As the vitriolic debate on healthcare reform dominates the news, healthcare industry leaders continue to focus on several issues: innovation to drive growth and promote cost efficiencies; new offerings to generate higher value for each healthcare dollar invested; and the emergence of attractive new global markets and technologies. They recognize that continued economic weakness and new sets of competitive and regulatory pressures create a more challenging environment to drive business growth. At the same time, they see tremendous opportunities to develop cost-effective products and services that can dramatically improve patient care on a global basis.

At Columbia Business School’s 6th Annual Healthcare Conference held on November 6, nearly 500 students, alumni and other professionals heard more than 35 speakers and experts discuss these issues. The attendees benefited from panels on an array of healthcare topics including biopharmaceuticals, medical devices and diagnostics, healthcare services and information technology, venture capital/private equity, mergers and acquisitions and emerging markets. The day concluded with a networking reception and career fair where attendees met with the event’s 20 corporate sponsors.

Fred Hassan, chairman and CEO of Schering-Plough, gave the opening address. Despite economic, competitive and regulatory pressures facing the pharmaceutical industry, he was confident that new therapies and vaccines would be developed to address large areas of unmet needs, most notably Alzheimer’s disease, which represents a devastating social and economic threat to society.

Following his remarks, three concurrent panels took place in the morning. They focused on information technology solutions, growth strategies of Big Pharma and small-cap biotechnology companies, venture capital and private equity investment strategies in healthcare, and the impact of proposed healthcare reform initiatives on payors and providers.

Mike Barber, vice president and head of Healthymagination for GE, reviewed GE’s new $6 billion global commitment to develop new technologies and services to reduce costs, improve quality and expand access for millions of people around the world. Among other objectives, this initiative will accelerate healthcare information technology, support consumer-driven healthcare, create new wellness and healthy worksite programs and facilitate access to cost-effective healthcare in rural and underserved areas.

Three concurrent afternoon panels covered healthcare mergers and aquisitions, medical devices and diagnostics, and challenges and opportunities for healthcare companies in the emerging markets. Alex Gorsky, worldwide chairman for medical devices and diagnostics at Johnson & Johnson, discussed emerging opportunities to develop new therapies to extend and improve a patient’s quality of life, as well as new cost-effective and less invasive medical devices and procedures. He also commented on the changes underway in global healthcare companies and how employees need to expand their skills and experiences, such as seeking new functional roles and positions in new geographic regions to broaden their understanding of different healthcare systems and customers.

Photo courtesy of the Healthcare Conference

Behind every great man, some say, is a better woman.

Last Thursday, I had the rare and exclusive privilege to attend “Keeping America Great”, a CNBC-moderated town hall event at Columbia Business School with two incredible men: Warren Buffett, MS ’51, and Bill Gates. Buffett and Gates, the introduction announced, were returning to school, not to learn, but to teach.

Students asked questions about the influence of greed on the financial crisis, Buffett’s purchase of Burlington Northern, career advice, Steve Jobs and what keeps them up at night.

One student asked what advice they had for those who were unclear about what to do in life?

“First of all,” Buffett replied, “I’d say marry the right person. And I’m serious about that. It will make more difference in your life. It will change your aspiration, all kinds of things. It’s enormously important who you marry.”

“Oddly,” writes Roger Lowenstein in his Buffett biography, “when Buffett graduated in 1951, both (Benjamin) Graham and his father advised him not to go into stocks.” Buffett offered to work for Graham for free but Graham turned him down, saying he was still overpriced. Rather than take another job on Wall Street, Buffett returned to Omaha where he began to court Susan Thompson. The two married in 1952. Two years later, he was hired by Graham and the Dow had its best bull run since 1942. In 1954, the Dow (including dividends) rose 50 percent. Three years later Buffett opened his Partnership and the rest, as they say, is history.

Similarly, Bill Gates met his wife at a Microsoft press conference in 1987, “coincidentally” just before the company’s meteoric rise (see stock chart below).

Now, if I learned anything in statistics, there is clearly a positive correlation here. This poses an interesting question. Would Buffett and Gates had such tremendous runs as single men?

Which leads me to a question posed by Dean Glenn Hubbard. He asked the two men how they would develop business leaders who understand context and connect the dots.

“Some never learn, you know,” Buffett replied. “Having sound principles takes you through everything. And the bedrock principles that really I learned from Graham and Dodd, I haven’t had to do anything with them. They take me through good periods. They take me through bad periods. In the end, I don’t worry about them because I know they work.”

Teaching principles has become the new hot topic among business schools. “A year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers,…” a recent article in The Economist questioned, “will (MBAs) be taught to do things differently?”

Along these lines a student asked Buffett whether ethics could be taught in business school.

“Well, I think the best place to learn ethics,” Buffett replied, “is in the home.” (see video clip)

As the event progressed, I began to realize that the event was less about teaching future business leaders about business and more about teaching future business leaders folksy home-grown values.

So allow me to attempt to provide context and connect the dots: a strong partner leads to a successful marriage, which leads to good family values and ethics, good business, and keeping America great. Or in mathematical terms:

Then again, I should have gathered this from the event’s own introduction. Buffett and Gates were returning to school, the introduction announced, “not to learn, but to teach, showing the next generation of business leaders that wealth is not about the money you amass, but the number of lives you enrich.”

So was Buffett’s marriage his most important investment?

If so, please take note: We don’t need a revised MBA curriculum, just more social mixers! Two Columbia Business School students, Mandy Tang ’10 and Lori Clement ’10, are already leading this charge with a new company called Pom Pom Love, a “NYC-based, fun-loving singles events company.”

Cover photo credit: Eileen Barroso

While there is no secret recipe for success, a few of the necessary ingredients became evident on November 12 during an hour of conversation with two of the most successful American businessmen of all time, Warren Buffett, MS ’51, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

During their town hall meeting with the Columbia Business School community, Buffett and Gates discussed the environment that facilitated their success, from America’s “equality of opportunity” and willingness to invest in long-term projects to their own driving passion, mentors and even good fortune.

Both Buffett and Gates gave enormous credit to what Buffett termed the “fertile soil” of the American economy: “What drives the American system is the equality of opportunity in a market system and the knowledge that when you get out of here, you're going to enjoy the fruits of the knowledge you have gained,” said Buffett. Gates added that he “was a huge beneficiary of this country's unique willingness to take risk on a young person.”

It became clear that the fruit Buffett referenced was neither money nor his investment in clothier Fruit of the Loom. It’s crucial, Buffett argued, to find a career or idea that “turns you on,” while Gates added that his “fanatical” passion for software drove him forward for the early part of his career. Buffett summarized this point in one of the most poignant moments of the conversation:

“We did both have a passion. We were doing what we did because we loved it. We weren't doing it to get rich,” he said. “We probably felt if we did it well, we would get rich. But we’d have done it if somebody was slipping bread in under the door, you know, to keep us going.”

The two titans of industry also touched on the importance of being taught by good mentors. Buffett cited Columbia professor and father of value investing Benjamin Graham, for whom he went to work shortly after graduating from Columbia Business School.

Another important element of success, they acknowledged, was luck: Gates credited his parents for creating an environment that enabled him to pursue his passion, and his good timing to be working with software while the applications for microprocessors were still developing. “It turned out only if you were kind of young and looking at [the invention of microprocessors] could you appreciate what it meant,” he said.

Passion and opportunity continue to propel Buffett and Gates’ upward trajectories — and they’d like to keep going: “I’d love to trade places with any of you,” Buffett said to the student audience with a knowing smile.

Cover photo credit: Eileen Barroso

They are two icons of American business — Warren Buffett, MS ’51, and Bill Gates. On November 12, Columbia Business School students will have the opportunity to connect with them in person. They will appear together in a special hour-long community forum at Columbia Business School, which will be filmed by CNBC for global broadcast. During the event, Buffett and Gates will field questions from students about the economy, the future of capitalism and corporate social responsibility.

It is the first time Buffett and Gates, who met each other in 1991, have appeared together at Columbia University. The last student forum they participated in was in 2005 at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Of the many bonds in their friendship, philanthropy and a shared philosophy of giving back to society is one of the strongest. In 2006, their relationship made the history books when Buffett announced that he would give the bulk of his estimated $40 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates and Buffett’s latest ventures have been in recent headlines. Last week, Berkshire Hathaway announced a $26 billion deal for the railway company, Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Earlier in this year, Berkshire invested in BYD, a Chinese electric car company.

In a speech in October, Gates called for a new green revolution in agriculture and announced a $120 million package of agriculture-related grants to nine institutions around the world. Taking a page from Berkshire’s playbook, Gates wrote the foundation’s first annual letter this year and said the foundation will give away $3.8 billion in 2009.

CNBC will broadcast “Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: Keeping America Great” moderated by CNBC’s Becky Quick on November 12 at 9 p.m. and 12 a.m. ET . Join the conversation with other students on Facebook and on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Columbia Business School

New research from Professor Olivier Toubia featured in the current issue of Columbia Ideas at Work demonstrates the power of viral marketing. Working with Aliza Freud ’01 (EMBA), who is the founder and CEO of the social media platform SheSpeaks, Toubia examined how influencer communities can promote and track viral product buzz.

The case study
The research centered on OPI nail products. “They were a very traditional brand and wanted to tap into consumer insights and advocacy,” says Freud. Using the SheSpeaks online community, samples of the new nail product were mailed to 10,000 self-declared beauty enthusiasts. The same women also received coupons for future purchases. Meanwhile, OPI also placed traditional coupons and ads in magazines and newspaper inserts. The result? The viral campaign outperformed the print campaign by 1200%. “It’s not surprising,” says Freud. “There is a much deeper engagement online than flipping through a magazine.”

What does this mean for marketing?
In the past five years, brand marketing has changed dramatically with the emergence of social networking. Current research, such as the data from Toubia and Freud, is backing that up. Freud, who spent 10 years at American Express in marketing and product management, says that marketers are in the rapid evolution phase of brand strategy.

“Brand managers need to change their way of thinking,” she says. “Historically, marketing has been a one-way communication and brands tried to stifle or control conversations about the product. Today, it is very different — it’s a two-way conversation between the brand and the audience.”

“In the future, managers will care much more deeply about these opportunities and make consumer conversations integral to their marketing program,” continues Freud. “They can engage with consumers online and capture a lot more information.”

Photo credit: Will Vanlue

Today, one of TED’s offspring — an independently organized local version called TEDxEast — is taking place in New York City. Professor William Duggan, author of Strategic Intuition and co-author of The Aid Trap, written with Dean Glenn Hubbard, and Naif Al-Mutawa ’03, founder of The 99, are among the speakers at the inaugural event. Other speakers include author Suzy Welch, 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea; Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup; and Chris Elam, artistic director of Misnomer Dance Theater. Ed Rashba ’04 and Melek Pulatkonak ’02 helped organize the event.

TEDxEast is streaming live from the City Winery in New York City from 1 to 6:30 p.m. ET on November 6. Check back soon for video clips from the event.

	Students at the University of Dar Es Salaam listen to a lecture.

At last night’s Community Forum, Dean Glenn Hubbard, professors Bill Duggan and Gita Johar, and Eric Tienou ’03 of Burkina Faso discussed economic development in Africa. Hubbard and Duggan’s recently published book The Aid Trap (see blog post) advocates for aid investment directly into the small business sector rather than charitable aid through NGOs. Hubbard, who also spoke last week at the “Peace Through Reconstruction” conference, has said that a Marshall Plan-like program is not only a moral and economic imperative, but also good foreign policy for the United States. (Watch a video of his presentation.)

One example of how the development of the small business sector is taking place is emerging through the School’s partnership with the University of Dar Es Salaam (UDBS) in Tanzania, Africa. The partnership is made possible through Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program.

Several faculty members, including Murray Low, Eric Abrahamson and Gita Johar, spent last summer working in Tanzania to teach students and UDBS faculty members. The goal of their work was twofold: to prepare local students to earn a cobranded advanced certificate in entrepreneurship and business management, and to facilitate UDBS faculty members in learning interactive case method teaching. The School is also helping to establish a PhD program at the African university.

“The group of students was incredibly diverse,” Johar said about her experience teaching. “We had chicken farmers and dried fruit distributors to engineers, consultants and a range of microfinance entrepreneurs.” This summer completed the first of a five-year teaching exchange.

While many of the challenges for small business owners in Tanzania are familiar — management, staff turnover and competition — the biggest challenge, said Johar, is access to capital. “Friends and family are the bank,” she says, noting that bank loans are virtually nonexistent. Nonetheless, students were very enthusiastic about the material.

“We were thrilled,” she says. “They were very hungry to learn and apply the teaching to their ventures.”

Last week, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, spoke with Columbia Business School students about his experience as an entrepreneur and in social enterprise. He recalled the moment he realized that he wasn’t cut out for management early in the firm’s history (today he calls himself a customer service representative) and selected Jim Buckmaster to run the company as CEO in 2001. “The decision made me wince because I had to relegate control,” Newmark said. “But it worked. You need to know when to get out of the way and stop talking.”

So how does a start-up founder know when to get out of the way? We asked Brendan Burns, adjunct associate professor in the entrepreneurship program and who teaches the course Launching New Ventures, for his insight. This is what he told us:

In general, company founders fall into two simple categories: (a) first-time founders, and (b) repeat or “serial” entrepreneurs. In both cases founders tend to be special individuals whose idea(s) are spawned from a unique customer insight (often from a sales background), technical innovation (technology background) or a perception of a future opportunity (futurist/evangelist type). Company founders are not usually people who excel in process, building of an administrative infrastructure, compliance with various regulations, etc. That is not to say they are cavalier about it, it is just not at the top of their mind or specifically germane to building a company.

Since companies typically grow in phases, or between inflection points that call for different levels of infrastructure, a lack of process refinement usually helps, not hurts, in the earlier stages. Creativity, flexibility and openness are crucial to success in these stages. As you add more people (employees and partnerships), customers and the overall number of transactions, process and discipline become hugely important parts of “scalable growth.”

For every company, reaching that inflection point where things start to fall through the cracks is a true test of long-term viability. The exact metrics are different for every company, but the ability to anticipate these issues, add professional management to negotiate them and put ego aside in the pursuit of supporting the right outcome determines success or failure.

Not surprisingly, first-time founders fail more often than serial entrepreneurs at navigating these growth pains. Serial entrepreneurs more often have the self awareness to step aside or recruit executives with complementary strengths to support scale. Also, serial entrepreneurs more often go out and attract advisers who help hold them accountable to making these changes.

Photo credit: JD Lasica

I recently had the honor of moderating a panel at the Outstanding Directors’ Exchange Program in New York City this early October. ODX is a leading forum for the sharing of insights and ideas among directors; it is also a partner with Columbia Business School’s Executive Education program. On my panel were David Nadler, a former Columbia Business School professor and who is now a vice chairman at Marsh & McLennan, a global professional services firm, and Ron Rittenmeyer, former chairman, president and CEO (retired) of EDS and a current director at R. H. Donnelley. They made some observations that I found very compelling:

David Nadler suggested that one key thing boards need is input into strategic decisions when there are still choices to be made, rather than simply being asked to vet decisions that management has already come to a conclusion about. We need, he suggests, to get away from a “review and concurrence” process and instead adopt one in which a board can make meaningful choices. The second key issue that boards need to be engaged on has to do with the question of risk — often the most significant risks don’t show up in the spreadsheets and presentations shown to the boards. What is needed, instead, are candid conversations about what happens if the unexpected happens or if the strategy goes wrong.

Ron Rittenmeyer noted that it is important to support innovation, but that the board needs to take into account what the company has to work with. “You have to innovate from where you are,” he said. That has powerful implications for understanding the three pillars of strategic execution: talent, technology and financial considerations. Rittenmeyer said he believes it is crucial that the board probe deeply into whether the company can actually execute against the strategy, no matter great the plan sounds.

For my part, I suggested that one of the big shifts in the world of strategy today is not necessarily reflected in board-level conversations. We still proceed as though there is a thing called a “sustainable-competitive advantage” in many industries. In reality, advantages in many segments are increasingly transient — what we have are cases of developing insight, launching initiatives, exploiting an advantage and then exiting. So boards need to be having candid conversations about this entire cycle, asking such questions as: What is our process for finding new advantages? How long will they last? What is our approach to exiting and freeing up resources when there are no longer benefits to be gained?

In such environments, I also proposed that boards can completely kill effective innovations by insisting on the wrong metrics — such as worrying about the rate of failure. I’ve long said that the rate doesn’t matter if the costs are low. Imposing those requirements will guarantee risk aversion among the staff.

Photo credit: Michael Sauers

	Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with a sample of polar ice during his visit to the Polar ice rim on September 1, 2009 to witness firsthand the impact of climate change on icebergs and glaciers.

Today, the 2009 Social Enterprise Conference: From Vision to Practice is taking place at Columbia Business School. This year’s event features Craig Barrett, former chairman of Intel, as the keynote speaker, and the panel topics touch many areas of business and sustainability. One panel will touch on how the private sector can provide solutions for clean water scarcity; another will showcase successful social entrepreneurs. Many of the themes that are being discussed today came up as part of a debate we took part in last week at the Carnegie Council.

Last Wednesday, a team of second-year students made up of Irene Pipola ’10, Kayvan Parvin ’10, and myself participated in “The Future of Business and Sustainability” debate, hosted by the Carnegie New Leaders. The group debated with teams from the NYU Stern and Baruch business schools and explored various ways of using the private sector to achieve environmentally sustainable outcomes.

The debate took place on a cruise around Manhattan on a “green” boat powered by biodiesel fuel. The evening began with clips of the new film Shattered Sky, by Stephen Dorst, which explored the parallels between the current debate on climate change to the one that led up to the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that resulted in the regulation of industrial gases that were causing holes in the ozone layer. The Protocol has been very effective and levels of harmful gases in the atmosphere rapidly have stabilized in the years since it was passed with no economic impact on consumers.

Dorst was present, and we discussed the similarities between the two cases; in both, corporate lobbyists held up the legislation for years and winning public support was crucial to providing the political will for change. Most importantly, the leadership of the United States is key in both cases; it took 14 years after the discovery of the ozone-depleting properties of certain industrial gases to get global agreement — and U.S. leadership was crucial to bringing the world together to solve the problem. Similarly, the debate on how to regulate greenhouse gases to mitigate climate change has been going on for decades — and the lack of U.S. leadership has been fundamental to the inability of the world’s nations to reach an effective plan of action.

Once the debate started, our group put forth several innovative ideas on New York, business and sustainability. Kayvan identified innovative business models that could address the split incentives problem that causes many profitable opportunities in energy efficiency to go unrealized. Irene discussed how congestion charges and incentives for some businesses to operate at flexible hours could be cost effective tools to reduce the strain on New York’s public transit infrastructure. I insisted that solving the fundamental problem of the externalities associated with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change could not be addressed without putting a cap, and therefore a price, on those emissions.

Photo credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

The media industry is in dire straights — and it’s not because of the Internet. Rather the industry has made some fatal mistakes based on flawed strategies of growth and convergence. A new book, The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies written by Columbia Business School faculty members Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave, delves into the reasons why the industry is hitting bottom.

In the October issue of the The Atlantic Monthly, an excerpt from the book maps out the reasons behind the value destruction in media companies including “relentlessly overpriced acquisitions, ‘strategic’ investments, and contracts for content and talent.” The authors argue that drastic action is needed by the media giants to restore value. That requires “jettisoning all [the] entrenched media myths and going back to basics: understanding the key characteristics of various media segments and applying established business principles to determine the best way forward.”

So what exactly would this drastic action look like? Author Ava Seave, adjunct associate professor of finance and economics, elaborated.

“All of the advice we give in the book should be evaluated in light of the specific media segment the company operates under. If a company has the misfortune of being a conglomerate, each individual business should be evaluated in relationship to its industry, not its ownership,” says Seave.

“For example, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s businesses (stock symbol MSLO) operate in multiple arenas — each with their own characteristics. The company’s products in magazines, books, TV syndication, online content aggregation and retail licensing are all very different businesses with very little in common in cost structure and competitive environment,” she continues. “It may be flip, but we are serious when we advise that the first drastic change is that immediately (if not sooner) media companies can stop making crazy acquisitions or have wild expectation about synergy among unrelated segments.”

The six principles the authors recommend media companies live (and die) by, according to Seave:

1. Dare to dream Imagine how the industries in which you operate could operate and most effectively organize -- and try to move the industry to the ideal.

2. Keep it local, keep it focused Ignore all the conventional wisdom about global footprint, and find businesses that have either a narrow geographic territory or more likely a product niche. This will have the double whammy of increasing likelihood that scale can be achieved quickly and there is a good basis for customer captivity.

3. Efficiency is cool It may be that asking you to pay attention to revenue and cost management is like preaching abstinence-only sex education in a high school, but it is important for you to try.

4. Don’t be such a big shot Overpaying and other means of destructive competition is a communicable disease, so try to find small areas of collaboration in your industry; cooperation can be similarly contagious.

5. Watch your back Even companies that seem to have an impregnable fortress will eventually be scaled, so a constant reassessment of the strength and reinforcement of the the source of competitive advantage is called for. Increased competition with other forms of media make it even more important to cooperate with your allies and collaborators.

6. Dying with dignity is an option It’s hard to admit you’ve lost it, but rather than reinvesting in projects that have little prospect of generating an adequate return, instead, milk a declining franchise and return the proceeds to the shareholders.

Photo credit: Kent Kanouse

Join professors Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave as they discuss the new book on November 16. Event is hosted by Columbia Business School Office of Alumni Relations. Click here for more information about the event.

Is it time for a new approach to solving world poverty? That question is at the heart of a new book, The Aid Trap, by Dean Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan, a senior business lecturer at Columbia Business School. In it, they argue that direct loans to businesses similar to the Marshall Plan is a more effective way to help sub-Saharan Africa pull out of poverty, rather than direct aid from charities and NGOs.

Hubbard and Duggan argue the current economic aid system — where non-governmental organizations run development projects — isn’t working effectively and there needs to be a “reorientation” of aid directly into the business sector. In many poor countries local business sectors are suppressed, they say, and that leaves economic development to either NGO-type entities or large multinationals. Their answer is to open up the middle of the economy for local business in order to have long-term sustainable growth.

“The question is mid-sized businesses. If you look at growth in the U.S. over the past two centuries or the industrial revolution in Western Europe, it was centered on growth of mid-sized enterprises,” Dean Hubbard said in a recent video interview at Forbes.com. “Mid-sized businesses need a very different credit structure than either microfinance or large multinationals, and that is missing in much of sub-Saharan Africa. A business focus on aid could get that going.”

Read more about The Aid Trap and in a Q&A with Dean Glenn Hubbard.

	From left to right: Manisha Kathuria ’10, Marieke Van der Lans ’10, Marcela O. de Rovza, Tiago Sousa ’10 and Riccardo Boin ’10.

Our Pangea Advisors project started with a “field trip”… yes, even in New York City we had this amazing opportunity! We left campus on a rainy day and we traveled for a couple of hours by train, ferry and taxi cab to reach a remote corner in Staten Island. There, for the next three hours, we immersed ourselves in the reality of 15 Hispanic immigrants, who were mostly day-workers, attending an evening class in financial literacy.

Qualitas of Life, our client, offers community-based financial education workshops for Hispanic immigrants in New York City. Its mission is to give these men and women tools to improve their personal finances and provide more opportunities for their families. It is a young organization and it faces the challenge of attracting, exciting and retaining volunteers who facilitate the workshops. As a Pangea Advisors team we were asked to develop a plan to strengthen their volunteer organization.

After thoroughly understanding our client’s mission and objectives, we were ready to do some investigation. We conducted interviews with staff members, board members and volunteers to better understand the challenges for the organization. We then decided to benchmark Qualitas of Life with other successful non-profit organizations and their volunteer programs. To do so, we not only did desk research, but also interviewed key people working in other non-profit organizations in New York City that had succeeded in creating an outstanding network of volunteers.

We traveled up and down Manhattan talking to executive directors and volunteer coordinators. It brought us to the most interesting places that we would have otherwise never seen — such as the 32nd floor in a typical New York City tower next to Penn Station, which, as we stepped out the elevator, turned out to be a huge warehouse with kids’ clothing and toys. We were in the right place to meet the executive director of a great non-profit organization called Baby Buggy.

We spent several weeks on data collection, interviews and follow-up meetings with the client, and then we were ready to develop our final recommendations. Our Pangea Advisors team met early in the morning and spent the entire day defining the framework and guidelines for our report. In a small room in Warren Hall everything came together: all our individual insights and opinions, different views on the structure of the recommendations (not surprising with three consultants and one banker among us!) and a lot of humor. In the end, it led to six types of recommendations: raising awareness; identifying and recruiting volunteers; welcoming new volunteers; organizing and allocating tasks to volunteers; measuring and rewarding volunteers, and communicating effectively with volunteers.

