Articles

Yossi Sheffi's most recent book is The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage (MIT Press), which argues that a company's survival and prosperity depend more on what it does before such a disruption occurs than on the actions it takes as the event unfolds. Sheffi works on the international playing field, launching in 2003 the MIT-Zaragoza Program, a new logistics university in Spain based on a unique international academia, government and industry partnership, and, in 2008, the Center for Latin-American Logistics Innovation, in Bogota, Colombia, with the participation of dozens of Latin American universities and businesses. He was interviewed by Michael S. Hopkins, Editor-in-Chief of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Even before launching the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence,Thomas Malone was tryng to imagine how work could one day be done differently. A professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, he was a founding co-director of the Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, and in general has continuously explored how "to help society take advantage of the opportunities for organizing itself in new and better ways made possible by technology." Some of those ways offer interesting paths to sustainability but the paths are to sustainability as Malone defines it, which doesn't mean a world in which everything is built to last. "It's often the case that good things are sustainable, but sometimes things are sustainable but not good," he says. "And sometimes things are good but not sustainable." In this installment of the MIT Sustainability Interview series, Malone addresses the mental models that impede management progress, the role of collective intelligence in solving climate problems, and his view of how wrong people are about what business is for. He spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Hopkins.

Judy Layzer isn't, by any common definition, a futurist. But after a conversation with her you might feel you've just spoken with one. A political scientist by training, Layzer now teaches and writes in MIT's urban studies department, where she has become increasingly focused on sustainability and the built environment especially the ways that that environment is going to change. The way she tells it, change sounds like possibility (however hard it may be to achieve). As she says after enumerating some of the "healthy changes and opportunities" that will result from higher energy prices, "all of this is in some ways an urban planner's dream. It's the way we thought people should be living anyway." For the MIT Sustainability Interview series, Layzer spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins.

For innovation, corporate culture matters more than location.

Fallout from the financial crisis could hinder innovation—by limiting options for technology start-ups.

Executives tend to think of mass customization as a fascinating but impractical idea, implemented in only a small number of extreme cases, such as Dell Inc. in the PC market. But over the past decade, the authors have studied mass customization at different organizations, including a survey of more than 200 manufacturing plants in eight countries. From that investigation, they found that mass customization is applicable to most businesses, provided that it is appropriately understood and deployed. The key is to view it fundamentally as a process for aligning an organization with its customers' needs through the development of a set of three organizational capabilities. Those three fundamental capabilities are: (1) the ability to identify the product attributes along which customer needs diverge, (2) the ability to reuse or recombine existing organizational and value chain resources, and (3) the ability to help customers identify or build solutions to their own needs. Admittedly, the development of these capabilities requires organizational changes that are often difficult because of powerful inertial forces in a company, but many obstacles can be overcome by using a variety of tools and approaches, and even small improvements can reap substantial benefits. The trick is to remember that there is no one best way to mass customize: Managers need to tailor their approach in ways that make the most sense for their specific business.

What happens when user communities—connected by the Internet—start to create their own brands?

In their 1998 Sloan Management Review article "Preserving Employee Morale During Downsizing," the authors maintained that strong organizations need to develop resilience so they could take advantage of new opportunities that arise during periods of economic retrenchment. They detailed four stages of downsizing programs: deciding to downsize, planning the program, making the announcement and implementing the program. In this sequel, the authors argue that downsizing programs aren't just about "doing more with less." They also provide opportunities to build a sense of trust and empowerment between managers and employees, which can provide significant benefits going forward. In addition to examining the impacts downsizing has on surviving employees and how survivors can influence whether a program is successful, the article explores three new areas that the authors have come to recognize as important to the success of downsizing efforts: (1) how organizations must become more flexible, (2) how they must become more innovative and creative, and (3) how they must improve their communications with stakeholders who are increasingly skeptical of downsizing efforts.

Clayton Christensen is best known for his ideas about how disruptive innovations can transform markets. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses topics ranging from the downturn's effect on innovation to opportunities to improve the U.S. health care system. Christensen thinks the economic downturn will be good for innovation, because downturns force innovators to adapt their strategies to the market quickly and inexpensively. What's more, he notes that resource constraints stimulate breakthrough thinking. And, despite the recent problems in the financial markets, Christensen believes that, overall, innovation has been beneficial in financial services. He cites historical financial innovations, such as no-load mutual funds and index funds, as examples of the way disruptive innovations in financial services have benefited consumers. However, he also notes that there are markets in which regulation is necessary--and the securities industry is one. Christensen, who is the coauthor of a new book on health care, The Innovator's Prescription, also discussed how disruptive innovation might improve the U.S. health care system. He explains how disruptive innovation helps make goods and services inexpensive and accessible.

Managers will never be able to predict the future as clearly as The Amazing Kreskin. But by making a deliberate effort, they can develop the clairvoyance they--and those around them--already possess into a potent competitive weapon. Because their antennae are always aloft, executives naturally detect weak signals as they drift in and out of range from the outer edges of their marketplace. How they find, keep and make sense of those faint clues can make all the difference when it comes to getting an early start on confronting a threat or exploiting an opportunity. In this article, the authors draw from their research into companies that learn from the future. They outline the specific skills managers need to develop--and those they had better lose--to correct their fuzzy vision of what's ahead. First, the authors identify the different breeds of biases that most managers don't even realize they have, and provide them with the tools to rout out such distortions. Then they outline nine proven and practical strategies managers can use to find, understand and make use of the most meaningful distant data. Confronting reality isn't as straightforward as hushing hunches in favor of high-minded analysis; there has to be room for both. Finally, the authors encourage executives to consider new information within the context of as many wider views of the future marketplace as they can find--tapping the farsighted folks at their company and in their industry. By learning how to extract meaning, managers will grow to understand that the future is plainly ours to see, no matter what the song says. What takes work is piecing those glimpses into a plausible panorama so that managers can see where their company strategy fits--before anyone else does.