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BlackBerries are not just for pie any more. And some fear the addictive pull of BlackBerries and other “smart phones” can cause more harm than grandma's sugar-laden pie.
MIT Sloan Professors Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates and doctoral student Melissa Mazmanian sought to understand the so-called “CrackBerry” phenomenon, a nickname spawned out of the addictive nature of such devices.
The team spent several months studying BlackBerry use at a small financial services firm where the work is fast paced and work-life balance valued. Employees had used BlackBerries for four years, and the team found some negative patterns.
Ninety percent of the firm's employees described their behavior with the device as something akin to compulsion, confessing to an inability to refrain from checking the device.
With such obsessive use, employees came to expect each other to be available day and night, and the devices proved a distraction in meetings — prompting the company to limit such use.
The employees recognized the drawbacks of BlackBerries, the team found, but they maintained the benefits outweighed the costs.
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Sales Conference: Good selling begets good leadershipOften overlooked in academic circles, the art of successful selling will be explored in depth on Friday, May 4, when MIT Sloan hosts its first Sales Conference at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge.
The theme of the conference will be “The Power of Sales Driven Leadership,” and panels of experts will focus on the practical, hands-on sales skills behind great business leaders.
Tim Armstrong, vice president of advertising sales at Google, is slated to serve as keynote speaker. He, along with a number of executives and venture capitalists from some of the nation's leading companies, will take part in panels covering topics ranging from trends in global sales to sales force building and management.
The conference is run the MIT Sloan Sales Club, which has grown to include nearly 100 members since its launch in 2006. Largely focused on entrepreneurship, the club sees sales training as an integral part of any business education. And the conference is a way to introduce students to a wide range of philosophies and ideas concerning sales.
“We want to bring together senior executives from all different industries and backgrounds to discuss their particular challenges in sales, as well as provide practical training on how to improve your own sales skills,” explains Nathan Williams, codirector of the conference. “The Sales Club is incredibly diverse and we want to reflect that diversity at this conference.”
Photo: Tim Armstrong, vice president of advertising sales at Google, is keynote speaker for the conference.
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MIT SMR: Time for an open business model?Investment in innovation is often a casualty of rising R&D costs and sagging product revenues. But an open business model can reduce the cost of innovation and spawn new streams of revenue, according to Henry W. Chesbrough, writing in the Winter 2007 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review.
Development costs are lower under an open business model, Chesbrough writes, as a firm makes greater use of external technology in its own R&D process and realizes savings in time and money. An open model also frees a firm from the market it serves directly and enables it to participate in other segments through licensing fees, joint ventures and spinoffs, and other means.
In “Why Companies Should Have Open Business Models,” Chesbrough explains how companies can realize the benefits of open innovation and provides case studies on how IBM, P&G, and Air Products migrated to more open business models.
In addition to the benefits of open innovation, the winter issue includes articles on leadership, branding, sustainability, global business, marketing, governance, managing people, strategy, and more.
The MIT Sloan Management Review is a quarterly research journal that provides useful and innovative ideas for business leaders.
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Motherhood and the lure of the officeHaving children led MIT Sloan Assistant Professor of Organization Science Denise Lewin Loyd into a new area of study: the increasingly difficult balance between work and family life. It's an issue Loyd and other new mothers know well.
“It is very challenging,” says Loyd, who has two young children. “I don't know any woman grad student or faculty member who is considering a family who doesn't have the ongoing discussion in her head of Should I have children? When should I have them? How will it impact my career?.”
Loyd and others have found the right balance at MIT, a family friendly institution, but more widespread connectivity to work from home and on the road threatens to tip the balance for many. And, she says, the challenge confronts a cross-section of employees, not just women and male workers with children.
Understanding the perspectives and needs of diverse employees is at the heart of much of Loyd's work.
In addition to work-life balance issues, she studies interactions of teams and how differences between group members affect the processes, performance, and dynamics of a group.
“We're always going to have diverse groups working together,” says Loyd. “Demographics, race, departmental affiliations, and gender may suggest certain status differences. Working in experimental settings tells us much about how these differences impact group interactions in the workplace and is critical to understanding how people solve problems together.”
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Leader in sustainability to speak to MIT Sloan communityGoing up? Since joining Otis Elevator in 1975, George David has made the corporate ascent. And as chairman and CEO of United Technologies Corporation, Otis' parent company, he has done it in a way that achieves both shareholder value and sustainability.
MIT students will have a chance to learn David's approach to achieving a balance thought by some to be next to impossible. He will speak Feb. 22 as part of the Dean's Innovative Leader Series.
