Feelings, oh whoa, feelings!

Emotion doesn't matter in the workplace, right? You don't get angry when an incompetent, yet politically-charged, peer gets promoted (and a raise) and you don't. What would happen to corporate ratings if an emotional metric were somehow deployed to evaluate them? Currently we have a "Top 100" employers to work for - but I'm not sure we can say systematically how to achieve a top rating in this category (aside from treating people like they are "people"). Paul Herr weighs in on this topic at:

http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/message-wall-street-its-all-about-feelings?utm_source=MIX+Fix&utm_campaign=ad1474b358-MIX_Fix_Aug20_2010&utm_medium=email

Reality fitness marketing

"Everyone has a big 'but,' Simone, let's talk about yours"
- PeeWee Herman in PeeWee's Big Adventure.

Nike attempts to reach a "larger" audience with its new promotions. If you haven't read "Just Do It," which I regard as one of the best marketing books ever, it's time to revisit. Meanwhile, check out this story on BusinessWeek.

Who's leading the hiring process? Small business

CareerBuilder's latest nationwide survey shows that small businesses – one of the major drivers for economic recovery and job growth – will be hiring in the second half of 2010.  Thirty-two percent of companies with 500 or fewer employees plan to add new employees in the months of July through December.  Twenty-one percent will hire full-time, 11 percent will hire part-time and 6 percent will hire contractors or temporary workers.  Of companies with 50 or fewer employees, 24 percent plan to hire in the second half of 2010.  The survey was completed in June 2010 and included more than 1,300 employers in businesses with 500 or fewer employees and more than 4,400 workers.

The article also lists the types of businesses entrepreneurs say they've started over the past year. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker?

Read the full story on Yahoo! Finance here.

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Fast Company Most Creative People in Business

I'm late to reading this issue, but Fast Company has published its list of 100 most creative people in business. The link to the full list is here: Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business.

I was particularly struck by the convergence of art, programming, and humanity of Zachary Lieberman. Zachary Lieberman shows us how a person who considers himself an artist can enact changes in technology and peoples' lives.

"Dynamic capabilities" versus "satisficing" - Part II

Three weeks ago I posed a question: How do organizations really create new routines and capabilities? "Dynamic capabilities" allow organizations to develop new routines and capabilities to adapt to their competitive environment, whereas "satisficing" is a form of decision making under limited constraints that satisfies some desired goal, however imperfectly or sub-optimally. I gave current and former students the formal definitions of each concept and asked them to indicate by survey which concept they thought was appealing, interesting, and a more realistic depiction of what takes place in organizations. Here are the results.

"This concept is appealing to me" received much higher agreement with respondents for dynamic capabilities than satisficing.

Similarly, "this concept is interesting to me" received much higher agreement with respondents for dynamic capabilities than satisficing.

And yet respondents overwhelmingly indicated that they thought satisficing was a more realistic depiction of what takes place in organizations than they did dynamic capabilities.

Competing conclusions? (1) The satisficing literature failed to satisfy the explanatory requirements test for how organizations develop, recombine, and refine their routines and capabilities. (2) "Dynamic capabilities" sounds sexier than "satisficing." (3) The decision-making component in satisficing is important for "what really happens in organizations," but is less interesting or appealing than the theory that seemingly ignores managerial decision making. What do you think?

1,000 Pitches!

How do you come up with a really valuable and novel idea? One way is to start with 1,000 ideas (your own or those of others). The University of Michigan produced over 2,000 ideas in its "1,000 Pitches" site. Unlike business plan competitions, whose merits for students remain untested, pitching competitions allow a far greater range of participants, reduce the need for producing dressed-up pro forma financials, and can be far more engaging to a broader audience. What's your idea for a novel and valuable pitching competition?

"Dynamic capabilities" versus "satisficing"

How do organizations really create new routines and capabilities? Since its introduction in 1997 (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, SMJ, 1997), the theoretical lens of “dynamic capabilities” has gained considerable attention in the strategic management literature. Dynamic capabilities are a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments. In other words, organizations use dynamic capabilities to develop new routines and capabilities to adapt to their competitive environment. In practice, however, organizations have been creating new routines and capabilities in response to changing environments well before the introduction of dynamic capabilities. An alternate theoretical view for explaining this comes from the managerial decision-making literature: satisficing - a form of decision making under limited constraints that satisfies some desired goal, however imperfectly or sub-optimally.

