Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2016 från Rotman Management

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In the Information Age, we have more choices than ever before — which makes choosing harder than ever. If you go to your local Barnes & Noble store, you can choose from maybe 50,000 books; but Amazon offers millions. Thankfully, it also has a ‘model of you’, based on everything you’ve ever done on the site. Effectively, this model does your browsing for you, and presents you with your own bookshelf, different from everyone else’s. Netflix has a similar model for movies. These customer models generate 33 per cent of Amazon’s revenue and 75 per cent of Netflix’s. Such models aren’t just for books and movies: increasingly, they are being created for everything we consume, online or offline. Even Walmart uses machine learning to decide which goods to stock and…

Following are some of the core assumptions that Hasbro needed to selectively forget to ensure its future: • We are a product company. • We make analog-based games that have long product life cycles and generate high margins. • We distribute through brick-and-mortar retail outlets. • Our consumers are kids aged 15 and younger. • We make board games that promote face-to-face social interaction in a physical setting. • We are an American company.…

10% of people will be wearing clothes connected to the Internet 91.2% 90% of people will have unlimited and free 91% (advertising-supported) storage 1 trillion sensors will be connected to the Internet 89.2% The first robotic pharmacist 86.5% 10% of reading glasses will be connected to the Internet 85.5% 80% of people will have a digital presence on the Internet 84.4% The first 3D-printed car will be in production 84.1% The first government will replace its census with Big Data sources 82.9% The first implantable mobile phone will be available commercially 81.7% 5% of consumer products will be printed in 3D 81.1% 90% of the population will be using smartphones 80.7% 90% of the population will have regular access to the Internet 78.8% Driverless cars will equal 10% of all…

CHARACTER: Five qualities are fundamental to the leader as a person, to his/her identity, and give us reason to trust him/her. Authenticity – being real, genuine, transparent, and sincere in one’s relations and interactions with others. Integrity – acting with fidelity to one’s values and beliefs, living up to high standards of morality and promise keeping. Concern – demonstrating interest in others, encouraging adaptive development, and promoting a healthy, sustainable culture. Restraint – displaying a calm disposition, characterized by reasonableness and by avoidance of emotional extremes or impulsiveness. Humility – showing awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses, an openness to others, and a belief that all persons have worth. SUBSTANCE: Five qualities inspire commitment, inform action, and lead to above-and-beyond effort. Practical Wisdom – displaying highly honed qualities of insight…

Shivon Zilis Venture Capitalist, Bloomberg Beta [a $75 million early-stage venture capital fund backed by Bloomberg L.P.] THE WORLD OF WORK is transforming at an unprecedented rate, and a large part of that is due to advances in data and machine intelligence. We take a lot of our inspiration from Bloomberg, the LP in our fund, as it was one of the first products to harness vast amounts of data and make insights immediately usable in a business context. Bloomberg is also a great template for startups: it has achieved global scale; it has a strong and open culture that embraces technology; and it has been led by its founders for decades. Bloomberg was created 30 years ago on a then-controversial idea: that information in financial markets should be more…

RAPID PROGRESS IN THE FIELD of artificial intelligence (AI) has provvoked intense debate about the implications of this trend for society. Some see a driver of economic growth and boundless opportunities to improve living standards. Others see existential threats ranging from killer robots to widespread technological unemployment. Though we believe the worst of these fears are overblown, cognitive technologies — the products of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) — cannot be ignored. They are an emerging source of competitive advantage for business and are on their way to ubiquity at work and at home. Artificial intelligence researchers have sought to develop techniques to enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks once thought to be solely the domain of humans, including playing games, recognizing faces and speech, making…

TODAY, BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PAYERS for healthcare services throughout the world are imposing strong demands for efficiencies. At the same time, unconventional competition is arising from newly-converging technologies and services, creating a platform for transformative change in healthcare quality and access. This disruption is challenging existing actors in the healthcare sector while at the same time, creating opportunities to design stronger systems. Perhaps more than ever, commercial players are at the centre of the opportunity to achieve a stronger balance of quality, cost and access to healthcare services. The core demand is straightforward, if difficult to accomplish: companies across the health and life sciences sector need to realign their goals with the changing nature of the health system, while identifying profitable opportunities to lead collaborative efforts with system stakeholders.…

IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE to inventory all of the useful transactions people conduct on the Internet every day. In 2014 alone, e-retailers based in the United States sold more than $300 billion of merchandise, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. But valuable online activity includes much more than shopping: most U.S. colleges and universities offer online courses and people commonly publish books, raise money for deserving charities, and even find life partners online. Governments, however, have not been as successful at convincing citizens to access public services online. In Ontario, the provincial government has made more than 40 services available online, including address changes, driver’s license and health card renewals, and copy requests for various records such as birth and marriage certificates. Expanding citizens’ use of just one of…