We worked hard to make the recommendations very specific and tangible. For example, we made a sample spreadsheet for the allocation of tasks to volunteers and we wrote sample introduction e-mails to new volunteers. Before finalizing the recommendations, we discussed them in detail with Qualitas’ two staff members, who helped us by pointing out where we could be even more specific.

In the first week of August, the entire team was invited by Qualitas’ president and founder, Marcela O. de Rovzar, to present and discuss the final recommendations. They were excited about our recommendations, and we had an in-depth and fruitful discussion with Marcela and the Qualitas staff during which we got a chance to share our views on the various challenges faced by the organization.

Now, a month later, it is great to see that they have already been implementing most of our recommendations. We are still following Qualitas with a lot of interest and self-satisfaction.

Photo courtesy of Marieke Van der Lans ’10

You’ve heard about companies using TweetDeck to tweet on Twitter, updating their Facebook status while feeding into FriendFeed, and building buzz to bolster conversation on their blogs. But if you don’t understand what any of this means, and consider yourself a marketer, then 1) you are not alone and 2) you need to understand what all of this is about.

Social media as a communications channel is the New Big Thing for marketers. So what do you need to do to stay ahead of the curve and make sure your social media initiatives are successful at your company? Let this article be your starting point.

1) Launch, Track, Learn, Evolve, Rebuild

Don’t skimp on reporting. Everything in the online space is trackable — so track it. Launch initiatives quickly and then use the information and results that are gathered to learn and continue to evolve your platforms. Some of my greatest insights and strategic program adjustments have come by really diving into the numbers.

As a student in the Executive MBA program I recently completed a class called Decision Models, which is focused on how to structure information to support managerial decisions. I had little exposure to these areas before, but I was able to use the classroom knowledge immediately in my job. I used the models and applied them to my results to help inform funding allocations. You might consider doing the same thing.

Powerful in its simplicity, yet worth emphasizing — in social media it is critical to launch quickly, track results, continuously learn, iteratively evolve, and periodically rebuild your entire system.

2) Leadership Support and Empowerment

The success of social media programs can be influenced by the degree of leadership support and decentralized decision-making inherent in the process. To me, leadership support means two things: 1) empowering employees and 2) encouraging new ideas by involving social media gurus.

First, empower employees. Senior leaders in most traditional companies are digital immigrants and they are still getting up to speed on these new channels, they need to have trust in the digital natives — the thinkers who have come of age in the digital era. Smart leaders will empower the digital natives to make decisions as they themselves learn the ropes. In time, it is likely that companies which support employees to deliver on new social media initiatives will be the clear winners and innovators. Take, for example, the story of P&G, which is recognized for pioneering sponsored advertising in soap operas when TV was the next big thing.

Secondly, involve social media experts. It is challenging to launch company “firsts” in social media, even if you are working with people who have a can-do attitude and are empowered to drive these initiatives forward. Employee burnout and retention can happen with social media, just as it can with any other creative endeavor. Whether as a leader or peer, continually identifying and retaining people who are skilled in social media will help serve any establishment seeking to make inroads in this space.

3) Form Progressive Partnerships

At its heart, social media is about people and relationships. You can say this applies for anything in marketing, but I believe it is especially true for social media.

In the beginning, the process is about finding and retaining the right employees who are resilient, can work within internal processes, and who are also willing to challenge the ideas when appropriate. However, quickly, this evolves to fostering the right external partnerships. At OPEN Forum, we are fortunate to partner with big brands, small brands, and individuals’ brands. We partner with major online publications like Mashable, experts like Guy Kawasaki, and sponsors like FedEx, along with some of the best and brightest small business owners out there — our customers. (Also, on a personal note about relationships, it’s especially nice to work with another Columbia Business School grad, Julie Hansen ’03 (EMBA) of The Business Insider.)

Through listening and remaining open to opportunities with our partners, we’re able to exchange value organically, in a way that creates efficiencies and opportunities for all. As an example, we frequently meet with small business owners to find what is working for them and what they need (including my own personal experience consulting for SweetRiot, one of our small business retail customers). We help drive their business growth by offering advice, and they come to better understand the value of our products and services so they use them more — it’s a win-win situation. Do this authentically and consistently and you will win. I will leave you with a final thought — whether you are a digital immigrant or digital native, it’s imperative that marketers realize that social media is the business strategy — not just a part of the business strategy. So, keep this in mind as you start to get social and you will be truly successful. If you have any questions, feel free to tweet me at @brianlenhart.

Photo credit: Mike Paradise

Stereotypes and bias can affect judgment in the subtlest of ways. New brain imaging research shows just where these biases are experienced deep within grey matter.

“My colleagues and I were interested in determining how the brain responds when people are ‘put on the spot’ by decisions that could make them appear racially biased,” says Malia Mason, assistant professor of management who studies decision-making and the neuroscience of social perception. She will be co-hosting a symposium on diversity and leadership later this month at Columbia Business School.

Mason and her co-authors, Michael Norton, Joe Vandello, Andrew Biga and Rebecca Dyer, looked at how the brain helps people manage decisions that others might interpret as discriminatory. The researchers measured their white participants’ brain activity while they decided which of two individuals was more likely to have certain traits (e.g., gentle, intelligent, Canadian). On some trials participants were asked to decide between two white candidates, on other trials the particpants had to make a judgment involving a white and an African-American candidate.

“The results revealed that the brain’s alarm — the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a cortical region that detects conflicts or uncertainties — is triggered when people have to choose between a black and a white candidate,” Mason says. “Importantly, this occurs regardless of the relevancy of the trait or characteristic in question. The sound of the ACC alarm was just as loud when people decided who was Canadian as when they decided who was intelligent.”

Having to choose between a black and white candidate was also associated with activity in brain regions that support concentration (the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex or DLPFC) and flexible responding (the lateral orbital frontal cortex or LOFC). Like the brain’s alarm (the ACC), these regions were recruited even when participants’ decisions could not be taken as evidence that they harbored stereotypical beliefs. These findings suggest that the judgmental context itself — having to choose between a white and a black participant — sets off a cascade of events and signals the need to proceed with caution and care, to inhibit stereotypical beliefs, and to consider how a decisions will be interpreted by others, says Mason.

“The good news is that people appear to be sensitive to social injustices and highly motivated to seem egalitarian,” says Mason. “Unfortunately, these findings also suggest that egalitarian aspirations alone do not lead to social colorblindness. The challenge is to help people unlearn beliefs with a dubious basis. Our results suggest that brute inhibition of stereotypes is a lot of work for the brain.”

The Program on Social Intelligence and the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics are hosting the research symposium “Inclusive Leadership, Stereotyping and the Brain” on September 18, 2009. Learn more about the symposium and register for the event here.

Images courtesy of Malia Mason

Should we really be encouraging students to start businesses early in their careers?

I must admit that while my instinct has always told me yes, there have been moments when I wondered if I was right. While our success rate is similar to that of the venture capital industry as a whole, not all of the students we have encouraged to found businesses have been successful.

So in the spring of 2006, some colleagues of mine and I decided to collect some data. We wanted to learn about the entrepreneurial careers of Columbia Business School graduates so that we could know how to serve them better during their time as students.

After analyzing the survey results, we found that the answer to the question of when best to start your own business is not straightforward.

For our survey respondents, starting a first business two to five years after completion of business school led to the creation of the most successful businesses in terms of revenue. However, starting earlier than that was strongly correlated with starting multiple ventures — which was an even more important predictor of success.

The thousands of unique stories that lie beneath these results, all reveal that learning by experience is hard but unavoidable. We’ve found that students learn best when they are working on real projects, and that combining academic and practical experience while in business school can minimize the pain and maximize the gain of entrepreneurial endeavors. We seek to combine the best of academic and practical experience.

Becoming an entrepreneur is a very personal decision, and the right time to start a business is when it’s right for you. On average, 90 percent of the entrepreneurs we surveyed felt it was a good professional decision to start their business when they did; only 10 percent regretted their decision.

But regardless of what the timing may be, there is ultimately nothing more satisfying than running your own company and being master of your own destiny.

Next Week: What to Consider When Starting a Business

Public outcry has a mixed history of leading to changes in foreign labor practices. For example, in the 90s anti-sweatshop activism led to some successful reforms in labor policy. Today the issue appears less visible. New research from a visiting scholar at the Bernstein Center for Ethics & Leadership examines how organizations respond to societal pressures for changes in their corporate social responsibility policies.

Noshua Watson, visiting Bernstein from INSEAD, studied the case of MAS, a Sri Lankan apparel manufacturer that supplies to companies like Victoria’s Secret, as part of her PhD dissertation. Professor Bruce Kogut advised her work. One of the questions she looked at was whether it is better to meet external demands and conform to industry norms for CSR, or for an organization to differentiate itself.

MAS is typical of many manufacturers in developing countries, where the low cost for implementing modern production methods and an available low-skilled labor pool are appealing. In 2003, the company created — and then heavily promoted — a robust CSR program called Go Beyond for the education and empowerment of its predominantly female workforce. The program has been a social and financial success and it has contributed to the company’s doubling of its revenue from $500 million to $1 billion between 2005 and 2008 by supporting strategic partnerships and bringing in customer donations, Watson found.

Watson concluded that the CSR program at MAS illustrates that there is a difference between “substantive compliance with human rights standards and superficial conformity with industry peers in the way the standards are implemented.” In other words, MAS outperformed the industry standard for CSR and in doing so, was able to leverage that success into growth.

However, Watson says it is not without risk to deviate from industry norms and that companies with a thicker financial buffer are better positioned to innovate new ways of implementing CSR.

“Companies that consistently go beyond industry standards and thrive tend to begin with additional resources that allow them to experiment with their CSR policy,” said Watson. “They also perceive that there will be gains from that experimentation even though simply conforming to industry standards would allow them to satisfy critics.”

Photo credit: hexodus

Even as Spain’s savings banks struggle to survive in the fallout of the banking crisis, one bank, Caja Navarra is pioneering a new way with what it calls civic banking. Their goal is to provide a new level of transparency and agency for customers by engaging them in a dialogue about where their money should be placed.

Caja Navarra is one of 46 regional savings banks in Spain called cajas. The operations are owned by local interests and governments, and the cajas comprise almost half of the country’s banking system. Unique to these regional unlisted mutuals is that they give a hefty piece of their profits to local causes. One criticism of the caja system is that the banks “have become a financial tool of whichever party governs the region.” However, Casa Navarra is doing something new: the bank donates 30 percent of its profits to a social cause that its customers decide upon — and there is transparency about exactly how much the bank’s profits are.

In the latest issue of the Chazen Web Journal, Nicholas Doimi de Frankopan ’09 sat down for a video interview with Enrique Goni, the CEO of Caja Navarra. (view the complete interview). Goni said that he doesn’t think that civic banking is a niche trend, but rather represents the future of banking.

“I am convinced that civic banking and our way to understand it is the pioneer,” Goni says. “I am personally convinced that banking activity has to change radically and if banks are not civic-minded in the future, they will not [exist].”

Earlier this year, as Spain’s commercial banks, such as Santander, went relatively unscathed by the banking crisis, cajas took a hit — Caja de Ahorros Castilla-La Mancha received a €9 billion bailout at the end of March — and they have been far more affected by delinquency and high-risk loans. That has placed renewed debate over the future of Spain’s savings bank system.

Photo credit: failurez

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What is the key to case studies at business school?

“Always know someone who has read the case,” said Professor Todd Jick, bringing a light-hearted touch to a serious subject: learning in the MBA classroom.

Last week, international students arrived on campus. With more than 40 countries represented, the School designed an orientation to help them navigate the intricacies of American (and New York City) culture, including a lecture on learning.

Professor Jick discussed cold calls — the legendary practice of being called on at random — and speaking in class.

We offer you a few dos and don’ts from his presentation:

	What is your best tip for succeeding in the classroom? Please leave a comment.

Do

Add something you know about or share your unique knowledge, such as how it works in your country or experience.

Prepare special analysis (number crunch, Google some background information) and be prepared to share.

Volunteer to add more information to the debate and take a position.

Don’t

Sit in the back of the classroom and try to hide.

Make one big comment and then withdraw for the rest of the term.

Over-prepare a comment and then say it even if the conversation has moved on.

Wait until the end of the term to start speaking and participating.

Participating in class discussion is an essential part of the MBA experience, Jick said, but he also pointed to skills acquired in addition to the case material. The practice of cold calls helps students learn to think on their feet, speak in public, deal with pressure and assemble ideas under the spotlight.

“It’s not the end of the world when you don’t have the answer and you’re cold called,” said Jick, smiling. “But it is the second time.”

Photo courtesy of Columbia Business School

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A typical Wednesday morning finds millions of online banking customers checking their balances. Unless, that is, the stock market has tanked.

When the stock market goes down, sticking your head in the sand regarding your own money and investments is not uncommon. Early research findings from Professor Nachum Sicherman, working with George Loewenstein and Duane Seppi at Carnegie Mellon University and Steve Utkus at Vanguard, show that consumers undergo an ostrich effect — giving selective attention to investment information — with their bank account balances when they see bad financial news.

In their study of 3,000 consumers at a regional U.S. bank, Sicherman and his colleagues found that when the market goes down, so does online balance checking. On average, a one percent rise or fall in the stock market increases or decreases, respectively, the likelihood of a customer logging into his or her bank account by one percent. Additional preliminary results taken from the data of one million customers at Vanguard are consistent with this outcome, says Sicherman.

Initial results show that individuals with larger balances, especially those with higher percentage of stocks, check their balances more frequently. Women, for example, go online less than men, and the ostrich effect is stronger for men than for women. Their data also showed that Wednesday has the peak number of account logins and people tend to check their balance between 9 a.m. and noon.

Sicherman and his co-researchers are looking at the results to see if there is a link with patterns of trading.

“To what extent does the ostrich effect affect trading if people are reluctant to look at their account for psychological reasons when the markets go down?” says Sicherman. “The next logical thing to hypothesize is that if they are not looking, then they are trading less. But we don’t have an answer yet.”

Photo credit: Njitram lexe Nav

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The reasoning went that if you could gain large market share in a growth market, you could capture a major cost advantage. That would give you a competitive advantage over smaller-share rivals.

You remember the matrix, of course: the 2x2 grid in which you plot the growth rate of your market against your position in that market. The high/high box (big shares in growing markets) were “stars”; the high/low box (big shares in slow-growth markets) were “cows”; the low/low box (small share in slow-growth markets) were “dogs” and the remaining quadrant (small share in low-growth markets) were question marks.

The strategy advice was to invest in stars, use the cows for cash, sell off the dogs, and … well, it was never quite clear what to do with the question marks. At one time, an academic study found that 75% of all CEOs of American companies were aware of and had used some aspect of the BCG matrix in making portfolio allocation decisions. It later transformed into the famous GE Matrix and also found its way into other tools offered by consulting firms such as McKinsey.

Well, it was too good to last, I suppose, because as the model gained in popularity, criticism of it grew. Observers argued that it was fundamentally flawed and led to starved cows, mis-fired stars, lost opportunities for profit and worst of all, the wholesale abandonment of markets whose domestic growth might have stalled, but which were growing globally (such as televisions).

The academics weighed in as well, with studies by Columbia’s own Don Hambrick and Ian MacMillan empirically testing the conclusions in the model (see references). But wait — it’s back!

In the May issue of the Harvard Business Review is an article (“Is Your Growth Strategy Flying Blind?”) on growth strategies that advocates a granular approach to analyzing possible markets, based on — you guessed it — market growth rate and market share (among other things). The approach differs from the old BCG approach in that the units of analysis the authors suggest are smaller — right down to individual product lines, customer segments and regions, but the strategic advice remains pretty much the same. Invest in those segments that show high growth rates, in which the position is strong and in which there is momentum. A great idea whose time came … and went … and has come again.

References: Hambrick, D. C., I. C. MacMillan & Day, D. L. 1982. Strategic attributes and performance in the BCG matrix: A PIMS based analysis of industrial product businesses. Academy of Management Journal, 25(3): 510-531.

Hambrick, D. C. 1982. The Product Portfolio and Man's Best Friend. California Management Review (pre-1986), 25(000001): 84.

	From left to right: Prof. Yusheng Zheng, Wharton School and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, paper award winner Guoming Lai and Prof. Fangruo Chen.

Channel stuffing can lead to all kinds of distortions and ultimately hurts the long-term value of a company. So what are the incentives for a manager to engage in the practice? That was the winning topic for the Best Paper Award at this year’s Conference of the Overseas Chinese Scholars Association in Management Science and Engineering (OCSAMSE), which took place in Shanghai in July.

The conference was sponsored by Columbia Business School’s China Business Initiative, which is part of the Chazen Institute for International Business. OCSAMSE is the only organization representing overseas Chinese scholars in management science and engineering. The conference series was focused on integrating theory and practice and panelists discussed supplier relationship, supply chain and operations management.

Professor Fangruo Chen awarded the research prize to Guoming Lai and Lin Nan from David A. Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and Laurens G. Debo from University of Chicago Booth School of Business for their paper “Manager Incentives for Channel Stuffing with Market-Based Compensation.”

The winning paper authors suggest that managers find real earnings management more attractive in the wake of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. However, managers also now face more “real” constraints, such as bounds on physical inventory and often their interests are not aligned with long-term stakeholders. The results create three effects that drive the manager’s incentives for channel stuffing.

Other speakers at the conference included Dr. Weihua Ma of China Merchants Bank, Qinghou Zong of the Wahaha Group, Weimin Sun of Suning Appliance Co. Ltd., Steve Graves of M.I.T. and Mike Pinedo of New York University Stern School of Business.

Photo courtesy of Mei Xue

The key challenge that healthcare enterprise leaders face is determining how to drive innovation while addressing problems of affordability, inefficiency and gaps in quality. This task is now complicated by strong economic headwinds that limit the resources available to attack these problems. Industry executives are also dealing with new sets of competitive and regulatory pressures on their efforts to drive business growth.

At Columbia Business School’s 5th Annual Healthcare Conference held in New York City on November 21, over 500 students, alumni and other professionals heard more than 40 speakers and panelists discuss these issues.

The featured healthcare leaders said they are embracing change to develop creative solutions to the industry’s growing problems and to provide attractive investment opportunities on a global basis. A career strategies panel of executive and corporate recruiters also presented their views on the skills and talents necessary for healthcare professionals to succeed in this dynamic environment. This was followed by a concluding career fair and networking reception with the conference’s 17 corporate sponsors.

Ed Ludwig ’75, chairman and CEO of BD (Becton, Dickinson), gave the opening keynote address. Ludwig said that a successful global healthcare company must use technology, scale, global reach and operational excellence to offer value-added products. These products should reduce costs, enhance the quality of patient care and generate sustainable earnings growth.

Following his remarks, four concurrent panels took place in the morning session on the topics of pharma and biotech, medical devices, diagnostics and payor/provider issues.

The pharma and biotech panel discussed the trend among companies to narrow their therapeutic priorities, focus on biologics, pursue licensing and target acquisitions and seek enhanced productivity and cost savings. Numerous early-stage biotechnology companies are turning to larger pharma and biotechnology firms to survive as they are unable to secure capital from the public market. Global medical device companies are seeking to introduce innovative and cost-effective products in a challenging regulatory and pricing/reimbursement environment and pursuing acquisitions and new markets to meet growth objectives. The consensus of the payor/ provider panel was that any healthcare reform in 2009 would likely be incremental due largely to economic and political headwinds, and that a key focus would be on information technology and expanding access to those without insurance coverage.

Robert Essner, former Chairman and CEO of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and now executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School, provided the lunchtime keynote speech. He suggested that although the pharma industry faces significant challenges, the combination of new drugs, biologics and vaccines in key areas of unmet need (e.g. Alzheimer’s, cancer, congestive heart failure) and the massive influx of informed baby boomers, who are demanding health solutions, provides favorable long-term growth prospects for innovative global pharmaceutical companies.

Three afternoon panels covered M&A, life science investments and emerging markets. It is anticipated that healthcare M&A will remain active across all sectors and that consolidation among Big Pharma companies appears inevitable. Early-stage life science companies and investors face a capital squeeze, which is threatening the viability of existing companies with lower levels of funds available for new investment. Emerging markets are an increasing focus for global pharmaceutical and medical device companies that are seeking new markets for their products.

The final panel of the day focused on the changing talent acquisition and development strategies of major healthcare enterprises. Panelists commented that successful leaders will need to have global and cross-functional experiences; that employees should be open to lateral moves that broaden their skills and experiences; and that healthcare companies considering new hires are seeking a broader “toolkit” of skills that reach beyond the traditional focus on healthcare backgrounds.

For more information about the conference and sponsors visit www.cbshealthcareconference.com.

	McHugh was recently featured on MSNBC’s “Your Business” (watch the video).

Emily McHugh ’99 is the CEO and co-founder of Casauri, a manufacturer of designer laptop cases and accessories. This post is re-published from McHugh’s Casauri blog.

When I applied to Columbia Business School I was not exactly sure what I was going to do once I received my MBA. My hope was that I would “figure” it all out in business school and ultimately end up with a job that was better than the one I had before business school. Business school gives one the opportunity to be exposed to various opportunities from a unique vantage point. It is like being offered a smörgasbord of career paths from which to choose. However, in order to choose, it is important to ask yourself whether you are able to muster the passion necessary to be truly happy and fulfilled in a particular career. Being passionate means that you love something so much that you are willing to suffer and endure whatever it takes to be successful.

I came to the realization of my passion during the last semester of business school when I took an entrepreneurship course. It was in that class that I finally “figured” out what I was going to do with my MBA — go into business for myself. After all, I would be able to put everything I ever learned into practice and become a true-blue businessperson.

Having an MBA is not a prerequisite to becoming an entrepreneur, neither does having an MBA guarantee or improve your chances for success. However, the MBA teaches key business principles. The MBA helps to remove some of the uncertainty in the business landscape by teaching the vocabulary and components of business.

The entrepreneur can expect that having an MBA will: 1) add credibility to a potentially incredible endeavor, 2) develop confidence to overcome the impossible, and 3) build stamina and endurance to persist in the face of uncertainty. Having an MBA will not: 1) make starting a business easy, 2) save the entrepreneur from struggles and hardships, and 3) teach you everything you need to know about starting and running a business.

It is probably safe to say that with or without an MBA, most entrepreneurs have to start their businesses from scratch without the benefit of a defined and predictable path. Most entrepreneurial skills have to be learned on the job or during the course of the entrepreneurial journey. Moreover, despite the commonalities that entrepreneurs share, each entrepreneur’s experience is unique and highly dependent on the type of business venture being pursued.

The two most valuable lessons I learned in business school that helped to prepare me for entrepreneurship were valuation and negotiation. One does not become an expert in these areas just by taking a class, however, one becomes aware of the tools needed to be effective in assessing value (valuation) and persuading someone to give you what you want (negotiation). Ultimately, communication unifies the above two skills. Being able to express or “sell” yourself expedites entrepreneurial success, since most of your time is spent trying to convince people to believe in you.

	What has been the most valuable lesson from business school in your experience? Please leave a comment.

In business school, valuation is mainly taught from a financial perspective in terms of valuing companies or pricing securities. However, valuation principles are applicable to any situation where determining worth is in question. Since most of the decisions entrepreneurs make involve applying limited resources to limitless needs, being able to intelligently allocate resources is essential. As entrepreneurs, we have to constantly determine value — of products, employees, customers, and services. This skill requires extensive practice, since it is not an exact science.

Negotiation is another nebulous area, as it involves many independent factors to be effective. Negotiation is the ultimate team sport. It is like a dance where you try to avoid stepping on the other person’s toes. To negotiate requires research and as thorough an understanding of the given situation as possible. We negotiate at every level of our lives, starting from infancy to adulthood. Entrepreneurship requires endless negotiation, the ability to overcome obstacles, inspire others to action, and risk losing what you actually may want to obtain.

The MBA provides the tools that improve one’s ability to valuate and negotiate. Beyond these skills, the MBA provides access to an incredible network of contacts that can help propel your business forward. It is a personal choice whether the business school experience will be appropriate for each entrepreneur. I would not recommend to someone contemplating entrepreneurship to wait, go to business school, and then start a business as a fixed formula. However, I would recommend seizing opportunities as they present themselves. In my case, I am very glad the opportunities included an MBA.

With at least 2,000 car dealerships from Chrysler and GM slated to close this year (and more than 1,000 dealerships overall that closed last year), the existing American dealership model is in crisis. The closings appear to underscore just how over-extended — and over-stocked — the U.S. dealership system has become. One of the fatal flaws for dealerships has been an inefficient distribution network.

