Articles

Generating good innovation proposals from within the ranks of the organization is only the beginning. The more difficult part is creating a selection process that identifies which ideas to implement.

Smart executives are searching out people to send them signals about how their businesses are really being received.

Jim Rogers' official titles are chairman, president and CEO of Duke Energy. But he says those titles boil down to two roles: general and scout. As general, he sets goals for people. As a scout, he gets to meet people, listen to their ideas, and think about all the potentials for his industry. He thinks of his company as a technology company disguised as a utility. Energy has been at the front of innovation, he notes. Duke Energy is a Charlotte, N.C.-based electric power company that supplies and delivers energy to approximately 4 million U.S. customers. Rogers sees the company's job as being a "nimble pioneer" to help usher in new technologies, new public policies, and new ways of thinking about energy directions. Rogers spoke with Michael S. Hopkins, editor-in-chief of MIT Sloan Management Review, about why education is not sufficient to get people to do the right thing, when it's good to give in to risk, and how Duke Energy plans to shift from being a "supplier of electricity" to an "optimizer of use."

Businesses' ability to process numbers in "well-behaved rows and columns" goes back 40 years, notes K. Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer of Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest companies in India. In this interview with Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins, Krishnan explains why figuring out how to mine and process the information in text, video, and audio is the new frontier.

When consumers encounter negative information about a company, its reputation for corporate social responsibility can help--but only sometimes.

Today's collaborative and creative leaders engage in six boundary spanning practices.

Despite the economic downturn and tenuous recovery, more than two-thirds of businesses are strengthening their commitment to sustainability, according to a new global study by MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group, as reported in this article. The study found that 69% of companies surveyed plan to step up their investment in and management of sustainability this year. Just over one-quarter (26%) plan no change, and only 2% intend to cut back on their commitment. The study also found that a two-speed landscape is emerging, with a gap between sustainability "embracers"--those who place sustainability high on their agenda--and nonembracers or "cautious adopters," who have yet to focus on more than energy cost savings, material efficiency and risk mitigation. Embracers are significantly more confident about their competitive position than nonembracers are. Seventy percent of embracers said they believe their organizations outperform industry peers. By contrast, only 53% of cautious adopters described themselves as outperformers, and 14% admitted to lagging behind peers--more than twice the percentage of embracers who made the same claim (6%). In addition, nearly three times as many embracers (two-thirds of them) as cautious adopters said that their organization's sustainability actions and decisions have increased their profits. "What's fascinating is that these findings depict a business landscape in general that's tilting hard toward where the embracers already are," says Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of MIT SMR and a coauthor of the report. "So the embracers have handed us a kind of crystal ball. Their insights and behaviors suggest a blueprint for how management practice and competitive strategy will evolve." The report identifies seven specific practices exhibited by embracer companies, which together begin to define sustainability-driven management.

We should aim not for faster information but faster decision making — not the same things.

Research confirms that you'll be less productive if your attention is spread too thin.

Want to increase sales of a bundle of goods or services that includes both pleasurable and utilitarian items? Research suggests that a discount will increase sales more effectively if it's offered on the pleasurable item.