skills’ are important, but they tend to believe you should develop them on your own time, or maybe through a quick half-day workshop on presentation skills. We approach it with a lot more intellectual rigour, because we understand how difficult it is to change patterns of behaviour in people. At the moment, this course is voluntary. From extensive research, we know that self-development…

Upcoming Events Complete details are available at rotman.utoronto.ca/events January 15, 5:00-6:00pm, Toronto Getting it Done Experts Speaker Series @ Rotman Speaker: Duncan Fulton, Managing Editor, Leader to Leader His Book: Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way: Developing & Applying a Forward-Focused Mindset (McGraw-Hill, 2013) January 20, 4:00-6:00pm, London, UK Rotman Strategy Experts Spea ker Series 2 Speakers: Tim Rowley, Associate Professor of Strategy & Director - Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics & Board Effectiveness @ Rotman; Author Andrew Shipilov, Associate Professor of Strategy & Akzo Nobel Fellow of Strategic Management, INSEAD; Author Their Book: Network Advantage: How to Unlock Value From Your Alliances & Partnerships (Jossey-Bass, Jan. 7, 2014) January 20, 5:00-6:00pm, Toronto Creativity in Business Experts Speaker Series @ Rotman Speaker: David Burkus, Assistant Professor of Management, Oral…

IN THE EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE, Peter Drucker writes at length about decision making, arguing that it is a central executive task. An effective decision-maker, he says, focuses on the most important decisions, works to achieve deep conceptual understanding and isn’t overly impressed by speed. But Drucker also points to a particular idiosyncrasy of effective decision-makers: “The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash of divergent opinions and out of serious consideration of the competing alternatives.” Effective decision makers, Drucker says, disregard conventional wisdom about reaching consensus and instead work to create disagreement and dissention. As an example, he points to the man who turned General Motors into the largest company in the world: “Alfred Sloan is reported to have said at a meeting of one of his…

ROB MCEWEN HAD A PROBLEM. The chairman and CEO of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner — a mine nearby was thriving; but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine. Then, inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the opensource revolution. Bucking fierce internal resistance, he created The Goldcorp Challenge: the company put Red Lake’s closelyguarded topographic data online and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could identify rich drill sites. To the astonishment of players in the mining…

IN THE MIDST OF OUR CHAOTIC WORLD, no matter what your circumstances or goals, we can assure you of one thing: you will be better off if you are a skilled thinker. As a manager, leader, employee, citizen, friend, parent — in every realm and situation of your life — good thinking pays off. Poor thinking, in turn, inevitably causes problems, wastes time and energy and engenders frustration and pain. Critical thinking is the disciplined art of ensuring that you use the best thinking you are capable of in any set of circumstances, which entails asking yourself questions such as, What is really going on in this situation? Am I deceiving myself when I believe that ...? What are the likely consequences of failing to ...? If I want to…

IF YOU SPEND SOME TIME studying the kinds of decisions people make and the outcomes of those decisions, you’ll find that humanity does not have a particularly impressive track record. Career choices are often abandoned or regretted; business decisions are frequently flawed; and on the personal front, we’re not doing much better: we don’t save enough for retirement; we let work interfere with our family life; and 88 per cent of New Year’s resolutions are broken. Why do we have such a hard time making good choices? The most widely-used decision making process is the prosand-cons list, whereby you mentally or physically list the positive and negative attributes of a particular choice and tally them up. The advantage of this approach is that it’s deliberative: rather than jump to conclusions,…

When it comes to how we approach work — and life — you believe people belong to one of two camps. What are they? In both work and life, there are two basic types of motivation. Some people look at their goals with what we call a ‘promotion focus’, meaning that when they think about doing well on a particular project, they’re thinking about what they can gain from being successful — how they will end up better off, make progress and advance. The second type of motivation is a ‘prevention focus’. When these people think about doing well on something, they’re thinking about what they can avoid losing if they’re successful. They might think about how success on a particular project will make their job more secure, for instance.…

IN WORKPLACE GROUPS, cognitive diversity usually trumps IQ; but not unconditionally. Research by complexity scientist Scott Page demonstrates that a team of diverse thinkers tackling a problem will outperform the smartest individual in a group. The cognitive biases and limitations of even the smartest individual are usually no match for a group of minds correcting and building on one another. But this impressive benefit of team thinking is completely lost if its members are unwilling to challenge each other. The reluctance to express opposing views troubled psychologist Irving Janis 40 years ago. Janis coined the term ‘groupthink’ to describe the tendency for teams to move to-wards unanimous conclusions because of individual desires to conform. Groupthink is just one form of a broader obstacle to high-quality discussion: the pervasive and dominating…

Your research includes work on Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (‘ODT’). How do you define it? Human beings are characterized by two basic, opposing needs: a need for inclusion — a desire to ‘belong’ that motivates our immersion in social groups; and a need for differentiation from others. An ‘optimally distinctive’ identity is one that satisfies the need for inclusion within an in-group (i.e. feeling similar and belonging with a group) as well as the need for distinctiveness between that in-group and various outgroups, so as to distinguish one’s group from others. These needs have their origin in our evolutionary past, where security and survival depended on inclusion in stable, clearly-differentiated social groups. As a consequence, our sense of personal security is maximized in a context of ‘ingroup’ membership with clear in-group/out-group…

IN OUR WORK, we are often asked to improve the strategic thinking capabilities of a company’s leaders. Defining what a client means by ‘more strategic’ can be an intriguing and revealing exercise, because the variations between definitions say a lot about the assumptions and biases people bring to strategy. To get a sense of what strategic thinking looks like in action, we often ask leaders to name a gifted strategic thinker and to describe what makes them gifted. The usual suspects emerge; among them, Steve Jobs, for his singular design vision and the turnaround he engineered at Apple; Gandhi, for his lasting effect on change movements for generations based on the success of civil disobedience; and Oprah Winfrey for her ability to leverage her brand across a wide spectrum of…

Your latest book is about a skill that you call “the hidden driver of excellence”. Tell us about it. My new book is about the power of focus, and the brain systems involved in training our attention. I argue that leaders need to be adept at three varieties of focus. The first is self-awareness, and as a result of that, the ability to manage your own emotions; the second is awareness of other people; and the third is an outer focus, whether it’s an awareness of your organization as a whole or a larger sense of the broader systems that affect your industry. The largest possible lens for our focus encompasses global systems and considers the needs of everyone — including the powerless and the poor — peering far ahead…

HAVE YOU BEEN ‘NUDGED’ to behave in a more socially-or economically-sustainable way lately? While you might not realize it, you probably have. Drawing on findings from Behavioural Economics, University of Chicago Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein first introduced the notion of ‘nudging’ in their 2008 best-seller, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. A nudge, they taught us, is any aspect of the ‘choice architecture’ that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way, without removing any options or significantly changing economic consequences. For example, consider two school cafeterias that want to help students consume less junk food. The first one decides to attack the problem by placing a ‘tax’ on burgers and French fries and banning the sale of desserts altogether. The second cafeteria takes an alternate route,…

IN MAY 1490, Benito Garcia, a woolcomber from Spain’s Toledo province, was accused of heresy, sacrilege and conspiracy. Dragged to a dungeon and given 200 lashes, he professed his innocence. Even when heresy was only half-proven in those days, the king’s Grand Inquisitor had established five prescribed steps for local vicars to follow: threaten torture; display the instruments of torture; strip the suspect in readiness; strap the suspect naked to the rack; and, finally, turn the winch. Benito was taken through all five steps and, though stretched by several inches on the medieval device, held strong for five days. Finally, his will broke: he ultimately confessed to charges of witchcraft. Flash forward 500 years to an American classroom in an affluent New York neighborhood. Here we meet Adam, a nineyear-old…

I’M STANDING NEAR THE DELI COUNTER at the supermarket. Close to me are five or six other people, and we are all eyeing the same quarry: rotisserie chickens turning on a spit in the monster-sized oven against the far wall. The timer on the oven tells us that there are just over three minutes left before the chickens are ready. More people gather. I inch closer to the counter. The others do the same. I can feel a tension thickening in the atmosphere; my nerves are starting to peak, my heart is beating faster. I stop for a second and ask myself why I feel this way. All of us standing at the counter can see that there are more than enough chickens available for the crowd. Even if there…

HARRIS FELT STUCK. At age 39, he’d had a successful career as a regulatory affairs expert. Although at the top of his function in a celebrated biotech firm, something was missing. He yearned to run a business, to manage a profit and loss. He wanted challenge; he could do his job in his sleep. His mentor asked him (again) to be patient. His wife, at home with two young children, cautioned him against leaving for a risky start-up; he was the breadwinner after all. For him, it was now or never. In the interim, he was working night and day on a new drug introduction without a clear idea of what to do next. Susan’s job as the head of the change management practice of a leading consulting firm fell…

Most of us think we are better drivers, more honest and more intelligent than other people. You have found that these inflated beliefs aren’t just inaccurate, they can lead to problems. How so? Virtually all of us have something in common: we think too highly of our skills and abilities. On a wide range of dimensions, we rate ourselves higher than our peers, colleagues, or competitors — to an extent that can be absurd. A 1997 U.S. News and World Report survey, for example, asked 1,000 Americans a simple question: “Who do you think is most likely to get into heaven?” Overall, the respondents believed that then-president Bill Clinton had a 52 per cent chance, basketball superstar Michael Jordan had a 65 per cent chance, and Mother Teresa had a…

How do you define metacognition? Metacognition means thinking about thinking — the ability of the human brain to monitor its own cognition in order to shape and control future behaviour. For example, a student who believes she has studied enough for an upcoming exam is making a metacognitive decision about the strength of her memory. She’s not getting any feedback about her learning, but she’s able to utilize this assessment to decide whether to stop studying or continue working. There are two aspects of metacognition — one is the monitoring, or the thinking about thinking; and the second is then using those judgments to control our behaviour. I study how metacognitive monitoring is implemented in the human brain. My research aims to construct a ‘picture’ of how the brain mechanisms…

The Rotman School of Management continues to build on its reputation for excellence in teaching and research, with new faculty appointments for the 2013/14 academic year. “This year’s appointments all have very strong teaching and research records and are joining us from some of the top universities in the world,” says Joel Baum, professor of Strategic Management and associate dean, faculty, at the Rotman School. BING HAN comes to the Rotman School as a professor of Finance from the University of Texas at Austin. Recently he has been a visiting professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Peking University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. His research and teaching interests include theoretical and empirical asset pricing, behaviour finance, risk management and real…