In a decade under David, UTC has turned profits, established a record of innovation and productivity, and emerged as a global leader in sustainability. The company was recently included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for the eighth year in a row. It was also recognized at the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos as one of the “100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World.”
Interacting with such innovative and forward-thinking leaders is at the heart of the MIT Sloan experience. Classes and student clubs host hundreds of speakers throughout the school year, in addition to the corporate and governmental connections students make on trips and treks.
The Dean's Innovative Leader Series invites select leaders who are shaping the present and future marketplace for frank and meaningful discussions with students.
A list of past speakers is a veritable who's who of global business, including Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO of Xerox; Carly Fiorina, SF '89, former president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard; and G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., CEO of GM.
This spring two more dynamic leaders will speak: Jack Welch, former GE CEO and a lecturer at MIT Sloan, on April 12 and Peter A. Wuffli, group chief executive officer of UBS AG, on April 24.
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Inaugural MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference, Feb. 10Good draft picks. Innovative coach. Spirited fans. Grit, hustle, and determination on the field of play. Now you can add analytics to this list of keys to success for a professional sports franchise.
Increasingly a powerful tool in distinguishing the best sports franchises, analytics will take center stage at the inaugural MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference, Feb. 10 at MIT, sponsored by the MIT Sloan Entertainment, Media & Sports Club.
The conference will feature leaders in sports analytics addressing such questions as: Why are some sports teams and leagues more successful than others? How does quantitative analysis factor into personnel decisions such as drafting players and making trades? How should teams determine the optimal ticket pricing strategy? Will rule changes be introduced to counter the pace of technology improvements?
“This conference will bring together for the first time sports industry leaders from the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL who are integrating an analytical approach into their personnel decisions and business operations,” says conference co-chair Daryl Morey, MBA '00, assistant general manager of the Houston Rockets and former instructor of the popular Analytical Sports Management Course at MIT Sloan.
Slated to participate are:
“MIT Sloan's inaugural Sports Business Conference is an important step in showcasing the role of MBAs and the use of analytics in the industry,” says McCourt. “As president [of the LA Dodgers], I believe that hiring the right people with the necessary analytical skill set combined with excellent interpersonal skills will result in a winning team for fans and profitability for the franchise.”
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Biotech and housing innovations win MIT $100KTwo life-changing inventions took the top prizes at the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition during a ceremony at Kresge Auditorium on May 18.
The start-up SteriCoat won the MIT Business Venture Robert P. Goldberg Grand Prize for a revolutionary antibacterial coating that significantly reduces the incidence of infection in patients using catheters.
The other top honor — the new MIT Social Impact Prize — was awarded to CentroMigrante Inc., which integrates architectural innovations and a versatile self-help business model to provide clean, safe, affordable housing for indigent job hunters in developing urban areas.
This year marks the evolution of the MIT $50K, the world's preeminent business plan competition, into the MIT $100K. The additional funds make possible the new MIT Social Impact Prize, which recognizes the business plan that best serves low-income communities.
More than 164 teams entered the competition, the largest number of entries “since the peak of the dot-com bubble,” says Lawrence Walmsley, an MIT $100K organizer. Fifty-five of those teams competed for the Social Impact Prize.
Read more about this year's MIT $100K contest.
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CIO Symposium: Maximizing the business value of ITOnce consigned to managing technical people and assets, chief information officers are emerging as important strategic leaders — asked to partner strategically with other units, to develop profit and product centers, and to help drive the corporate agenda.
This is one of a number of trends on the agenda at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, June 21. The symposium brings together 500 senior-level IT decision-makers for a day of networking and spirited discussions on today's business and technology issue.
With the theme “Maximizing the Business Value of IT,” the symposium will focus on the impact of recent IT developments along two tracks: Technology & Business and IT Organization.
Panels will address the following topics:
Dave Girouard, who manages Google's growing enterprise business worldwide, will deliver the keynote address. The symposium is organized by the MIT Center for eBusiness and the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Boston, in association with the Society for Information Management (SIM).
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Bright lights of business converge at MIT Sloan Convocation 2005Alumni traveled to MIT Sloan Oct. 6-8 from around the world to get late-breaking knowledge from business legends like Morris Chang, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor, John Thain, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and Carly Fiorina, former CEO and chairman of Hewlett-Packard.
At this, MIT Sloan's much anticipated triennial convocation, alumni had the opportunity to connect with one another, with faculty, and with some of the great business minds of our era. They took classes with the school's top faculty — intensive updates like Rebecca Henderson's "Standards and Strategy: Competing in Increasingly Open Worlds."