My research, conducted with my colleague Gérard Cachon at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, shows that the current structure of the U.S. brands’ dealership network led to inefficiencies in the distribution system. These inefficiencies add to the total distribution cost, which accounts for 30% of the price of a new car.

A major inefficiency is the pattern of holding inventory — an important part of the distribution cost. Most of the vehicles in the U.S. are purchased directly from dealer stock and holding inventory is expensive, especially when credit is scarce as it is now. The graph below illustrates important differences in the monthly days-of-supply for Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota.

The popular press suggests that 60-day supply is the ideal level of inventory for the auto industry. This is, in fact, the industry average, but the figures show that Toyota is consistently below that benchmark while Chevrolet and Ford are usually above it (other brands of Ford and GM also show a similar pattern). Overall from 2000 to 2004, Chevrolet held about 130,000 more vehicles in inventory relative to Toyota (300,000 compared to 170,000 units), even though the two brands sold about the same number of vehicles in the U.S.

The huge number of GM dealerships explains most of this difference in inventory performance. As of 2007, Chevrolet had around 4,000 dealerships compared to 1,200 Toyota dealerships. That means that an average Toyota dealership sells three times as many vehicles.

Source: Automotive News 2007 Yearbook

Due to economies of scale, managing inventory for a Chevrolet dealership is much more costly than for Toyota. In general, dealerships from domestic manufacturers carry substantially more days of supply. Consequently, they require more cash to operate, their inventory is less fresh and they tend to have more overstock at the end of the model year, which in turn leads to more rebates. All of this translates into higher distribution costs and lower profits for the dealer.

How could U.S. auto dealerships be improved? Reducing the number of dealerships can do several things.

First, it will reduce cannibalization between dealerships, increasing average sales per dealership. Dealers can take advantage of economies of scale in the distribution process and have more frequent deliveries and lower safety stocks, thereby reducing the amount of inventory held without hurting (and possibly improving) customer service. It also helps to keep a fresher stock to better match customer preferences and to lower markdowns at the end of the season.

All of this leads to a more profitable dealership and a more efficient distribution network. Higher dealership earnings can be used to invest in better showrooms and better training of the sales force, which can improve customer service and further boost revenues.

Photo credit: never a safe second

Why do we love our iPhones so? Of course the reasons for the gadget’s immense popularity are many, but consider this: the device’s interface — complete with colorful pictures and icons — may activate the part of our brain associated with emotional processing, and that, in turn, may lead to greater consumer preference for the best-selling phone.

In a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Professor Leonard Lee, with his colleagues Dan Ariely at Duke University and On Amir at the University of California San Diego, found that decisions made with emotional processing, such as a gut decision, rather than cognitive processing (analyzing the pros and cons) tend to be more consistent. And consistency is, after all, what we humans really crave. Indeed, there is long-standing evidence in social psychology that we aim for consistency across all our beliefs and attitudes.

“How happy or satisfied we are by our preferences is driven by consistency to some extent,” says Lee. “When we use emotional processing to make decisions, we can actually be more satisfied with our choices.”

Lee found that certain attributes elicit more emotion-based decisions. For example, a color photo of an object rather than black and white text describing its features provokes more emotional, and thus more consistent, decisions in people. He also found, in another study, that some products might naturally elicit more emotional processing than others.

“Even if the product is essentially utilitarian and elicits more cognitive processing, we can put a more emotional layer on it so we can better elicit emotional processing,” says Lee.

For marketers and product designers, the implications are manifest — the big, shiny red button will outperform that wonky features list when it comes to giving consumers a choice that they will feel satisfied with.

“For many consumer products, it makes sense for marketers to use as many affective cues or emotional cues to elicit consumers’ emotional processing rather than just listing all the features of a product, which might induce greater cognitive processing,” says Lee.

Photo credit: David Pham

In a recent Forbes.com op-ed, professors Bruce Kogut, Patrick Bolton and Tano Santos argue that in order to be effective, a good regulatory system must distinguish between prevention and resolution. The current system, they say, has failed to do so, instead relying on “stop gap” prevention measures.

Kogut, Bolton and Santos say that the current system failed to follow the principles of crisis prevention by allowing incentives to become misaligned, creating risk-blind structural silos and failing to require the disclosure of risk exposure, particularly in the case of credit default swaps. The solution, they propose, is the creation of a new entity — the Crisis Resolution Board. They write:

A new regulatory system must also be capable of crisis resolution, because the hallmark of modern financial crises is that the limits of institutions and markets quickly bleed into one another, and the problem rapidly takes on a global scale. The data show that as the most recent crisis hit, all the crickets began to sing in harmony — all markets behaved erratically simultaneously. A “regulator of regulators” — which we will call the Crisis Resolution Board — should be charged with monitoring and responding to systemic risks.

The Crisis Resolution Board cannot be merely an honorary posting. Effective intervention by the Crisis Resolution Board will require social capital — crises always rely upon the personal knowledge among the players. Thus, this oversight board should include the chiefs of the Treasury, Fed and an FSA regulatory agency, as well as industry and investor representatives. In addition, the board must have more than global access to data — it must have knowledge of the global exposure and the systemic risk provided by a research staff that continually tests its instruments against the dynamic evolution of markets.

Concretely, what would the Board do? First, it will have power to monitor the exposure of all financial institutions and markets, and to issue early warning signals. This is hardly a radical idea. The IMF plays a similar role at the global level in monitoring national reserves. The role is clearly feasible for a national regulator and will lead to a strengthening of global financial market coordination.

Second, like any good fire brigade, which has a deep respect for plumbing, when things get hot the board will ensure that the financial markets’ plumbing is functioning. Markets depend on brokerage, exchanges and settlement. That’s their plumbing, and it’s also the key to systemic risk. It must be charted and tracked globally if we are to know what to do when the next crisis comes.

Regulatory reform should seek to distinguish between crisis prevention and crisis resolution. Prevention relies upon a tripartite structure and clear rules of accountability. Crisis resolution demands an integrated approach to systemic risk. Both structures are required and yet, no country has yet to design such a system. This is the time to do so.

Photo credit: SKPY/Scott

“Suddenly every investment banker wants to be an entrepreneur,” says Tom Bowen Wright ’09, founder of Neighborhood Hero. “Finding great talent is much easier right now.” The downside? “Raising capital in this market is really tough,” he adds.

Regardless of the economy, there are evergreen challenges for young companies. “All your policies and procedures have to be developed from scratch, and that can be an extremely time-consuming part of the start-up process,” says Jennifer Wright ’09. Costs can add up if you’re not careful. “Running up legal bills is actually very easy,” says Robert Liebesman ’09.

This weekend a group of start-up companies started by Columbia University graduates, including this year’s four Lang Fund Board investment picks and ventures from the School of Engineering, will take part in a Columbia Ventures Showcase. We spoke with this year’s Lang Fund recipients about the most important lesson he or she learned at Columbia.

Tom Bowen Wright ’09, Neighborhood Hero, a digital communication tool to help merchants and local consumers connect

“It is critical to encapsulate a powerful vision behind your idea and you need to package it and sell it. I have also learned that you need to do as much research as possible before jumping into the deep end. There is no reason why, before you invest thousands of dollars in R&D, you can’t have already established who the customers are, their specific needs, what they would pay for your product if you were to make it and what it would take to actually close a sale with them. If you haven’t proven to yourself and to others that there is a genuine need, you should not roll the dice.”

Arlyn Davich ’09, PayPerks, a corporate incentive program to convert employees to electronic pay checks

“The power of a win, win, win proposition. The time I have spent honing the value proposition of each layer in the value chain has paid off in dividends.”

Robert Liebesman ’09, Palogix USA, provides reusable and rental storage and shipping solutions

“Listen to people’s criticism and don’t get disheartened. You take five steps forward and then three backwards. Make sure to process information and to not have a selection bias — there are threats to your business; make sure you are aware of them. I have found that stepping back and looking at the big picture can help me get out of treading water. Make sure to have a balance in your life; this stuff can consume your life pretty quickly, so force yourself to have an hour or two a day for other people and hobbies. I get my best thinking done during long runs. Give your head a chance to sort out the clutter.”

Jennifer Wright ’09 (EMBA), Environmentally Conscious Organization Inc. (e.c.o.), a design, licensing, manufacturing and subcontract management firm dedicated to the use of recycled materials

“Professor Cliff Schorer told us ‘Never turn down an opportunity to talk about your product.’ I believe this to be true and I made sure we were present at every entrepreneurial event at Columbia to talk about our product. You never know who could be instrumental in helping your business.”

It is no secret that the mobile phone industry is thriving in emerging markets, and that this growth has helped make cell phones the fastest spreading technology in human history. Less known, but equally as important, is that this growth has extended well beyond the ability to make phone calls. Today mobile operators in Africa, Asia and Latin America also offer their customers the ability to send cash to relatives, pay bills, and even check whether a taxi is legal or illegal, all via their cell phone. Many of these services have even begun transforming entire societies — in Kenya alone a mobile phone-based cash transfer service called M-Pesa has over six million customers.

However, despite these innovations, we believe mobile-phone based services remain limited relative to their potential in emerging markets because they rely on a fairly basic form of technology: SMS text messaging. These messages are limited to 160 text characters and due to their simplicity are simply not designed to deliver the advanced services we are accustomed to in more developed markets.

For us, these facts beg the question: when will mobile services in emerging markets evolve beyond text message technology? Relatedly, when will consumers in emerging markets embrace the enhanced functionality that comes with purchasing a more advanced handset? We believe that time is now, at least for certain customer groups. So-called “smartphones” — phones such as the Blackberry, iPhone and G1 that have the ability to download new software applications — have already transformed the way consumers in developed markets use and access data (iPhone customers alone have downloaded more than one billion applications). And certainly smartphones, which are in effect mini-computers, have even greater potential in emerging markets where relatively few computers exist. There is little doubt that smartphones will soon be more widespread in emerging markets yet a central question remains: who will build applications for these underserved customers?

Enter Frogtek, a for-profit social venture that began as an idea in the classroom at Columbia Business School and will soon begin formal operations in Colombia. Frogtek is premised in part on the theory that smartphones can solve several major problems endemic to emerging markets that text-messaging based technology solutions cannot. Of course, we recognize that getting customers to use smartphones in emerging markets today comes with a unique set of challenges. Perhaps most prominently, smartphones are still fairly expensive. Moreover, most software applications for smartphones were developed with a rich consumer in mind. These challenges are not insignificant.

For these reasons, Frogtek today is focused on what we believe can be a vanguard customer group in emerging markets, one that already has access to capital and a demonstrated need for simple and customized technology solutions: micro-retailers. The need we’re addressing is that most of these “mom-and-pop” shops do not keep sales records, which can result in inefficient business operations and even bankruptcy. Hence, our first product is an accounting and inventory management tool that allows a shopkeeper to use a smartphone as a point-of-sale device; the camera even doubles as a bar code reader. The phone generates basic reports about sales, inventory and profitability, and information is also uploaded to Frogtek servers wirelessly for secure storage and further analysis.

At this stage we have completed a prototype and will be working with SABMiller and a prominent Colombian NGO this summer to test our product with 50 shopkeepers. By the end of the summer we plan to have a complete version that we can distribute more widely in Colombia and eventually Latin America.

Accounting solutions are only the first step for Frogtek. If we are successful this summer and shopkeepers become comfortable using smartphones, we believe it will be relatively easy to develop and introduce additional products via smartphones such as micro-insurance and branchless banking. Time will tell whether our idea is premature but there is little doubt that smartphones are coming soon to an emerging market near you.

David Del Ser '08 is a 2009 Echoing Green Fellow. He is also the 2008 winner of the Nathan Gantcher Award in Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School.

Images courtesy of Frogtek

The upcoming transition at Xerox from Ann Mulcahy to Ursula Burns as CEO is an important benchmark for female corporate leadership. However, the news at Xerox doesn’t compensate for the fact that there continues to be a paucity of women in senior management positions, says Professor Ray Fisman. Why is that?

In a recent article for Slate, Fisman looks at one of the reasons the gender gap persists in some fields, like science and technology. He suggests that mentoring — beginning in the classroom — may be one area to consider. Fisman considered a study by University of California-Davis economists Scott Carrell and Marianne Page and James West at the Air Force Academy, about academic performance in math and science and professor gender at the Air Force Academy. The study demonstrated that female cadets who had female instructors had better performance than those with male professors (download PDF).

“Having a male instructor didn't just affect female cadets’ performance in their first-year classes — ramifications could be seen throughout their undergraduate careers. Not surprisingly, students who did well in their introductory science classes were more likely to go on to obtain science degrees (and presumably go on to science-related professions),” he writes.

Fisman brought the issue to a scientist and colleague at Barnard, Stephanie Pfirman, for her insight. She made the point that academic performance in young women is not only an environmental issue — but it is also a psychological one and that there needs to be more encouragement for women to “realize that getting an A- or even a B+ in an introductory course doesn’t spell the end of your career as a scientist, as many high-achieving young women believe.”

Without diminishing the very real issues that exist at the institutional level, we wanted to know more about how perfectionism may bottleneck female achievement, in the sciences and beyond, and how might mentorship meet that challenge?

We asked Cali Yost ’95, author of Work+Life Fit, who has written widely about gender and the workplace and mentorship issues, about that topic. She agreed that perfect is too often the enemy of good and that better mentoring could start to resolve this.

“There is a lot of pressure on women to be perfect at both work and at home,” says Yost. “Female mentors may say ‘You can’t do this job and have a life’ rather than giving a broad and innovative way to do both. They may not have had a lot of choices and flexibility when they were doing it 20 or 30 years ago, and so they are not able to mentor in that dimension. There needs to be more conversation around that.”

Yost points out that employers today are more willing to consider alternative and flexible options for women with families, for example. And that needs to be acknowledged in the mentoring process itself.

“One skill set for mentoring is that when mentees ask ‘How did you do it?’ the mentors talk about in such a way that shows that their experience isn’t the only way or answer,” Yost says. “They may say things that may not apply today and we need to facilitate the conversation and help mentors be creative in the context of today.”

Photo credit: Alvaro Canivell

Media publishers are marching ever closer toward pay walls and price hikes for their content. Last month, GigaOM Network, a group well known for its tech blogs, announced it will charge a $79 annual fee for its research service. Hulu may soon jump to a subscription service as well. Offline, the New York Times recently increased the price of both its weekday and Sunday newspapers.

A variety of pricing schemes and solutions for content — pay walls, increased fees, bundling and micropayments — has been the topic of media discussion in the last year. But will people start paying for something that has been free? Not if there’s cheaper competition, says Ava Seave, adjunct associate professor in finance and economics. She is the co-author, with Bruce Greenwald and Jonathan Knee, of The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies, which will be published later this year.

“It’s pretty hard to start charging if there is a substitute product that is free,” she says. “Free competition forces companies to try and make due with advertising or other revenue, which they hope they are making up for in eyeballs. What we may see is that many companies will go under or become only marginally profitable. At this point new companies won’t want to enter in the ‘free’ business and they will try to enter by charging for some sort of differentiated product. But it’s tough.”

Print publishers for magazines and newspapers are struggling to find the right price for their products. But as ad revenue dries up, where does the pricing power remain if it’s not with advertisers? Seave says there is no one right answer to that question.

“You can’t make any generalizations across the board — each industry vertical is different,” she says. “One thing that you need to know is who the players are and look at the product in a local way or in a space.”

For example, the New York Times, in their decision to raise the print price, likely made a calculation that existing paper-readers were committed and a bump in the price would not lead to a subscriber drop-off.

“It seems as if the remaining readers of the newspaper are inelastic when it comes to price. Even with a higher price-per-copy, these readers will, by and large, stay with the paper,” she says. “It is possible that the Times will lose so few copies due to the price increase that they can still make more money from circulation and they can still be able to guarantee the same amount of money by guaranteeing the reader level to keep up their ad rates. They probably figured that paper buyers are committed and so net, they could be ahead for the moment.”

But for online-only media, finding the right price is especially difficult because free competition is stiff. “Electronic media has very little pricing power,” says Seave. “It is too easy for consumers to click around to find something that is a reasonable substitute and is free.”

So how do companies get online users and readers to start paying for their products? Create necessary value.

“You have hook someone into some sort of product and then make it so that it is essential to their work,” says Seave.

Photo credit: Rick Valentin

Last week, Xerox made history when it announced that CEO Anne Mulcahy will be succeeded by Ursula M. Burns when Mulcahy steps down in July.

The occasion marked the first time that a female CEO of a Fortune 500 company has passed the position to another female. Currently, there are 12 female CEOs in the Fortune 500.

The transition, which has been carefully orchestrated, represents a textbook leadership succession plan as well as an important benchmark for women in corporate leadership. However, as important — if not more so from a performance standpoint — will be the number of women holding senior management positions. (Indeed, Mulcahy will remain as chairman on the board.)

Research from Professor David Gaddis Ross indicates that having a higher percentage of women in senior management positions equates to better firm performance. From a recent article in Ideas at Work about Ross’s research:

To investigate the connection between women senior managers and firm performance, Ross and Dezsö examined such performance metrics as the market-to-book ratio, return on assets, return on equity and annual sales growth from 1992 to 2006 for the largest 1,500 U.S. firms. The researchers analyzed the relationship between these measures and the percentage of women in senior management positions up to, but not including, the CEO level. Separately, they studied these performance measures in firms that had female CEOs.

Their findings showed that having a higher percentage of women in senior management positions up to the CEO level — in most cases, just having a single female — is positively associated with better firm performance. For companies with a female CEO, however, the association with firm performance is neutral or negative. This suggests that female senior managers do add value to their firms but that whatever special qualities female managers may have are neutralized by the unique attributes of the CEO position.

In news closer to home, another technology company led by a female CEO was recently profiled in Alumni News. Read a Q&A with Rebecca Masisak ’90, co-CEO of TechSoup Global.

Photo courtesy of Xerox

The ailing newspaper industry has seen its troubles go from bad to worse in recent months, with several high-profile closures and bankruptcy filings. Professor Jonathan Knee, director of Columbia Business School’s media program and co-author of the forthcoming “Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies?”, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal on the subject. Knee’s recommendation? Newspapers should focus more on their local coverage.

WSJ: What would be your advice to newspaper owners?

Knee: You have seen people outsource everything from printing to editorial and indeed, any kind of journalism where your scale in the local community does not provide you with an advantage should be gotten elsewhere. If you find out how many people the large papers sent to the national conventions, you would wonder whether that’s economically justified. You have to focus on your competitive advantage, which is local. When the smoke clears, the local newspaper, which may not be the sexiest part of the newspaper industry but is overwhelmingly the largest and most profitable part of the industry, will be a smaller and more-focused enterprise whose activities will be directed to those areas where their local presence gives them competitive advantage and they will continue to generate as a result better profits than the supersexy businesses in the media industry asking for government or nonprofit help like movies and music.

The newspaper industry has not been blessed with the best managers, and generations of monopoly profits do dull the senses. On the journalism side, I think many managers would rather have avoided a fight with journalists than actually force them to think harder about what their readers want, rather than what they want their readers to want. In the economic environment we’re in, newspapers can’t afford to do every six-part investigative series they could have done before.

Photo credit: Matt Callow

Nearly 35,000 people — including a group of students from Columbia Business School — descended on Omaha this weekend for the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. This year’s gathering — commonly known as the “Woodstock of Capitalism” — was under especially close scrutiny after the company’s net worth shrank by 9.8% in 2008. However, according to Professor Bruce Greenwald, those losses are somewhat “fictitious” over the next five to seven years. Greenwald, gave his view on Buffett’s annual letter on CNBC on March 2 (see video), says that Berkshire Hathaway did “surprisingly well” in a tough environment on the investment side.

But what lies at the core of Buffett’s investment strategy?

In an article written in 1983 for Hermes, and republished this year in celebration of the 75th anniversary of Security Analysis, Warren Buffett ’51 profiled nine “superinvestors.” In his own words, Buffett describes the investment principles that so heavily influenced him:

The common intellectual theme of the investors from Graham-and-Doddsville is this: they search for discrepancies between the value of a business and the price of small pieces of that business in the market. Essentially, they exploit those discrepancies without the efficient market theorist’s concern as to whether the stocks are bought on Monday or Thursday, or whether it is January or July, etc. Incidentally, when businessmen buy businesses, which is just what our Graham & Dodd investors are doing through the medium of marketable stocks — I doubt that many are cranking into their purchase decision the day of the week or the month in which the transaction is going to occur. If it doesn’t make any difference whether all of a business is being bought on a Monday or a Friday, I am baffled why academicians invest extensive time and effort to see whether it makes a difference when buying small pieces of those same businesses. Our Graham & Dodd investors, needless to say, do not discuss beta, the capital asset pricing model, or covariance in returns among securities. These are not subjects of any interest to them. In fact, most of them would have difficulty defining those terms. The investors simply focus on two variables: price and value.

Keep reading the complete article in the Spring 2009 issue of Hermes, or download a PDF of the original here.

The outbreak of swine flu, which is responsible for at least 159 deaths in Mexico, has put the U.S. vaccine industry into overdrive. However, the New York Times reports that federal officials are warning consumers that a swine flu vaccine will not be available until late November at the earliest. What does this long lead time teach us about supply chain risks?

In the case of vaccines, it underscores how dependent the U.S. supply is on a traditional — and slow — manufacturing process that involves growing the vaccine viruses in hen eggs. The process takes approximately six months for a finished product to be ready for market.

Professor Awi Federgruen, who has written in Ideas at Work about his research on supply chain risk in general and the flu vaccine in particular, says that the vaccine industry is lacking adequate incentives for investments in better and faster technology and larger capacities.

“When the need arises for a new type of vaccine — like we have now — and to act on it with traditional technology, it takes an enormous amount of time to produce something that can be used,” says Federgruen. “That’s a real problem because by the time it gets to market the epidemic may have done all the damage. If we had an industry that was more agile, we would be in much better shape. How do you provide an incentive structure to invest in such technologies?”

While faster technology does exist, it has not been implemented on a scale that would be needed to supply an entire domestic market. Part of problem, says Federgruen, lies in the roulette-nature of flu vaccine manufacturing in general, where assessments are made far in advance of flu season or potential pandemics and easily result in mismatches of supply to the demand.

“This is another way in which we collectively pay a big price in that we have suppliers operating with inferior technology,” Federgruen says. “And they are operating with inferior technology and low capacities because to change these amounts to large investments, the long term benefits of which are too risky. The federal government has started to address the problem by providing roughly $1 billion in grants for construction costs and guaranteed vaccine purchases. However, considerably more needs to be done to provide adequate incentives to the industry.”

Photo credit: hmerinomx

One of the companies I studied for my dissertation research, which dealt with how established companies build competences to tackle new areas, was Citibank (as it was then known). Citi was kind enough to sponsor my three-year research program on their corporate ventures that yielded many insights into the corporate venturing process (and which helped me get through graduate school). I studied their successes and the failures and tried to figure out what made the difference.

Ironically, one of Citibank’s major successes was its credit card division. In a plot with many twists and turns, I learned how Citibank had leveraged Bank of America’s marketing campaign to switch from BankAmericard to “Visa” by capitalizing on a mistake. Bank of America, which had convinced many customers that a Visa card was the next must-have financial product, proceeded to promise customers that they would indeed get their new Visa cards — but only when their current cards expired. By definition, half their target audience would have to wait six months or more! Citi put huge ads in the newspaper, promising that if customers applied for its Visa, they would get one immediately. The response was overwhelming — so much so that the resulting cash outflow nearly sunk the bank. The operational stress was legendary. Warehouses full of Christmas receipts were said to be still sitting around in February. Cleaning up the operations was what eventually set John Reed up to become the CEO of the bank.

An even bigger problem, however, was that bank regulation at the time (the 1970s) strictly limited how much interest could be charged on consumer credit. These regulations, called usury laws, were intended to help protect consumers from the rapacious behavior of people who would take advantage of them. But by 1980, the interest limits imposed by usury laws were lower than the rate of inflation. Citibank was being squeezed between New York state usury laws and double-digit inflation rates.

“You are lending money at 12 percent and paying 20 percent,” said Walter Wriston, then the CEO of Citi. “You don’t have to be Einstein to realize you’re out of business.”

Citi successfully lobbied the government of South Dakota for a deal. The company would bring thousands of well-paid white collar jobs to a state that was going through massive economic suffering in exchange for the ability to charge higher rates of interest on revolving credit card debt. Deal done, Citi moved, and the forces that shaped the way we use credit cards today were set in motion.

Amazingly, even when interest rates came down, consumers continued to pay high rates of interest on their cards. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the people that run credit card companies must be the smartest behavioral economists in the world — they figured out how to get people to take the cards, run up balances and ignore the long-term implications.

