Back to B-School

Ahh, high school. The time in one’s life where buying the right sweater seemed just as important as having clean air to breathe. While most of us have at least some fond memories of high school, many are happy to leave those days of adolescent angst behind. So what happens when you find out that the business world is more like high school than you thought it would be?

New research from the Kellogg School of Management finds that in the world of VC firms, there are established cliques (the cool kids, if you will) and new kids, or new firms, trying to find their way into the cliques.

The research was conducted by Yael Hochberg, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management; Alexander Ljungqvist a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Yang Lu, an assistant VP at Barclays Capital. Here are some of the effects of VC cliques they found, as reported by a Kellogg Insight article: (more…)

When a business gives away its products for free and sustains itself through advertisements alone, how can rivals that charge for their products and services compete? This is one of the questions addressed in new research by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and Feng Zhu (pictured), an assistant professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Through an email exchange, Casadesus-Masanell and Zhu discussed with me some of the concepts covered in their study “Strategies to Fight Ad-Sponsored Rivals.”

BNET: Your research looks at ways that companies charging fees for products and services can compete with other companies offering those things for free. This is a problem that has famously affected the entertainment industry and old media; what other sorts of businesses are being affected?

RCM & FZ: Ad-sponsored products and services are increasingly prevalent in many industries. In addition to traditional media industries such as newspapers and television, today we can find many free products and services in many different industries such as online services (e.g., social networking sites such as Facebook, content sharing sites such as YouTube, email services such as Gmail and Hotmail, and online searches such as Google and Microsoft Bing), software applications (e.g., many of the iPhone applications), paper cups from FreePaperCups.com and free phone calls (e.g., Blyk). (more…)

What would happen if you got rid of your sales staff’s quotas? Would they slack off and make your profitability plummet?

According to new research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the opposite very well may happen: eliminating quotas can provide a means of boosting your profits.

Quotas are generally seen as a way to encourage and pay off employees who work the hardest, but researchers Harikesh Nair, a Stanford GSB associate marketing professor, and Sanjog Misra of the University of Rochester found that quotas can actually encourage employees to make fewer sales. Nair explained how in a Stanford press release: (more…)

For the past two weeks, I’ve posted highlights from my recent conversation with Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth professor Ella Edmondson Bell, author of the forthcoming Career GPS: Strategies for Women Navigating the New Corporate Landscape, about the challenges that women face in today’s workplace and what women can do to better succeed in business. In this third and final installment, I gave Bell the chance to respond to a question raised by my fellow BNET Insight blogger Sean Silverthorne. 

BNET: A recent post citing Sylvia Ann Hewlitt’s research that 84 percent of executive women compared to only 40 percent of men have seriously considered leaving their jobs in the past year sparked a big discussion about why women are unhappy at work. I was curious if you agree that women are often more unhappy at work than men, or if you had any other comments on this.

Bell: I’m not sure if women are unhappy or if they feel they’re not being given the same opportunity. If they feel that they aren’t being appreciated and aren’t being heard, and if they feel that their contributions aren’t considered important, I don’t call that unhappy. I don’t like that particular framing. I think unhappy needs to be really, really unpacked. It’s the fact that [women are asking], “Am I being appreciated for what I bring to the table? Am I being heard? Am I being solicited? Am I being challenged?” That’s a lot deeper than being happy. Happy is far too simple for me. (more…)

When is the last time you gave serious thought to keeping your top performers engaged and happy? If you answered “before the recession,” you’re not alone. Many managers have faced more immediate concerns about keeping their companies afloat, and this paired with the fact that there aren’t a lot of jobs out there right now means that employee job satisfaction might have slid down the list of priorities.

A recent article from the MIT Sloan Management Review warns managers that once conditions improve, the number of executives leaving their companies for new opportunities historically spike.

Elizabeth Craig, John R. Kimberly and Peter Cheese write in “How to Keep Your Best Executives” that now is the time to get serious about employee retention strategies. They list three keys to keeping employees satisfied and happy within your company: (more…)

When New York City mandated last year that chain restaurants had to label the calorie content of items on the menu, many assumed that restaurants would lose business as customers saw how many calories were in their burgers and fries and opted to stay home and eat a lighter meal instead. At the very least, it seemed that lower calorie options would gain popularity.

However, a study from the Yale School of Management found that this hasn’t necessarily been the case.

Victoria Brescoll, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Brian Elbel, Rogan Kersh and L. Beth Dixon, all from New York University, studied the fast food purchases of participants before and after the calorie labeling mandate. They focused the study on low income and minority neighborhoods in which residents face a greater risk of obesity.

Here’s what they found: (more…)

Last week, I posted excerpts from my recent conversation with Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth professor Ella Edmondson Bell, author of the forthcoming book Career GPS: Strategies for Women Navigating the New Corporate Landscape, about some of the challenges women face in today’s workplace, such as continued exclusion from business networks and new pressures brought on by factors such as technology and globalization.

However, Bell says that despite these issues, now is a great time for women in the workforce: (more…)

If you’re worried about whether or not your employees behave ethically, a pair of MBA professors have come up with a simple solution: spray a little citrus-scented Windex in their work environments.

TIME reported recently about new research finding that clean smells promoted good behavior. The research was conducted by Katie Liljenquist, a professor at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management, and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

The researchers conducted experiments testing subjects’ honesty and generosity. One group was tested in a room cleaned with citrus Windex, and one group was located in an unscented room. In one experiment, each group was given a set of tasks to complete. In their packet was a flyer asking for charitable donations. Of those in the clean-smelling room, 22 percent said they wanted to donate money; only 6 percent in the other room agreed to give.

“Economists and even psychologists haven’t been paying much attention to the fact that small changes in our environment can have dramatic effects on behavior. We underemphasize these subtle environmental cues,” Galinsky said in TIME.

As someone who can’t concentrate when my desk gets too messy, to me this makes a degree of intuitive sense. However, others are skeptical that clean smells specifically trigger more moral behavior. TIME also spoke to Brown University psychologist Rachel Herz, who said that participants who liked the smell of citrus might have simply been in a more positive mood, not necessarily a more ethical one.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of Flickr user zsoul, CC 2.0.

 Loading ...

In a recent interview with Ross School of Business professor Jeff DeGraff posted on the University of Michigan’s web site, DeGraff urges companies to consider downtimes the best for pursuing innovation, even if that means spending more money than on the surface seems wise during a recession.

He shares three key reasons why this is the case:

• Investing in innovation when costs are low will pay off in the future: “At some point, U.S.-based firms are going to come out of the recession. And there will be a shakeout of those who have invested in the last development cycle and those who have cut back,” says DeGraff. (more…)

  Email Stacy Blackman Follow me on Twitter

For a long time, marketers have assumed that when consumers fail to gamble on a new product or service in place of their regular one, it’s because of their fears of loss. However, research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University finds this may not be the whole story.

The recent Kellogg Insight article “Should I Stay or Should I Go” details the research of Kellogg marketing professor Alexander Chernev, in which he asked people if they would consider investing in funds with higher yield potential than the funds they already owned. He categorized respondents as prevention-focused, those who more often stayed with the status quo, and promotion focused, those who would try something new if it seemed profitable.

With the prevention-focused group, Chernev found that their reluctance to try new products couldn’t be solely attributed to simple loss aversion; if that were the case, then they would have chosen the higher-yield investment. (more…)