Many of the weekend's discussions dealt with issues of global responsibility — "Making Globalization Work for All," for example, featuring Hannah Jones, vice president for corporate responsibility at Nike, and "Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty" with Barbara Stocking, director general of Oxfam, Great Britain. During a networking lunch, MIT Sloan students presented a poster session, sharing information and insights on current projects that are changing the world.
One of the high points of the convocation was the Passion to Action Summit. The event celebrated the launch of the MIT Leadership Center and featured panel discussions organized around critical global business issues. Featuring such headliners as biotech pioneer Bob Langer, Nobel prize-winning biologist Phil Sharp, and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, the summit presented discussions that illuminated the hallmarks of productive, visionary leadership.
Photo: Carly Fiorina, former CEO and chairman of Hewlett-Packard, speaks at MIT Sloan Convocation 2005.
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Top CEOs team to create the Alfred P. Sloan Management SocietyTwo of the abiding tenets that fuel the work of the MIT community are collaboration and experience. To progress, you must collaborate across function and discipline, and you must integrate research with actual practice. The revolutionary Alfred P. Sloan Management Society is a powerful amalgam of both ideas.
The organization brings together 15 of the world's most visionary executives with MIT Sloan students and faculty to bridge the worlds of academia and industry. The business leaders will bring their expertise into the classroom and also unofficially advise on curriculum, research, and other academic matters. Citizens Financial Group CEO Lawrence Fish will teach a banking case study.
“We are a small group of experienced and interested people who want to become engaged for the benefit of MIT Sloan," explains society member Michael Armstrong, who has chaired the boards of Comcast, AT&T, and Hughes Electronics. Armstrong is now a visiting professor at MIT Sloan. "While we may set up a more formal set of objectives, the Society will retain its informality and responsiveness so that we can function effectively as a good sounding board for the Dean and faculty.”
MIT Sloan lecturer Howard Anderson is credited with the inspiration for the organization. As founder of the Yankee Group, he had developed relationships with many of the group's members, which include the CEOs of Bell South, Aetna, and the New York Stock Exchange. "The Society," he says, "consists of leading movers and shakers in American industry who are committed to working with faculty, administrators, and students — who as a result will be in regular contact with some of the nation's best business minds.”
Anderson believes in the power of first-hand knowledge. "Society members," he says, "are making a commitment to help train the next generation of business leaders.”
Read more about the Alfred P. Sloan Management Society and its distinguished members.
Photo: Michael Armstrong, who has chaired the boards of Comcast, AT&T, and Hughes Electronics.
AP Photo
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MIT Sloan Convocation 2005: Theoretical insights. Practical methods.Every three years, MIT Sloan alumni travel to the Institute from around the globe to monitor advances on the frontier of management. The three-day MIT Sloan Convocation draws some of the world's most renowned alumni, all dedicated to investigating new directions in technology, entrepreneurship, consumer behavior, and management practice.
The 2005 MIT Sloan Convocation, Oct. 6-8, featured talks by Morris Chang, SB '52, SM '53, ME '55, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC); Carly Fiorina, SM '89, former chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard; and John Thain, SB '77, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.
MIT Sloan Convocation offered alumni the opportunity to upgrade critical knowledge by attending an invigorating roster of talks, discussion groups, and seminars with the industry leaders and MIT Sloan professors who are defining their fields. Rebecca Henderson, for example, explored strategies for competing in an increasingly open world. Michael Scott Morton investigated corporate strategy for information technology.
Other faculty led panel discussions, including Richard Locke, who hosted Hannah Jones, vice president for corporate responsibility at Nike, and Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, in a frank dialogue about socially responsible globalization.
The convocation kicked off Oct. 6 with the Passion to Action Summit — a confab of MIT leaders that served as the official launch of the MIT Leadership Center. In addition, the 2005 convocation celebrated two key landmarks in the history of management education: the 75th anniversary of the MIT Sloan Fellows Program, the first executive program in the world, and the 25th anniversary of the Management of Technology Program, a trail-blazing program that inspired more than 250 imitators. The two programs merged in 2004.
Read more about MIT Sloan Convocation 2005.
Photo: In one session at MIT Sloan Convocation 2005, MIT Sloan Professor Rebecca Henderson explored strategies for competing in an increasingly open world.
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MIT celebrates its leadersMIT is celebrating the launch of the MIT Leadership Center today with the Passion to Action Summit, a half-day program that draws together extraordinary leaders for intense, provocative discussions of ideas that are shaping society — how we live, how we work, how we learn, and how we lead.