FORMER INTEL CEO ANDY GROVE famously said, “only the paranoid survive.” Clearly, in a disruptive environment, being paranoid isn’t enough. How can a business prepare itself for the possible threat of new incumbents? To address this question, I studied some prominent long-surviving firms and found a consistent theme: over time, they all proactively changed their strategy to respond to the changing environment. Traditional strategic planning seeks to pre-plan how the world will be in years to come — at a time when the reality is more akin to the Red Queen effect from Alice in Wonderland: running as fast as you can, just to stay in the same place. Faced with dynamic environments, firms need to be nimble, innovative and entrepreneurial — just to survive. Nevertheless, most firms continue to…

Describe the universal challenge faced by today’s leaders. Modern executives face two fundamental challenges: optimizing their existing business while at the same time, innovating to create new value for the future. The problem is, these challenges call for a completely different set of metrics, mindsets and leadership approaches. Managers and executives, consultants and academics have long wrestled with how to achieve this, and in response, some of them have embraced a concept known as ‘ambidexterity’ — the organizational capability to fulfill both the innovation and execution imperatives at once. However, the challenge goes beyond managing today’s business while creating tomorrow’s. I have found that a critical third element is required, and that is proactively letting go of yesterday’s values and beliefs. The fact is, to get to the future, you…

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, revolutions have occurred when new technologies and novel ways of perceiving the world trigger a profound change in economic systems and social structures. The first profound shift — the transition from foraging to farming — happened 10,000 years ago, and was made possible by the domestication of animals. The agrarian revolution combined the efforts of animals with those of humans for the purpose of production, transportation and communication. Little by little, food production improved, spurring population growth and enabling larger human settlements and the rise of cities. The agrarian revolution was followed by a series of industrial revolutions that began in the second half of the 18th century, with the first spanning from about 1760 to 1840. Triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the…

DISRUPTION IS AN OVER-USED TERM THESE DAYS, rendered almost useless as a conveyer of meaning. We need to shed the additional baggage that comes with the term as it is used today — in particular, the notion that the stumbles of every established firm are the consequence of disruption. At the same time, we need to hold onto the term’s essence, because disruption is something that firms the world over remain at risk of. For the purposes of my research, I define disruption as ‘what a firm faces when the choices that once drove its success become those that destroy its future’. This allows us to see disruption as a legitimate phenomenon, but also provides a means of explaining when a situation facing a firm is not in fact disruption,…

For the past year, as the head of innovation at MetLife Asia and running our incubator, LumenLab, I have been working with our teams to create disruptive business models that drive growth. Reimagining insurance — by moving beyond the current definition of what insurance could or should be — is our objective. In pursuing it, we have discovered that we can maximize our impact not just by building businesses, but also by affecting culture change. Specifically, it has become clear that to achieve our objective, we need to instill a growth mindset in our people. As defined by Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck, a growth mindset is an attitude about approaching challenges that embraces exploration, experimentation and collaboration. The research of Prof. Dweck and others shows that fostering this mindset…

IN A MORNING RITUAL cemented in the American zeitgeist, four million Americans get their cup of coffee at Starbucks. But among those who receive their morning pick-me-up every day, do any stop to ask the question, ‘Who serves the barista?’ Certainly, the barista seems to be paying attention. And for what seems like the first time in a long while, an influential political candidate has paid attention, too. Mirroring the growing number of news stories highlighting America’s growing inequality, Bernie Sanders’ popularity remained steadfastly throughout the entire Democratic Party primary season in the face of the ‘establishment candidacy’ of Hillary Clinton. Despite low unemployment, low interest rates, and high per capita productivity, everyday people in cities all over the U.S. dramatically protested an unjust system. To understand the current malcontent…

A lawyer by trade, you were hired as ING Direct Canada’s general counsel — and eighth employee — in 1996. What drew you to the company? The truth is, luck had a lot to do with it. The year before, I had gone with my father to his mechanic’s, and Arkadi Kuhlmann [founder of ING Direct] just happened to be there. While we waited for our cars, we chatted, and he told me about his vision for the bank. When I left the auto shop that day, I just knew I had to be a part of it — so I tracked him down and asked for another meeting. I basically told Arkadi flat out that I wanted to work for him; and after a few interviews, he agreed. I…

THE IMPERATIVE FOR INNOVATION continues to rise in importance: in The Boston Consulting Group’s 10th annual global survey of the state of innovation, 79 per cent of respondents ranked it as either their top-most priority or a top-three priority — the highest percentage since we began asking the question in 2005. At the same time, our research indicates that four attributes are critical to a robust innovation strategy: • an emphasis on speed; • the use of technological platforms; • well-run (and very often lean) R&D processes; and • the systematic exploration of adjacent markets. In this article we will take a deep dive into each of these four practices, which are enabling innovation across industries, sectors and regions. 1 AN EMPHASIS ON SPEED Speed enables companies to catch consumer…