At the time, changes in the rules around credit cards were viewed as having many positive consequences. Entire populations, like students and housewives, got access to spending power and the chance to build an independent credit record. Credit cards changed the allocation of credit from whatever the local bank manager thought about you to a more objective formula, which was based on things like your ability to pay and not the color of your skin or social status. And if you were truly facing an emergency, credit card debt could get you through a rough patch. But whoa, hasn’t bankings’ dependence on cards now gone way too far?

Retroactive changes to interest rates on existing balances, increasing interest rates for payment issues with other lenders (such as the phone company), selling an account from one provider to another and charging customers for the transaction. And fees, fees, fees galore — for everything from late payments to charging above your maximum. It is just amazing. And at some level, I think this behavior violates most people’s basic understanding of what is a fair and appropriate way to treat consumers.

My prediction is that for the first time in several decades, there may be a populist, political and economic perfect storm that will result in a reining in of the card companies. Now let’s hope that the useful and advantageous aspects of the card industry don’t get thrown out along with the more egregious practices.

Photo credit: Giuseppe Leto Barone

How can managers prepare for the less beneficial outcomes of practicing fairness?

According to the research of Professor Joel Brockner, both staff and management alike benefit when a firm makes a strong commitment to practice fairness. While there are some barriers to implementing fair process, Brockner says, it’s undeniable that firms that do so consistently see higher levels of employee commitment and productivity and that their employees report more job satisfaction and less stress — which makes overcoming those barriers a worthwhile investment. His research is featured in the most recent Ideas at Work.

But fairness can come at a cost.

“If people feel that the process was handled fairly regarding a decision that they will not be happy with, such as the loss of a job, or the failure to get a promotion, there is less resentment directed toward to the organization,” he says. “But the potential risk is there is more self-blaming and more low self-esteem.”

The tenure system illustrates the dilemma of process fairness. “When someone is turned down for tenure, the last thing they want to hear is what a fair process it was because then they feel like ‘OK, I got what I deserved.’ If they got what they deserved and the outcome is bad then they may feel badly about themselves.”

Brockner’s advice to managers? “The negative consequences of fair process don’t mean you should forego fairness. Practice fairness but also be aware that people may end up feeling badly about themselves and take additional action to counteract it.”

For example, Brockner and his co-authors recently found that people who engage in corporate-sponsored volunteer activity often feel more committed to the organization, precisely because the act of volunteering reaffirms their sense of self.

“There is a conundrum when you dole out unfavorable outcomes. If you are fair, people blame themselves, if you are unfair, then they blame you. So beware — you’ve got work to do as a manager either way.”

Learn more about Professor Brockner’s research in Columbia Ideas at Work, where he outlines the keys to process fairness and offers guidelines to help firms make hard decisions in a fair way. Read more about (download file) his research on the downside of process fairness.

Photo credit: Eric Lemoine

As with nearly every facet of the economy in the past year, family wealth has had its share of financial setbacks.

An April 2 report in the Economist estimated that the financial crisis has created a loss of more than $10 trillion worldwide for high-net-worth individuals. And the collective shudder that results from the mere mention of the name Madoff suggests that this is more than a financial crisis — it’s a trust crisis.

Family Wealth Management, a new Executive Education program launched in partnership with the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing, is designed to specifically address some of the unique challenges facing families with large and complex investment portfolios.

“If people had asked more specific process and operational questions of Madoff, they wouldn’t have invested with him,” says Professor Bruce Greenwald, the program’s faculty director. “We see an opportunity to bring the principles of value investing to families. People will better understand what their money managers are doing, and because it’s their own money they have the most incentive to listen.”

For families who take an active role in investing, the first step is learning the basic framework of sound capital management.

“The Graham and Dodd approach is, we believe, the most sustainable and long-term strategy for investing,” Greenwald says. “If you’re thinking about a family that wants to preserve wealth over many generations, you want to look where there is limited impairment of capital and some upside that isn’t just market swing.”

The four-day course, which begins in May, will cover the framework of value investing, how and what questions to ask, and even behavioral economics.

“The Family Wealth Management program helps families understand what the process is about before they put their family assets at stake,” Greenwald says.

Photo courtesy of Columbia Business School

Is the tale of Exubera — an inhalable form of insulin that Pfizer launched in 2006 and withdrew in 2007 after poor sales — a bellwhether for Big Pharma?

“It taught me that the organization lacked accountability and the willingness to make hard decisions,” Jeff Kindler, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, said in a recent address to students as part of the Silfen Leadership Series. “But we have made a lot of changes over the last two years and we’re dramatically different now. That’s why we are able to do the Wyeth deal.” (See post, “A Perspective on the Pfizer-Wyeth Merger.”)

In an hour-long lecture, Kindler, who came to Pfizer in 2002 from the McDonald’s Corporation and who has been in the company’s top post since 2006, discussed how Pfizer is changing its strategy to confront impending patent expirations and other value chain challenges, such as the company’s declining stock price and public opinion of leadership. He also discussed the company’s integration with Wyeth.

“Every element of the value chain had been severely challenged, and many people think the Big Pharma model is irreparably damaged,” he said. However, Kindler said that January’s merger with Wyeth represents a “terrific diversification” and a “big change in the blockbuster business model.”

Kindler said Pfizer is focused on six strategies: investing and focusing in areas of unmet need such as Alzheimer’s, oncology and inflammation; becoming a leader in biotherapeutics; having a larger presence in the area of vaccines; taking advantage of its position in developing markets where there is large unmet need; establishing more generic products; and strengthening other areas, such as animal health products.

“[The Wyeth acquisition] puts us in a position to advance every one of these strategies. When we’re complete, we will be extraordinarily diversified and able to operate across the whole health spectrum,” Kindler said.

Photo courtesy of Columbia Business School

Last November, I posted a rather negative view of the proposal to bail out General Motors (“Bail Out GM? No Way”). It wasn’t a good idea for a number of reasons, I said. Keeping the company going with government money is essentially a vote of confidence that the current management team — the one getting the bailout — can return the company to viability. Moreover, GM is a classic case of ‘permanent failure’ in which its importance to key stakeholders (employees, dealers, communities) keeps it going rather than its ability to create a customer.

Well, here we are, five months later, and what have we learned? For one, the shocking collapse in demand for cars has continued, affecting all car companies but particularly GM. Second, the restructuring plan submitted by GM — as we might have predicted — wasn’t far-reaching enough to have a sufficient impact. Finally, we learned that the folks in charge of bringing the company to its current state of non-viability were probably not going to be the ones to turn things around. These are just some of the surprises facing the taxpayers whose money is going toward the bailout.

So the CEO of GM has been asked to leave, and now reliable experts are saying that bankruptcy may be the only option for GM. The sad part is that dragging out the march toward what is looking like almost certain bankruptcy is chewing up even more resources, further weakening the company and undermining confidence in our system’s tools for addressing truly significant problems. Some of these wasted resources could have been used to buffer some of the painful social adjustment costs for those who will really suffer from a bankruptcy — GM’s employees.

Photo credit: vetcw3

Only days before the Indian Premier League is set to begin its month-long second season in South Africa, a different sort of cricket tournament concluded at Columbia Business School. Last night, Cluster C's Team 11 nabbed the winning spot in Case Competition 2009.

Sponsored by the Dean’s Office, the Chazen Institute, the Samberg Institute and Columbia Case Works, the event was Columbia Business School’s first ever case competition. The winning team was awarded a check for $2,400.

This term’s case, The Launch of the Indian Premier League, followed Lalit Modi as he endeavored to build a domestic cricket league in India. The league plays a new form of the game that lasts about three hours and which is more compatible with television. The league’s eight teams are based in Indian cities in a model similar to American professional sport leagues.

“Almost no one gave the new cricket league a chance when it was first conceived,” says case author Professor Rajeev Kohli about how he became interested in the story. “But not only was it successful, it became a phenomenon around the world. The case centers around why that is so.”

Kohli says there are three keys to IPL’s success:

1. The players: “There was great clarity in Modi’s mind that the first issue was the players. He created the right incentives for them so [joining the IPL] would be financially lucrative for every top player in the world.”
2. Securing broadcast rates: “The payment structure was based on a long-term (10 year) contracts with clauses for ratings. The broadcasters had the right incentives to take risks and to make the product right for a prime-time audience in a country where most households have a single televisions set.”
3. Glitter factor: “Once the [Bollywood] stars showed interest, the league became a very glamorous mix of cinema and sport. Suddenly all the industrialists said, ‘We want in, too.’”

“By providing the right incentives, structuring the broadcast rates and bringing in glamour, and attracting women and children into the audience, Modi was able to create demand,” explains Kohli.

How will this season’s South Africa location affect the league’s success? The IPL had to move the 2009 tournament out of India due to ongoing security concerns surrounding national elections.

“It is a disappointment, but in balance it is the best thing that could be done at this time and keeps the players safe,” says Kohli. “My hunch is that they won’t be much affected because it is a media event, and South Africa also has many cricket fans.”

Photo credit: SJ Jagadeesh

If you visit a McDonald’s in India, you might notice the Chicken Maharaja Mac on the menu. In Norway you might dine on a McLak, a grilled salmon burger with dill sauce. By decentralizing their decision making, multinational firms such as McDonald’s are able to create specialized products and better cater to local tastes.

But just how many specialized products should firms offer? Not that many, says Professor Catherine Thomas.

In a Columbia Ideas at Work article, Thomas explains why less might be more when it comes to offering localized varieties. “The benefit of being a multinational and having a brand is that a company can take advantage of economies of scale by producing the same product in bulk selling it everywhere, minimizing unit cost and increasing profits,” Thomas says. “But acting against that are differing market demands. So, if a company were to sell the same product range in each country, it may well lose brand-level market share.”

By employing some form of decentralized decision making, companies are better able to target the tastes of their customers. “An executive in the company headquarters in Brussels,” Thomas explains, “can’t make the best decisions on what to offer in various European markets because that person doesn’t know the local markets well enough to understand preferences.”

Using research on the sales of different varieties of laundry detergent across Europe, Thomas created a model to determine how sales were affected by replacing localized varieties with more standardized ones. She found that detergent manufacturers could produce far fewer varieties without diminishing profits.

Still, Thomas warns that firms should think twice before centralizing their decision making — it may result in having too few localized products on the shelves.

“Multinational consumer product firms operating in complex product markets should stick with some form of decentralized decision making as the best way to ensure their products are aligned with the local preferences of customers,” Thomas says. “But understand that a decentralized organizational design includes an inbuilt bias towards the manufacture of too many products.”

For more information on the dilemmas faced by multinational brands, as well as Thomas’s research, see “Too many products?” in Columbia Ideas at Work.

Photo credit: blmurch

Consumer spending typically falls during a recession, but does that mean that entrepreneurs have to wait until the economic clouds have passed to introduce new products?

Just the opposite, says Professor Amar Bhidé in a recent New York Times Room for Debate blog post. In a recession, Bhidé says, consumers are forced to reexamine their behavior — and it is in this “reshuffling of the deck” that entrepreneurial opportunities are born. Bhidé, author of The Venturesome Economy, points to the early 1980s as an example of how a changing economic landscape paved the way for many successful businesses:

About 20 years ago, I studied 100 founders of Inc. magazine’s 1989 list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. Virtually all of them had started between 1981-83 in the midst of an awful recession.

But that didn’t prevent those founders from starting a new venture — in fact, in many ways it may have helped. Several had lost their jobs, so they weren’t risking steady employment — and they were able to hire employees who didn’t have great job prospects on the cheap. Landlords offered leases without asking too many questions about credit histories. Suppliers were willing to wait to be paid.

And even though the old economy and the rust belt was in a deep slump, the personal computer was taking off, and with it opportunities not only for new hardware and software makers but also for retailers, resellers and even magazine publishers.

Bhidé expands on the importance of consumers’ continual thirst for innovation in a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. He writes, “The venturesomeness of consumers has nourished unimaginable advances in our standard of living and created invaluable human capital that is often ignored.”

He cites the personal computer as a product whose success was driven by forward-looking consumers who, despite a challenging economic environment, were willing to change their purchasing behavior and adopt an innovative new product.

History suggests that Americans don’t shirk from venturesome consumption in hard times. The personal computer took off in the dark days of the early 1980s. I paid more than a fourth of my annual income to buy an IBM XT then — as did millions of others. Similarly, in spite of the Great Depression, the rapid increase in the use of new technologies made the 1930s a period of exceptional productivity growth. Today, sales of Apple’s iPhone continue to expand at double-digit rates. Low-income groups (in the $25,000 to $49,999 income segment) are showing the most rapid growth, with resourceful buyers using the latest models as their primary device for accessing the Internet.

The takeaway? Purchases of cars and other big-ticket items may be down, but consumers are still willing to pay for innovation — and that may be the ladder we need to climb out of this dark economic hole.

Photo credit: Fr3d

If you’re in the market to beef up your investment portfolio — and have the stomach to ride the Dow roller coaster — Andrew Ang, professor of finance, says to follow this checklist before you decide to buy or sell.

1) Know your risk tolerance
This seems obvious. If you’re very risk averse, don’t hold a lot of risky assets. Unfortunately, a lot of people have learned the hard way that they overestimated their risk tolerance. Equities fell in 2008 by a lot — around 50% worldwide. You need to be very comfortable with the proportion of risky asset holdings and then stick to this. Making adjustments to your portfolio right now by selling equities could be one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You don’t sell stocks when stock prices are really low and future-expected returns are very high.

2) Diversify widely
The large negative returns that have occurred in many asset classes doesn’t mean that diversification has failed. In fact, it’s quite the contrary. If, like James Barrow, you bought 10% of Bear Stearns in 2007, you would have lost close to everything. He would have been much better off buying the S&P 500. Similarly, if your employer allows you to buy company stock, don't build up a large position. Your salary comes from that firm, and you add to that risk by having savings in that same firm. Buy the S&P 500 or something else instead. Diversification means not bearing the specific risk of an individual firm. Diversification also means recognizing your investment property in the Hamptons looks a lot like your equity portfolio.

You want to diversify widely. Hold many different asset classes. In 2008, Treasuries were one of the few asset classes to increase in value. If you didn’t hold them, you missed out. Note that diversification doesn’t mean that owning many different asset classes will shield you from many of those asset classes having simultaneous downturns, which we’ve seen over the last few months. Diversification doesn’t guarantee this. If you’re uncomfortable bearing risk, see (1).

3) Rebalance regularly
Every year, or at some regular interval, rebalance your portfolio. Suppose you hold 60/40 equities and bonds. At the end of the year, if equities increase relative to bonds, you sell equity to buy bonds. After 2008, you bravely buy equities and sell bonds. Rebalancing is inherently contrarian. You buy assets with declines in prices and pare back your exposure to assets with increases in prices. An investor doing this from 2001 to 2007 would have sold equities and bought bonds almost every year. If you didn’t do this, your portfolio by the end of 2007 would be heavily weighted into equity and you would be bearing enormous equity risk. Rebalancing tempers that risk and makes sure you are bearing only as much exposure to risky assets as you can tolerate.

4) Save, save and save
There is no such thing as a free lunch. High returns only come with high risk. For saving towards retirement, you must save, save and then save some more.

5) Keep your costs to a minimum
Avoid active mutual funds and other active management like the plague. The average active mutual fund loses money. Hold index funds instead. Keep things simple. Structured assets simply chop up positions of underlying assets with leverage and charge you a lot of money. Minimizing costs means you get to reinvest more and that means more money for you at the end.

Photo credit: Bill S.

Did you “Elf Yourself” last holiday season? OfficeMax’s seasonal marketing campaign featured a viral Web component which allowed customers to superimpose an image of their own face on an animated dancing elf. According to Internet tracking service comScore, more than 17 million people visited the Elf Yourself Web site during the 2007 holiday season. But did all of those unique visitors translate into increased sales? The answer is not really: the company’s reported total sales in Q4 2007 were down 2.6%. The economy’s slide hasn’t helped either; in 2008, OfficeMax reported that its 2008 Q4 earnings were down more than 14%.

Ava Seave, an adjunct associate professor in Finance and Economics, recently blogged about the correlation between viral marketing success and sales totals. Seave suggests that marketers examine traditional metrics to gauge the success of their campaigns. She writes:

Viral marketing can decrease acquisition costs for new customers because your current customers essentially endorse your product when they send along a game or video they think is funny or interesting, and, of course, is associated with your product.

However, the acquisition cost calculation needs to be done over time, since a viral marketing campaign almost never leads to direct sales from that game or video viewing. The right goals for a viral campaign should be a lot more old school: Does this campaign generate leads and does it help with brand recognition?

Judging a viral campaign’s success for lead generation is straight forward — count the number of the leads that close and judge the quality — i.e. total revenue — of the new customers. To count, how many leads land on the registration form and actually fill in the information, and how many abandon? What percentage of leads make a transaction? What is the cost of the lead and the cost of the order?

Compare these statistics to all your other sources, naturally. Does this campaign help with brand recognition is a harder question to pull out a quantitative answer. You can point to the number of downloads or pass-alongs as new exposures to your brand, and we assume exposure will lead to recognition. You also could look at what terms are put into search engines that lead to your site and determine if this indicates the effectiveness of the campaign.

Photo credit: Judy Baxter

How can marketers adapt to this challenging economic climate? Professor Don Sexton offers three keys to success.

Do not use an axe to make cuts
In a down economy, the worst thing you can do is make across-the-board cuts. If you go in with in axe, you will most likely make some real mistakes. Think more carefully where your outlays are. How do you determine what you get back from marketing expenditures? You must first understand the long-term value of your customers to you and the costs involved with finding and keeping them. If you go by your gut you will have a problem. This applies to which type of media to use, such as deciding between social media and more traditional types of media, and to whom you direct your marketing efforts.

Help your customers find value
Don’t just say “we feel your pain.” Think about what you can do to help and find ways to partner with your customers. For example, I recently heard about an auto dealership that will give you a loaner if you need to get to a job interview. It’s not a major outlay for the dealership but it shows they care about their customers. The point is not just the thought but the action behind it. What you do with your customers now will affect your performance in the future.

Marketers must also rethink how to delight customers. You want to satisfy customers but make sure the balance between costs and value is correct. Don’t cut costs so much that you are pulling down value to the customer more than any costs you save and don’t add value so much that your costs increase more than the additional value you are providing. We call this “value engineering.”

Perceiving is believing
Marketers need to be more transparent to consumers. For example, even if the $400 million that Citigroup reportedly spent on the naming rights for the new Mets ballpark is a good idea — and that is debatable — Citi still must consider how people will perceive that expenditure. Someone unfamiliar with how branding works and why such a move might make sense may wonder why their taxes (via bailout money) and fees/interest they pay the bank are being used to put a name on a stadium instead of helping them. That kind of perception can have a negative impact. No company is immune to such scrutiny. These days marketing actions are public and will be discussed. Companies should be sure that people are going to understand the motivation behind its actions. They really have to think about what signals they are sending with every marketing action they take.

Don Sexton is the author of Marketing 101, Branding 101 and Value Above Cost: Driving Superior Financial Performance with CVA®, the Most Important Metric You’ve Never Used.

Photo credit: Harlem Lands

Merck announced yesterday that it is acquiring Schering-Plough in a stock and cash deal valued at approximately $41 billion. The move follows Pfizer’s announcement in January that it will acquire Wyeth in a $68 billion deal (see blog post “Perspective on the Pfizer-Wyeth Merger”).

The rationales behind these acquisitions are similar. Both Pfizer and Merck are reacting to the industry’s perceived overcapacity on a global basis and are seeking to broaden their technology platforms. The companies each face slowing revenue growth as a result of the unique life cycle of prescription drugs (where sales of a major product can vanish in a matter of months upon patent expiration) and a downturn in the number of new drug approvals. Lastly, Pfizer and Merck see their respective horizontal mergers as significant opportunities for cost savings.

For Merck, the acquisition of Schering-Plough broadens its product line, research pipeline and technology platform (e.g., biologics) and creates a larger base so that no single product has a material impact on the company’s earnings or infrastructure. The acquisition will also allow Merck to “smooth” earnings post 2010 when the patents on two of its main drugs, Cozaar and Singular, expire. In addition, Merck can consolidate the joint venture it has with Schering around blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drugs Vytorin and Zetia for more effective decision making.

The transaction raises a number of questions, however. First, there is an inherent integration risk complicated by Merck’s relative lack of experience in orchestrating these large transactions and the ongoing integration of Schering’s earlier acquisition of Organon. Merck is also betting on the strength of Schering’s research and technology platform and promise of its pipeline. There also may be questions involving Schering’s arrangement with Johnson & Johnson around Remicade and its follow-on a rheumatoid arthritis drug (hence the rationale for the reverse merger) — plus there is growing competition in that category. The ability for Merck to reignite growth of the Vytorin/Zetia franchise also will be a challenge. Lastly, the new combined entity remains reliant on the global prescription drug sector that faces increased challenges and threats.

Bottom line: the deal can be viewed as a logical response to an industry that has overcapacity, unique (and now shorter) product life cycles, and slowing top-line growth. Merck and Schering-Plough have largely complementary therapeutic and product portfolios and technology platforms, and have been working together for years through the Vytorin/Zetia joint venture. The key questions relate to execution risk, i.e., Merck’s ability to integrate without major disruptions to its business, and whether this transaction will materially improve Merck’s longer-term growth prospects.

However, the transaction shows Merck management is willing to take bold action in seeking to strengthen the company in the face of an increasingly challenging and competitive environment.

Photo courtesy of Schering-Plough

Last August I talked about the actions Big Pharma may take to address its slowing top-line growth and the upcoming slew of major drugs facing patent expiration in the next several years. A “horizontal merger” was one option discussed, and yesterday Pfizer proceeded with that strategy with its $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth. So why did Pfizer pursue this strategy, and will it encourage other Big Pharma players to pursue a similar approach?

One contributing factor to Pfizer’s deal with Wyeth is the company’s impending loss of patent exclusivity for its blockbuster drug Lipitor in 2011. Lipitor had $12 billion in sales last year, amounting to 25% of Pfizer’s total sales. However, Pfizer is also keenly interested in gaining access to Wyeth’s long-established biologics expertise and portfolio (Pfizer did not have critical mass in this area), its promising (albeit risky) experimental Alzheimer’s drug, as well as its vaccines franchise, consumer healthcare business and animal health franchise. The deal broadens Pfizer’s portfolio and provides added flexibility in managing earnings over the next five years.

However, the deal is unlikely to contribute to top-line growth in the near term for several reasons. Wyeth has its own patent expiration issues over the next three years, and large pharma mergers are inherently disruptive, particularly to R&D divisions, which are the lifeblood of these companies. The acquisition premium Pfizer paid (approximately 30% over last week’s price) will require Pfizer to be very aggressive in cost-cutting to make the deal accretive to earnings by year two, and that may exacerbate the organizational disruption. Pfizer announced it was cutting its dividend in half to help finance the acquisition (one of the reasons investors previously held Pfizer shares was its high dividend yield).

Will we see other Big Pharma mergers in the near term? Well, virtually every company is considering the possibility, however, challenges remain for other deals, including pricing, financing, social issues (such as who will run the combined entity), antitrust and expected market reaction. Two of the major players are already tied up in other large transactions: Roche’s bid for the remaining shares of Genentech that it does not already own, and Novartis’s two-step acquisition of a controlling interest in Alcon. It is doubtful that the Pfizer deal materially changes the competitive dynamics in the industry. Other Big Pharma players must consider their own internal capabilities and growth prospects and determine whether it is worth taking on the inherent risks of a large pharma merger in today’s competitive economic environment.

Photo credit: Dan Buczynski

Weaving personal growth into professional success was one of the main themes at this year’s annual Columbia Women in Business (CWIB) conference held on February 20. The conference brought hundreds of alumnae and professional women together for more than a dozen panels.

“We are entering a phase where we are delving into much deeper civic engagement,” said Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS, in her keynote address. “It’s important to get outside your work experience to get perspective. Engage with your relationships, family, life and community.”

The day’s panels addressed the work-life matrix through different lenses, including Wall Street, corporate social responsibility and all-female industries.

Across the panels several common threads emerged. Good relationships — both in and out of the office — are key to success; the definition of success is constantly evolving; and the importance for women to develop specific skill sets.

“I realized how important it’s been to have partners in other parts of the bank,” said panelist Chandra Metzler, a director at Deutsche Bank, when speaking about how the banking crisis has impacted her job. “It’s been important to have people to talk to because you have already-established relationships.”

That theme was also discussed in the “Creating Champions and Allies” panel, in which participants advocated a 360-degree approach to developing allies, encouraging the attendees to “champion above, down and around.”