Rosalind Williams, historian and MIT professor; Bob Langer, biotech pioneer; Phil Sharp, Nobel prize-winning biologist: and Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, will explore the implications, opportunities, and responsibilities of propelling technological innovation.
MIT Professor Peter Senge will talk with Frannie Léautier, a World Bank executive; Jeremy Hockenstein, CEO of a non-profit in Cambodia; and Ron O'Connor, founder of Management Sciences for Health — all striving to develop sustainable solutions to societal challenges and overcoming the barriers of leading across sectors, locally and globally.
Four entrepreneurial, creative MIT students will demonstrate how they organize, innovate, and act on their passion to make a positive difference in the world with MIT Professor Woodie Flowers. Together, they examine what more can be done to support and enable MIT students to lead.
This celebration of MIT leaders is the ideal occasion to launch an organization dedicated to spurring creative thinkers into active leaders. The MIT Leadership Center blends MIT's pre-eminence in technological innovation with the MIT Sloan School of Management's resources in management and leadership. Working together with business, academia, and industry, the Center creates cutting-edge theory, pragmatic tools, and action-oriented curricula to enable present and future leaders to tackle complex, global challenges and create positive social change.
Learn more about the MIT Leadership Center and the Passion to Action Summit.
Photo: Rosalind Williams, historian and MIT professor, will participate in a session exploring the implications, opportunities, and responsibilities of propelling technological innovation.
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Balance in biotech's favor at MIT $50KA company marketing a device to help people with a balance or vestibular disorder was awarded the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition's $30,000 grand prize in a ceremony at MIT's Kresge Auditorium Monday, May 9. The victory for the privately held company, Balico, marks the fourth year in a row a medical device company has taken the top honor at the oldest and best known among university business plan competitions.
The Balico business team includes Baruch Schori, a participant in the MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership.
The company reports that at least half of the U.S. population suffers from a balance or vestibular disorder sometime during their lives. It will develop and commercialize a wearable vibrotactile balance aid that accurately senses and displays body tilt to help reduce the risk of falls.
Balico was chosen from seven finalist teams, each of which presented its business plan to an audience at the ceremony that included venture capitalists and business leaders.
The $50K judges awarded first runner-up honors to Nanocell Power, which has a manufacturing process that provides efficient distribution of expensive catalyst and carbon nanofibers in the fuel cell membrane. The second runner-up was Vacuum Excavation Technology, which offers an excavation device that works with existing machinery to enable efficient operation without risk to utilities or operators.
Learn more about the MIT $50K winners.
Photo: Business team members of Balico, winner of the 2005 MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition.
Photo by Justin Allardyce Knight
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Jack Welch tells what it really means to be the "smartest person in town"“A rock star of the business world," was how MIT Sloan Dean Richard Schmalensee introduced him, and retired GE Chairman and CEO Jack Welch did not disappoint the hundreds of students crammed into Wong Auditorium, spilling out into corridors, and watching live on Webcam.
As famous for his candor and rhetorical skill as for his strength as a business leader, Welch needed no warm-up act to keep the crowd on the edge of its seat during his talk at MIT Sloan on April 12, 2005. Although in the midst of promoting his bestselling memoir "Winning," written with new wife and former Harvard Business Review editor Suzy (Wetlaufer) Welch, America's most charismatic CEO spent the hour focused on leadership and never lost track of whom he was talking to.
Part of the Dean's Innovative Leader Series, the talk was heavily attended by present and future leaders and Welch talked straight to them. A leader's role, he told them, is to impart vision and a healthy corporate culture, build great people and great teams, and show them how to lead. A leader's job, he said again and again, is not to be "the smartest person in town," but to hire and inspire the smartest people in town.
One of the keys to growing into leadership, Welch said, was to build confidence and for that reason, he noted, he never berated anyone when they were down. He himself had accidentally blown up a plant early in his career as an engineer at GE and never forgot that his boss, former MIT professor Charles Reed, left him feeling taller and more confident than when he arrived for the reckoning, quaking in his boots.
Confidence, Welch said, was something the students seated before him would build at MIT Sloan. "As one of the greatest schools in the world, MIT Sloan gives you self-confidence — after all, you got here in the first place." But he urged his audience to aspire beyond being one the smartest in the classroom. Looking around at them, he predicted, "The people in this room will go out and do something that will change the shape of the game!”
Watch the video of Jack Welch's talk.
Read about Jack Welch's talk at MIT Sloan.