If you're reading this post, chances are you have just completed a survey in which I am trying to capture your impressions of these competing(?) approaches to capability building. The dynamic capabilities literature is one of the most popular areas in strategic management now, while satisficing seems to have fallen out of favor. With few exceptions (Winter, 2000, 2003), scholars have ignored satisficing in the management literature. No one offers it as an alternative explanation. There is no special interest group dedicated to satisficing, nor are there any research paper sessions at Academy of Management or Strategic Management Society meetings dedicated to satisficing. I hope to find out more about how these views work (or don't) together!

The passion of words in management

In a recent Harvard Business Review article that we read for Management class, Gary Hamel (2009) urges us to humanize the language and practice of business. "To create organizations that are almost human in their capacity to adapt, innovate, and engage, management pioneers must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals...These timeless virtues have long inspired human beings to extraordinary accomplishment and can no longer be relegated to the fringes of management."

Hamel claims that the discipline of management relies too much on words like "focus," "advantage," "superiority," "differentiation," and "value." He claims that these words are far less likely to invoke an emotional response than words like "love," "beauty," "truth," "honor," and "justice."

I decided to perform an empirical test of this claim. With the help of our 49 CIMBA students in Intro to Management, I asked them to assign a value of 1 to 5 (completely disagree - completely agree) to indicate the extent to which each of these words inspired feelings of passion. The results? Hamel is correct, at least in this sample population. Nearly all of the corporate word - emotional word pairings proved to be different in statistically significant ways. The only exceptions were some pairings with the word "value," which indicates that this word has far more depth and complexity in interpretation than differentiation, superiority, focus or advantage.

You can view the results yourself by clicking here. Send me your comments!

Hamel, G. 2009. Moon shots for management. Harvard Business Review, 87(2): 91-98.

European Contagion?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/bcArtIframe.html?z=0&videoId=1247466963617&pageSection=world
The accumulation of budget deficits in some European Union countries has created a classic moral hazard problem for the EU, and especially Germany, which championed the common currency over a decade ago. The current debt and currency crisis in Europe poses threats to Spain and Italy as well. The video to which this link leads explains the complexities and hazards of sharing a currency across national borders. Here is the full article from the New York Times.

CEO vs worker pay

In our Intro to Management "Drucker Day," we discussed articles about Peter Drucker heralding him as the "Father of Modern Management" (Byrne, 2009), imagining what Peter Drucker would say today (Kantor, 2009), and why we should still pay attention to his management lessons (Kantrow, 2009, 1980). One of the trends that particularly troubled Drucker was the increasing misalignment of CEO pay with the pay of regular workers, which he thought was morally wrong. We did an experiment in class today. I asked management students to (1) name a company they would like to work for, (2) how much they would want to be paid for being the CEO, and (3) how much they would want to be paid for simply working there. The results?
In a class of 44 management students, the average ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 73, and the median ratio was 20. A typical student expects to make $1 million for being the CEO, but is perfectly happy to accept a salary of $55,000. When Drucker raised his concerns about pay disparities 20 years ago, the ratio was 40. Just prior to the meltdown of 2008, the ratio was 400, which also happens to be the maximum ratio reported by any student in our class. Do novice management students lack a sense of the magnitude of CEO salaries today, or are their estimates a more accurate reflection of what CEO salaries should be? The mode salary of $500,000 suggests the former is explanation.
Post Script: See Flowingmotion's comments below. They offer some compelling questions about how HR recruiters fail to justify this gap. We need empirical tests.

Managers in popular media

In CIMBA's spring semester session of Introduction to Management, we debated the need to "professionalize" the practice of management in ways similar to that of the practices of law and medicine. Anyone can be a manager, but you can't be a medical doctor or lawyer without a specific degree and credentials (with the exception of "My Cousin Vinny"). The focal article of our discussion was Khurana and Nohria's 2008 HBR article "It's time to make management a true profession." After our classroom discussion, I asked CIMBA students to send me images of managers from the popular media and got some interesting (and scary) results. Click here for CIMBAn submittals. Are doctors and lawyers similarly depicted in popular media? Is the "dark side" of management just as dark in law and medicine? What does a "professional manager" look like?

Drucker "still matters"? Yes.

When Peter Drucker passed away in 2005, he was heralded - as he was for decades prior - as the "father of modern management." Drucker's writings helped to develop management as both a profession and an academic discipline during the past half century. Despite these acknowledged contributions, Drucker's influence seems to be missing from current conversations we have in management as a practice, and even more so in management as a research subject. We began exploring Peter Drucker's teachings last semester in CIMBA's Introduction to Management class. Students reported that this class opened their eyes to view management in ways that they had never considered before; many said they would devote more of their future studies to the discipline of management. This semester we'll continue our emphasis on Drucker's lessons and hopefully create a process that leads to better managers for our future.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_48/b3961001.htm