Exploring life after Steve Jobs at Apple, INSEAD’s Prof Hal Gregersen writes:

Steve Jobs was a master at the five skills of disruptive innovators. He personally excelled at connecting the unconnected, or associational thinking. He was constantly on the hunt for new insights by observing the world through the eyes of an anthropologist. He regularly networked for new ideas with people who were 180 degrees different than himself. And he constantly experimented with different prototypes of every product and service Apple ever produced. At the very core, Jobs was exceptional at asking provocative questions, ones that challenged the status quo, inside Apple and out. Put simply, Jobs thinks different because he acts different — habitually.

Even more important, when Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 (after being kicked out in 1985 by less than creative senior executives), he not only leveraged again his disruptive skills as the new CEO, but he created a top team of people with strong innovation and execution skills. Some were quite like him, innovators like Jonathan Ive, and others not quite as much like him, executors like Tim Cook. Jobs also created a culture of innovation (though he likely called it a culture of excellence) with processes and philosophies that reinforced the power of not only getting great ideas but transforming them into world changing products.

As for the future Prof Gregersen predicts:

With Jobs now moving on of his own accord, we will see how well the people, philosophies and culture that he put into place during the past decade will leapfrog Apple employees past the question “What would Steve do?” to a much more productive one: “What should I do?” Moving ahead, some Apple employees should act different and think different to get surprising new ideas. Others should focus on delivery to make sure things not only get done, but get it done exceptionally well. Some should focus on both. If innovation and execution happen consistently enough across Apple in the months and years to come, I’m confident that the people, processes and philosophies that Steve Jobs put into place today will indeed keep the innovation engine humming at Apple Inc tomorrow.

The formula is simple – consistent innovation and execution with the right people, philosophies and culture. Whether Apple will continue produce more of “world changing” products only time will tell.

More here.

Source : INSEAD Knowledge

Summarising GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt’s address at Singapore on growing and building sustainable business in these uncertain economic times, INSEAD Knowledge notes that : 

• successful business players need to have a corporate culture and strategic process that is flexible and can adapt quickly.
• this recovery will likely look different and rely more on the principles of entrepreneurship.
• countries around the world (notably the US) are moving into an era of activist government.

For me, Immelt’s commitment to GE’s core values shone through in this excerpt:

He stressed that ‘commitment to integrity’ comes first, noting that the company is more important than individuals and that everyone must embody the best practices around compliance. Second, a “commitment to performance” where high-performing people are focused on results. Finally, a “commitment to change” where “Knowledge has almost no shelf life,” according to Immelt. He says if you’re not reinventing yourself, or trying to do new things, you become static and are quickly beaten by the competition.

 More on Immelt’s Singapore talk here.

Via : INSEAD Knowledge

In this address to the students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, FBI Director Robert Mueller, talks about how 11 September 2001 was a transformative event in the 100-year history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

One of his biggest challenges was to change the culture of the venerable institution while trying to navigate the new demands being thrown at it.  He explains, "After Sept. 11 one of the side effects was the understanding we could not let it happen again. If we had not had the catalyzing event we would not have made the strides to change the culture to understand the priorities and bring everyone in the bureau behind the concept that the American public expects us to stop [another] Sept. 11. We have to do it — even though more often than not it doesn’t result in slapping cuffs on somebody and putting him in jail."

Source :  Stanford Graduate School of Business

A firm’s organisational chart can uncover important insights into its inner workings. Research by the Kellogg School of Management and the University of Essex finds that , “structure can also reveal much about the competencies and areas of competitive advantage within the organisation.”

Any student of organisational design can tell you that firms can structure along functional form, meaning that the firm organises itself by business functions such as marketing, research and development (R&D). On the other hand firms can alternatively organise themselves by, “product line, such as the models and vehicle types within an automotive company or the brands owned by a consumer packaged goods company.”

The research notes:

A key advantage of a product-line organisation is that it enables the firm to reward the employees’ efforts by using pay-for-performance mechanisms that involve less noise than those used in a functional organisation. This is because the contribution of a product line to firm’s profitability is typically easier to measure than the financial contribution of functions such as human resources or marketing.

