Origin and originality of ideas

"Make it a practice to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea must be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on."

- Thomas Edison

This semester's class of CIMBA entrepreneurship students are developing business plans for food tours, social networks for studying abroad, RFID tracking of personal valuables, and kiosk-based auto rental. While each of these ideas has been implemented before in some shape or form, these students embraced Edison's advice and the challenge of original adaptation. Look for updates here!

Managerial decision making

Decision making is one of the most important functions of management. Despite its importance and exhaustive study on the topic, we still struggle to make decisions effectively. In two STVP videos posted here, Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path explains how efficient decision making can be supported by giving the decision maker responsibility, accountability, and authority, and Dominic Orr of Aruba Networks describes how to cultivate a fast decision making process focused on facts and intellectual honesty. Finally, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely discusses how we are all victims of the "illusion of control" in decision making (click on the image above). Clearly, there is more researchers can do to help managers become better decision makers.

When managers are more effective than markets

During the Intro to Management lecture on October 15 we discussed the need (or not) for the professionalization of management (Khurana & Nohria, 2008) and the reason why firms exist. With the recent scandals attributed to managers and their alma maters, these are useful questions to ask. In contrast to "professionalized" occupational roles like doctors and lawyers, however, managers must deal with planning, organizing, leading, and controlling (the four basic functions of management) - planning for an uncertain future, creating effective and efficient structures for organized activity, motivating and directing people, and trying to keep everything on track. It is the manager's skills that allow organizations (aka "hierarchies") to be superior in many cases to markets and contracts (the domain of lawyers). In recognition of these important differences and the importance of organizations in economics, Oliver Williamson is one of two economists who won the Nobel prize for economics this year. Professor Williamson's work explains conditions under which firms or markets would be the superior form of organization. For us, the challenge is to create managers who can master planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the functions of the firm. Professor Williamson knows we could never codify that! (Clicking on the image takes you to the October 17 story in The Economist)

Khurana, R., & Nohria, N. 2008. It's time to make management a true profession. Harvard Business Review, 86(10): 70-77