For most graduates, an ideal gift

Adam Bryant

For years, I have been blogging about Adam Bryant’s column, “The Corner Office,” that appears in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. By providing an excerpt from each week’s column, I hope I have helped to increase the readership that Bryant and his interviews so richly deserve.

Times Books has just published The Corner Office, an anthology of 75 of Bryant’s interviews. As I will suggest in my review of the book, I think it offers an ingenious “orchestration” of information, insights, and recommendations from a wide variety of C-level executives, most of them CEOs. Several of those interviewed are prominent (e.g. Microsoft’s Steven Ballmer, Cisco’s John Chambers, Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, Disney’s Bob Iger, and Ford’s Alan Mulally) but most of them were not be familiar, at least to me.

If you know someone among those graduating from schools, colleges, and universities who has expressed an interest in a business career – or who has only recently embarked on one – I think Adam Bryant’s book would be an ideal gift. It really does provide, as its subtitle correctly suggests, a wealth of “indispensable and unexpected lessons from [mostly] CEOs on how to lead and succeed.

If you don’t know any imminent or recent graduates, give the book as a gift to yourself.

In fact, I highly recommend this book to anyone who possesses “insatiable curiosity” to gain a better understanding of what great leadership is…and isn’t.

Please click here to read Bryant’s recent column about the book.

Please click here to check out his superb interviews.

 

Al Roth’s Pioneering Work In “Market Design”

Here’s an article written by Martha E. Mangelsdorf and featured online by MIT Sloan Management Review. To check out all the resources, sign up for free email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Al Roth

Al Roth, expert in game theory, experimental economics, and market design, is all about getting economists more closely involved in resource allocation — especially the complicated cases where you can’t depend on pricing to help in matchmaking.

Roth is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and in the Harvard Business School and one of the big names in the field of matching markets — building efficient systems that match, for instance, new doctors to their first hospital jobs out of medical school.

MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson is a fan. Brynjolfsson writes at his blog: “In these markets, small changes in the ‘rules of the game’ can lead to big efficiency gains, and it’s not always obvious how to best make those changes. That’s where the kind of deep theory that Al does can have practical value.”

The Boston Globe profiled Roth and his work earlier this month, in a piece called “The Matchmaker.” The story looked at the way Roth is bringing economics into new corners of the real world:

“Roth has emerged as a rare figure in the academic world: a theorist willing to dive into real-world problems and fix them. After helping the med students, he designed a better way to assign children to public schools — the system now used by both Boston and New York. He also helped invent a system for matching kidney donors with patients, dramatically increasing the number of donations that take place each year. More recently, he and one of his students have been talking with Teach for America about improving the system it uses to deploy volunteers around the country.

“Academically speaking, Roth is a pioneer of so-called market design: finding situations where a market is failing — often, a place that most people wouldn’t even recognize as a market — and making it work better. Roth has influenced a cadre of young, energetic market designers, many of whom have taken up prominent positions at top universities. Inspired by Roth’s work, these rising economists are also setting their sights on real-world problems. Some are looking at dating websites; others are interested in how universities could do better at scheduling their students’ classes. Like Roth, all of them envision a world in which economists, as unlikely as it may seem, are recognized as society’s mechanics.”

Read more about Roth and find links to his work at Roth’s Harvard page and at his Market Design blog.

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Martha E. Mangelsdorf is a senior editor at MIT Sloan Management Review. An experienced business and careers journalist, she loves to edit, write and learn about management, innovation and entrepreneurship — something she has been doing since she worked at Inc. magazine, where she was a senior editor, a senior writer, and a senior producer at Inc.com.  She has been editing for MIT Sloan Management Review since 2005. Another area of fascination for Mangelsdorf is career transition and career change. For four years, she wrote a monthly series about career change for The Boston Globe. Her book about that subject, Strategies for Successful Career Change: Finding Your Very Best Next Work Life, was published by Ten Speed Press/Random House in 2009. Strategies for Successful Career Change was named one of ten “best new books for job hunting” by More.com and one of “five books that will help your career” by CareerBuilder.com.

A Quirky Way of Innovating

Joshua Gans

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Joshua Gans  for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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One of the great facts of a quarter of a century of scholarship from MIT Professor Eric von Hippel and his co-authors is that a vast number of useful innovations come not from some scientist and engineer tinkering in a lab, but people who would best be described as users solving their own problems. Examples abound from scientific instruments [pdf] to mountain bikes [pdf]. In some cases, the innovations were the work of lone innovators while for others local communities together produced advances.

