Articles

New research offers insights into an increasingly important boardroom role.

What's the current attitude of the "green"-goods consumer in the downturn? And apart from general economic conditions, what factors determine whether consumers do--or do not--buy green? According to a research survey conducted by The Boston Consulting Group and an interview with Catherine Roche, a coauthor of the BCG survey and report, consumers haven't abandoned green--but have shifted emphasis among their reasons for pursuing it. "Before the crisis, green was about health and safety, green was about savings, green was about things that are directly beneficial to you--and it's still about that." Now, though, saving money is the dominant desire and benefit. Supported by the research, Roche discusses several other main points in her interview: (1) Price is not the obstacle when consumers consider green purchases; (2) green programs motivate and engage employees; and (3) companies are reluctant to publicize their green (or sustainability) efforts for fear they'll be accused of "greenwashing." This feature is culled from a special online exploration thread at sloanreview.mit.edu, and includes outtakes from a dozen additional short interviews with executives, as well as a longer interview with George Kern, head of the luxury watch maker IWC International Watch Co. It also contains infographics assessing which factors are likeliest to prevent a consumer from buying green. The biggest? "Awareness"--the fact that consumers are often unaware of green product alternatives.

Senior Lecturer in Behavioral and Policy Sciences at MIT Sloan School of Management, Peter Senge has lectured extensively throughout the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding of economic and organizational change. He is the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants dedicated to the "interdependent development of people and their institutions." Senge is the author of the widely acclaimed The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990). His latest book is The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday Currency, 2008), which details the way companies around the world are leading the change from "business as usual" tactics to transformative strategies essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. Senge spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Hopkins.

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.