Big Think

BNET bloggers Sterling Performance have an interview with C.K. Prahalad, Innovate by Numbers. In it they talk about the concepts in his recent book, “The New Age of Innovation,” which they call “as much a practical manual as a manifesto of change.”

They have a concise discussion of why Prahalad is a prominent management thinker, and two of his core ideas, co-creation (which he calls N+1) and global resourcing (which he calls R=G).

For a different medium on the same book — here is the first of two video clips of him talking about his ideas with Business Week.
In the second, he makes the interesting statement that in his theories, “we’re almost asking people to run a marathon 400 meters at a time.” He also attacks what he calls “the illusion that we don’t have time to step back.”

More when Sterling Performance posts part two of its interview.

Maybe because it’s August, but education continues to be on my mind, particularly whether American universities are out of step with where they need to be for business. A reader who apparently noted my posts on Clay Christensen and whether college is a waste of time sent a link to “Higher Education: Dangerously Close to Being Irrelevant.

That post includes this assessment of what students get vs. what they need:

“Students are inside a classroom (tethered to a place), using textbooks and handouts (printed materials), they must pay tuition and register to attend (the experience is closed), talking during class or working with others outside of class is generally discouraged (each student is isolated though surrounded by peers), each student receives exactly the same instruction as each of her classmates (the information presented is generic), and students are students and do not participate in the teaching process (they are consumers).”

In contrast, consider what the same person experiences when she is outside the classroom:

“From her dorm room / the student center / a coffee shop / the bus a student connects to the Internet using her laptop (she is mobile), uses Google to find a relevant web page (a digital resource which is open for her to access). While carrying out her search, she chats with one friend on the phone and another using instant messaging to see if they can assist in her search (she is connected to other people), she follows links from one website to another exploring related information (the content is connected to other content), she quickly finds exactly the information she needs, ignoring irrelevant material (she gets what is important to her personally), and she shares her find with her friends by phone and IM (she participates in the teaching process).”

This seems a kind of caricature of the overall college experience.  We used to go mobile, heading off to libraries to find information that we needed, much of which remains offline.  Quite often we would see people there that we could speak with in person and who knew what we needed (there were also librarians, who remain surprisingly useful).  We were not thwarted by tedious sifting through irrelevant links in search results.   We had study groups to learn from each other and share what we found.  In classes, we could ask questions of our teachers, who were experts in their field, customizing the experience on the fly. And lectures or discussions gave us a baseline of what we should be learning.

Certainly, things have changed since I was in school — I recently had lunch with my college advisor, and she tells me it’s much different now.  For instance, students brag about not finishing their reading.  Perhaps that’s customizing the experience, but it sounds to me like it’s failing to learn something (and yes, there are things I failed to learn during college, too).

Meanwhile, the comments on whether college is a waste of time  give a useful discussion of the issue. Most interesting to me were ones saying that college is valuable, but is it really worth the price of tuition and room and board.

Does design really matter? A reader in Britain emailed me to ask what I thought. She is a designer at a major British airline that starts with a V and also is in school, working on a project about “How design thinking will be able to help business leaders articulate their vision.”

She’s been reading various BNET posts on innovation and design, and whether the MFA is the new MBA.  She wonders whether business leaders who aren’t designers actually think much of design at all. She says she’s found it difficult to get opinions from traditionally trained business managers. So take the poll below and crank out some comments. She might cite you in her research.

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800ceoread is readying its take on the 100 best business books of all time. It just offered up a sneak preview of five of the books that will be on the list, which will be published in December

Four of the five are conventional business books, if an eclectic selection:

“The First 90 days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels;”
“Good To Great;”

“Moneyball;”

“Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.”

The fifth is the perhaps outlandish choice of — you’ll never guess — a Dr. Seuss book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go. ”

I pulled this book off the shelf tonight. It’s a wonderful little story about perserverance, and having fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as did my sons.  But it seems not so much about business, to me.  800CEORead said: It’s self-help at its finest, self-help in the same way that Thoreau and Emerson championed self-improvement.”

It uses fewer syllables per word than Thoreau or Emerson, a point in its favor.  Personally, if I’m picking a children’s book that tells me something about business, I’d have to go with the “The House at Pooh Corner.”  It has Tigger, the epitome of the unmanageable employee (and aspiring CEO), Rabbit in all his micromanaging, scheming splendor, Pooh at his earnest best, fending off corporate Heffalumps with his trembling sidekick Piglet, and the Eeyores and Owls that inhabit companies everywhere. Christopher Robin, the actual CEO, appears periodically to clean up messes (a nice change of pace from today’s headlines).