On the subject of networking and career development, Merle Duskin Kailas, executive director of the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation, advised the audience, “Develop a skill set early in your career. Always remain on the credit-side of every equation.”

Where can career seekers find opportunity? Lisa Carnoy CC ’89, managing director and head of global equity capital markets at Bank of America, told audience members at the “Banking in High Heels” panel that it is still an opportune time to begin a career in finance.

“It is a fantastic time to join banking,” Carnoy said. “You will be pulled up faster on the upside — which will inevitably be more extreme the next time — than if you joined in a more robust period. It takes guts and long-term perspective.”

Photo courtesy of PBS/Columbia Women in Business

Could the power of the crowd soon rival corporations’ ability to organize labor? Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing and writer for WIRED magazine, says it is possible. Howe is speaking at today’s BRITE conference. (Read Howe’s blog; see Public Offering’s live Twitter feed of the BRITE conference.)

The practice of crowdsourcing is simple: an organically-formed community of people use their spare cycles to produce content or solve tasks. “Whether or not [crowdsourcing] will be a model of economic production that occupies space like outsourcing or a long-term permanent alternative to traditional methods of labor acquisition remains to be seen,” Howe said in a recent interview. “I hypothesize we will see the community begin to rival the corporation as a way of organizing labor.”

If the phenomenon is poised to become a serious segment of economic production in the near future, how broadly can the trend be applied?

Already, crowdsourcing has migrated from areas such as open source software to graphic design and stock photography to spot news. One collaborative project referred to as the Eco Team translates the Economist into Chinese each week. Crowdsourcing’s tentacles have also reached into the world of finance through peer-to-peer lenders such as Prosper.com.

The trickiest application, however, is in its use of monitoring — new projects are harnessing the crowd by acting as a kind of universal Big Brother. On the bright side, new efforts such as the Herdict Web project usher in a new type of group-generated transparency to the flow of information. However, the application of crowdsourcing gets decidedly more complicated when it ventures into such areas as patrolling borders (see the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition).

As the applications continue to play out in multiple arenas, there remains a constant: the potential labor pool is ever increasing.

“One thing that is safe to say is that the economic downturn is adding fuel to the fire because crowdsourcing tends to be cheaper and more affordable than [traditional] hiring,” Howe said. “Crowdsourcing is based on people’s spare cycles, and as spare cycles increase, the size of labor force as measured in labor hours will increase.”

Photo credit: James Cridland

“We are great risk of becoming over-dependent on a miracle solution,” Sam Zell cautioned students during his recent presentation at Columbia Business School. Referring to the current economic crisis as the first “Blackberry recession,” Zell warned against instant gratification and said the economic recovery could be slow and gradual.

Professor Lynne Sagalyn introduced Zell, who spoke about the economy and the real estate market on February 17 as part of the Silfen Leadership Series.

Though cautious, Zell did sound a note of optimism when he said that the real estate industry will recover more quickly than pundits suggest, and that equilibrium for the single-family home market could appear as soon as the summer.

“But before you ask where the opportunities are, you have to identify what your capital is worth. The biggest mistake anybody could make is to assume that his capital is worth the same today as it was a year ago or two years ago,” he said. “The reality is that it is worth two, three or four times more than it was as recently as 24 months ago.”

Zell said opportunity could be found in the debt-side of real estate and in geographic areas where demand is growing, citing locations as diverse as China, Brazil, Mexico and Egypt.

“Ultimately, profitability will come from the acquisition of assets at measurable discounts to replacement costs, whether it is in equities, real estate or any other area,” he said.

Photo credit: Leslye Smith

This post contains an update.

Retailers have been stunned by how abrupt the change in the economy has been and that it has happened across all strata of consumers. It is most pronounced in the luxury sector. As recently as seven or eight months ago, luxury thought that it was invulnerable, but that is not true.

Many luxury customers are aspirational and are vulnerable to downturns in the economy. The core customer with essentially unlimited disposable funds may no longer find it fashionable to behave as they had in the past. Irrational exuberance may not return and people may not seek to live beyond their means, choosing a more conservative lifestyle. Now, the customer is saving for the first time in many years, and this recession will leave a lasting mark on consumer behavior.

Jobs, confidence are lacking
Retailers are one of the largest sectors of the economy. They are very large employers. When business declines, retailers stop hiring. Layoffs soon follow. We’re seeing this across the country. Laying off large numbers of people creates a cascade of breakage. This impacts consumer confidence; everyone knows someone who was laid off. Stores begin to close. That is very visible. At the end of the day, if people don’t have jobs, there is no recovery and that’s the end of it. The consumer has to be viable, which means jobs and a rise in confidence. Many people with viable jobs become increasingly fearful of losing their employment. We’ve gone from irrational exuberance to irrational fear.

It’s good to be different
This downturn creates powerful opportunities for organizations to emerge if they can successfully differentiate themselves. Retailers with notable products and services can create enormous energy and value. Two examples are Apple and Amazon. Apple has a highly differentiated product and a selling environment at retail that is incomparable. Their market share will continue to climb as long as they continue to satisfy their customers’ needs and wants. Amazon aggregates assortments of merchandise in an on line setting that is the best in the world and continues to acquire more and more market share. They invested in an esoteric device, the Kindle, and surprise! It looks like a $1.4 billion business next year.

On the other hand, retailers with little or no forward strategy like the department stores, who have been playing out a “Last Man Standing” end game have little likelihood of future success and vitality. Layoffs in this sector are a tragic and ineffective expression of survival. You can’t use reductions in force as a strategic blueprint. It creates enormous disruption and leads to more crises downstream.

Good news for the shopper
Currently there is an enormous excess of inventory in many retailers supply chains because of recent extreme and unanticipated shortfalls in sales. These excesses will have to be liquidated. Retailers are dumping inventory, canceling what they can and avoiding buying forward product. In the next year we’re going to see fewer stores, less inventory overall in stores and less discounting because of less inventory. Prices will come down because consumers will expect more value and will be less willing to play the high-low game as they have in the past.

This economic downturn, recession if you will, is likely to continue for at least 12 to 18 months and maybe longer. I believe that when it is over the retail landscape will be very different than it is today.

UPDATE (2/25/09): Follow up from the Retail & Luxury Goods Conference. Keynote speaker Robert Burke said, “I don't think the department stores are completely dead and I don’t believe luxury is over. … It became overused and ambiguous terminology.” View the complete video (part 1, part 2) of his speech. -CN

Photo credit: Christopher Chan

This is part of a series of posts to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Social Enterprise Program and newly expanded nonprofit and social enterprise course offerings in Executive Education.

Today, the nonprofit sector is one of the fastest-growing areas of the economy. It is doing more and more of what the government used to do in social services, healthcare, education and culture. Along with the growth in this sector, there comes a greater need for leadership over bigger and more complicated enterprises. If nonprofit organizations are not performing efficiently, it affects our whole economy.

Nonprofit leaders have the same accountability to “stretch a dollar” as their corporate counterparts. We’re seeing a great deal more sophistication in how nonprofits operate and how they relate to the board and their constituents. Accountability is strong and forceful, and the media is playing a vital role in making sure nonprofits are accountable and transparent to stakeholders.

Another change we’re seeing in nonprofits is that wealth is no longer available to the same degree as in the past. Increasingly, there is more dependence on operating income rather than philanthropy. The skills required for growing capital on the inside are different from those you need for raising capital on the outside. This shift will transform nonprofits, because they now must be self-sustaining and enterprising.

I recently had the opportunity to work with Betsy Poirier ’08 at the Norman Rockwell Museum as part of the School’s Nonprofit Board Leadership Program. She brought a whole new level of expertise in how to commercially position the museum store on the Internet. Betsy’s experience exposed a real gap between the skill sets Columbia Business School students have and what most museums can attract and compensate.

How do nonprofits close that gap and attract that kind of talent? For starters, nonprofits need to offer compensation and benefits that can compete with for-profit organizations. They must also consider where they need talent. Do they need it at the operating level if it exists at the board level? The need for talent is acute at both levels, especially as demands on board members increase.

One solution to think about is to consolidate nonprofits under “umbrella” organizations. Perhaps several affinity organizations could operate within a “holding company” with administrative, IT and marketing services to better share limited talent and expertise. Nonprofits need to start thinking about what we can do collaboratively, given shrinking community resources. Nonprofits can use economies of scale to access leadership capital. They can also be more businesslike by creating growth paths and sharing corporate overhead and expertise. Community stakeholders will benefit as more output is gained from limited resources. In 10 years, we will not recognize the not-for-profit landscape as it enters the post-2008 world of economics.

Photo credit: Columbia Business School

How are entrepreneurs weathering the financial storm? Panelists in a recent Master Class on Innovation and the Economy discussed some of the ways entrepreneurs can stay competitive in a down market. (view video of the Master Class)

1. Look for money in the right places
While money is scarce (and being used to fund existing portfolios), it’s not impossible to find, the panelists agreed. “You can raise money if you have the right idea, but it has to be very real and very targeted,” said Professor Cliff Schorer. Alumni panelist Leonard Sylk ’65 said cutting costs was essential to raising funds and that firms should look to their suppliers for money. “Ninety days from your supplier is a gift because that can be interest-free money,” he said.

2. Secure your balance sheet
Preserve cash flow, ensure that there is capital on your balance sheet, take the long perspective and be wary of a high burn-rate, said Professor Morten Sorensen.

3. Find the opportunity
“Look at your resources and assets and find the opportunity,” said Schorer. “Ask, ‘Where can I take advantage of pockets of gold?’” Panelists discussed healthcare and energy as two areas with the potential for growth. “Provide services that can help companies run more efficiently and find places where there is revolutionary change,” continued Schorer.

4. Tap hidden resources
Schorer recommended that entrepreneurs wanting to build intellectual or leadership capital enlist the help of retirees. “Look to older people who are not returning to the work force and who are willing to help,” he said.

5. Be prudent to survive the game
“Resist the urge to expand beyond what you can handle, especially with fixed costs, and know how much debt you can take on,” said Sylk. “Have the discipline to say, ‘It’s not the right thing to do.’ Learn how to not be greedy and secure your position. If you can survive, that’s the most important thing, because you won’t have much competition left if you do.”

Photo credit: Jim Wallace

President Barack Obama announced a plan this week that would limit executive compensation at companies seeking large amounts of government aid. The plan includes placing a $500,000 cap on the annual salary of senior executives and restricting the cashing in of stock incentives until government assistance is repaid.

But will the limits create a leadership void at these firms? Professor Nahum Melumad said that some of the proposal’s terms could hinder recruitment and retention.

“You need the best talent money can buy and that may be difficult without the right award,” said Melumad. “Currently the administration is saying that a company may pay a large amount in the form of stock options, but that executives will be allowed to exercise those only after the government has sold its equity positions. That may be too long a period to retain any incentive impact and to attract top managers."

“A better way might be to have executive compensation consist of two key components: a ‘reasonable’ base pay and an additional component that is a function of improved company performance,” Melumad said. “The latter should have significant upside potential to attract top managerial talent.”

Professor Sudhakar Balachandran points out that even if firms aren’t too concerned about losing talent, they’re still faced with the challenge of motivation.

“There have been some arguments that there will be an exodus, but I am not too worried because the job market and prospects are tougher now,” he said. “In the past we’ve seen turnover when a firm’s retention mechanisms fail. But today, if someone wants to leave, where would they go?”

“If there’s no upside potential, you now have to worry that people will not work hard or smart, but instead that they will just show up and check off the boxes,” said Balachandran.

Photo credit: White House/Pete Souza

Google recently announced a plan to allow employees to exchange their stock options for new ones at a lower strike price. The program aims to create better incentives for employees, who have seen the company’s stock price fall more than 50% since 2007. Professor Wei Jiang offered her thoughts on the program in the Financial Times. She said:

How might Google justify its plan to exchange employee options? First, it might say that, without this initiative, staff will stop putting in long hours or coming up with ideas, since rewards would not kick in until Google’s stock price regained the $400-plus mark — a dim prospect in the foreseeable future. There is some truth to this. But how can exchanging options provide much incentive if employees expect them to be exchanged again if things do not work out further down the road? Second, it might say that without this measure staff will move. Yet there are few greener pastures out there. And why not give key staff restricted shares? Options are “cheaper” only when they are not properly expensed. Another argument is that Google staff should not be punished by stock price falls that were mostly due to the global financial crisis. I agree. But then, should the same rule not apply when the company’s stock price goes up in a bull market?

Photo credit: Keso S.

Models pose a paradox. They hold the key to extraordinary profits but can inflict destructive losses on a bank. Because a model entails a complex perspective on issues that are typically fuzzy and ambiguous, they can lock traders into a mistaken view of the world, leading to billionaire losses. Can banks reap the benefits of models while avoiding their accompanying dangers?

Our research suggests they do, and shows how. We conducted a sociological study of a derivatives trading room at a large bank on Wall Street. The bank, which remained anonymous in our study, reaped extraordinary profits from its models — but emerged from the credit crisis unscathed. For three years, we were the proverbial fly on the wall, observing the traders with the same ethnographic techniques that anthropologists used to understand tribesmen in the South Pacific. We identified a set of managerial procedures, which we call “reflexive modeling,” that lead to superior model development. (View the complete study)

The key to outstanding trades, we found, lies outside the models. It is a matter of culture, organizational design and leadership. The bank that we observed introduced reflexivity in every aspect of its organization. From the junior traders to the supervisors, everyone at the bank was ready to question their own assumptions, listen for dissonant cues and respect diverse opinions.

How? As many have already suggested, individuals certainly matter. The bank hired people with a healthy dose of humility and an appreciation for the limits of their smarts. This often meant opting for older traders rather than younger hotshots.

But the key to the bank’s reflexiveness did not just lie in individuals. By reflexiveness we don’t mean super-intelligent traders engaged in some heroic mental feat, splitting and twisting their minds back on themselves like some intellectual variant of a contortionist. Reflexivity is a property of organizations.

The architecture of the bank, for instance, was crucial. The open-plan trading room grouped different trading strategies in the same shared space. Each desk focused on a single model, developing a specialized expertise in certain aspect of the stocks.

To see why this was useful, think of a stock as a round pie. Investors on Main Street often eat the pie whole, with predictably dire consequences. The professionals that we saw, by contrast, sliced stocks into different properties. Each desk was in charge of a different property, and the different desks then shared their insights with each other. This could happen in a one-minute chat between senior traders across desks or in an overheard conversation from the desk nearby. This communication allowed traders to understand those aspects of the stock that lay outside their own models — the unexpected “black swans” that can derail a trade.

Sharing, of course, is easier said than done. The bank made it possible with a culture that prized collaboration. For instance, it used objective bonuses rather than subjective ones to ensure that envy did not poison teamwork. It moved teams around the room to build the automatic trust that physical proximity engenders. It promoted from within, avoiding sharp layoffs during downturns.

Most importantly, the leadership of the trading room had the courage to punish uncooperative behavior. Bill, the manger of the room, made it abundantly clear that he would not tolerate the view, prominent among some, that if you’re great at Excel, “it’s OK to be an asshole.” And he conveyed the message with decisive clarity by firing anti-social traders on the spot — including some top producers.

In other words, the culture at the bank was nothing like the consecration of greed that outsiders attribute to Wall Street. We refer to it as “organized dissonance.”

Our study suggests that a lack of reflexivity — that is, the lack of doubt on the part of banks — may be behind the current credit crisis. We are reminded of infantry officers who instructed their drummers to disrupt cadence while crossing bridges. The disruption prevents the uniformity of marching feet from producing resonance that might bring down the bridge. As we see it, the troubles of contemporary banks may well be a consequence of resonant structures that banished doubt, thereby engendering disaster.

This blog post was coauthored with Professor David Stark, chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and author of The Sense of Dissonance (Princeton University Press, 2009). Please visit Professor Daniel Beunza’s blog Socializing Finance to learn more about his research on the social studies of finance.

Photo credit: Daniel Beunza

What would you do if a client gave you a very expensive gold watch? The question was just one of many discussed at an ethics panel and debate that took place last week at Columbia Business School. Organized by the Student Leadership and Ethics Board, working with the Sanford C. Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics, an international panel of students discussed their perspectives and experiences confronting ethical dilemmas or corruption.

“Most of the time the ethical dilemmas are not created at the junior levels, but we are most often responsible for their execution,” said student board member Vicente Brocchetto ’10. “The way we handle these situations can make all the difference.”

Several key points/questions were raised:

• Knowledge of local customs and how respect is conveyed in different cultures is important. In one example, the matter of taking shoes and hats off when dealing with a local chief was key to winning a negotiation.
• At what level of materiality does corruption matter? There was an interesting debate about what a manager can overlook, and what a manager cannot, particularly in areas of the world where poverty is prevalent.
• How the use of the English language for business establishes formality and implicitly suggests that business is operating under a different set of standards.
• Leverage what you do have, rather than trying to meet or beat local corruption. In an example case of an international firm that confronted bid rigging by regional groups, the firm’s solution was to capitalize and leverage proprietary products available through its global network, rather than engage with local competition.
• How does perspective change for foreign national managers after training/managing in the United States? How do managers handle different standards for business in the U.S. versus abroad?
• Prof. David Beim, who moderated the panel, said, “Talk about [differences]. People are reluctant to talk about it because it is personal and can appear embarrassing. When you do talk, you find more options and that there’s more nuance than you might have imagined.”
• Don’t be afraid to turn down business. “Any quality firm turns down more business than it accepts,” said Prof. Beim.

Photo credit: Public Offering/Catherine New

Walking home late at night, a man finds his neighbor searching for something under a street lamp and stops to help. “What have you lost?” the man asks. “My wedding ring,” the neighbor replies. “Are you sure you dropped it here?”

“No,” the neighbor answers. “I dropped it over there, but it’s dark over there and light over here. I am searching where I can see.”

This ancient and well-worn fable is, unfortunately, an apt description of a great deal of research on the characteristics of highly effective teachers. Previous work on this topic, including some of my own, focuses on information already being collected by school districts and state boards of education, such as whether teachers possess graduate degrees, obtain special certification, or have a degree from a selective college. But to the frustration of many, these “highly qualified” teachers are typically no better than their less-decorated colleagues, or not nearly as effective as one might hope, given that we hire and pay teachers based on these attributes.

In a recent study, my colleagues Thomas Kane from Harvard University, Brian Jacob from the University of Michigan, Douglas Staiger from Dartmouth College and I try to shine a new light on this topic. To do that, we surveyed hundreds of new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness, including specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy and scores on a commercially available teacher-selection test. We then looked to see whether teachers who scored higher on these measures also led their students to higher gains in math achievement on standardized exams.

Our first finding was that none of the single measures we studied is a very strong predictor of student outcomes. In other words, there is no silver bullet, no pencil-and-paper test that will tell you exactly how good a prospective teacher will be in the classroom. However, we also found that the measures we collected can be used to build broader indices of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Moreover, by pooling individual measures into indices, one gains modest, but statistically significant, predictive power to predict which teachers will be more effective than others.

Through low-cost mechanisms, such as our online survey, school officials can gather an expanded set of information on candidates to help them use their resources more effectively. Districts can do their own analyses to see which teachers tend to perform well, and can focus their efforts on increasing the pool of candidates with similar traits. Individual schools could use this information to decide the order in which to interview candidates or the particular issues they focus on during the interview process.

Researchers and policymakers agree that hiring good teachers is one of the most promising paths to improving school quality. But, if we want to find a new supply of great teachers, we need to change methods by which we search for them. Like the lost wedding ring, we might just be surprised with what we find.

Photo credit: Liz Marie

This is the last in a series of posts on the challenges surrounding social entrepreneurship.

I have learned in my life as a business professor that just as being a good manager is not the same thing as being a good leader, being a media star is far different from being a good leader or manager. We live in an era where the media-friendly entrepreneur/founder must act on stage, under the spotlight. Many of the foundations supporting social entrepreneurs encourage what the French call mediatisation, supposedly under the theory that media attention draws resources to the enterprise. It also draws attention to the foundation or private investor who funds the star leader.

All of this comes at a cost. I wonder how many tragic failures we have created as a result of our preference for sparkling leaders, rather than ones who know their business and who know how to work on a team. I am absolutely for charismatic leadership, but I am wary of the prima donnas that we tend to create.

I would like to see fewer media leaders and more good team leaders in control of social enterprises. And I would encourage investors to put aside their egos in promoting excessive media attention. It is quite possible that when we have managed to develop better social capital markets, there will be less dependence on the egos of private investors who tend to bet on media figures.

It is a tragedy when an organization’s leader must leave his business and retire, or seek another role in the project. I can think of a social enterprise in Portugal that has done great things in its work with troubled youth. After 30 years of success, the company has slowed and the founder is in danger of seeing a total reversal of the gains it has made. The problem is that too much weight was attributed to the founder and not enough effort was spent creating a team around her that had real capacity or power. Not surprisingly, the leader has become too accustomed to the media spotlight to depart.

An equally painful case is the argument between two founders of an exciting enterprise engaged in funding new ventures in deprived urban communities in a European country.

One leader managed to attract far more media attention, and the chairman of the board threw his support to him for this reason. But was he the better leader or manager? This question appears to have been almost beside the point. As a consequence and despite ample talents, the other founder was forced to leave the enterprise he helped build.

A good entrepreneurial leader is not a substitute for good management, and an organization is more than just the leader. Success also requires team leadership and capable management. To build a successful social enterprise, we must make sure that teams lead the enterprise. And watch out for media-struck leaders.

The above is drawn from remarks made at “Leadership for the 21st Century,” an interactive training session held at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in Paris on October 23, 2008 to launch the Ariane de Rothschild Fellows Program: Dialogue & Social Entrepreneurship. The program aims to develop a network of social entrepreneurs with an interest in fostering a culture of mutual respect and dialogue among Jewish and Muslim communities. ]]> Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:11:56 EST ]]> Entrepreneurship Leadership Organizations Social Enterprise Strategy

We’ve been down this road before, and seldom has the ending been pretty. General Motors and the other American carmakers are textbook cases of what one of my colleagues famously called “permanently failing” organizations. The syndrome of permanent failure afflicts supposedly for-profit organizations that create no economic value or that even destroy economic value. This syndrome often persists because a coalition of stakeholders comes to value the organization as an organization — as an institution — and its survival becomes an end in itself. The webs connecting the entities that benefit from the company’s ongoing existence are so strong that they dominate all decision making. GM, depending on whose analysis you read, is widely recognized as having destroyed billions of dollars in economic value, and it has been unsuccessful in its half-hearted efforts at transformation since at least the 1970s.

What seems to be killing the company is a giant-sized version of the same self-inflicted wounds that get in the way of innovation and change at many large organizations: coalitions of value-chain partners; legacy agreements that lock in decisions that made sense in another era but no longer do; and leaders who are so embedded in a given thought world that they find it hard to move to a new model. These issues are frequent topics in our executive course Leading Strategic Growth and Change, in which a key theme is determining how to get your organization to not end up like GM by making necessary innovations and continuously changing as your world evolves.

This is not to say that GM hasn’t had its better moments. Its OnStar system is a textbook example of how to get innovation right, and the popularity of GM’s products internationally speaks well to its ability to produce cars and trucks that significant numbers of people want to buy. The problem is that the bulk of the organization remains unchanged, largely because those who would suffer from any such change conspire to keep things as they are.

So what is to be done? Clearly, a bailout is only going to prolong the death agonies. A bailout will do nothing to unwind the web of dependency relationships that are a huge part of GM’s trouble. Indeed, read any proponent of the bailout’s justification and you’ll hear all about the harm a GM bankruptcy would do to workers, suppliers, counterparties and other interested parties. I’ve yet to read one, however, that refers to the irredeemable loss to GM’s loyal customers, save those that argue that customers will have difficulty finding replacement parts in the future.

Somehow, the road to redemption is for the company to start unwinding the coalitions that trap it in its current situation. A bankruptcy could be a start. So could a slash-and-burn acquisition, though that hasn’t seemed to help Chrysler much. I’m not wild about the idea — who could be, considering the economic carnage it would likely create? The problem is that unless GM feels a compelling need to change, things are highly likely to stay pretty much the same, as they have done for decades, in spite of clear evidence that things are not working well from an economic perspective. As Peter Drucker once said, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” GM has not fulfilled that purpose very well.

Where public money could usefully go is toward lessening the pain for stakeholders, ameliorating the damage to innocent bystanders and helping with social adjustment costs. Without a fundamental transformation, the endgame can only be delayed, not avoided entirely.

Rembrandt, it turns out, is a great teaching tool for business leaders. Not as cautionary tale — the painter had notoriously bad money management skills — but rather as an expert on symbolic communication.