In a functional organisation, although compensation can still be tied to product-line profitability, the link between the choices for which managers have responsibility and the performance metrics on which they are rewarded is weakened, injecting greater noise into their compensation.

A product-line organisation provides another benefit to firms in which cross-functional coordination is critical: by consolidating decision making for all functions within a single product unit, managers can better coordinate functional choices. In a functional organisation, coordination is attenuated because responsibility for functional choices is dispersed across functional units.

Imbalances between functions or in the function/product mix tend to favor a functional organisation. For example, when marketing competencies are far more critical to the firm’s success than any other function, the firm might benefit from a functional organisation with a central marketing group responsible for the marketing decisions for all of the firm’s product lines.

The significance of the research lies its usage of economic theory to isolate the economic and organisational fundamentals to eliminate “noise” in evaluating managerial performance and compensation.

Source : Kellogg Insight

Continuing on the always on 24/7 lifestyle, see my earlier post, research by Wharton Business School management professor Nancy Rothbard tries to answer the question - is anyone ever really "off duty”?

Prof Rothbard asks further, "There are huge etiquette issues around the new social media, especially the interactive type. What if your boss friends you on Facebook? That's a dilemma. How do you not accept that friend? What if you really are friends?"

Rothbard elaborates that new communications technology is eroding the boundaries between home and office, which creates a "double-edged sword" for companies.

The flexibility and reach of modern communication tools have created new problems.  Rothbard continues, "On the one hand, it enables flexibility. In some ways, it makes you more effective. But it can also lead to a lot of burnout. In the long term, it may lead to conflict about how you feel towards your other life roles and your ability to be fully present in any one domain."

In related research Patricia Williams, Wharton marketing professor explains that for most of social networks users, "There is an understanding of the multiple roles we play. There is the self we are for our friends, a self for our family [and] a professional self. What's interesting is the degree to which we are comfortable playing all of those 'selves' at one time." 

While research by Monica McGrath, a Wharton adjunct management professor,  points out  that some of the misunderstanding about social networking is generational. She notes, “Older workers and managers may have a Facebook page, but it is not essential to them. Younger workers now entering the corporate world rely heavily on Facebook, Twitter and other social media to communicate. Right now, there is tension between those two generational approaches."

So, are there any rules to prioritise messages? According to business consultant Terry Thompson, the general "pecking order" in the business community when it comes to responding to different forms of communication is : e-mail should be answered within 24 hours, a telephone call returned even sooner with social networking sites taking the lowest priority.

Confused?  I am going offline- no more social networking for me.  Oh for the days of the snail-mail.

Source: Knowledge@Wharton

According to Lawrence Fish, Former CEO and Chairman of Citizens Financial Group, “ There are no B pluses in ethics. It’s pass/ fail.”  In a lively and informative discussion with MIT Prof Simon Johnson , Fish explores the recent collapse of American financial institutions, its causes and possible fixes.

The discussion also looks at: the banks that did not fail, how Canadian, Australian and other countries' banking systems also did not fail, the political landscape of banking regulation, ethics, bonuses in the banking industry and the ethics oath signed by 50% of the students at the Harvard Business School.

 A not to be missed video.

 For bios click :  Lawrence Fish,  Simon Johnson.

Source :  MIT World

They are brilliant in their simplicity.  In “Inventions Someone Could Have Thought Up Years Earlier” Alan S Brown writes :

There remain some inventions that seem so obvious—after they are invented— that they inspire us all to slap our foreheads and ask, "Why didn't I think of that?" They could have been invented years earlier, if only somebody had seen the problem differently—or even noticed the problem at all.  The best of these innovations share all the hallmarks of good design. They are useful, intuitive, unobtrusive, durable, and affordable. They are also economical in the sense that they do a lot with a little.