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Industry leaders convene to map future of biotechDesigned by a team of MIT Sloan faculty and other top biotech experts, Leading Innovative Enterprises: Strategies for Growth in the Life Sciences integrates strategic disciplines, frameworks, and tools formats to give the industry's new leaders a leg up on the dizzying challenges ahead.
One of the key draws of Leading Innovative Enterprises is the roster of life science luminaries who come to campus for frank talk with the participants of this 15-day program, which meets for one week in February, March, and May. In week one of the program, MIT Institute Professor and Nobel laureate Philip Sharp discussed both the perils and the opportunities facing managers trying to bring medical innovations to market.
Founding director of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and cofounder of Biogen and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Sharp won his 1993 Nobel Prize for work on RNA splicing. He warned the next generation of leaders in the room that as scientific breakthroughs are accelerating, product development is slowing and that they would need to pioneer a more productive pipeline to transform scientific advances into medical solutions.
Participants come to Leading Innovative Enterprises from the world's leading pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies to get such straight talk from the best heads in the field, including the 12-member faculty team. Led by program director Charles Fine, Chrysler LFM Professor of Management Science, the faculty comprises many of the top experts in growth strategies, innovation and technology management, systems thinking, leadership, and change.
Learn more about Leading Innovative Enterprises Executive Program.
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Getting Inspiration and Advice from the Best in the WorldIf MIT Sloan students did nothing else but tune in to the steady stream of wise men and women who spoke at the School in the fall of 2004, they would have come away with the education of a lifetime. Approximately 125 CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, and COOs, founders, presidents, chairmen, and key executives of organizations around the globe shared their hard-won experiences and strategies during the semester.
The roster included leaders from companies as diverse as Segway, Bose, Consumers Union, General Motors, Apple, Deutsche Bank, Eastman Kodak, DeBeers-Louis Vuitton, Hewlett-Packard, Goldman Sachs, Delta Airlines, Exxon Mobil, IBM, Nike, Pfizer, Yahoo, and the National Geographic Channel. They represented economies across the global marketplace from Asia to Europe to South America.
At a school where researchers make a point of having one foot firmly planted in the real world, the speaker series has evolved into a popular and powerful learning tool. Research centers, student groups, and alumni clubs have embraced the model, which taps into the first hand knowledge of many of the best minds in the world. Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Kofi Annan, Carly Fiorina, Jeff Immelt, Ross Perot, Michael Dell, Warren Buffett, Keiji Tachikawa, and Daniel Vasella are just a handful of the influential leaders hosted in recent years.
The Dean's Innovative Leader Series, sponsored by the MIT Leadership Center in conjunction with student organizations, brings to the School sought-after leaders like Orit Gadiesh, chairman of the board of Bain and Company, and alumnus John Reed, SB '61 and SM '65, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and former CEO of Citigroup. "Speakers of this caliber and this depth of experience," says Director of Corporate Relations Dave Weber, "add immense value to the other classroom and project activities that make up the bulk of the MIT Sloan curriculum.”
Review a sample of speakers at MIT Sloan in fall 2004.
Read about the Dean's Innovative Leader Series.
View videos of past speakers at MIT Sloan on MIT World.
Photo: Orit Gadiesh, chairman of the board of Bain and Company, speaks to the MIT Sloan community in December 2004 as part of the Dean's Innovative Leader Series.
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BT and MIT Sloan reinvent the inspired collaborationA decade ago, farsighted leaders at British Telecom (BT) and management pioneers at MIT Sloan independently came to the same conclusion: the World Wide Web would — sooner rather than later — make or break service-oriented entities like telecom companies.
BT's leaders heard about the work of MIT Sloan visionaries like Tom Malone and Michael Scott Morton who were inventing the next generation of organizations and they wanted to understand what that research would mean to the future of BT. They initiated a dialog, and the long, productive relationship between MIT and BT was born.
“The beauty of MIT Sloan is exactly that MIT and Sloan are intermeshed," says Dan Moorhead, director of organizational research, BT Group. "MIT Sloan presents a veritable feast to a corporation like BT." Moorhead notes that his company was drawn to MIT Sloan's reputation for building strong partnerships and its grasp of the impact of new technologies.
A founding sponsor of MIT Sloan's Center for eBusiness, BT finds its own interests intersecting with MIT Sloan research on many fronts. "At MIT, I am in touch with the latest, most rigorous, most provocative thinking," Moorhead says. "Leading edge research, not just text book stuff." He adds that the BT-MIT Sloan collaboration is "a good strong marriage — we have the data and MIT Sloan helps us get the most from it.”
Learn more about the dynamic partnership between BT and MIT Sloan.
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