Executives from the Columbia Senior Executive Program (CSEP), gathered at the Frick Collection on a recent Monday morning to learn how to better use symbols as leaders by looking at how master artists, such as Rembrandt, used symbolism in their paintings.

The class was a unique collaboration between CSEP’s director, Professor Paul Ingram, and the museum’s chief curator, Colin Bailey, that was part of the month-long executive education module on organizational alignment.

“When you draw your own conclusions from a story or symbol,” Ingram said in his lecture, “you are engaged in the creation of the message, you are active in creating meaning. That affects commitment.”

Consider direct versus symbolic communication: direct missives — such as a mass email — are fast and clear, they create authority and allow little room for misunderstanding. However, they are not very powerful messages; the more people who receive the message, the less power the message contains.

“Direct communication can be cheap talk,” said Prof. Ingram. “It doesn’t have much credibility.”

Symbols, however, require an investment from both the sender and the receiver of the message. That, said Ingram, makes the message all the more meaningful. The reader — and in the case at the museum, the viewer — is an active receiver. Take Rembrandt’s 1658 Self Portrait (pictured above), which was part of the day’s lesson: what is the meaning of the staff in the artist’s hand, the vestment-style clothing, the colors used? (Listen to Frick audio guide)

“There is no one right answer,” said Mr. Bailey. “There are only ways to appreciate the sophistication of what’s being communicated.”

Image courtesy of the Frick Collection.

A friend of mine recently donated storm windows to his daughter’s school. Not exactly a splashy gift, but that was entirely by design: he wanted to make a statement about giving according to the school’s needs instead of tying his donation to getting his name on a building.

This perspective on philanthropy is particularly welcomed by non-profits that are struggling to make ends meet during the current financial downturn. However, it is but one piece of a larger need to apply sensible economics in informing giving decisions.

I am a strong proponent of outcomes-based philanthropy — donors can and should demand to see that organizations use their dollars wisely. Yet if everyone demands that every dollar translate into incremental programs or services, grantees are left trying to figure out how to cover the overhead costs that are part of running any organization (or fudging the numbers they present to donors). Organizations may need to pare back services in response to hard times, and if they’re to avoid going into a downward spiral, donors will need to show a willingness to provide bridge funding to weather the financial storm.

As always, groups will be tempted to compromise mission in exchange for donor dollars. This is part of life in a non-profit, and as the going gets tougher, these temptations will multiply. This only reinforces the importance of having a clear sense of purpose and mission, so as to not lose sight of why you’re in this business in the first place.

Alumni are invited to attend “Squeeze Play: Philanthropy in a Recession”, an event with Professor Fisman and other guests on Tuesday, January 13th 2009 at 6:30pm. Register here.

Photo credit: Anna Vignet

The application of business research provides a critical link between theory and practice. As Dean Glenn Hubbard recently told faculty members at Columbia Business School, over the coming year the world’s financial turmoil will present an opportunity for research and innovation. He challenged the faculty members to frame their research in these terms:

1. How can we address problems and opportunities posed by globalization?

2. How can we design the most efficient provision of financial services (in matching savers and borrowers, and providing risk-sharing, liquidity, and information services)?

3. How should we conceptualize strategy and high-level business decision-making?

What areas of research would you like to see developed this year? How will you frame your organization’s thinking and goals in 2009?

We would love to hear your thoughts. Please leave your comments.

In 2009, change is not just a buzzword — it’s a top priority for many organizations and individuals. And according to Professor Eric Johnson, major change need not be difficult or expensive. Often, Johnson says, change can start by simply looking at how an organization — or a consumer — utilizes default settings.

“There are many defaults that affect you, and you don’t even realize it,” says Johnson. “An unchecked box is a default.”

Research by Johnson and Daniel Goldstein of the London School of Economics has shown that default settings have the power to affect change on a wide range of issues, from consumer purchases to organ donations. Take the example of buying a new car. A customer completes an online car configurator and is shown features that match her preferences, such as the option for a sporty three-spoke steering wheel with a high-horsepower engine. These adaptive defaults serve to align product and consumer as closely as possible. In a different study, a default for organ donation can account for a 16-50% increase in transplantations performed in a country, they found.

However, in addition to changing a desired outcome by checking or un-checking a box, a default also promotes change in user behavior.

“Defaults change the way you look at choices. It is as if you owned the default, and you have to decide what are the advantages and alternatives,” says Johnson.

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Johnson, with co-authors Goldstein, Andreas Herrmann and Mark Heitmann, discuss how to best design defaults. The first thing to consider is who is designing them.

“[Default settings] are a decision that is strategic and goes to the bottom line,” says Johnson. “But the decision is too often made by the IT person or the person doing the page design. It is an essential characteristic of a Web site. It’s part of a larger view that site architecture has a large influence over consumer behavior and that’s not something most firms and consumers anticipate.”

And that decision making need not require any overhead, says Johnson. “The beauty of defaults is that they can be changed by simply editing a couple of lines of HTML.”

To learn more about Professor Johnson’s research on defaults, see “Defaults make a difference” in Ideas at Work.

We asked faculty members to look back at the year and give us their pick for the best idea or book of 2008. Here’s what they said.

Professor Joel Brocker
Best idea: Behavioral economics and decision making
Why? “This year it’s been quite exciting to see the related fields of behavioral economics, behavioral finance and behavioral decision making coming into the popular domain,” said Brockner. “The fields refer to the psychological influences on decision making, and how people don’t always adhere to ‘economically rational’ views of decision making. There have been a number of books on this topic in recent years, such as Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and in 2008, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.”

Professor Eric Johnson
Best idea/book: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Why? The book’s notion of choice architecture is very powerful for firms and policymakers because they can make changes within their organizations for almost no money, said Johnson, who reviewed the book for Science magazine earlier this year.

Professor Rita McGrath
Best books: The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by A.G. Lafley and Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life by John Bogel
Why? Both of these topics, growth and a reordering of business values, will be key in the coming year, according to McGrath. “There will be a structural shift and we’re seeing the early warnings that will happen,” said McGrath. “Financial innovation is not the only kind of innovation. It is a great time for innovators to be looking forward for two reasons. First, tough times mean we have no choice but to be creative; a lot of great companies started this way. Secondly, when resources are hard to come by, people have to behave with more discipline. They test assumptions and impose a more disciplined approach.”

Professor Ray Horton
Best book: John Maynard Keynes: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman by Robert Skidelsky
Why? “I read this book last August while capitalism as we’d come to know and love was melting down into what now looks like the most severe downturn since the Great Depression,” said Horton. “Keynes had been out of vogue among most economists and policymakers for more than a quarter-century, dating back to the ‘purification’ of capitalism by Milton Friedman and other monetarists. If anyone wants to understand why we’re all Keynesians now, to borrow a phrase from Richard Nixon, Skidelsky’s biography provides the answer: Capitalism is very unstable from time to time, and from time to time the state needs to bail it out in order to get it up and running again.”

Professor Paul Glasserman
Best idea: The Federal Reserve’s managed sale of Bear Stearns
Why? “It was executed quickly (over a weekend) and creatively (given that Bear was not subject to regulation by the Fed). The Fed’s only exposure is a collateralized loan, backed by the type of mortgage-backed securities the TARP was later created to prop up,” said Glasserman. “Employees and shareholders suffered from Bear’s collapse, but the managed sale may have been the most effective step taken this year to try to limit the spread of the financial crisis.”

Professor Ray Fisman
Best book: Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano
Why? “The Camorra, Naples’ version of the Cosa Nostra, out-Godfathers The Godfather and out-Sopranos The Sopranos. Sometimes, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction (and in this case it’s certainly a lot more violent). As a scholar of economic gangsterism, it is really striking how often Saviano emphasizes that Naples’ mob bosses are rational businessmen of crime,” said Fisman. “You’ll never look at a ball of mozzarella the same way again.”

This is part of a series of posts on the challenges surrounding social entrepreneurship.

The case of Ethos Water offers us an example of the challenges in financing a social enterprise and why we need to improve the instruments available to do so.

A little background: the founder of Ethos, Peter Thum, wanted to create a bottled water company that donated part of its revenues to a fund to improve water supply conditions in poor countries. Founded by Thum in 2001, Ethos was acquired by Starbucks in 2005 for a total of $8 million.

A one-liter bottle of Ethos Water sells for around $1.80. A fraction of this price is given to NGOs that work to improve access to clean drinking water in underdeveloped countries. Starbucks aims to raise $10 million in donations by 2010. Of the $1.80 sale price, however, only $0.05 is donated.

The concept and purchase of Ethos have been the topic of much criticism in the blogosphere. One blogger, writing from France, summed it up:

We agree — it's a little weird. I am not challenging these criticisms except to add that $0.05 is not negligible and that $10 million is still $10 million. Every penny counts.

I use this example to discuss the company’s initial funding. Ethos was founded in 2001 by partners Thum and Jerry Greenfield and two angel investors. Three years later, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar invested in Ethos after it had experienced difficulties. Less than 10 months later, Ethos was sold to Starbucks, where the CEO is a friend of Omidyar. After the 2005 sale to Starbucks, all of Ethos’s original investors left with capital gains. During its four years of independence Ethos never experienced a profit, though it did contribute more than $100,000 dollars to several NGOs.

In the sale, the founders stipulated that Starbucks must continue to contribute revenues to a fund under their control. Instead, I would like to advance the idea today that it would have been better to create financial instruments in social funds independently. We would prefer to see the creation of financial instruments and markets that are designed specifically for social enterprise.

To do this, it may be necessary to create alternatives to the legal status of non-for-profit organizations that still provides the fiscal benefits of charitable giving. In return, shareholders agree to allow a portion of the capital gains be automatically reinvested in a social investment fund. More interestingly, it could be encouraged that these shares be traded in markets, which would improve liquidity and also attract a new segment of investors.

The story of Ethos is an example of the immaturity of existing financial markets today for the financing of social enterprises. It is scandalous that we have not managed to create financial instruments better adapted to the needs of social enterprise. We must create new, innovative markets for financial help in social enterprise.

The above is drawn from remarks made at “Leadership for the 21st Century”, an interactive training session held at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in Paris on October 23, 2008 to launch the Ariane de Rothschild Fellows Program: Dialogue & Social Entrepreneurship. The program aims to develop a network of social entrepreneurs with an interest in fostering a culture of mutual respect and dialogue among Jewish and Muslim communities. ]]> Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:30:40 EST ]]> Entrepreneurship Social Enterprise Strategy

The Tribune Company’s filing of Chapter 11 this week could wind up being the journalism industry’s equivalent of the subprime crisis. Print is the backbone of American journalism and if it collapses, then all serious, professional journalism is the United States is in peril. To avoid this, we must present new economic models to support good, robust print reportage.

One alternative is not-for-profit journalism. In my role as a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Hauser Center at the Kennedy School, I am creating a dynamic NPO database to follow these various emerging organizations. Though valuable, the not-for-profit model cannot replace a whole industry that represents billions of dollars. There is not enough philanthropy out there to do that. There must be earned income for print journalism.

Right now, almost all newspaper content that appears on the Web is free. The newspaper industry has been trading advertising dollars for Internet cents. How does it turn those Internet cents into Internet dollars? Or, simply, how does it get direct money from its users?

One discussion I’ve had with students here at Columbia Business School is about creating an earned-income model for the newspaper industry along the lines of Skype, where users make micropayments.

I check the New York Times five to 10 times a day on my Blackberry, for example, and I don’t pay a cent for that content. Is there a way for the Times and other newspapers — especially local newspapers, where there is high value for the reader — to create a micropayment each time a reader checks the site?

Multiply those small amounts by millions of users and it adds up to a serious amount of money. Direct micropayments are part of the solution, but experts must first create a model for them.

The challenge is to better understand the technology so it can be implemented seamlessly, like with Skype, or people just won’t participate. Another challenge lays in adoption: if only one or two newspapers do this, will readers simply choose to get their information elsewhere? Migrating from a free to a for-pay service in critical areas, like journalism, will take some work, but I feel confident it can be done.

Journalism is arguably one of the most important industries in the U.S. because it involves fundamental and basic freedoms: the right to free speech and information.

That Tribune Company filed Chapter 11 doesn’t mean that it — and others — are going out of business, but it does create a snowball effect and says to investors that print journalism is not a good place for their money. We need intelligent models to excite investors and present operators before things get worse.

The model that ultimately may make the most sense is some combination of micropayments and advertising. Academics and students must now present plausible models and see if the free market jumps on board. Otherwise, we are in danger of losing the great professional infrastructure that exists in American journalism.

Dr. Baker is the co-author of Leading with Kindness.

Photo credit: Daniel R. Blume

Much like the brick-and-mortar American mall, where dozens, if not hundreds of shops are clustered together, social commerce sites such as eBay, Amazon and ZLiO.com bring together online shops via links.

Research from Professor Olivier Toubia, conducted with doctoral student Andrew Stephen, shows that having a relatively large number of links directed to a shop benefits that shop. They also found, more surprisingly, that when shops link to each other, there is a net positive effect — even though this may seemingly increase competition. “It makes sense to link to other shops, even though you’re sending customers away,” Toubia says. “It helps more than hurts, because in most social networks people link back.”

Read more about Toubia’s research in Ideas at Work.

This is the first in a series of posts on the challenges facing social entrepreneurship. The following is drawn from remarks made on October. 23, 2008 at “Leadership for the 21st Century,” an interactive training session held at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in Paris.

I want to consider the question of strategy and competition among social enterprises. Is it true that there is no competition between organizations? Or do social enterprises need to be better equipped to function in the context of competition?

Among the conditions often attached to a foundation’s money is that the social enterprise receiving it must disseminate its business model to other organizations. This is not easy because there is little incentive to do so or time to allocate to this project.

I propose an alternative for exchanging knowledge that does not put a considerable burden on the people who must share it: co-location. Consider the model of La Ruche, a social enterprise that provides collective space to other social enterprises. A beehive offers a collective space where bees — the social entrepreneurs — meet and the exchange of knowledge can go through informal channels. Social enterprises that co-locate in this kind of setting are not in competition, for by design, they serve different needs by different means. Instead, the shared collective space creates a community of practice with positive incentives to share knowledge — without creating competition.

Whereas voluntary sharing knowledge is a good thing, we should not ignore that competition still exists everywhere and is itself an important driver of the dissemination of good ideas. Though often painful, it can serve us collectively if we give it the respect it deserves. Take this example: a very talented entrepreneur had the idea to create a company that would employ people with disabilities and allow the customers to share the experience of being disabled. The idea sold very well, and it came time to design a strategy to implement the concept in the real world.

But when the entrepreneur arrived in a major European city to study the possibility of implementing his business model, he was surprised to learn that he had arrived too late. Someone else had seen the idea and already launched the project. The entrepreneur was very disappointed and felt betrayed by a stranger.

When an idea is copied, who is in the wrong? In the business world, the fault lies with the creator: it is his responsibility to protect his idea and devise a strategy to exploit it.

But let’s not overlook the big picture: even though the case was disappointing for the entrepreneur, the social enterprise concept was still allowed to spread.

Like the previous example has shown, competition does not prohibit the dissemination of good ideas. However, instead of foundations demanding that the social enterprises they fund involuntarily disseminate their ideas, we should provide the tools and knowledge to entrepreneurs and equip them to effectively grow their business and innovations in the context of competition.

Photo credit: Peter Shanks

Where there is change, there is opportunity. This idea was at the heart of a recent presentation to students and faculty at Columbia Business School by Michihisa Shinagawa, president and CEO of Sumitomo Corporation of America. He spoke as part of the Center on Japanese Economy and Business’s ongoing Zandankai Series. The corporation is one of Japan’s largest trading companies.

Currently, there are three structural shifts that are transforming the Americas, which could provide opportunities for Sumitomo, said Mr. Shinagawa.

Firstly, there is a need to use natural resources more efficiently, such as by developing fuel-efficient transportation and energy-efficient buildings, and to develop alternative energy sources.

Secondly, the United States is becoming more of a consumer nation. Despite the current downturn, as income levels of immigrants rise and the region grows, the U.S. consumer market is expected to create greater business opportunities.

Lastly, Canada and Central and South America will continue to grow in importance as producer regions and supply sources, given that labor costs in China and freight charges will increase.

To take advantage of these structural changes, Sumitomo is developing strategic goals.

“The first strategy is to achieve ‘critical mass’ in markets,” Mr. Shinagawa said. “As commodity prices fluctuate and consumers become more cost-conscious, many industries, such as mineral resources, steel and aerospace, are up against stiff competition. As a result, companies are merging to become giant global players.”

He also discussed how the company would make the most of these current economic cycles.

“We try to anticipate economic cycles and recognize shifts in growth areas,” he said, citing Sumitomo’s real estate portfolio as an example.

“Until 2004, our U.S. office building portfolio had only one property, which was in New York,” he said. “Then we began recycling our assets and realized a large profit. We re-invested that profit, and today our portfolio is much more diversified and valuable.”

The final piece of Sumitomo’s strategy is an ongoing effort to be a ‘lean and mean’ organization by monitoring inventory levels, recycling investment assets and enhancing their human resources.

Photo credit: Michael Pereckas

Prof. Amar Bhidé’s compelling thesis from his new book The Venturesome Economy, was recently featured in the New York Times and The Economist.

At the heart of his argument is the idea that technological innovation is important for economic development. As important, though, if not more so, is the ability to apply that innovation creatively.

“The largest benefits,” Prof. Bhidé says, “will accrue to those economies that are most capable of taking advantage of these [technological] advances.”

His argument comes at a particularly critical point for American business, which faces ever-increasing technological competition from China and India and the potential for new government policy on research from the incoming Obama administration.

Prof. Bhidé argues that “midlevel innovation” is of greater competitive value than high-level research to companies.

“It is breadth of knowledge,” says Prof. Bhidé, “that underpins this ability to take advantage of innovation.”

His theory bodes well for MBA students, whose breadth of general management knowledge will be of increasing value in the corporate business world.

“The MBA education,” he says, “teaches you to think broadly and quickly about a variety of things.”

In the first half of 2008, the high price of oil caused food prices to rise dramatically. And while oil prices have come down for now, food prices are still up: it is estimated your turkey dinner will cost 5.6% more than it did last year. In addition, consumers are spending less as a result of current economic conditions. All of this means that restaurateurs — already accustomed to razor-thin margins even in a good year — must be more creative than ever to keep their businesses running successfully.

Public Offering spoke with two alumni in the restaurant business in New York City, Peter Schatzberg ’07, co-owner of FreeFoods Organic Cafe in Midtown, and Cecilia Pineda Feret ’92, co-owner of Brasserie Julien on the Upper East Side, about how they’ve changed their business models to adjust to these challenges.

Measure twice, pay once

“We work by the motto ‘What gets measured, gets done,’” says Schatzberg, who worked at GE before he ventured into the restaurant business with raw food celeb-chef Matthew Kenney. “If you are watching and measuring people, it changes people’s behavior. You can value engineer; I measure the chef every week and keep moving the target, and that changes behavior.”

Stay seasonal

“If you can change a whole item on the menu with a new name, new ingredients and a new price for the season, [a change in price] is less visible,” says Schatzberg. “We have also scaled back on meat and chicken and are offering more vegetarian choices.”

Curate the menu

“Items with higher profit margins should come first,” says Feret, who has been in business with her husband, who is the chef, for nearly 10 years. “Work with your costs and see what dishes you need to encourage people to try. We put all the entrees under $19.50 in one column because we saw people at the door were concerned with price, and this encourages them to come in.”

New food presentation

“We created a new menu item last year as a tactical way to keep our costs down but provide the same quality of meat,” says Feret. “The hanging brochette is a kebab presentation [of steak], that allows us to have the quality of filet mignon without having to worry about buying larger pieces that are more expensive.”

Photo credit: Peter Schatzberg

With Security Analysis, Graham and Dodd laid out a superb analysis that has stood the test of time. But their prescription for risk management was to say, “Buy bonds.” In their time, when they looked at the overall economic environment and at risk properly defined, bonds were where they saw methods and opportunities to control risk. Today, value investors think about managing risks in more sophisticated ways.

One of the real lessons of Graham and Dodd is that you had better understand the determinants of cash flows, you had better understand companies and industries, rather than just taking a historical average and slapping a multiple on it. And you had better understand when a company’s superior returns are going to be sustainable in the face of the relentless force of competition.

Graham and Dodd were aware of that, but in their world they didn’t see any chance of resisting that relentless force of competition — that if a company produced 20–30 percent returns on capital, five or 10 years later those returns were going to be gone. We have a more sophisticated view of which business models are likely to survive, of why it is that Coke produced superior returns for more than 100 years whereas other firms have produced those returns for short periods of time (notably the Internet-based industries).

So the first lesson we can take from today’s value investors: understanding sources of competitive advantage in a sophisticated way is a discipline that has advanced far beyond what Graham and Dodd envisioned. That means you can look at cash flows in ways that you never could before and think about risks you are exposing yourself to when you pay eight or nine times those cash flows, which could evaporate. Understanding the business models that fell apart and those that didn’t is very much a lesson in risk management.

The second lesson is something I’ve learned more recently by listening to other value investors: be good at buying insurance and formal risk management. As we’ve experienced in the past year, there are always events that can come out of left field. Begin to do active risk management so that you have a portfolio of good companies at good prices and are protected from the fallout.

This doesn’t mean trying to outguess people in forecasting the economy. What risk management means is having a sense of when there are macro vulnerabilities and when there are vulnerabilities in the market because of people’s bizarre attitudes toward risk. About a year before the LTCM bailout in 1998, I was offered a job by one of LTCM’s senior people. He proclaimed that risk was just going away, that it ultimately was going to disappear. This was during an enormous bubble, and it was a crazy thing to believe. I declined the offer. When the market starts to sound crazy like that, that’s when you want to buy insurance, and you want to learn to buy it in a way that’s most cost-efficient. Ironically, insurance is cheapest when you need it the most, because it’s precisely at that point when things are most overvalued.

More recently, it’s not just mortgages where people went crazy: you could get credit default swaps in summer 2007 on almost any debt at ridiculous prices. At its most ridiculous, you could get a contract that would pay full face value of Dubai’s sovereign debt if Dubai defaulted at four basis points. The market was saying that this country — with a short history, living in the most dangerous part of the world, subject to the greatest possible variation in economic and social conditions — had one chance in 2,500 years of defaulting on its debt. If you had bought those credit default swaps at those four basis points, then you would have made 21 times your money and protected yourself against potential losses. Earlier this year, the same credit default swaps were at 86 basis points simply because of the change in the psychological atmosphere.

You ought to have the sense that this is an opportunity to buy cheap general insurance because what is driving that situation is a perception about risk broadly in the economy that is pervasive.

Finally, such an approach rigorously exercised would have gone a long way toward avoiding losses in the recent mortgage meltdown. Meanwhile, the bailouts today have not even begun to address risk attitudes. We should remember that however new the risk management methods of today’s value investors are, they are based on the extraordinarily durable principles of Security Analysis.

This piece is drawn from remarks made by Professor Greenwald at October’s “Celebrating 75 Years of Security Analysis” symposium in honor of the new sixth edition, which was published on the 75th anniversary of the first edition. These remarks were also published in Ideas at Work.]]> Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:09:59 EST ]]> Capital Markets and Investments Strategy

The term “endgame” refers to the second half of a product’s life cycle, during which firms producing products face slow growth, no growth or negative growth in consumer demand. Are U.S.-based automakers prepared for theirs?

General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler Daimler AG are facing declining demand primarily because their products are less popular than those manufactured by competitors on U.S. soil such as Acura, Isuzu, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen. But this decline in demand is not the result of U.S. consumers buying significantly fewer cars; American autos are less popular because these automakers have failed to innovate to match consumer demand.

Yet even before this reality was recognized, General Motors had 22 idle factories that no incoming competitor wanted to acquire. Those plants weren’t attractive to new buyers because they were antiquated and because GM’s laid-off laborers had high wage expectations. In the 1960s, the era of domestic market share dominance and the time when “a good time was had by all,” the employees (including the managers) of U.S. automotive firms enjoyed lavish compensation packages, especially with respect to retiree benefits. But those good times had a steep price for American industry, opening the door to offshore competition in Detroit’s own backyard.

Look at the steel industry, for example, where similar “legacy” costs have in the past bankrupted more than 35 U.S. steelmaking firms. When the government-backed Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) created a way for investors to revive mothballed steel mills, U.S. steelmaking assets became hot properties. They were acquired by offshore competitors, such as Arcelor-Mittal NV from India and WCI Steel, which is owned by the Russian Federation, who bought their way into the U.S. market for steel with vastly reduced operating costs.

This phenomenon — offshore competitors becoming “domestic” — has already occurred in the automotive industry, where offshore competitors jumped the tariff wall long ago to become “local” and built their greenfield plants in regions where there were no legacy costs (or manufacturing practices) to hobble their cost structures.