Perhaps we can put together a list of the best children’s books for business readers, and fill out my whimsical headline.  Nominate yours in the comments.

Most firms wouldn’t think of hiring workers who don’t have a college degree. But degrees say very little about the person they’re hiring, argues Charles Murray, a scholar at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. The Wall Street Journal published For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time, sliced from his soon-to-be-published book “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.”

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance.

He’s even stronger in a Forbes essay, College Daze, where he says that that parents should encourage their high school graduates to volunteer, or get a real job and support themselves, and then maybe go to college.

I agree, to a point (see Is College Necessary?). In my profession, writing, college does not guarantee success. In high tech, famous college dropouts include Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates. Not that school doesn’t matter — venture capitalists, for instance, tend to prefer their entrepreneurs to drop out of certain schools.

Murray advocates leveling out the school factor somewhat by adopting certifications, not degrees.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

In fact, there is an organization that certifies business skills, modeled after the CPA. The Association of Professionals in Business Management offers two certifications, roughly equivalent to bachelor’s and an MBA. (Here’s a small profile of the organization I wrote for Fast Company in 2007).

What do you think, BNET? Would you rather have a certified employee, or one with a bachelor’s degree?

It’s popular now to think that business success is more random than not. Books like “Good to Great” get criticized because the companies profiled have underperformed the stock market since publication. Writers like Nassim Taleb pen bestsellers arguing that financial success depends on luck, turning the random walk into a kind of random mock. Even our basic ability to reason our way to good decisions seems undermined by our psychology (as argued in books like “Predictably Irrational” and “Sway”). It’s as though all of business is subject to the old saw about advertising — half of what we spend is wasted. So if half of our business decisions are a complete waste, what does it tell us?

It tells us first off that we have to have some good luck to succeed as entrepreneurs.

We also need good timing, a tangent to luck. Timing often boils down to patience. Some of the entrepreneurs I interview have spent 20 or 30 years working towards their ideas, finding market niches that will sustain them for a bit here, getting a government contract there, failing once or twice or thrice with businesses that try to make an idea fit markets before they’re ready. Sometimes other, luckier people have better timing, and look like overnight wonders.

So what about talent? Does intelligence or skill or experience count for nothing? That’s the implication, isn’t it?

I had lunch today with a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was having none of that argument. He agrees that luck and timing are essential, but without talent, you only have two-thirds of your martini. He also notes that the martini they make in the typical neighborhood bar is not the same as one at place like New York’s Vintage Restaurant.

So what do you think? Do we succeed by talent alone? Is luck dominant? Timing? Or do we need the full cocktail to avoid failure?

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Is a Harvard MBA worth it? Maybe, says British journalist Philip Delves Broughton, who quit his job at the Daily Telegraph to get a Harvard MBA, then wrote a book about it, “Ahead of the Curve.”

BNET1’s post MBA Follies: Two Years at Harvard Business gives some background on the book, as does Sterling Performance, which weighs in on What a Harvard MBA Teaches You. Both of these, and other reviews, focus on Delves Broughton’s doubts about what he’s done and his concerns about the experience. They suggest it is not a happy book for potential Harvard students. But The Economist’s review, The factory for unhappy people, makes the book sound more promising, and even says that Delves Broughton had “a positive experience” at Harvard.

Of note from The Economist’s review is that Delves Broughton’s book is a kind of introduction to current management thinking, which might be a useful crib in and of itself.

Also, Delves Broughton accuses HBS of two failings.

 First, it pushed the idea that its alumni would be equipped as leaders capable of solving all the world’s problems, rather than merely doing a decent job of running a company….His second worry was that so many of his classmates seemed destined for careers that would leave them no space for a happy personal life.

Harvard has probably lucked out that Delves Broughton’s book has gotten buzz, and not HBS professor Rakesh Khurana’s “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands,” which argues that business schools have undermined the very idea of business education.

Instead, it will probably become the business school set’s version of “OneL: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School,” Scott Turow’s first bestseller about the legal world, back in 1977. That would be a happy ending for Delves Broughton, and not so bad for Harvard, either.

