Ideas Made to Matter
18 quotes for business and management from 2020
Amid the chaos of 2020, some wisdom shone through. Here are words worth rereading from business leaders, scholars, and scientists.
Faculty
Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT, where he is a Professor of IT & Marketing, and Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society where he co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.
He was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012), and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently a founding partner at Manifest Capital and on the Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science, in London. Sinan was the scholar-in-residence at the New York Times R&D Lab in 2013, and has worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, Snap, AirBnB, Yahoo, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from big data analytics, social media, and IT investments.
Sinan’s research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40” by Businessweek.
Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds Master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University, and received his PhD from MIT.
He enjoys cooking, skiing, and telling jokes about his own cooking and skiing. His most recent hobby is learning from his four-year-old son. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral.
Yang, Jeremy, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6224-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2020.
Aral, Sinan K. New York, NY: Random House LLC, 2020.
Holtz, David, Michael Zhao, Seth G. Benzell, Cathy Y. Cao, M. Amin Rahimian, Jeremy Yang, Jennifer Allen, Avinash Collis, Alex Moehring, Tara Sowrirajan, Dipayan Ghosh, Yunhao Zhang, Paramveer S. Dhillon, Christos Nicolaides, Dean Eckles, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6111-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2020.
Zhao, Michael and Sinan K. Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6170-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, 2020.
Aral, Sinan K. and Dean Eckles. Science Vol. 365, No. 6456 (2019): 858-861.
Aral, Sinan K. Harvard Business Review, July 2018.
Amid the chaos of 2020, some wisdom shone through. Here are words worth rereading from business leaders, scholars, and scientists.
From how recommendation engines work to how misinformation spreads on social media, here are four books from MIT Sloan that made some sense of 2020.
Source: Bloomberg Law (Podcast)
Sinan Aral...discusses how the signs of violence could be seen in social media well before the riot.
Source: Yahoo Finance (Video)
"My biggest concern is that social media platforms...will be used to motivate, coordinate, and mobilize further violence."
Source: Cheddar (Video)
Sinan Aral, director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy, MIT Sloan joins Cheddar to discuss Section 230 and the future of social media.
Source: WSB-TV (Video)
"...two people in the same district, voting in the same election can have access to completely different information about the election..."