Monday, August 19, 2013

Social Business: Innovation, Organization & Leadership

Social Business

Thursday, August 15, 2013

People must take responsibility for managing their careers: Robert Steven Kaplan

As a vice-chairman-of-the-Goldman-Sachs- Group turned-Harvard-Business-School-professor, Robert Steven Kaplan often has graduating students dropping into his officefor career advice.
A typical case might go like this: the student applied for a high paying job in the financial services sector, but now that the offer has actually come though, he's not sure it's what he wants. He feels guilty about his ambivalence since it's a job everyone else covets and rejecting it seems selfish and self-indulgent. Maybe he should put his misgivings aside and do what his family and friends expect?

"Many of us motor through our young adult years trying to rack up one achievement after another - being 'successful'," says Kaplan, who has recently authored a book titled What You're Really Meant to Do: a road map for reaching your unique potential.
"I advise students to beware of conventional wisdom and focus on the difficult task of understanding who they are and where their interests lie. You can't be a bystander in your own life. Managing your career is 100% your responsibility." The problem is not limited to b-school campuses. Kaplan narrates numerous cases of accomplished individuals who find they no longer enjoy what they are doing. "They don't feel successful, though everyone around them thinks they are," says Kaplan.
"In mid-career executives it manifests itself in a feeling of confusion about where to turn and a concern that they have painted themselves into a corner. In older executives and professionals, it's sometimes reflected in feelings of bitterness and regret."
Whatever stage in their careers they may be at, Kaplan advises his readers to go through a process of heightening their self-awareness. The first step here is to assess one's strengths and weakness, not in terms of vague character traits, but in terms of skills.
These might include skills in written communication, presentation, quanitative analysis, negoatiation, interpersonal skills and ability to confront others constructively. The importance of these skills varies according to the job and the level of responsibility, so this analysis is an ongoing process. A skills mismatch is one of the common reasons people find themselves unhappy in a job to which they have been promoted.
In some cases, it is the reason they are not promoted. Kaplan advises everyone to make a habit out of introspecting on their skills so they may pro-actively manage their capabilities. This doesn't mean trying to develop a skill you are inherently weak at.
On the contrary, it might be best managed by delegating that part of the job to someone who is truly good at it. Kaplan presents an example from the financial sector, where a junior executive had excellent market knowledge and client skills, but lacked the quanitative skills required for financial modeling, an important part of stock picking.
She was set to quit her job when her seniors suggested she might be able to offset her weakness by teaming up with others on her client teams. She stayed on and moved up to more senior positions where her job required less modeling and ultimately emerged as one of the top professionals in her firm. "This is a lesson I learned in my own career: the capabilities of my assembled team needed to fit with my own skills and deficiencies," says Kaplan.

Is There Still a Role for Judgment in Decision-Making?

In the last several years, a veritable tsunami of advice on how to make decisions has hit the Internet and what few shelves remain in our local bookstores. The advice is a distant relative of early ideas about decision theory in which we were advised to construct decision trees, mapping outcomes, attaching values to each one, and estimating probabilities that various combinations of outcomes might occur. Judgment entered into the construction of the resulting "decision trees," but the process itself was a way of injecting a certain amount of objectivity and analysis into the decision to be made.
In recent years, we have been advised to make certain decisions in a "blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, to "think twice" by Michael Mauboussin, and to think "fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman. The replacement of customs and biases with data, "big" or "small," has been intended, at least in part, to drive out such things as tradition, habit, and even superstition in endeavors ranging from child rearing to professional sports. After all, wasn't the book and film, Moneyball, at least in part a glorification of the triumph of statistics and probabilities over intuition and managerial judgment in professional baseball?
Two recent books add to the genre of advice on decision-making. One advises us how to make better decisions. The other helps us ensure that we don't allow our decisions to get sidetracked (or sidetrack them ourselves).
In their book Decisive, the Heath brothers cite four major reasons—all linked to common human traits—why we make poor choices and how to avoid doing it. They are: (1) the "narrow framing" of problems that makes us miss options; (2) the "confirmation bias" that leads us to give undue credence to information confirming a decision while ignoring other information; (3) the injection of "short-term emotion" into the decision process; and (4) overconfidence that we naturally display about the future (something that may be peculiar to only certain of the world's cultures, by the way).
They advise us to do such things as: (1) widen our options by emphasizing the "and" over the "or" in formulating them; (2) reality-test assumptions by reviewing them with more objective associates or making small tests; (3) seek ways of attaining distance by looking at a decision through someone else's eyes or focusing on the long-term impact of the decision; and (4) prepare to be wrong by setting limits on outcomes (similar to a "stop loss" order in stock trading).
Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino cites findings from her own research studies and those of her colleagues in her book Sidetracked, to warn us of three types of forces that derail our decisions: forces coming from within, from our relationships, and from the outside. Among those that emanate from within are an inaccurate and often inflated view of ourselves that leads us to treat advice inappropriately at the wrong times, "infectious emotion," and a tendency to adopt an overly narrow focus. To cope with these she suggests ways of achieving greater self-awareness (mitigating our biases by soliciting expensive advice, which we are more likely to take seriously, for example), taking our emotional temperature (determining when our feelings regarding a decision "were triggered by an event unrelated to the decision at hand"), and "zooming out" for broader perspective (for example, by asking "What information am I missing?").
I didn't Google the texts of these books, but there is no mention of the word "judgment" in their tables of contents or indexes, and I don't recall the use of the word in the texts. In fact, if there is a sense that one gets from all of this work, it is that we are our own worst enemies when it comes to making and implementing good decisions. We need tools to correct the errors and biases of our own judgment. This is puzzling, because we are frequently reminded that the ability to exercise judgment is what sets humans apart from other forms of life. (Perhaps judgment is what leads us to adopt recommendations such as those of these authors.) Is there still a role for judgment in decision-making? What do you think?