Today, the automobile industry’s endgame problem is determining how to scale back the manufacturing capacity of those firms whose products are no longer economical to produce. However, in spite of this endgame for some firms, many others that are producing cars in the U.S. are doing just fine.

Photo credit: Pennilicious

Where are value investors looking for in today’s market? In an interview with US News & World Report on November 7, Professor Bruce Greenwald discussed the effects of the current market on the mindset of value investors, Warren Buffett’s investments in General Electric and Goldman Sachs and where the best opportunities lie. (Read the complete interview.)

Excerpted from the interview:

Photo credit: iStockPhoto

Above: Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy spoke to Columbia MBA students as part of the Silfen Leadership Series on Oct. 6 (part 1). View entire speech: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

It is one thing to turn around a troubled company — it is another to transform it. Anne Mulcahy has done both. As the CEO and Chairman of Xerox, she led the company from near bankruptcy in 2000 to $17 billion in revenues today. She recently spoke to Columbia Business School students about her experience guiding a corporation out of a time of crisis — more relevant than ever, she noted — and creating one of the most respected and enduring businesses in the world.

A few of Mulcahy’s lessons on leadership:

Take time

“Understand the issues in the company and know what the problems are that you are facing. When I started … I traveled the world for 90 days listening to the problems through the eyes of our employees, investors and customers. A lot of our problems were masking fundamental issues in the business; we were trying to put out fires when we didn’t even know were the fuel leak was. Taking the time to understand the issues in a company is important.”

Communicate openly

“With our people and in public I was very candid about the issues. The level of transparency with regard to the problems you have is becoming more important by the day; an ability to talk about what will be done to overcome them is the other part of the communications strategy.”

Believe in it

“You have to have people aligned with your goals and objectives. It’s the scale of belief that is the single most important thing to making progress and without that, it is a disadvantage being big. It was the single most important thing for [Xerox] to make as much progress as we did.”

Make decisions

“Be bold and decisive in a time of crisis. Moving quickly and decisively and making a few mistakes is much more important than being as thoughtful and as perfect you can be when you don’t have time to put that perfect solution in place.”

Simplify your business plan

“We undid all the complexities and engineering so that there was this incredible logic about revenue, costs, expenses and profits that we hadn’t seen in a while. … It’s about strengthening the business fundamentals, discipline and control; it’s about having the discipline be focused on productivity and improvement.”

Don’t wait to change

“Use good times to change; don’t wait until the crisis. ... You have the luxury of time and [change] can thoughtful and it’s easier on the people.”

Follow your instincts

“Use your experience to make decisions. We had a five-dimensional management matrix [when I took over as CEO] and each step of it was logical, but when I looked at it, I couldn’t really find anyone who was accountable. It’s far less important the choice you make, than making a choice for clear accountability. So we made a choice: geography is our P&L center. At the end of the day, when I want to know what’s happening in Europe, I call the guy who is managing in Europe. It’s not perfect, but it’s clear and it enabled us to move quickly and efficiently.”

What you do in the voting booth on Election Day could be the product of your system’s hardwiring. According to recent research by Prof. Dana Carney, political left-right differences are rooted in basic heritable personality traits such as openness and conscientiousness.

The study, conducted with professors John Jost (NYU), Sam Gosling (UT-Austin) and Jeff Potter at Atof Inc., demonstrates that liberals are generally messier, more open to new experiences and more expressive than their conservative pals, who tend to be more organized, conventional and reserved. Sound familiar? Recall that Family Ties’ Alex P. Keaton, a suit amongst the hippies, was a die-hard Reagan supporter. However, in this campaign season a substantial number of Republicans have defied the liberal stereotype and crossed the aisle to become “Obamicans.” We spoke with Prof. Carney about this trend. She said:

There is a cognitive style association with being more liberal or more conservative. Liberals are able to tolerate more ambiguity and more ideas all at one time, as well as ideas that don’t have a right answer. That cognitive style lends itself to work in experimental science, literature and other things that are ambiguous. A conservative mind searches for answers and looks for them in black and white; it wants resolution and order in work and life.

We as people are cognitive misers and so we want leaders who will worry about “it” for us. That’s why in last few elections we have seen the electorate gravitate towards leaders who appear to have answers and are not wish-washy, like we saw with [the failure of] John Kerry’s campaign. We want things to be simple so we don’t have to think as much. Historically, we have seen this issue. Democrats tolerate ambiguity and open mindedness. Americans have gravitated away from that because we’re cognitive misers and it is costly to think — we want to reserve these precious cognitive resources for other, more immediate, activities like how to do one’s job, how to raise one’s kids and what to have for dinner.

But Obama has done a lot of conservative things in the way he speaks and in the simplicity of his message. He’s being clear about what he is planning to do and where the country will be during his presidency; he is much more decisive and people have responded to that. McCain has also been decisive and clear. So this decisiveness is certainly not the only thing carrying Obama’s lead in the polls.

Our data suggest that liberals are much warmer and approachable than conservatives. We are certainly seeing this play out among Obama and McCain. Obama is much warmer and charismatic. He smiles more and has more expansive gestures which signal dominance. McCain has a shorter stature and limbs which, even when he does make expansive gestures, appear less dominant than when Obama makes them. McCain has very serious facial expressions and smiles less. McCain is less warm to his family members, as well. All of these nonverbal behaviors add up to Obama appearing more warm and approachable and charismatic which, as we well know, accounts for some of the variance in for whom Americans vote. It seems the recipe for whom Americans elect may well be rooted in some combination of simplicity of message, interpersonal warmth and a charisma quotient.

This is the first in a series of blog posts on healthcare industry topics that will be discussed at the upcoming Columbia Business School Healthcare Conference on November 21.

As growth slows in the pharmaceutical sector, shareholders are putting pressure on companies and their executives to make some difficult decisions. Pure-play companies — the ones focused on discovering, developing and marketing breakthrough prescription medicines — must decide whether to remain as is, diversify into other healthcare businesses, merge with another global pharma company or find other means to grow their businesses and/or diversify their risk.

Major pure-play drug companies generate more than 90 percent of their revenues from branded, not generic, prescription drugs. Top-line industry growth is slowing from the double-digit figures we saw between 2000–2003 and is now expected to reach low single-digit growth over the next five years. There are several reasons for this:

• Companies face patent expirations of their largest drugs and eight of the 10 largest products today will lose exclusivity in the next four years, which represents more than $50 billion in sales
• New product approvals in the past year were the lowest in a decade
• Cost–containment efforts by third parties that pay for drugs (governments, insurers) are forcing companies to prove that their drugs are not only safe and efficacious but are also cost-effective

On the plus side, there remain large areas of unmet need (cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, diabetes, vaccines) and new developing markets (BRIC) to penetrate. As well, better technology is improving drug’s chances for success. Despite the industry’s declining growth rate, these pharma companies have among the highest profit margins and most are sitting on hordes of cash with little debt. They are among the highest valued companies in the world — a far different scenario compared with other industries under assault (auto, airlines, financial services, retail, etc.).

Diversify or stay “pure”?

So is this the time to pursue a new diversification strategy for these global pharma companies?

Drug giant Novartis apparently thinks so. In the past few years, the company has spent $8 billion to acquire a large generics business (Hexal), $5 billion to acquire a vaccines and diagnostics company (Chiron) and recently announced a two-step $40 billion acquisition of a 77 percent interest in an eye care company (Alcon).

Contrast that strategy to drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb, which spun out its orthopedics business (Zimmer) and sold its U.S. consumer health business (to Novartis). It recently announced the sale of its wound care business ConvaTec and plans to spin out a portion of its nutritionals business (Mead Johnson). All this is in order to focus more on its core branded prescription pharmaceuticals business.

A major acquisition of a large, faster-growing healthcare-related business may diversify the risks inherent in drug development and enhance growth; however, companies will pay for this growth in high acquisition costs (using cash and/or lower PE stock) without assurance that sufficient synergies will be generated to cover the acquisition premium.

Purchasing a large generics business may be a possible solution given the large number of drugs coming off patent, the attractiveness of “biogenerics” and use of generics in emerging markets. However, operating margins are lower in that competitive segment due to heavy price competition (especially in the U.S.), and the generics business is a very different business/operating model from the research-based branded pharma companies.

The “urge to merge” was strong in the mid 90s. Today it has lost some luster. Companies (and investors) are concerned about the integration risks of combining two global drug companies and question whether this would indeed enhance top-line growth.

Stay the course

The likelihood is that these major pure play pharma companies will stay the course — at least for now — with the belief that their research pipelines, augmented by targeted acquisitions, will generate a sufficient number of innovative drugs and vaccines to sustain competitive growth rates. Payers and investors should continue to reward innovation. Meanwhile the companies are cutting costs and seeking efficiencies in their global businesses to sustain modest growth, high profit margins and favorable dividend yields.

Will this strategy work? Stay tuned!

Photo credit: Michelle Tribe

Ron Gonen ’04 will change the way you think about recycling. He’s been honing his strategy ever since the day he convinced his high school of the economic benefits of purchasing reusable metal silverware instead of plastic.

Get tough love

When you’re an entrepreneur in the midst of traditional businesspeople, everyone wants to pat you on the back and encourage you. But when you get into something like the Entrepreneurial Greenhouse Program and you’re in the company of other entrepreneurs, you get a much higher degree of constructive criticism, which is critical to the success of any new venture.

You have to believe in yourself when starting a business like this. Before you pitch the idea to anyone else, you first thing have to sell it to yourself, and keep convincing yourself of its potential every day. But you also have to be humble enough to acknowledge areas for improvement.

Once I had committed myself to launching RecycleBank, I needed people who were going to tell me at key junctures: “That’s not going to work.”

Articulate the benefits

People want to do good things, but it helps when they’re given an incentive.

In the RecycleBank program, we make the incentives explicit, by rewarding people with points based on how much they recycle. These points can then be redeemed through our corporate partners — vendors as diverse as Apple, Chipotle and Zales.

I’ve tried to communicate to a variety of constituents that in all the actions that we take, if we think about the environment, we can also think about the ways to cut costs. I don’t want people to think about helping the environment as just the right thing to do — which it is — I also want them to see that it’s an effective way to generate positive financial return.

Make it scalable

In 2004, I was operating this business out of my apartment on the Upper West Side, and now, in 2008, we’re already providing service in 10 states.

In the beginning, growth was largely supported by millions of dollars in private equity investments, but at this point, I hope that we’ve done our last round of fundraising.

Since RecycleBank’s revenue comes from our ability to divert trash from landfills, this program is naturally sustainable.

I believe we can continue to grow with the support of our Reward Partners, leaders in local government and our team. We’ve been incredibly successful, reaching 90 percent of households in the areas we’re operating within and increasing recycling rates by more than 100 percent.

And I’m confident that we’ll soon be able to reach the entire country, as we keep making it easier for more people to see the immediate rewards of their recycling efforts.

Photo Credit: RecycleBank

All of these things are surmountable.

There are certain practices that take place in the for-profit world that can benefit us in this sense. For example, strict accountability, transparency and financial purity are the kinds of things that, like it or not, Sarbanes Oxley has taught us. I think a lot of this can be applied to the nonprofit world.

Having said that, for the most part people work here because they believe in a noble cause and want to do good works. As we borrow some of these techniques in the for-profit world, we have to be very mindful of making sure that we don’t turn antiseptic and lose our soul and our heart.

We do amazing things every single day. We’re filled with heroes here, and it’s so easy to feel inspired. In my former life I definitely worked for companies with higher purposes, but at the end of the day you’re counting widgets, you’re counting dollars. Here, we’re counting lives impacted — it’s extraordinarily inspiring.

The conversations at the Red Cross are so different than the conversations that go on in the corporate world. Here, we ask: How do we galvanize people from 42 states to get into Iowa and help people clean up after the flood? How do we get enough emergency response vehicles to drive around with hot meals to keep these people fed? How many people can we shelter in high schools and dormitories?

So when I say we have to revitalize the brand, I don’t mean redo or replace. We don’t want to change what the brand stands for, since it’s such an international treasure. You see that red cross and think: help is on the way. I don’t want to change that. I just want to turn it into something hip and exciting. Part of that involves becoming more consumer-focused. Here, it’s all about putting our brand in front of people so that they donate time, money and blood.

UNICEF is a good example of brand revitalization. And I think when you have a beautiful legacy, it shouldn’t be that hard. Our favorability and affection rating is highest among 18 to 34 year-olds, so we just have to tap into that and make it so that the Red Cross becomes part of the fabric of the way they become philanthropic. That generation is so in tune with community service. They want to change the world, and we just have to let them change it with us.

Gail McGovern ’87 was named President and CEO of the American Red Cross on April 8, 2008. In both 2000 and 2001, Fortune magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most powerful women in business. She is a graduate of the Executive MBA Program at Columbia Business School.

CBS Professors Nelson Fraiman and Medini Singh recently offered their views on the pace of economic development in Uruguay to the newspaper El Observador (download pdf of article here), addressing how the country could increase its levels of productivity and innovation in order to rival global competitors.

Calling Uruguay “stuck in time,” Fraiman and Singh asserted that the mindset of Uruguayan entrepreneurs has to change in order for the country to catch up to the rapid pace of development in other emerging nations, particularly India and China.

“Unlike India or China, here I don’t see hunger in the people,” Fraiman said. “Uruguayans are content, and that can be a problem.”

Both Fraiman and Singh said that Uruguay’s small geographic size should not hold it back, and proposed that if local entrepreneurs could optimistically embrace change and let go of a compulsion towards conformity, the country would be able to take advantage of limitless possibilities.

The only challenge now is to identify which business activity to focus on in order to distinguish Uruguay from other emerging nations and add unique value to the global market.

Fraiman proposed that Uruguay could exceed competitors in offering knowledge-based services, and Singh said he believes that it’s necessary for the country to focus on technical education in management and technology, “because this is what the world needs today.”

This discussion came out of a workshop to Uruguayan entrepreneurs last month on “Strategy and Operational Excellence for Global Competitiveness.”

I asked a few members of the CBS community what they are reading this summer:

Professor Daniel Ames (Management):

I’m reading Snoop, a book by psychologist Sam Gosling. Gosling’s work revolves in part around how people intuit what others are like based on their stuff, such as their offices or bedrooms or what music they listen to. It gets readers thinking about how they themselves might be judged or misjudged by others based on their stuff.

Professor Hitendra Wadhwa (Marketing):

Groundswell, by Li and Mernoff
An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, by Josh Waitzkin
Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Brafman and Brafman

Professor Paul Glasserman (Decision, Risk and Operations):

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Professor Eric Johnson (Marketing):

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
You can read Professor Johnson’s review of Nudge in the July edition of Science magazine.

And for summer reading online (get out your Kindle), a recent media panel at CBS shared their online favorites.

Any other suggestions?

Taking organizational service to the next level is not just about executing key strategic goals. According to Professor Awi Federgruen, companies need to focus more on considering the relationship between strategic options and operating cost.

“It is challenging but relatively easy to come up with planning approaches that will take out the organizational fat to reduce operational costs for given strategic goals,” Federgruen told the FT in a BearingPoint podcast. “But what is much more challenging and ultimately much more important for most organizations is to understand how the required operating costs interact with the strategic goals of the company.”

Within a corporate landscape that’s becoming more and more competitive in terms of the quality, accuracy and timeliness of services provided, organizations need to take a step back and weigh the implications of certain initiatives to the bottom line.

“Those tradeoffs between operating costs and strategic goals are not easy to figure out . . . and yet [they’re] something that organizations should indeed stay awake about, because without having a good understanding about what indeed the revenue implications are of strategic choices . . . one may be missing the big picture,” Federgruen said.

What challenges does your organization face in thinking about strategy choices in terms of operating cost — and do you agree that the task deserves greater attention?

As I wrote in a previous post, our recent Lang Center survey showed that starting multiple businesses is an important predictor of entrepreneurial success.

One thing I encourage students to do when looking to start a business is that they must temper their idealism with a bit of realism. For instance, those who start businesses in search of autonomy may find themselves jumping through hoops for a host of customers, bankers, investors and employees. Challenge, excitement and creativity are surely part of the experience, but entrepreneurship is also a lot about slogging through the tough times.

Having a great business idea is a good start, but very few ideas are compelling strokes of original genius. Most initial business concepts go through significant revision as the idea moves into reality. And it is rare for a business to unfold according to plan.

However, that original idea will get students into the venturing corridor, where one opportunity leads to another. Those who start with the long-haul view of building something significant have the right mindset for dealing with the ups and downs of an entrepreneurial career.

The first bit of advice is to really try to understand the Chinese culture and how the Chinese people think. It’s easy for Americans to be very optimistic and wanting to share their success, methodology and ideology, because they have had 200 years of amazing success and prosperity.

China, on the other hand, has been a disaster for the last 200 years. So the Chinese people tend to be very concerned about things — even paranoid. They might be concerned about foreigners, who haven’t generally done good things to China over the past 200 years, or worried over the increased connectivity of the world. They want to build stability and sustain it.

The Chinese people have a strong sense of their culture and country, and they do spend time learning different ways of thinking. It’s an amazing, enriching experience for someone to learn to see things from different perspectives.

The second bit of advice is this: Don’t change too rapidly. In any career change, it’s sort of like rock climbing: You have four limbs, but you never move two limbs out in the air; you always keep three limbs attached to the rock and just move the fourth one so you don’t fall.

So as you think about a career change, don’t think about the dramatic jump. If you were previously in an American media company, don’t jump directly into a small Internet start-up in China, where the employees don’t speak English. Instead, think about going to a multinational American company that is trying to set up shop in the media, then move into a multinational Internet company, then move into a Chinese company and take a few years to get accustomed. I think that would be much better for your career than to take a quantum leap.

The third thing to keep in mind is that China is an amazing, fast-paced place; make sure you are ready for that. Everything is moving at a thousand miles an hour. There are good things about decisiveness, about deals being made very quickly, about people’s desire for success, but there are also challenges: people or companies trying to cut corners, things being done in very strange and potentially questionable ways, people eager for success who make decisions that are maybe good for the short term but bad for the long term.

But regardless of the good and bad, it’s incredibly fast-paced. If you feel you’re ready to work really hard and get accustomed to such an environment, then China is the place for you.

Image credit: Steve Webel

If you are planning to pursue a career in venture capital after business school, a word of advice: get experience doing market sizing (OK, market estimating is probably more like it) and practice, practice, practice.

By market sizing, I mean taking a given market (e.g., the market for HD televisions or widgets or oatmeal cookies) and slicing and dicing it based on a series of assumptions.

I have had some opportunities to practice this through my internships (looking at market sizes to inform business plans or VC investments) and to a small degree in classes, but you can always improve — and the only way to improve is to practice.

If I could rewind to last summer, I might have spent some time practicing management-consulting case interviews (even though I didn’t want to go into consulting) for that very reason.

Why?

Well, case interviews require you to quantitatively walk through a business problem and figure out the magnitude of profit, revenue, etc., which guides your decision making. More important, they force you to develop your own analytic process.

Doing this repeatedly is bound to make you improve.

Bonus VC job tip: Pick an industry you know little or nothing about and spend about 10 hours (give or take) during a one-week period looking at the industry trends, value chain, competitive landscape, market sizes and value proposition for key players, and think about what you would like to invest in (if anything). After doing this, you’ll be familiar with yet another space and have another set of insights to share during your informational and formal interviews.

Even as U.S. consumers are trimming spending, Coach chairman and CEO Lew Frankfort ’69 is going on the offensive, according to an interview in the WSJ. Frankfort has opened nearly 30 stores in China and has plans for 50 more. He is also broadening Coach’s consumer base by introducing more high- and low-end styles.

Will this dilute the brand? Here’s what Professor Bernd Schmitt told Public Offering:

Judging Coach’s approach by the traditional standards of “Perhaps we are decreasing the overall image and prestige of the brand by making it too widely available” is not necessarily the right way of looking at it.

The concept of luxury has been changing over the years. The old “elitist” concept of luxury, which is high-priced, hand-crafted goods manufactured in Europe, is not the only concept anymore. Luxury nowadays is much more associated with lifestyle, with doing innovative things, doing something special for the consumer. And “special” can mean various things — it can mean using high-end materials or using low- and high-end materials together or bringing the brand close to where the consumer lives.

Coach’s approach makes a lot of sense to me. What Coach is saying is that while you of course need a presence in all the major cities where luxury products are bought — the world cities for example, including New York and Hong Kong and Tokyo and certain European cities — you also need to bring the luxury product to other cities where consumers live and shop, so as not to make the consumer come to you.

Life often gives us hard decisions to make, and in my line of work — M&A at GE — hard decisions come fairly often.

But good decision making requires skills, and one way to learn these skills is by practice. Last year I got to take part in developing case study materials for CBS’s core strategy class, which gives students the chance to practice real-world decision making. It involved creating a video to record the decision-making process that a colleague and I participated in at GE in a way that allowed students to think about what they would do if faced with the same circumstances. Students got experience, and also got to see how a major corporation evaluates tradeoffs and makes decisions.

Another facet of good decision making is learning how to ask the right questions. I was just telling EMBA students in Donna Hitscherich’s M&A class that when we evaluate divisions at GE we don’t just ask, “How is this business unit performing?” but rather “How will this business be performing three, five or ten years from now?”

One recent example is the divestiture of our plastics business. GE Plastics was performing OK, but we decided it would be difficult for us to grow the business due to our inability to hedge the ever-increasing cost of benzene (an oil-based derivative and the primary ingredient for plastic pellets). GE Plastics had an excellent valuation, so we decided to monetize the business in favor of reinvesting the proceeds towards some of our faster growing, more profitable businesses.

The key point is that good decision making is a process, and learning how to analyze and interpret the tradeoffs among choices is a critical skill. Ultimately, the goal is to make good decisions that result in positive outcomes, but a robust decision-making process will also mitigate the risk of bad outcomes over time.

As CBS’s Michael Mauboussin quotes Robert Rubin in the book More Than You Know:

Individual decisions can be badly thought through, and yet be successful, or exceedingly well thought through, but be unsuccessful, because the recognized possibility of failure in fact occurs. But over time, more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better overall results, and more thoughtful decision-making can be encouraged by evaluating decisions on how well they were made rather than on outcome.

]]> Fri, 16 May 2008 12:21:53 EDT ]]> Leadership Organizations Strategy A few weeks ago the New York Times carried the headline, “Michelin Giving Up on PAX Run-Flat Tire.”

When the tire was first announced in 2005, a few of my colleagues and I were so taken with the concept — a tire that could run for as much as 120 miles with a flat, eliminating the need to store a spare tire — that we’ve used it in our classes as an example of how a company can innovate by eliminating features that some customer segments view as either negative (having to store a spare takes up space and costs more fuel) or a neutral (we don’t notice it and don’t care about it).

This was a big-bet innovation for Michelin, intended to overturn the industry in the same way that their introduction of steel-belted radial tires did nearly 60 years ago.

What went wrong?

While it isn’t fair to retroactively criticize the approach Michelin took to introducing this innovation, there were some trouble signs early on:

A BusinessWeek article from 2004 notes that the PAX tires don’t fit into conventionally designed vehicles. To use them, cars must be equipped with a specially designed chassis and wheels and, once converted, can’t take regular tires. What that means is that to get the tires replaced, customers must find an authorized PAX service center to repair or replace the tires.

The lack of compatibility with preexisting infrastructure also proved to be a contributor to the product’s undoing. Although the company enjoyed some success, including having PAX tires come standard on Honda’s 2005 Odyssey Touring minivan, other firms failed to adopt the practice. PAX, as it turned out, was not a huge advancement over other run-flat technologies; it required specialized equipment and systemic changes, and was launched into a category that turned out to be a niche. This situation was a far cry from the promise of a tire that would revolutionize driving habits and totally change the industry.

Frameworks could have helped anticipate obstacles

We always advise companies launching innovations to consider not just the technical performance of the product (or service) but the whole chain of experiences customers go through in the course of being customers. With a tool called the consumption chain, we suggest that companies work all the way through the total customer experience — from awareness of need all the way through search, selection of a provider, payment and so on through final disposal.

Clearly, the PAX system let customers down at some of these vital “links” in their consumption chains. They faced difficulty getting the tires replaced and repaired, and evidently the competitive separation between PAX and other run-flat tire designs didn’t overcome those problems.

Another tool to employ when thinking about the launch of new offerings is to consider all the factors that may cause delay or resistance. This involves systematically thinking through all the reasons that a customer might not be willing to adopt an innovation. One of the most serious of these roadblocks occurs when adoption requires changing expensive, embedded systems. (You can read more about this in a book I cowrote called Market Busters.)