Of course, established firms know that users can be useful when it comes to product design. It has been long established that firms will engage with customers and potential customers to assess needs. Commonly, firms will now conduct pre-market beta testing of products. But the idea that the users themselves are the source of key ideas is still treated as a novelty.

Von Hippel realized early on that to make the most out of these innovations, it was important to make information flows more, well, fluid. While users could generate great innovations, disseminating those innovations to other users and to manufacturers was another matter.

It’s even more complicated than that, because information between users and manufacturers is not the only flow of information. Conceivably, a new product idea could be an amalgam of ideas and suggestions from a wide number of people. In firms, meetings and other interactions serve this function. For users, communities can do the trick. But what about other perspectives that might contribute pieces of innovative ideas? Is there a market for components of ideas?

This is a question dear to my own research heart. I have always been interested in how ideas match with other assets (marketing, distribution, and regulatory) that can bring them to market. Even for that case, there is lots of trade but communication flows are often two-way and not what you might see from larger markets. Creating markets for ideas is challenging.

Part of the reason is making sure the innovators can safely get a solid return. But when it comes to idea components, the challenges are even greater. Scott Adams nicely articulates the issues here, and imagines a future where such a market exists.

In my imagined future, you start by making a home video of yourself pitching your idea, just as you would to an investor. You upload your video, along with a detailed description of your idea, to a web site where other entrepreneurs around the world are doing the same thing. But instead of simply soliciting funding, you solicit an entire team, based on whatever skills your business requires. The key to making this work is that no one quits his existing job, or provides funding, until all of the resources for the idea are lined up. The main function of the system is making sure everyone’s conditions for participation have been met before any risks are taken.

Enter Quirky. Quirky’s mission is to crowd-source innovation and product design. They create consumer products by first setting up a competition for solicited but fairly rudimentary product ideas. People evaluate these and some are selected to obtain further refinement. Individuals suggest different features, designs and then even the product name and marketing slogans. Then, if enough people look like they actually want to buy the product, Quirky manufactures and sells it. All along the way, people earn “influence points.” It is not just coming up with the initial idea that wins you points — offering other idea components and playing an active role in voting for different suggestions also contribute — and depending on how many points you have, you may be entitled to a share of the earnings.

Now this is one of those ideas that can sound good in theory but be hard to pull off. For starters, enough people have to believe in what Quirky can do to actually contribute. The good news here is that Quirky appear to have got passed that initial concern and have launched real and interesting products.

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If you only wish to read this article, please click here.

Joshua Gans is an economics professor at Melbourne Business School and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research (New England). All views here are his own.

Clarity; Focus; Definition; “What kind of company do you want to be?” – observation/insight from Farhad Manjoo

The incoherence, I think, is a sign of something deeper: Research in Motion doesn’t know what kind of company it wants to be.
Farhad Manjoo, What on Earth Happened to BlackBerry?:  Research in Motion’s new tablet is a misguided mess.

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I know practically nothing about technology.  I use a Mac, an iPhone, and I’m on a waiting list for the iPad 2.  These are made for a non-techie like me.

But I like to read Farhad Manjoo on Slate.com.  He teaches me, enlightens me, and though he must be some kind of techie genius, he writes in language I can understand.

In an article on the current state of Research in Motion (Blackberry), this quote jumped out at me:

The incoherence, I think, is a sign of something deeper: Research in Motion doesn’t know what kind of company it wants to be.

Of course, it reminds us of Peter Drucker’s famous first question:

“What is your business?” 
(Drucker’s other two questions:  “Who is your customer?  What does your customer consider value?”)

Clarity; focus; definition.  These are not “modern,” innovative” concerns.  These are always absolutely required for business success.

What kind of company do you want to be?  Start there, and start building. And if you ever forget this — if you can’t answer this in a crisp, short, coherent, sentence — then it’s time to start over.

Find the 3 Ingredients to Job Satisfaction

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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Far too many people toil away in jobs that leave them dissatisfied.

To avoid — or remedy — an unhappy job situation, find a position that allows you to do three things:

What you like to do. If what you enjoy doing most is useful, it ought to be part of your career.

What you do best. Many people spend years trying to improve areas of weakness. Focus your energy on mastering what you’re good at.

What is valuable to the organization. Figure out how your particular strengths can be used to better your company, unit, or team. A sense of contribution will make you feel more engaged.

If your current role doesn’t fulfill all three, talk with your manager about changing some of your responsibilities. If there is a real mismatch, consider switching organizations or careers.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Managing Yourself: What Brain Science Tells Us About How to Excel” by Edward M. Hallowell.

To read the full post and join the discussion, please click here.