Social Media Week: Innovations in the Developing World

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Strategic Marketing Plan: The Inverted Marketing Funnel

Monday, August 12, 2013

Top 10 Future Technology That Exist Today

Friday, August 9, 2013

Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — Industrial policies that subsidize (often large) incumbent firms, either permanently or when they face distress, are pervasive. Despite the ubiquity of such policies, their effects are poorly understood. They may encourage incumbents to undertake greater investments, increase productivity, and protect employment. But they may also reduce economic growth by discouraging innovation by both entrants and incumbents and slowing down reallocation. The reallocation implications of such policies may be particularly important because the existing literature attributes as much 80 percent of productivity growth in the United States to reallocation when less efficient firms exit and more efficient firms enter. In this paper, the authors build a model of firm innovation and growth that enables an examination of the forces jointly driving innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation. This model fits the key moments from microdata reasonably well, and is in line with the range of micro estimates in the literature. Key concepts include:
  • This general equilibrium model, incorporating both reallocation and selection effects, highlights the potential pitfalls of industrial policies supporting incumbents, particularly large incumbents.
  • Industrial policies (subsidies to incumbent R&D or to their operating costs) reduce growth and welfare, while entry subsidies have a positive but very small effect.
  • Optimal policy, which can have substantial innovation and growth gains, simultaneously encourages the exit of under-performing incumbent firms and supports R&D by high-type incumbents and new entrants.
 

AUTHOR ABSTRACT

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A key feature is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using detailed US Census micro data on firm-level output, R&D and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output and R&D, and its implied elasticities are in the ballpark of a range of micro estimates. We find industrial policy subsidizing either the R&D or the continued operation of incumbents reduces growth and welfare. For example, a subsidy to incumbent R&D equivalent to 5% of GDP reduces welfare by about 1.5% because it deters entry of new high-type firms. On the contrary, substantial improvements (of the order of 5% improvement in welfare) are possible if the continued operation of incumbents is taxed while at the same time R&D by incumbents and new entrants is subsidized. This is because of a strong selection effect: R&D resources (skilled labor) are inefficiently used by low-type incumbent firms. Subsidies to incumbents encourage the survival and expansion of these firms at the expense of potential high-type entrants. We show that optimal policy encourages the exit of low-type firms and supports R&D by high-type incumbents and entry.

PAPER INFORMATION

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Apps to Send Smartphone Files Into the Cloud