Few of the favourites at ASME’s Mechanical Engineering :

Tilt-and-roll luggage - Today, tilt-and-roll suitcases are so common, we would be hard pressed to find a traveler without one. And certainly, there is nothing complex about attaching two wheels and a handle to a suitcase. It requires no more prior art than the knowledge of wheels and levers.

Color-coded connectors - To hook up a sophisticated stereo once required some knowledge of where to attach the phonograph, speakers, tape player, antenna, and ground. This sounds complex, but it was by no means as hard as putting together today's home theaters, which include all of those components plus televisions, cable or satellite receivers, DVD players, recorders, multiple speakers, and more recently, computers and home networks.  Yet home theaters are far, far easier to hook together. Why? Because jacks and wires are color coded.

Two-sided keys - This was a slick invention for anyone who ever fumbled with a car key in a cold parking lot late at night. Instead of looking for the business end to align up or down, the two-sided key works no matter which way you insert it into the door lock.

Fat pens - Once upon a time, elegant pens were thin but they were hard to hold. Today, pens have grown fatter, with pliant plastic bulges and shapes that make them easier to get your fingers around. The same is true for tools and industrial products.

The list also includes squeeze bottles and the sports bra.  Read about them here.

SMS, email, voice-mail, Blackberry, Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedin- have any of these technological tethers that binds you to your work in an always-on 24/7 global economy disturbed your personal time ?  If the answer is yes- you are not alone. And what will work be like in the future ?

In the September 2009 edition of the IEEE Spectrum , Susan Hassler explores this issue in the article "Working In an Always-On World".  Big businesses, entertainment companies and even politicians are trying to work their strategies to counter as Hassler writes :

Entertainment and publishing giants like Walt Disney Co., Sony, and News Corp. are struggling to figure out how to make money in a world where people are served up an endless buffet of free news, information, and entertainment, anywhere, all the time. Public relations and marketing firms are scrambling to respond to the Twitter/Facebook effect, which lets companies talk directly to consumers and vice versa, 24 hours a day, without having to go through flacks and marketers.

Telecommunications and computer companies as always are striving to deliver the most flops or baud in the smallest, cheapest, cleverest appliances. But now they’re doing it in an environment in which anything less than a killer app has a shelf life of less than a year. Ouch.

Even politicians are chastened. Speaking at the meeting, former U.S. presidential candidate Howard Dean said that while President Obama’s use of new Web tools put him in the White House, these same tools have the potential to “put politicians out of business.” Citizens, Dean went on to say, may not need politicians to get things done anymore. They can organize for themselves, whenever and wherever they want to.

But what about the rest of us ?  There are many schools of thought as Hassler further explains:

Some say it will be a lot like it is today, only more so. Organizational theorists like Thomas W. Malone, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of The Future of Work, believes that any job that involves parsing or creating knowledge will be carried out by “e-lancers” who will rarely go to an office. No more sweating in traffic jams, but the already-shrinking divide between work and personal life will continue to disappear.

Others think offices will remain important, but that embedded sensors and intelligent agents, combined with high-powered search technologies, will make some kinds of knowledge work obsolete. Machines will research, collect, sort, update, and weight information. People will decide what to do with it next.

E-lancing-  that would be a good career move, eh ?

More here.

If you are a tweep you would know the hashtag  #GFC stands for the Global Financial Crisis.  To keep abreast with the latest on the GFC I go to The Baseline Scenario , a blog by Peter Boone, Simon Johnson and James Kwak.  The blogosphere is full of praise for its easy to understand style  and incisive analysis.  Highly recommended by the New York Times Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman- it is  essential reading for anyone needing an authoritative reference to the current economic crisis.

Here's an excerpt from the section Financial Crisis for Beginners :

We believe that everyone should be able to understand how the financial crisis came about, what it means for all of us, and what our options are for getting out of it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of all writing about the crisis – including this blog – assumes some familiarity with the world of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and so on. You’ve probably heard dozens of journalists use these terms without explaining what they mean. If you’re confused, this page is for you. Over time, we will be adding more explanations and more links to external sources, so check back for updates.

Go to The Baseline Scenario for more.