Articles

In his book “Reinventing Management,” Julian Birkinshaw urges businesspeople to give more thought to management models.

The editors of the MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winners of this year's Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the authors of the most outstanding SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2008 to summer 2009.

Leading innovators are using information systems to make their activities more efficient.

Large companies that invest in trendy IT innovations may see their reputations — and CEO compensation — increase the next year.

When two business models, and two business units, make sense.

In theory, IT innovation is important — except it's often not a priority in company budgets.

When a crisis strikes, brands can avert backlash from consumers -- and even strengthen the brand -- with well-considered and thoughtfully deployed communication. Based on scientific research on persuasion, the authors present a comprehensive crisis communication framework to help restore consumer trust, illustrating these recommendations using cases of both successful and unsuccessful recovery from brand crises. The authors draw heavily on Toyota's recent experience in responding to the unintended acceleration of some of its vehicles. Toyota's responses provide examples both of what to do, and what not to do, when a company is accused of wrongdoing. The authors contend that there is no one best communications path to follow when a company is in crisis. Rather, they say, the best approach will depend on the answers to three central questions: Is the accusation prompting the crisis true? Is the crisis severe? Has the company established its brand as something that customers closely identify with? Taking these factors into account, a company might best be served by some combination of seven communications strategies. These strategies range from admitting error and apologizing on the one extreme to defiantly denying and wrongdoing and even attacking the accuser on the other. In addition to describing these seven communications strategies, the authors also lay out four lessons on corporate crisis communications that emerge from the Toyota debacle. One, in the Internet age, speed of response is imperative. Second (and a corollary to the need for speed), companies need to be ready for a crisis at all times, and have at hand a step-by-step protocol to follow when bad things happen. Third, it is essential that in a time of crisis, the CEO him or herself -- not lower level management--needs to step forward and publicly articulate the company's responses. And fourth, companies must not delude themselves that they can skate by while ignoring a crisis. Response is essential.

Sustainability initiatives have three stages, each requiring differing organizational capabilities.

A general assumption about innovation-oriented partnerships between companies is that success grows out of good relationships based on mutual trust, while poor cooperation and a lack of trust lead to disaster. Yet examples abound of high-trust partnerships that fail to innovate and of turbulent ones that succeed. Is trust in fact overrated? Is it sometimes an actual hindrance to innovation? Can we think in terms of an optimal level of trust -- not too little and not too much? Because case studies are not adequate for evaluating correlations between the level of trust and innovativeness -- it is impossible to disentangle trust from the many other contributing factors -- we set up a series of experiments, using pairs of individuals who already knew each other and who had sufficient prior experience together so as to have formed distinct trust perceptions. Results point to a major finding: As mutual trust increases, the partnership's creativity goes up, reaches a maximum point and then starts to decline. Similarly for innovativeness. As mutual trust increases, innovativeness also goes up -- but only to a certain point, after which innovativeness declines, even though it stays at higher levels because of greater commitment. We explain this seemingly strange pattern as follows: If a team enjoys a high level of trust and mutual caring, individuals might become too accommodating, quickly accepting their partners' ideas and thus reducing the amount of dynamic task-oriented conflict. The team might then have lower creative tension, consequently reducing the partnership's effectiveness. The bottom line: When inventing together, trust is good; but avoiding too much trust is better.

Supply chain managers can impact sustainability in areas such as packaging and transportation.