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A response to the criticisms lobbed at MBA programs for producing flawed business leaders has been for programs to ramp up their ethics offerings. But according to Roger Martin, head of Canada’s Rotman School of Management, what future business leaders really need is an education in multiple fields, including design.

In Martin’s new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, he argues that MBA programs focused solely on analytical thinking have made business managers lose their creative and intuitive sides. A blend of “design thinking” and analysis, Martin argues, could help MBA grads emerge as more complete managers.

So how can you integrate design thinking if you’re already in the business world? Fast Company blogger Dev Patnaik recently participated in a lecture with Martin, and shared a few tips from their conversation:

• 1. Think of yourself as a designer when working out business strategies: Coming up with business strategies should emphasize possibilities over existing information and frameworks. Patnaik writes, “You can’t analyze your way to real strategy. You have to create it from data, guts, empathy, creativity and a little thin air.”
• 2. Make your leadership style a blend of analysis and intuition: Patnaik brings up the often-cited Steve Jobs to illustrate this point. While Jobs’ intuition has produced great innovations like the iPod, his lack of business analysis has led to flops like the Power Mac G4 Cube. Business leaders need to work on developing both skills.
• 3. Throw out your templates: True “design thinking” happens when managers try to solve a problem or create a product that hasn’t been seen in any form. However, Patnaik writes, “Most people, whatever their background, are more comfortable reapplying a formula that has worked in the past than at generating new possibilities. They just try to use a template from an existing success, which is the chief reason we see so many copycat products and copycat strategies.”

Eames chair image courtesy of Flickr user geraintandkim, CC 2.0.

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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…)

Remember when people used to make it a Blockbuster night, and the lines at your local video store snaked all the way back through the foreign film section? Chances are, if you’ve visited a video store lately, it’s been a lot less populated. In fact, according to a recent Knowledge@Wharton article, Blockbuster plans to close 40 percent of its stores over the next two years to focus on its digital rental service.

The culprit behind Blockbuster’s woes, not to mention the closing of many a beloved mom-and-pop video store, is Netflix, the subscription-based DVD rental service that delivers movies to our mailboxes in ubiquitous red envelopes. In “Netflix: One Eye on the Present and Another on the Future,” the Wharton community weighs in on the company’s past and present successes and the challenges it faces from competitors such as iTunes and digital streaming channels like Hulu.

No matter how Netflix fares in the future, the article points to a few keys to its successes so far that are worth studying, no matter what line of business you’re in. (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…)

Don Sull of the London Business School is a popular and familiar voice on the Back to B-School blog.  He was recently cited by Fortune as one of the “ten new gurus you should know.” In today’s post, you’ll get to know more about him and his new book, The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunities in an Uncertain World.  In the final installment of our four-part conversation (you can start with the first part of our discussion), we discuss the role that managers at different levels in an organization can take to adapt to turbulence and how luck affects a business’s success.

BNET: What are the first few steps a manager might take to reform an organization if he or she recognizes a hardening of strategies and practices during turbulent times?

Sull: That’s a terrific question. First, of all, it depends who you are in the organization.  If you’re on the board, there are many things you can do to help if you introduce the discussion about hardening of practices. I think outside directors in general don’t do nearly enough in their role as a check on institutional blind spots. If you are a CEO — especially one brought in specifically to make changes — you have to quickly find out who among your direct reports gets this issue of hardening of processes and practices, realizes the danger, and sees the importance of fixing it. If they don’t see what you see, you may have to let a couple of people go and bring new people on.

The tricky place is when you’re a middle manager: You’re running a good-sized piece of the business, but you are three to four levels down from the CEO. A lot of people think, “There’s nothing I can do.” That, I think, is complete nonsense; it’s a cop out. You should start to look for a cohort of people and articulate your combined story on what you think the priorities of the company should be and what you should do to react to the turbulence you face. That’s the first step to finding sympathetic executives more senior in the organization. There are also great opportunities to have an impact from this kind of position when a CEO is replaced. Often when a new CEO comes in, he will meet with the top 50 to 100 managers to get a read deeper into the organization. I know of some people who have had great impact on these occasions when they had a compelling analysis prepared.

BNET: Your book takes on the role of luck.  Could you lead us through how much impact than can have?