The PAX tire shows once again that if a product is going to be incompatible and require specialized handling to repair or replace, it also better have earth-shattering benefits (think iPod). Otherwise, people will never overcome their reluctance to change away from the conventional.

How do you get nearly seven hundred graduate students to donate to an unrestricted gift? In past years, class gift committees thought it wouldn’t be possible to rally students around something that wasn’t tangible like a scholarship fund or a classroom. Others tried, but then had to change course when they faced too much pushback from the student body.

But the fact is that unrestricted gifts make the biggest difference to nonprofit organizations — including business schools. And this year, the Class of 2008 not only became the first class in the history of CBS to pledge an unrestricted gift, but also attained a never-before-seen participation rate: 95 percent. We beat practically all of our peer institutions — in both participation and total dollar amount pledged.

More importantly, such an achievement signals our commitment to each other, and to our school. This is one of the few opportunities our class as a whole had during our two years to work toward a common goal — and the class of 2008 came together in a way that’s never been done before.

It was a challenge from the beginning because there was little structure, precedent or knowledge of how to run a campaign like this. We had a town hall and other education sessions to discuss why we thought the unrestricted gift would be the best choice for the School, and agreed that our class had the ability to make the leap and support such a mission. Then we began to plan our campaign.

We invited Dean Hubbard to a few talks, displayed signs around the school and thermometers in the lobby to publicly gauge our progress. We also had training lunches for cluster representatives so that they could give more in-depth responses to their classmates’ questions and held events for our entire Class to participate in. Our success was also largely due to the hard work of the Alumni Transition and Development Committee, which we created last year to raise awareness about what it means to be a graduate of Columbia Business School.

Because of our early efforts, we were able to get a lot of buy-in before we even started the campaign — and survey results showed that giving unrestricted funds was something a significant portion of our class supported.

Once the campaign launched, more and more students engaged in the process, and even some of the hardest skeptics turned into vocal advocates when they saw how the Class of 2008 had the chance to do something historic.

I’m so heartened and impressed by my classmates. The economy is the worst it’s been in a long time, but we realized how fortunate we are to have a Columbia MBA and to have a huge community of people who will continue to support us throughout our careers.

I care deeply about this school, and it was so exciting to have the opportunity to help the class give back — and build community — in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Thanks to everyone for rallying around such a great cause.

The highlight of my year at CBS is teaching Entrepreneurial Finance. I enjoy interacting with students, putting together the cases and bringing in speakers from the entrepreneurial and venture capital communities.

But what I enjoy most as an economist is the opportunity to think deeply about entrepreneurship. To many, entrepreneurship calls to mind the path-breaking motivation envisioned by Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” But much of entrepreneurship — and much of what we can teach in business school — is more akin to “nondestructive creation,” in which the entrepreneur puts the pieces of a puzzle together in a way others haven’t seen before.

And many examples bring these economic insights to light: CBS ’01 grads John Londono and Zohar Yardeni discussing how they turned listening to corporate calls into a multi-million dollar business. Ben Rosen ’61 recognizing great potential in Lotus. Russ Carson ’67 taking insights from the healthcare industry to transform a modest hospital contract-management business into a major hospital chain, collecting billions of dollars in value.

The combination of a compelling profit model at a disruptive time by the right entrepreneur can be a winning one. This critical feature of entrepreneurship — identifying and capturing opportunity — is teachable, and is integral to the efforts of many faculty members at CBS. Instead of saying “no” whenever an opportunity has problems (as it always does) one can learn to ask: “What can go right? What can go wrong? And how can I tilt the odds toward success?”

In our “Game Theory and Incentives in Business” course, Professor Paolo Siconolfi and I use experimental methods as an active teaching tool, simulating a strategic market environment in which students can actively participate.

In our most recent experiment, we simulated George Akerlof’s market for lemons (faulty used cars). In his paper “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Akerlof illustrates the failure of a market due to asymmetric information between sellers and the buyers.

For this experiment, we divided the class into two groups: buyers and sellers. Sellers were able to chose a price, quality grade and whether they wanted one or two units. The sellers were told the monetary costs of producing each of their units, and these costs depended on the quality grade: a higher quality grade meant a more expensive unit. Sellers did this all without knowing what their competitors chose.

After all seller decisions had been submitted, both prices and quality grades were provided to buyers. Buyers then were allowed to make purchases of at most one unit at the posted price.

Of course the purpose of all this is to make a profit, so the sellers are trying sell at a price above the cost of a unit and buyers are trying to buy at a price below the value of the unit.

This experiment had two treatments. In the first four rounds, the buyers were able to see the quality grades before they bought a product, whereas in the last four rounds the quality of the product was hidden.

Buying and selling grade-two units is the socially and individually optimal outcome (it maximizes the income for both buyers and sellers) and this was indeed the case in the first part of the experiment: the majority of the transactions involved grade-two units at approximately right prices, with very little excess supply or demand. (You can see the results in the figure below, where the theoretical demand and supply is given on the left hand side.)

However, when the quality became unknown, the buyers reacted to the possibility of buying low-grade products. In fact, in round five, only four transactions (out of a possible 10) took place. The sellers responded quickly to the demand and lowered the prices. The market quickly converged to the lowest possible price level, and only low-grade products were sold.

Some students were playing in groups, and we overheard them reacting to adverse selection and moral hazard effects in a way that proved Akerlof’s theory. Our students were masterful in understanding the incentive problems in the market.

Of course none of this could have worked without enthusiastic students. We were very lucky to have a select group who took the theory and experiments very seriously and brought their insights into the classroom.

We like to conduct these experiments before discussing key economic ideas and principles, and during the spring term we conducted a good number of them: the pervasive winner’s curse phenomenon in auctions; a persistent bubble in a limit-order market; failure of auction mechanisms in the existence of asymmetric information; behavioral considerations beyond rationality in a trust game; and many other phenomena that arise in strategic market environments. Besides giving us a chance to illustrate the shortcomings and teachings of these theories, we find that these experiments allow students to gain firsthand experience with market theories and encourage them to ponder the underlying questions and issues.

Does Barack Obama have a better shot at beating John McCain than Hillary Clinton? The answer may lie partly in whether voters are looking for honesty or competence in their candidate. And one clue to how candidates are perceived is the shape of their face. Babyfaces (large eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin) are judged to be more honest than mature faces, but also as more naïve and perhaps less competent.

A survey of 150 Columbia undergraduates found that they perceived all three presidential hopefuls as having somewhat mature (rather than baby) faces; however, Obama was judged to have a significantly less mature face than Clinton. Consistent with the face stereotype, he was also perceived to be more honest than Clinton.

So is Obama likely to have a better shot at beating McCain than Clinton? Not so fast. In our survey, judgments of babyfaceness were negatively correlated with competence. In other words, the less mature the face is perceived to be, the less competent the candidate is judged to be.

And while Obama and Clinton are rated as equally competent when the question is asked directly, Clinton’s and Obama’s faces could cue voters to perceive Clinton as more competent.

The ultimate question is whether honesty or competence will dominate the election this Fall. Our survey found that George W. Bush was rated to be both dishonest and incompetent (this was a Democratically skewed sample), but judgments of his competence were significantly lower than judgments of his honesty.

In this situation, Obama has two winning strategies. First, make the issue of honesty crucial in the election by highlighting instances of dishonesty in the current administration. And second, provide strong cues to competence so that the face-shape cue is not used to form competence judgments.

What about Clinton? Given her low honesty ratings (even lower than McCain’s), she needs to downplay the importance of honesty and hope that her face helps legitimize her claims of greater competence.

After spending a few months over here, I wanted to offer some perspective on the situation.

The surge and its underlying counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy seem to be making gains. I see the impact each day during intelligence briefings on local area operations. The shift in media attention away from Baghdad, and toward Afghanistan and Waziristan, serves as further evidence of the muted successes of COIN.

Recent improvements aside, I stand quietly skeptical as the postsurge drawdown looms in the near term. A key tenet of the COIN strategy has been battle-space denial through troop presence. Simply stated: peaceful gains have been made by increasing our presence in the neighborhoods of Baghdad. America’s forthcoming surge drawdown will increasingly foist the burden of peacekeeping upon local Iraqi leadership.

Unfortunately, lasting strategic success relies largely on the Iraqi people’s ability to assume control of security. Reviewing Iraq’s formation, and the eight decades of sectarian rivalry that ensued, would force most objective observers to wonder about the likelihood of peace in the wake of troop drawdowns. Furthermore, our military is incapable of sustaining current troop levels.

On a personal level, this has been an eye-opening experience. Life in Baghdad is surreal. My unit has not been tasked with off-base operations, so the largest threats remain rocket and small-arms fire that insurgents shoot into the base.

I live in a trailer park named Dodge City North near the base’s eastern edge. Typical mornings include the sound of explosions and automatic-weapons fire in the neighborhood to my east. Low-flying helicopters zoom overhead around the clock, the thumping of their rotors vibrating the walls of my trailer as they pass.

Peppered about the base are trailer parks similar to my own with other choice names like Freedom Village and Liberty East. Among the maze of trailers sits “The Oasis” chow hall. Though the menu varies each day, corn dogs are readily available year-round, and the facility’s Sunday morning telecast laughably features Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts aimed at keeping the warrior spirit freshly invigorated.

I recently made a trip to visit our few remaining British allies near the Iranian border in Basra. Basra is different from Baghdad, as the Iraqi Army has already assumed control of the southern portion of Iraq. The Brits are paring down their forces. At present they have just 5,000 service members remaining, and those souls are getting shelled regularly by Shiite militia in the area. The threat of rocket fire requires sleeping in steel and cinder-block coffins. These truly unique confines allow one to rest knowing that only a direct hit will bring harm.

It is amazing to think that you are now just a few short months shy of graduating from EMBA. I wish I was there with you all. Hopefully I will be home in time to crash a Friday evening social event in May.

With that I leave you with this quote:

“The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose.”

J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle

(J. Glenn Gray was a WWII veteran who received a PhD in philosophy from Columbia before the war.)

Best regards,
Todd Morris

“To be where the consumers are just before they get there and offer them what they didn’t know they wanted.”

This ability to see change before it happens — or to imagine change and create it — can result in billions of dollars. We know the legends well:

Bernie Marcus was fired as CEO at Handy Dan, a small home-improvement chain. Together with a colleague who had also been axed by the board, he developed a customer-centric supersized chain known today as Home Depot.

Jerry Perenchio co-purchased Univision television network for $500 million in 1992. Since that time, Univision Network grew to become one of the top five networks in the country in any language, and in 2006, Perenchio sold Univision for $13.5 billion.

Howard Schultz was an executive at a housewares manufacturer when he noticed that a client was ordering an unusually large number of specialty coffee machines. He visited the client, a four-store operation called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice — and today he oversees more than 3,300 stores worldwide.

Ted Turner bought two failing TV stations in the Southeast and launched a revolution in the way we watch and receive the news. In 1970, he believed that a 24-hour all-news network would turn a profit and transform the news business. By 1980, that vision became CNN.

In all of these, it’s easy to see that innovative thinking was critical in their success.

But can we be taught that? Or is innovation instinctive?

While you consider your answer, I asked experts on the topic to weigh in:

Tom Kelley:

I absolutely believe that innovation can be learned. And the good news is that everyone has that innovator’s mindset already inside them, so the challenge is not so much to learn innovation as to recover some of the open-minded creativity of youth. Baudelaire said “Genius is childhood recalled at will,” and the innovator’s challenge is to tap into that latent talent hidden within their team.

Kelley is the author of The Art of Innovation and general manager of IDEO, the award-winning design and development firm that produced the Apple mouse, the Palm V and the revolutionary and deceptively simple Shimano Coasting bike. Kelley’s work deconstructs the practice of creativity and examines the genesis and execution of an original idea.

John Maeda:

It is this basic question the innovator asks herself, “Am I normal” or asked another way: “Am I different?” Innovators are born when they choose to leverage their mind to the fullest — when they flip the simple switch in their mind from “normal” to “different.” Keeping the switch flipped ON while the pressures of the world keep flipping it OFF — now that’s the hard part and the real challenge: how to stay innovative for life. That’s the greater question in my mind.

Maeda is from MIT’s Media Lab and soon will assume the reins of the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a world-renowned graphic designer, artist, computer programmer, educator and theorist. Esquire magazine named him one of the most important people in the 21st century. I.D. magazine selected him as one of the year’s 40 most influential people in design.

Bernd Schmitt:

Many view innovation as technical innovation; that’s a narrow engineering mentality. From a customer-oriented perspective, innovation is anything that improves customers’ lives in product design, but also communications, shopping environments, on web sites, etc. Think Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty (the message and the innovative You Tube ads); think Abercrombie’s hip retail space; think Facebook. And that type of innovation can certainly be learned and taught — just like technical innovation. In my marketing courses and in my writings I equip students and executives with tools that marketers can use to challenge marketing and communications assumptions (the sacred cows), look outside the industry for inspiration (outside-industry benchmarking) and examine the core of a strategy and take it to an extreme (strategy stripping).

Schmitt is executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at CBS and has written about the limitations of traditional corporate culture, the need to promote creativity and innovation and the unique challenges of establishing and cultivating a powerful brand.

What do you think? When it comes to entrepreneurship and innovation, what can and can’t be taught?

In a recent Wired article, editor Chris Anderson creates a useful taxonomy of new business models, leveraging the idea that some aspects of the offering are free to the end user (although someone in the economic ecosystem is making money).

The different models he lists are:

The freemium. In this model, basic versions of products (such as software) are given away for free, while premiums and upgrades are offered for a price. This works because the cost of providing the basic version is generally pretty low while the profits on the upgraded version are substantial.

A clever version of this is currently offered by Classmates.com, a social networking site that provides information about people you attended school with. I’ve been bombarded recently with come-ons from this site, suggesting that I find out who signed my “guest book.” But to find out this interesting information — you guessed it — you have to subscribe and take out a “premium” membership. I find that irritating. And no, I haven’t bought.

Advertising. This is probably the best known of the “free” models and has formed the basis for many traditional industries, from newspapers to television. The places where advertising dollars are spent have radically changed, and this has shifted the economic underpinnings of many industries while creating a boom for others. The core idea is that advertisers will pay to get your attention, regardless of the ”free” offerings you actually came to consume.

Cross-subsidies. These are the traditional loss leaders well known to retailers. The idea here is that you give away one product (or portion of a product) in the pursuit of charging higher prices on others — examples are money-losing sale offers in the supermarket, low-priced CDs at Wal-Mart or toasters at the bank. They are all provided to get you to buy the more expensive offers.

The key assumption here is that customers are open to cross purchasing — not always true. When Wal-Mart went into Germany, for instance, they discovered (much to their dismay) that German shoppers are happy to engage in “basket splitting” — meaning they will go to multiple stores and scoop up the low priced items only, rather than buying everything from one place. Wal-Mart eventually had to make a rather humiliating exit from that market.

Ironically, business books fall into this category too. Very few people make a lot of money on business-book sales — instead, the real money comes from speaking and consulting work.

Zero-marginal cost. Software distributed over the web and digital music fall into this category. While there is a cost to create the initial offer, the cost of distributing it broadly is very low.

And sometimes the free good is actually a come-on for another item. For instance, while it may be impossible for a singer to limit the distribution of songs in digital form, they may make their money on concert sales (a variant on the cross-subsidy idea).

Labor Exchange. In this model, marketers offer you something for free in exchange for you providing them information or assistance. Anderson uses the example of Google providing “free” directory assistance because they can use the calls to improve their voice-recognition technology, potentially opening the way to a huge market down the road.

Gift economy. In this model, things are given away for free out of altruism or because people simply enjoy doing the work required to create the goods. The classic examples here would be open-source software and Wikipedia entries. People voluntarily create and consume the free good.

While there is still room in the economy for premium-priced real goods, the “free” based business models are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Among the implications of the free economy? There are a few that business people should keep in mind:

First, when many aspects of an offering are free, premiums are going to be placed on those aspects that are scarce or expensive. While you may be able to get free lectures on YouTube, for instance, people will still pay for the in-person experience of a real, live, class because that in-the-moment experience is irreplaceable.

Second, don’t be greedy — you may find that you have to give away a lot to keep your core offerings relevant and of interest to your target customers.

Finally, be open-minded. While you may find that you can no longer make money on certain aspects of your business, there may be surprising opportunities to capitalize on relationships in other ways.

Imagine you could have a PGA Tour player hit one of the following for you: all your putts, your short game, your long game or your sand shots. Which should you choose? I’ve asked this question to a number of golfers, and judging from the various responses I’ve received, the answer isn’t obvious.

So I decided to find out with a research project that combines my academic and golfing interests.

Using a unique dataset containing thousands of individual shots of amateur and professional golfers in regular and tournament play, I developed a method to analyze these and other questions related to the play of golfers of various skill levels.

It’s probably not surprising that professional golfers are better than amateurs in every aspect of the game. But having a PGA Tour player putt for a single-digit handicap golfer would only help by about two shots per round. The short game accounts for less than two shots per round. And the sand game accounts for less than one shot — not enough to make a big difference in the overall score.

However, the long game accounts for over nine shots in an 18-hole round — by far, the biggest contributor to scoring differences between pros and low-handicap amateurs.

Now suppose we split the long game into two groups: tee shots on par-four and par-five holes, and all other shots over 100 yards. Long tee shots account for a four-shot difference per round, and the other long-game shots account for about five shots per round. Either group is more important than putting or short-game shots.

Why isn’t putting more important? It’s partially because the amateur golfer has almost 12 putts per round within 2.5 feet of the hole that are rarely missed, so having a pro hit those putts wouldn’t help much. Of course, the difference in the number of putts taken is greater between pros and higher-handicap golfers — a difference that would be made greater by the very fast greens of the Masters Tournament.

The long game is more important because PGA players drive the ball about fifty yards farther and straighter than low-handicap amateurs.

Now if I could only figure out how to drive the ball fifty yards farther.

Professor Broadie’s research will be presented at the fifth World Scientific Congress of Golf in Arizona at the end of March and will be published in a proceedings volume. A PDF of the paper can also be downloaded here.]]> Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:31:39 EDT ]]> Strategy Napoleon, Buddha, Bill Gates — what makes them all great? According to a new book by Professor Bill Duggan, extraordinary achievements begin with strategic intuition, or flashes of insight in which the brain connects seemingly unrelated bits of information to solve a complex problem.

“Like leadership or judgment, sometimes it seems like some people have it and some people don’t,” said Duggan during an interview with The Invisible Hand. “The most important thing I’ve learned is that it's a normal function of the human mind. You can indeed learn it, and teach it.”

Many of us have had an “Aha!” moment. But whether your “Aha!” is about a shorter subway route or the meaning of life seems to depend on your situation. As Duggan points out, it was not Archimedes the cobbler who shouted, “Eureka!”

According to the article, decision briefs — pioneered by experts here at CBS — have a leg up on the case study in doing this. Decision briefs provide students with less information than a standard case study and require them to come up with strategies.

“We want our students to be used to dealing with incomplete data,” Dean Hubbard was quoted in the article. “They should be able to make decisions out of uncertainty.”

Yet in many organizations, Small Think rather than Big Think prevails. Managers are stuck in a thinking mode characterized by inertia and resistance to trying out the unknown. Those charged with developing strategy stick with the status quo, the same old procedures, planning tools and strategy maps, even when they fail to produce bold ideas.

To break out of this mold, it is key that we question our deeply held assumptions — the sacred cows of a business — and develop alternatives to them. That's what Samsung has done in consumer electronics by focusing on customer experiences rather than on technical product features alone, thereby challenging Sony and quickly turning itself into a creative powerhouse. That’s what Dove did when it challenged the entire beauty industry with its Campaign for Real Beauty, featuring ordinary women of all ages, sizes and shapes. That’s what is happening at the Metropolitan Opera. The Met is no longer just an opera stage in New York: it broadcasts its opening night live in Times Square, has made deals with Sirius Satellite Radio and beams its Saturday afternoon performances into movie theaters worldwide.

Pulling off bold strategies that change markets requires leadership through every step of strategy development, planning and implementation. But the first step for companies who aspire to thinking big is to look beyond the conventions of their own business.

Kill those sacred cows!

For the rest of you (B-school applicants and first year students who are still open to suggestions), here are three pieces of free advice.

None of it is unique, some of it you may have heard before, but all of it has been useful in my B-school career.

1. Figure out what’s important to you — and quickly: Business school is a deluge of recruiting events, social functions, courses, group work, interesting guest speakers, etc. If you don’t figure out what parts of your business school experience are most important (and do that early on in your first year), you’re going to find yourself overwhelmed, and potentially unable to capitalize on the great opportunity you’ve been afforded at a top business school. Enjoy the diversity of experiences that are available to you, but don’t sacrifice depth for breadth. And don’t feel bad making trade offs — business school is all about prioritization and time management.

2. Try something that you wouldn’t have thought of trying, or that is outside of your comfort zone: For me — 150 lbs., 6 ft., with a body mass index of zero :) — that “something” was rugby. Other people I know have decided to pick up a new language, take up squash, travel to a developing country over winter break on a consulting project or learn to play the guitar. And the guitar players got school credit — you can’t beat that!

3. Stay attached to the world outside B-school: This is especially important for those of you who are married or have significant others. Make sure you involve that special someone in your business school activities as much as possible. Sure, your other half is not going to want to hang out with you at the library while your learning team cranks out a DCF model, but happy hours, cluster events and the like are great opportunities to invite them along. And, at least at CBS, this is totally welcomed and encouraged.

There’s no question that email offers great efficiency in passing on information and in asking for information, and this efficiency leads to productivity — a good thing.

But the sheer amount of email exchanged at companies is an overwhelming problem. Emails have come to replace voice-to-voice and face-to-face transactions and are making the workforce feel anonymous and impersonal. Bosses complain that they get too many emails, and their people, ironically, complain that these same bosses send too many emails.

There is no good solution. What I tell leaders in my consulting job is that if you’re trying to make decisions around something or if you’re trying to coach people or if you’re trying to motivate, inspire or galvanize people through email, you’re wasting your time.

Until leaders recognize how counterproductive and demotivating the email experience can be at times, this isn’t going to get fixed.

There are some tricks that can help:

1. Set some ground rules to help employees decide which conversations should be handled via email and which should be handled face-to-face or phone-to-phone.

2. Restrict your email to a certain number per day per person.

3. Don’t use email for those occasions when you’re trying to motivate, inspire, galvanize or energize.

4. Ask an admin to vet emails and try to handle the less important ones themselves, passing on the most important ones to you.

5. If the matter being discussed is urgent, put “urgent” on it — and if this is a crisis, and you really need an answer immediately, put that in the subject line. Sometimes people cheat with this, but even if people are playing it straight 70 percent of the time, this will very often get you to the most critical emails during the day, and the others you can defer.

Professor Feiner is frequently called upon by alums for advice. If you have a suggestion for a question, please drop us an email at media@gsb.columbia.edu.

My heart went out to two companies who had to make those painful decisions. In one case, that of Polaroid, the decision was to stop making instant film, a product deeply linked to the company’s identity. They have just announced that they plan to close factories in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands that make instant film. They’ve stopped making instant cameras for some time now. The other, even sadder case is that of Toshiba, whose high-definition DVD format has now lost out in the standards war and will be discontinued.

Fans of the instant-film format are howling, but the relentless realities of declining sales and the relegation of instant film to a footnote in the photography industry leave Polaroid with few options.

The good news is that perhaps a smaller company will license the rights to manufacture the instant film and keep some supply available.

Toshiba, in contrast, sees no hope, resigned to the fact that its HD DVDs have irrevocably lost the standards war to Sony’s Blu-Ray technology. This must feel like sweet justice for Sony and its CEO Howard Stringer (c’mon, everybody remembers Betamax vs. VHS) and be a bitter disappointment for Toshiba. Standards battles are hard to predict, and both sides went into this one well armed for a long war of attrition. With computer manufacturers, content providers and others unprepared to place a compelling bet on one or the other standard, the battle could have dragged on for some time.

I find it fascinating that the critical blow (after some others had been cast, of course) came from a third party that stood to lose a great deal in a protracted standards battle, and that’s Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has no interest in shoppers holding off their purchases for fear of spending a lot of money on a piece of obsolete junk. The superstore’s perspective is: who cares who wins, as long as the situation gets resolved and commerce can chunk merrily along. So when one of the big film studios went with Blu-Ray, that was enough to convince Wal-Mart that it was time to place a bet. Toshiba’s capitulation came within days.

While both stories are sad, they do serve to remind us that for innovation to progress, some established practices, offers and products have to give way. It sure isn’t the most pleasant part of the innovation process, but it is necessary. So best of luck to both companies, and may something brighter offer some excitement down the line.