Box is one of my favorite cloud storage apps. It’s a free download for iOS and Android, and the service is also available for PCs. The app is great to look at and its controls are clear, so it is easy to begin using it.
To upload a file, you click on a small cloud icon with a plus sign in it. The app offers the option to upload a file, like a photo or video, or to perform actions like creating a folder to organize files.
Viewing a file simply requires clicking on the relevant file name in the list of your files. You can print the file out, add it to a list of favorites, or perform other actions like sharing the file with other users by e-mail. Box is designed for group collaboration as much as for single users; you can invite colleagues to work together on a file through the service’s Web interface.
Box is a powerful app, but it has a few limitations. There is no batch uploading, so be prepared to upload one file at a time. And the free service provides only five gigabytes of storage; no single file can be larger than 250 megabytes. You will have to pay for more storage — the Business level costs $15 a month for each user, for example, but it offers one terabyte of space and file uploads of up to two gigabytes.
DropBox is perhaps the best-known cloud storage app. It looks similar to the Box app, but it has a little more functionality. It is available free for iOSAndroid andBlackBerry devices, as well as for PCs and Kindle Fires. DropBox has more sharing options than Box, including the ability to send a link to a particular file over Facebook or Twitter, or as a text message.
DropBox also feels a little more polished than Box, probably because of its unfussy visual design. The app is integrated into a device’s systems. It can automatically grab photos and videos when they are taken, so they are instantly stored safely in the cloud.
I prefer DropBox’s iOS interface because its layout is clearer than the Android version, which tends to involve more clicking to navigate through its menus. In all cases, though, the app is easy to use and the company promises tight security to protect data. Perhaps the app’s biggest limit is its pricing: it is free for just two gigabytes of files, which may be quickly eaten up by smartphone videos. Prices start at $10 a month for 100 gigabytes and greater.
Cubby, made by the people behind the well-known LogMeIn apps, offers even simpler cloud storage and sharing. It’s free for iOS and Android. The app functions similarly to its rivals, but there are fewer menus and buttons to get in the way of using it.
The app can upload photos and video to your Cubby account from your phone. It includes a neat interface for making an individual file public, or to let you share a link to the file by e-mail. On the app’s Web site you can upload and share more diverse file types, which can then be viewed on a mobile device. From the app, you can also choose to save a file to a device to work on it when an Internet connection is not available, which is handy for commuters.
Cubby does not have quite as many features as its rivals, but like the other apps it uses encryption, and an extra Cubby Lock password can be added to data for still more protection. The app is free for up to five gigabytes of storage — 25 gigabytes with customer referrals — and there is no limit on file sizes.
It’s possible that you will find yourself using several of these apps and forgetting which files are where. Then you can turn to CloudMagic. It’s a free iOS and Android app that aggregates many different cloud storage systems into one, including DropBox, Box and others like Google Docs and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The most powerful feature of CloudMagic is its search function, which helps find the file you’re looking for.
Most of these services require you to sign up for an account; remember to keep your passwords secure to protect all your data as it floats in the cloud.
Quick Call
Fruit Ninja, a popular casual game on iOS and Android, is now available in an edition compatible with Microsoft’s latest smartphone operating system, Windows Phone 8. It’s silly, fun and costs only $1.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

Business Innovation with Information Technology

Entrepreneurs Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

The 10 Myths of Entrepreneurship

Thursday, August 1, 2013

The way we interact in the digital space has changed the way we communicate


The digital age not only requires a change in physical elements but in thinking as well. A website can no longer just be a one-way street. It must have the ability to communicate, be functional, and express a particular brand. In a way, it must be an authentic representation of the company. The days of a website being a simple placeholder is over. What has taken its place is the ability for people to actually use the website and gain an understanding of the company/brand without having to be in contact with the physical representation.

This shift in the way we interact in the digital space has changed the way we communicate. The U.S. government though late to the game has noticed this shift.

The U.S. government is shifting the way they think about digital. They are using websites and mobile marketing techniques to not only reach but also communicate with their users. They realize that the digital space is a way to help people understand and communicate with a government that has been up until now unreachable. As opposed to being some entity that is deemed too big to understand, the government is employing techniques that include actual user-friendly websites and applications to communicate with their citizens.

They are able to relay data that can be beneficial to people. They are able to help keep their citizens up to date on projects that are taking shape in their area, they are able to relay the data of the census without having to go through snail-mail, they are able to keep a two-way street open between the government and everyday people. This however is not a wide spread phenomena throughout the bureaucratic system just yet but the transformation is in deed taking place.

How are brands doing this – they have changed the way they think, going from a consumer-based mindset to a user-based mindset. A consumer-based mindset usually entails that there is some occurrence where a customer visits a website for a particular reason and makes a purchase. A User (coined by Aaron Shapiro, author of his recent book User’s Not Consumers and the CEO of Huge Inc.) is the person/people who interact with your company through digital media and technology. These people do not necessarily have to be a customer of your company. They do not even need to make a purchase or buy a product the first time they visit your site. They might have been told to visit your website or have happened to stumble across it. They are simply people who use or rather interact with your website or digital representation of yourself and brand.

This is what the U.S. Government is realizing. By updating their digital look they open up interactive pathways for a conversation to take place between their users and themselves. The users might not initially make a purchase on a website but they are introduced to the brand. The likelihood of them returning to your digital representation is very high considering the ability of the user to understand the information in front of them. And when they do return it might be for a purchase or transaction of some sort. In terms of the government it could be for information that might have been previously difficult to relay to the user. But with the advent of digital and brand recognition this information can be easily accessed and obtained while conversing in real-time.  

by Nage Gibson-Thompson