Sull: The role of luck in business is systematically under-discussed in management books. In Good to Great Jim Collins does a good job of consolidating some common sense observations. But he claims he’s discovered the eternal laws of physics of organizations, stating, “If you do these things, you’ll have a great organization.” I think that’s half the equation. The other half is “what threats and opportunities are presented to you by the external context?”  I think the reality is, for most managers, you can’t predict or dictate the timing, magnitude, or form of opportunities.

In The Upside of Turbulence, I’ve tried to bring luck and external opportunities back into the equation. Listen, there is stuff you just cannot predict; luck can help you or hurt you. However, there are things you can do to increase the odds that you’ll spot an opportunity that others miss — and increase your organization’s ability to seize opportunities in a timely and effective manner.

BNET: What are some of those things managers and companies can do?

Sull: In broad strokes there are three approaches: anticipation, agility, and absorption. Anticipation is a firm’s ability to collect and process real-time data on the situation, explore surprising results, and identify emerging opportunities and threats. Agility is a firm’s ability to consistently identify and exploit opportunities more quickly and effectively than rivals. Absorption refers to the structural factors — including size, diversification, resources, balance sheet strength — that allow firms to weather shocks in the market, and live to fight another day. At a time when few firms have a triple A credit rating, companies that can master anticipation, agility, and absorption will be well positioned regardless of what the future brings.

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…)

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…)

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Don Sull of the London Business School spoke with me recently about his new book, The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunities in an Uncertain World.  In the first installment of our conversation, Sull defined “turbulence,” and in the second post he discussed how Nokia took advantage of turbulence to redefine itself as a company. Today he explains how managers at all levels of a company can take advantage of opportunities that arise from turbulence.

BNET: The are other books out there about surprising event and how they can affect business, including The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.  What specific new angles does The Upside of Turbulence bring to the discussion?

The bulk of my book talks about “what do you do?” in turbulent markets. Taleb’s focus is: As an investor, how do you deal with turbulence?  The focus of my book is: as an executive or a manager or an entrepreneur, how do you deal with turbulence?  The thing about stock market trades is that you can reverse them overnight; there’s no stickiness.  But imagine if you are, say, Micky Arison running a cruise line.  Your cruise ships last 35 years.  Your brand takes you decades to build. You can’t reverse your decisions so quickly.  When you have long-lived assets like brands, technologies, patents, physical plants, and employees, it’s a very different dynamic.

There have been a lot of books about how you manage risk — how you cope with the potential downside of unstable markets.  But I don’t think there have been quite as many that focus on the opportunities that arise from turbulence.

BNET: How can a midlevel manager — who can affect company practices but is not necessarily “helming the ship” — take advantage of turbulence he sees?

Sull: I wrote this book to make it scalable to folks at different levels of an organization. Some lessons are focused on people in the C-Suite, but there are a set of things that you can do if you are running a business unit, a function, or a region.  One of the points I raise in the book is about the need for agility. There are three different types. The first is operational agility. Within your business unit there are steps you can take to seize opportunities to grow revenues and cut costs. The second type is what I call portfolio agility. That means pulling resources out of less productive or promising ventures and putting them in more productive opportunities. The third is strategic agility. Periodically the environment throws golden opportunities your way — to acquire a competitor or enter a new market, for instance — and you need to be able to see and seize those opportunities.

You see those opportunities at all levels of an organization. Even with portfolio agility, which some people say is a headquarters responsibility. But every manager is making portfolio decisions of some sort; they’re just smaller.  And you’d be surprised at how mid-level folks can affect strategic agility. They can often start the ball rolling for some type of acquisition when they see, say, a competitor on its heels.

If you rely on only the CEO to drive agility in your organization, you are dead. You’re not distributing both the responsibility and the decision-making to take the actions to thrive in turbulent markets.  And, if you’re a big, complex organization, you are dead.

When I teach these concepts in a boot-camp format, about one-third of the attendees are CEOs or managing directors of organizations — but two-thirds aren’t.  You can apply these tools at any level of your business quite productively.

We’ll conclude our discussion with Sull next week as focus on how managers can adapt their organizations to take advantage of turbulence and the role of luck in business.