In the realm of creativity research, there are two schools of thought: the ‘tension’ view and the ‘foundational’ view. Please describe them. Most people are familiar with the ‘tension view’ — which is commonly referred to as ‘diversity of thought’ or ‘recombination of ideas’. The underlying concept is that new ideas are in tension with how we currently think. We get so embedded in one way of thinking about the world, that it is very difficult to break out of it. Within this view of creativity, if you want new ideas, you should bring diverse people from different backgrounds, brainstorm, and do some form of recombining of their ideas to get to a breakthrough. The second view of creativity is known as the ‘foundational view’, and it suggests that, in…

Digital platforms and tools continue to transform daily operations within firms. Talk a bit about the challenges this is creating for managers. These new technologies require analytical tools and frameworks, familiarity with data, and an ability to put data, market requirements, and firm strategy together to form insights. For most people, this is very new; and it’s also new for the people they work with and manage. As a result, there is a huge skills gap at many different levels within firms. Going from data to a managerial insight is actually quite complex. Data is messy, the world it represents is complex, and both training and effort are necessary to arrive at sound interpretations. The problem is that many managers avoid complexity, almost instinctively: they’re busy, they have information overload,…

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MINDS and machines lies at the very heart of innovation, and its history has brought fundamental disruptions to the global economy. To date, this relationship has had three key stages — the third of which is unfolding today. The first stage came when we introduced powerful tools to help with agricultural work. Until then, agriculture had been the pillar of economic growth; suddenly, machines could be used to reduce workload. The second stage was the Industrial Revolution, which saw the introduction of even more powerful machines and the expansion of industry, with successive waves of automation. That phase was similar to the first, in that we were again using machines to unburden us from some of the hardest and most tedious tasks that humans were performing. While…

FOR MOST PEOPLE, it is not easy to picture the buying and selling of cognitive capabilities that have traditionally been embedded in humans — things like judgment and decision-making. Yet, thanks to recent advances in machine learning, we face the very real possibility of precisely such a ‘market for intelligence’. Given the potential of this market to transform the global economy, we must all begin preparing — now — for its emergence. In 2014, upon reflecting on the significance of achieving artificial intelligence (AI), renowned physicist Stephen Hawking wrote: “The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide; but the eradication of war,…

In the mid-1990s, toy giant Hasbro saw itself as a product company, with offerings consisting mainly of toys (G.I. Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony) and board games (Life, Monopoly, Candy Land). Hasbro competed in an industry broadly referred to as ‘family entertainment’—toys and games described by marketers as appealing to ‘kids from two to 92’. Until the 1990s, people typically purchased its products in a retail store. Today, Hasbro is a self-styled ‘branded-play company’. Its relationships with customers may or may not begin with a physical product on a shelf. Customers get to know and use its core brands across multiple platforms: online games, fan sites, movies and TV shows, digital gaming systems, and comic books and magazines produced through partnerships with Disney and others. The goal is to create…

We used to live in a world where businesses operated ‘pipelines’, creating products and services that flowed through a linear value chain from supplier to consumer. But increasingly, market upstarts are leveraging connectivity, democratized tools of production and recent developments in artificial intelligence to challenge this linear flow of value — building ‘platform ecosystems’ that enable value exchange across a network of participants. These platforms do not need to create value themselves: instead, they aid in the creation of value by producers and consumers in their network. Platforms create incentives for participation, provide a plug-and-play infrastructure for people to connect, and rules that foster interactions. Facebook doesn’t create its content, Google its web pages, Apple its apps, or Alibaba its store fronts. These successful platform companies have led the way,…

WHEN LEADERS LAY AWAKE AT NIGHT, trying to figure out how their businesses can become the next Apple, Amazon or Uber, they often focus on how they themselves can generate the next big idea. What they don’t appreciate is that innovation isn’t about leaders’ ideas: it’s about enabling great ideas to be born and flourish. The essential role of the leader is to shepherd creativity through to productivity. How to go about it, is the question. Our research has revealed some very specific, often less talked-about qualities of leaders that are likely to produce valuable innovation. Furthermore, we’ve learned that these behaviours can be measured — and that you can coach people to develop them. You may be surprised that the leader you assume should be championing innovation may not…

THE YEAR WAS 1878, and George Eastman was a 24-year-old junior clerk at the Rochester Savings Bank in dire need of a vacation. He decided to go to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. At the suggestion of a co-worker, Eastman purchased all of the requisite photographic equipment to record the trip: a camera as big as a Rottweiler, a massive tripod, a jug of water, a heavy plateholder, the plates themselves, glass tanks, an assortment of chemicals, and, of course, a large tent — this last item providing a dark place in which to spread emulsion on the plates before exposure and a dark place to develop them afterwards. Eastman never did go on that vacation; instead, he became obsessed with chemistry. Back then, photography was a ‘wet’ art,…