Understanding why we make seemingly irrational decisions underpins several current books. One of those is  “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior,” and authors Ori and Rom Brafman are featured in this podcast with 800CEORead.

It’s more than 30 minutes start to finish, but those who just want a quick overview of the book can find it in BNET’s shorter preview of the book, which introduces concepts like loss aversion, value attribution and group dynamics that can help companies (I also discuss the book briefly in this post, Why We Can’t Stop Making Bad Decisions).

In the longer podcast, at about 15 minutes in (unfortunately, it does not show the time, at least in my browser), the Brafmans start to talk about strategies company leaders can use to reduce the potential for being swayed by their powerful irrational tendencies.

For instance, they talk about how encouraging ‘dissenters’ to speak up can keep comapnies from making terrible decisions at times of crisis. They note that Bear Stearns had at least two points where a dissenting voice might have saved it from its fate, but did not have the culture for dissenters to speak out.

They also confess that they have irrational moments all the time. The point they want to make is not that we can stop having irrational impulses, but that we can adopt strategies to recognize that they’re happening and reduce their impact.

This is a worthwhile podcast for those interested in the subject and thinking about the book.

Think you’re immune to advertising and marketing? Think again. For those thinking about the future of advertising and branding, 10 questions with Rob Walker has some provocative stuff. Walker, who writes the “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine, has a book out, “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue: What We Buy and Who We Are.”

He was interviewed by Church of the Customer’s Jackie Huba, who asked some terrific questions.

Some of the highlights:

On whether Americans will regulate advertising more heavily:

Polls consistently tell us that Americans can’t stand advertising, don’t trust it, are annoyed by its incursion into and murkier venues — and yet there appears to be no particular popular interest in regulation….There’s much talk about tech-enabled consumer power these days, but it takes the form of “complain about a product on a blog and get a free replacement…”

Are things any different today for marketers than they’ve ever been?

Consumers have been complaining about and skeptical of advertising for as long as advertising has existed. Marketers have complained about consumer resistance the whole time, too. None of that’s new, and it’s important to see what’s not new if you want to figure out what is…

We’ve always trusted our friends more than television ads. Only recently have marketers figured out how to tap that directly by signing up tens of thousands of folks who volunteer to get products early and talk them up and so on. This leverages the “endowment effect” (the tendency to overvalue something simply because we own it), and, in effect, converts your friends into a marketing medium.

Is the 30-second ad doomed?

I’m not sure if the 30-second ad will ever disappear. Apart from shows like “American Idol,” and sports events, there’s news channels and the proliferation of TV in public places, like the gas pump, where it can’t be TiVoed. Let’s not forget only a fifth of American homes have DVRs.

If the book is as cogent as the interview, it’s a must-read for managers who want to understand consumer branding and marketing. Has anyone read it yet? Give us a comment if so.

If you’re in business, you probably think you are. Some 61 percent of managers say they’re too nice.

Tim Hiltabiddle, the co-author of “Nice Guys Can Get the Corner Office” is hosting 800CEORead for a day or two. Here’s his post on why he wanted to write the book, which boils down to this:

I am a recovering ‘nice guy’ and have had numerous experiences in my career when my desire to be ‘nice’ and please others hindered my ability to achieve success in the business world, including times when my clients, co-workers, and vendors took advantage of my good nature. I’ve made great strides over the years to get beyond this tendency and have learned to be more assertive, stick up for myself, deal with conflict, set good boundaries, and take more risks.

Hiltabiddle says you don’t have to be a jerk to run a company. But being too nice doesn’t work, either.

His next two posts say a bit more about how to avoid being a patsy or a jerk.

He points out that Nice Gals can also find the corner office.

And he posts his Nice Guy Bill of Rights, eight points that make up the heart of the book. Of course, the original Bill of Rights had 10 points. But this is a management book, not a world-changing document.

The third post made me feel iffy about the book. I like the premise — I often feel like I’m agreeable to a fault (and BNET’s editors remind me frequently that Big Think is too nice). But the first thing on their list is “You have the right to SELF-AWARENESS.” Blech.

I also wonder whether I really need the Right to BE BOLD or to SPEAK UP. But maybe I’m so stuck in my niceness I can’t see that I’ve stopped exercising these rights.

Has anyone read the book and found it helped them, um, CONFRONT (that’s another Nice Guy Right) their niceness? Or is it just psychotherapy-in-a-book, which usually doesn’t work?