STORIES ABOUT MICROSOFT’S RECENT TURNAROUND often focus on CEO Satya Nadella’s efforts to establish a new customer-obsessed, data-driven culture within the company — and they’re right. But that high-level view misses another, even more enlightening story that took place behind the scenes, and with a lot more participants. With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft employed a network strategy that took advantage of the enormous power of its community — users and external developers, as well as its own employees — to make its new operating system a rousing success. The Windows Insider Program (WIP) was originally envisioned by Windows Engineering as a way to solve the ‘scale problem’, by seeking telemetry and feedback from a large community of beta-testers. Partway through the development of Windows 10, however, they decided…

A few years ago, a group of seemingly-modest startups began offering consumers limited online lending or retail-payment services. These ‘fintechs’ operated in the margins and didn’t pose an obvious threat to established financial-services companies. Today, fintechs are rapidly entering the mainstream. Some startups, like Lending Club, have become household names. And more established tech companies, including Apple, Google and Samsung, have also begun to offer fintech applications. Each delivers (or plans to deliver) highly focused financial-services applications, often more effectively and less expensively than traditional companies. They have been attracting customers in larger numbers, leaving incumbent financial-services firms with no choice but to take notice. In such fields as online lending, money transfer and credit ratings, fintech companies are breaking the dominance of financial services’ largest players in novel ways.…

In your research with Clayton Christensen, you distinguished between two categories of entrepreneurs. Please describe them. The typical definition is ‘an individual who starts a new business’, but within that definition, there are actually two categories: regular entrepreneurs and innovative entrepreneurs. A regular entrepreneur starts a business that is either a franchise or an imitation of other businesses — for example, a McDonald’s franchise or a dry cleaning business. These people are not offering anything new or unique. Innovative entrepreneurs, on the other hand, launch a venture that offers a unique value proposition, and it is based upon their own idea. Only about 15 per cent of all start-ups fit into the innovative category. This is the group that we studied closely over an eightyear period, in an effort to…

When did you first realize you had what it takes to be an entrepreneur? I don’t know that I ever had that inkling. I just sort of looked around and saw entrepreneurs succeeding, and figured I might have a chance. I never had a lemonade stand when I was a kid, but when I was in high school and university, I was always organizing things; rock concerts, fraternity parties, radio shows. I loved the idea of creating something out of nothing, and having people enjoy it. I only realized that I preferred a more entrepreneurial work environment during my summer job at Goldman Sachs, when I was a graduate student. It became clear pretty quickly that the classic corporate environment probably wasn’t for me. Soon after that, I connected with…

IN A WORLD WHERE INDUSTRIES are being disrupted left and right, having a strong brand is no longer enough to compete. These days, companies must design their internal experience to authentically embody their external image. That’s because, with greater access to information about how a company operates, why it claims to exist, and who works for it, the ability of any stakeholder to gauge brand authenticity — and inauthenticity — continues to grow. Take the example of Comcast, which, ironically, is in the business of connectivity — yet there are countless documented cases of customers having an extremely painful experience when they attempt to connect with an actual person at the company. In short, connection is being sold externally, but the brand is not being embodied internally. How does this…

EARLY IN THE 20TH CENTURY, Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase ‘creative destruction’ to describe the disruptive process of ongoing technological and economic innovation within capitalism. In his day, theories of disruption were developed to describe the cycles of change that were a part of normal market forces. Little did Schumpeter know that the landscape of business in the early 21st-century would be dominated by ever-shorter intervals of volatile disruption that would radically redefine the very concept of ‘normal’. Today, we live in a world where creative destruction is happening faster than we can react. Whether the radical changes are in products, services, experiences, technology or organizational models, we seem to have entered an age of perpetual instability in business and society where the new mantra is, ‘disrupt or…

September 8, 8:00-9:00am Speaker: Michael Bungay Stanier, Partner & Co-Founder, Box of Crayons; Author Topic: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever (Box of Crayons Press, 2016) September 12, 5:30-6:30pm Speaker: Zeynep Ton, Professor, MIT Sloan; Fellow, Martin Prosperity Institute @ Rotman; Author Topic: The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profile (New Harvest, 2014) September 13, 4:00-5:00pm Speaker: Yuval Noah Harari, Lecturer in World History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Author Topic: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Signal, 2016) September 21, 5:00-6:45pm presentation Speaker: Andi Zeisler, Co-Founder and Creative/Editorial Director, Bitch Media; Author Topic: We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl ®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement…