Can bossless management work?

strategy+business, January 10, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by Tom Werner

If you’ve been feeling like your leadership contributions are underappreciated, add a copy of Why Managers Matter to your reading list. In it, Nicolai Foss, a strategy professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and Peter Klein, the W.W. Caruth Chair and professor of entrepreneurship at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, examine the various iterations of manager-free organizations that have been proposed—and occasionally adopted—over the past 50 years or so. Their conclusion: nonsense!

Foss and Klein lump the ideas of management thinkers, such as Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and Frederic Laloux, and approaches to decentralized management, such as holacracy and agile, into what they call the bossless company narrative. “The basic thrust of the genre is that while bosses are still around, the less control they exercise the better,” they write. “What the Harvard historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. called the ‘visible hand’ of management should give way to worker autonomy, self-organizing teams, outsourcing, and an egalitarian office culture.”

Then the duo bales the entire genre into something resembling a straw man and puts a match to it. “The near-bossless companies—and there aren’t many of them—with their self-managing teams, empowered knowledge workers, and ultra-flat organizations are not generally or demonstrably better than traditionally organized ones,” declare Foss and Klein. “Bosses matter, not just as figureheads but as designers, organizers, encouragers, and enforcers.”

Foss and Klein make a detailed and extended case against the bossless company narrative with which it is hard to take issue, especially in the realm of large enterprises. Schemes like holacracy, in which decisions are made by teams, may work for small companies with distributed ownership, such as boutique consultancies and other kinds of partnerships, but they haven’t worked in large companies like Zappos, which have many more employees and require far more coordination. Agility, too, tends to work better for running projects than for running whole companies. In short, hierarchical management structures are, as the authors put it, “the worst form of organization—except for all the others.” Read the rest here.

Employee resource groups are more than “food, fun, and flags”

strategy+business, December 13, 2022

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by MoMo Productions

In 1964, in the aftermath of race riots in Rochester, New York, Joseph Wilson, the CEO who transformed the Haloid Photographic Company into Xerox, invited Black employees to come together to address and remedy racial discrimination within the company. This group evolved into the National Black Employees Caucus, the first employee resource group (ERG). A half-century later, ERGs are a ubiquitous feature of the corporate landscape.

“ERGs have formed within the workplace to support and represent people with identities and demographics related to gender, race, sexual orientation, ability/disability, caregiver roles, military status, religious affiliation, generation, geographic area, job function, and more,” writes diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant and coach Farzana Nayani in The Power of Employee Resource Groups. In this handbook, Nayani offers practical advice to leaders of companies and ERGs who want to ensure that the time and resources they invest in their own groups are well spent.

“There is much debate as to whether affinity groups and ERGs are simply there to celebrate ‘food, fun, and flags,’” writes Nayani. But that’s a reductionist view, she says, one that ignores a host of potential benefits ERGs can provide to employees, companies, and communities. Nayani ticks them off: support, opportunities, and a voice for marginalized employees; enhanced leadership development and innovation pipelines; better employee engagement; increased reputational capital for the company; and more inclusive and socially responsible corporate behaviors that can deliver dividends to the communities in which businesses operate.

The key to achieving these benefits, says Nayani, is forging an explicit connection between a company’s ERGs and its organizational goals in five areas: workforce, workplace, marketplace, community, and suppliers. “Each of these five pillars is an area of focus where employee resource groups can offer contributions and also receive the benefits of efforts focused on the key themes,” she adds. Read the rest here.

Did Jack Welch Blow Up the Business World?

MIT Sloan Management Review, October 18, 2022

by Theodore Kinni



“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” wrote 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. With The Man Who Broke Capitalism, New York Times business reporter David Gelles attempts to resuscitate the hoary “great man” theory of leadership in a backhanded sort of way. He calls out the late Jack Welch, the General Electric CEO whom Fortune magazine anointed “manager of the century” in 1999, as the evil mastermind behind the litany of economic woes rooted in shareholder capitalism gone wild, but he pays scant attention to their root causes.

When Welch took up the reins at GE in 1981, it was not a prosperous time in America’s economic history. The post-World War II boom was on its last legs: America’s industrial giants were sinking under their own weight, and foreign companies, especially those from Japan and Germany, were making inroads the size of superhighways into the U.S. consumer market. GE, then one of the nation’s leading companies, was languishing in the slow growth environment too.

If you were in business in the 1980s and ’90s, Gelles’s recounting of Welch’s tenure at GE will be a familiar story. “Neutron Jack” cut head count and instituted an annual employee ranking scheme that required that employees in the lowest decile be fired. The company’s business units had to be No. 1 or 2 in their market or they were jettisoned. Meanwhile, Welch chased new growth opportunities in financial services and media — soon, GE Capital alone accounted for more than half of the company’s profits.

The results? “During [Welch’s] tenure, GE posted annualized share price growth of about 21% a year, far outpacing the S&P 500 even during a historic bull market,” writes Gelles. “When Welch took over, GE was worth $14 billion. Two decades later, the company was worth $600 billion — the most valuable company in the world.” Read the rest here.

To improve management, build a decision factory

strategy+business, June 21, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Lava4images

Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

by Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman, Yale University Press, 2022

“We think of organizations as decision factories,” write professors Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman in their new book, Decision Leadership. It’s an apt simile. Knowledge workers, whose output is typically decision-driven, now number more than 1 billion worldwide. Moreover, as the number of rote tasks that are automated increases, many more employees are being freed for higher-level work that entails decision-making.

Given this reality, it’s no surprise that boosting the decision intelligence of the workforce is moving up the leadership agenda. But Moore and Bazerman, holders of endowed chairs at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Harvard Business School, respectively, take an even more expansive position on decision leadership—a stance that sets up a formidable ambition for this relatively short book.

“We aim to define leadership in a new way, one grounded in the belief that leaders’ success depends not only on their ability to make good decisions but also on their ability to help others make wise decisions,” they write. “In our view, great leaders create the norms, structures, incentives, and systems that allow their direct reports, the broader organization, consumers, investors, and other stakeholders to make decisions that maximize collective benefit through value creation.” To support their new definition of leadership, Moore and Bazerman seek to weave together the various threads of behavioral economics that pertain to decision-making and then translate them into practical advice for leaders who want to both improve the quality of their own decisions and bolster the decision prowess of their companies. Read the rest here.

A kinder, gentler deal

strategy+business, June 2, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Say-Cheese

Split the Pie: A Radical New Way to Negotiate 

by Barry Nalebuff, Harper Business, 2022

Anyone who has been the underdog in a negotiation is going to eat up Barry Nalebuff’s new book, Split the Pie. The Milton Steinbach Professor at the Yale School of Management, who cofounded Honest Tea as a side gig, combines logic and empathy in a strategy that undercuts power-driven negotiating tactics.

The simple principle that drives Nalebuff’s approach is this: the negotiation pie—that is, the value produced by the deal, over and above the value that the parties to the deal can create on their own—should be equally spilt. It doesn’t matter who has the most power or who needs the deal the most—what matters is the value stemming from the deal and the inability of either party to achieve it without the other. In this sense, all the parties to the deal have a legitimate claim to an equal share of the negotiation pie.

Nalebuff illustrates this concept with an easily followed example: a pizzeria will give Alice and Bob a 12-slice pizza if they can agree how to split it. If they can’t, it will give them half a pie, but unequally divided: four slices to Alice and two slices to Bob. These no-deal slices comprise what Roger Fisher and William Ury called the BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) in their best-selling negotiation book, Getting to Yes.

Nalebuff’s solution is to focus on the additional slices that Alice and Bob get if they make a deal. He splits the six additional slices in half. This gives Alice a total of seven slices (her BATNA of four slices plus her half of the six slices in the negotiation pie) and Bob gets five slices (his BATNA of two slices plus his half of six slices in the negotiation pie). Voilà.

“The pie framework will change the way you approach negotiations in business and life,” writes Nalebuff, who has been teaching this approach to MBA students and executives at Yale for the past 15 years, as well as online at Coursera. “It will allow you to see the negotiation more clearly and more logically. It will lead you to an agreement where the principle applied doesn’t depend on the specifics of your situation. It will help you make arguments that persuade others by identifying inconsistencies in their approach.” Read the rest here.

Getting and staying motivated

strategy+business, May 5, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by ATU Images

Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation
by Ayelet Fishbach, Little, Brown Spark, 2022

In the early years of the last century, Hanoi had a rat problem. To solve it, the French colonial government placed a one-cent bounty on the rodents, which could be claimed by anyone who delivered a rat’s tail. Thousands of tails were tendered, but Hanoi’s rat population didn’t shrink. Instead, tailless rats were running through streets, and rat farms were discovered. To make money selling rats’ tails, you need lots of rats breeding more rats. The moral of the story: be careful which behaviors you reward.

Ayelet Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, tells the tale of Hanoi’s rats in Get It Done. The book is a deep dive into a veritable ocean of behavioral research, including a substantial number of studies conducted by the author. This area of scholarship is so full of codicils and complications that it’s a wonder that managers can motivate themselves, let alone the people in their charge.

Consider the role that progress plays in motivation. Will you be more motivated if you focus on how far you’ve already traveled toward a goal or if you keep your attention trained on how far you have left to go? The not-so-simple answer, explains Fishbach in chapter 5, is: it depends. What’s your emotional predilection—are you a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person? Is the goal you are pursuing a conditional one with all-or-nothing benefits that are paid on completion or an accumulative one from which you derive benefits as you go? And how far along on the path are you: how close are you to reaching your goal? Your answers to those questions determine how you should use progress as a motivational force. What’s more, if you don’t ask those questions and answer them properly, the progress that you’ve made toward your goal could become a demoralizing force and an obstacle to its achievement.

Every chapter in Get It Done reiterates the multifaceted nature of self-motivation and underscores the critical nuances in the kind of advice found in sound bites on social media... read the rest here

Follow your S curve

strategy+business, February 28, 2022

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by R A Kearton

Recently, someone on LinkedIn asked me for career advice. LOL. The ink line of my career is a random squiggle with lots of breaks and blotches. It isn’t until about halfway through that the line begins to look like it might be going somewhere. That’s the point at which I found something I enjoyed doing that paid enough for me to keep doing it. I grabbed that like a drowning man does a life ring.

I grabbed Whitney Johnson’s new book, Smart Growth, with similar enthusiasm, because it seemed there might be a more rational and ordered way to view my career. There is. As Johnson might tell it, I didn’t flounder for years; I followed the “S Curve of Learning.”

Johnson, a consultant and speaker, has a knack for picking out theories from the discipline of innovation and applying them to individual growth. In her 2015 book, Disrupt Yourself, she used Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation as the foundation for a guide to career-changing moves. In Smart Growth, Johnson applies Everett M. Rogers’s theory of innovation diffusion to forging a career path.

In his 1957 doctoral dissertation, Rogers showed that the number of Iowan farmers adopting a new weed killer followed an S curve: adoption started slowly, with only a few farmers willing to take a chance on the new product; shot upward as the majority of farmers became convinced of its benefits; and then leveled off as the remaining, most cautious farmers finally committed. By the time Rogers’s seminal Diffusion of Innovations was published in 1962, the rural sociologist was convinced that the S curve of innovation diffusion depicted “a kind of universal process of social change.” Indeed, S curves have been used in many arenas since then, and Rogers’s book is among the most cited in the social sciences, according to Google Scholar.

Johnson’s S Curve of Learning follows this well-established path. There’s the slow advancement toward a “launch point,” during which you canvas the (hopefully) myriad opportunities for career growth available to you and pick a promising one. Then there’s the fast growth once you hit the “sweet spot,” as you build momentum, forging and inhabiting the new you. And, finally, there is “mastery,” the stage in which you might cruise for a while, reaping the rewards of your efforts, before you start looking for something new, starting the cycle all over again. Read the rest here.

A leader’s handbook for managing culture

strategy+business, January 21, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photography by Paul Bradbury

Win from Within: Build Organizational Culture for Competitive Advantage
by James Heskett, Columbia Business School Publishing, 2022

One of the first business books I reviewed, back in 1992, was Corporate Culture and Performance, by Harvard Business School professors James Heskett and John Kotter. A few books explored organizational culture before it, most notably In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and the late Robert Waterman, but Corporate Culture and Performance was the first to try to quantify the economic returns of culture in a rigorous way. Thirty years later, Heskett, now 88 and professor emeritus, is still making the business case for corporate culture.

His new book, Win from Within, is a master class in building culture. It’s the kind of book that you can read in a few hours and then apply throughout your leadership career—which gets to Heskett’s thesis: most leaders don’t devote nearly enough time to managing the culture of their companies, and the time that they do spend on it is often wasted.

Heskett pins both problems to a flawed understanding of culture. “Strategy is hard; culture is soft,” he writes, beginning a list of common misconceptions. “The impact of a strategy on growth and profit can be measured, but that of a culture cannot. If you get the core values shared by everyone right, the rest will take care of itself. A strong culture helps assure good performance. To change an organization’s culture requires a long time. All of these assertions have been passed around in management circles over the years. And all of them are essentially wrong.” Read the rest here.

Better management through anthropology

strategy+business, December 13, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Kilito Chan

The next time you hear someone arguing that a liberal arts education is wasted on businesspeople, direct them to Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision. In this new book, the award-winning journalist, chair of the Financial Times’s US editorial board, and Cambridge Ph.D. in social anthropology makes a compelling, readable argument for the business value of her academic discipline. Tett finds that this value is delivered in three ways: anthropology makes the strange familiar, it makes the familiar strange, and it attunes awareness when listening for social silence.

“Making the strange familiar”—the quest to understand other people and cultures—goes back to the origins of the science of anthropology in the 19th century (although its main purpose in the early days was to justify “civilized” Western colonialists who were stealing the labor and resources of “primitive” peoples). In 1990, this quest—understanding, not plunder—led Tett to a remote village in Soviet Tajikistan, where she studied marriage rites for her Ph.D.

Making the strange familiar has also led marketers in a global economy to embrace anthropology in their quest to figure out how to sell their products to customers in far-flung markets. The resulting insights can be valuable indeed. Switzerland-based Nestlé’s sales of Kit Kat bars were lukewarm in Japan, until 2001, when marketing executives noticed that sales of the confection surged in December, January, and February on the island of Kyushu. Curious, they discovered that students associated the name Kit Kat with kitto katsu, which means “you must overcome” in the local dialect. The students were buying the bars for luck when they took their exams for high school and university. Nestlé built its Japanese marketing strategy around this insight, and by 2014, Kit Kat was the country’s best-selling confection. Read the rest here.

Best Business Books 2021: Taming collaborative dysfunction

strategy+business, November 8, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Serge Bloch


In the 1920s, Mary Parker Follett put forth the heretical idea that managers should pursue power with—not power over—employees. “It is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power,” argued Follett, whom Peter Drucker dubbed “the prophet of management.”

A century later, Follett’s vision is a reality. “Today, practically everything you do at work is a collaboration,” writes Rob Cross, the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College, in Beyond Collaboration Overload, this year’s best business book on the topic of management. “When you attend your morning meeting, when you confer with a direct report, when you help the new person figure out the right expert to speak with about a project, when you page through your emails, when you pause to chat with a colleague, when you move from one webinar to the next while simultaneously addressing instant messages that seem to have urgent time frames—again and again, you’re collaborating.”

If that description seems to be taking on a manic tinge, welcome to the manager’s world. “The collaborative intensity of work has exploded over the past few decades,” writes Cross. Drawing on a series of studies conducted under the aegis of Connected Commons, a consortium of more than 100 large employers, where Cross serves as chief research scientist, he finds that 85% or more of employee time is devoted to collaborative activities. And yet companies have “no idea what impact this time has on corporate performance, individual productivity, or—perhaps most disturbing—employee well-being.”

But Cross has an idea of the impact. Organizational network analysis, performance metrics, and extended structured interviews reveal that many managers collaborate too much—becoming obstacles to organizational performance and their own well-being in the process.

Take Scott, a manager of 5,000 people working in three business units of a large company. In just one of those units, which employed 1,800 people, a staggering 118 people on an average day were going to Scott with requests. Worse, more than 65% of them—78 people—said they couldn’t hit their business goals without more of his time. “This is another obscene number,” writes Cross. “When we see that figure edge up past 25% of a leader’s immediate network, we know we’ve got trouble. Although the leader doesn’t feel it while racing from meeting to meeting, he or she is slowing things down significantly.” The results are burnout, attrition, and lower engagement scores because people can’t get their work done. Indeed, Cross learned that Scott, whom many people in the company considered the leading candidate to succeed the CEO, was about to get fired.

If you’re lucky, your level of collaboration overload is nowhere near Scott’s level. But if you are feeling hard-pressed to keep up with the collaborative demands on your time, and those demands are taking a toll on your performance and well-being, Cross offers succor: he says he can show you (or someone with whom you work or live) how to “reclaim 18 to 24% of your collaborative time”—about one day per week. Read the rest here.

Why you want what you want

strategy+business, August 12, 2021

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Catherine Falls Commercial

In the new book Wanting, Luke Burgis, entrepreneur-in-residence and director of programs at the Catholic University of America’s Busch School of Business, takes readers down the rabbit hole of mimetic theory. Developed by French social scientist and philosopher René Girard in the 1960s and 1970s, mimetic theory seeks to explain human relations and culture in terms of desire. Girard’s theory and Burgis’s book are worthy of executive attention because they offer leaders insights into their own behavior and careers, as well as the behavior of the many stakeholders they are charged with understanding and influencing.

Our desires—above and beyond our innate human needs—are the driving force of mimetic theory. Girard’s analysis starts out, innocently enough, by suggesting that desire, which shapes every aspect of our lives, stems from observing other people and adopting them as models in an often-unconscious manner.

In short, what we want is what someone else has. The 1957 film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? offers a satirical example that may hit uncomfortably close to home for some leaders. Tony Randall plays a lowly ad man who desires an executive’s salary and prestige. But when he hits upon a scheme to promote a client’s lipstick using Jayne Mansfield’s lips and then rockets to the top spot in his Madison Avenue agency, he wonders why he wanted to get there in the first place. He leaves to raise chickens.

Girard’s theory isn’t as humorous. He argued that mimetic desires spawn rivalries as people vie to realize their ambitions. Sometimes, when the resources desired are limited, the competition intensifies into conflict. And because most people don’t understand or admit the true nature of the resulting conflicts, they scapegoat others. Girard believed these innocents are unjustly sacrificed in a kind of relief valve for societal pressure. Witness the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s demonization of Jews.

Girard went on to identify Judeo-Christianity as a historical aberration that subverted the scapegoat process. With the crucifixion of Jesus, the sacrifice of scapegoats was revealed as an unjust mechanism, writes Burgis, and “a veil was lifted on the recurring cycle of violence in human history.” (Unfortunately, lifting the veil has eliminated neither the scapegoating nor the violence.)

Like Girard, Burgis sees mimetic desire everywhere, and he interprets all sorts of events through its prism, including his own entrepreneurial ambitions. Read the rest here.

Expansionists, brokers, and conveners

strategy+business, March 31, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by John M Lund Photography Inc.

When David Rockefeller, grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1970s, liked something, he really liked it. He liked collecting beetles, and left a horde of 150,000 specimens to Harvard on his death. He also liked collecting people. His Rolodex (remember those?) contained more than 100,000 contacts; laid out end to end, its cards would have stretched 16 miles.

In the terminology of personal networks, Rockefeller’s custom-made Rolodex is a good example of an “expansionist network,” according to Marissa King, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management. In her book Social Chemistry, a wide-ranging but rather unconnected exploration of how we connect with other people, King explains that expansionists “have extraordinarily large networks, are well-known, and have an uncanny ability to work a room.” Expansionists create value by connecting contacts to each other. They are collectors and manipulators of what sociologist Mark Granovetter identified as “weak ties.”

But size doesn’t really matter when it comes to networks, says King. Rockefeller, for example, had to overcome the inherent difficulties of maintaining and leveraging an expansionist network by recording detailed information about his contacts on his Rolodex cards. When the Wall Street Journal got a peek after Rockefeller died at age 101 in 2017, it reported that there were 35 cards documenting his meetings with Henry Kissinger dating back to 1955. What really matters is the quality of your contacts and the structure of your network...read the rest here

Arguing your way to better strategy

strategy+business, March 2, 2021

by Theodore Kinni



Illustration by johnwoodcock

There is no shortage of theories regarding the proper basis for a winning corporate strategy. You can set sail on blue oceans with W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, hone core competences with C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, and get competitive with Michael Porter, to call out just a few of the fashionable options. But how do you transform the theories into a unique strategy capable of driving your company’s long-term success?

This is the question Stanford business school professors Jesper Sørensen and Glenn Carroll address in Making Great Strategy. It’s a book about strategic due diligence. And it fills an important gap in the literature by caring not a whit about a company’s strategy per se, but rather focusing entirely on how rigorously that strategy has been formulated and how thoroughly it has been vetted.

Toward this end, Sørensen and Carroll define strategy as a logical argument that coherently articulates “how the firm’s resources and activities combine with external conditions to allow it to create and capture value.” They further assert that “the development, communication, and maintenance of a strategy argument is best achieved through an open process of actually arguing within the organization, engaging in productive debate.”

Sørensen and Carroll find that in many companies this process of argumentation is either altogether missing or poorly conducted. Instead of using logical argument, decisions about strategy are often dictated by the most powerful people in the room. Or, when they are made more democratically, they are chosen in a rigged or otherwise flawed manner. The authors’ insights help explain the findings of a 2019 survey by Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting group, in which only 37 percent of 6,000 executive respondents said that their company had a well-defined strategy, and only 35 percent believed their company’s strategy would lead to success. Read the rest here.

Is the gig up?

strategy+business, December 17, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Brothers91

A decade ago, advocates touted the sharing economy as an alternative to corporate capitalism. Digital technology was opening vast, new peer-to-peer marketplaces: TaskRabbit and Airbnb were founded in 2008, Uber in 2009, RelayRides (now Turo) in 2010, Postmates in 2011, Lyft in 2012. These platforms promised that people would be able to make a good living while working when and how they wanted — selling their time and skills, and renting out their cars, spare bedrooms, and that dusty camping gear in the attic.

“You will know by now that things haven’t turned out exactly as expected,” Juliet Schor wryly notes in her new book, After the Gig. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College, and her team at the Connected Consumption project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, studied gig workers and platforms of the sharing economy from 2011 to 2017. The result is a more nuanced view than has been offered by previous books on this topic, which typically focus on either how companies can build their own platforms or how platform companies prosper by evading regulation and exploiting workers.

Among the insights: The less you actually need a gig job, the more likely it is that a gig job will work for you. “Workers’ experiences are not uniform, with variation in pay rates, job satisfaction, and how they do the work,” Schor explains. “As we saw these differences playing out at individual companies, we realized that they are explained by how dependent the worker is on income from the platform to pay basic living expenses.” Schor’s team found that supplemental workers — that is, workers who are not financially dependent on their platforms — make more money, have more autonomy, and are more satisfied with their gigs than platform-dependent workers. Moreover, the former group comprises 34 percent of the workers in the sample the team studied; the latter was only 22.5 percent. (The rest, nearly half of platform workers, fall between the two extremes.)

This finding partly contradicts the headlines of worker abuse that have generated a lot of political Sturm und Drang lately. At the same time, it is clear that the gig economy can’t really substitute for a full-time job. As Schor concludes: “With some exceptions, our data suggest that being dependent on a platform is not a viable way to make a living.” Read the rest here.

What people like you like

strategy+business, November 11, 2020

by Theodore Kinni




Photograph by Paper Boat Creative

I don’t set much store in the endless stream of recommendations offered by Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and most other online businesses. Occasionally, a book, flick, or song pops up that delights me, but most of the suggestions I get either miss the mark or appear suspiciously advantageous to recommendation engine operators and their advertisers.

Michael Schrage, visiting fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and s+b contributor, awakens us to the potential of delightful discovery in his latest book, Recommendation Engines. “Recommendation inspires innovation: that serendipitous suggestion—that surprise—not only changes how you see the world, it transforms how you see—and understand—yourself. Successful recommenders promote discovery of the world and one’s self,” Schrage writes in its introduction. “Recommenders aren’t just about what we might want to buy; they’re about who we might want to become.”

If this smacks of techno-utopianism, well, there is a strong strain of that ideology running through Recommendation Engines. For the most part, however, Schrage grounds this rosy view in the powerful effects that recommenders are already producing and balances it with acknowledgment of these systems’ potential for abuse. He also provides a short history of recommendations and a suitably technical description of how recommendation engines work and are built.

To date, the powerful effects of recommenders have manifested themselves mostly in commerce. Schrage cites a variety of facts in this regard: a survey that found recommendations account for approximately 30 percent of global e-commerce revenues; another that found online shoppers are 4.5 times more likely to buy after clicking on a recommendation; and research that “strongly suggests” recommendations drive roughly a third of Amazon’s sales. Read the rest here.

Best Business Books 2020: Management

strategy+business, November 9, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Illustration by Martin O’Neill; icon by Harry Campbell

This year, COVID-19 upended management-as-usual. Sure, managing is still a matter of getting things done in organizations — divvying up objectives into tasks, ensuring employees have the resources and skills to complete the tasks, overseeing their progress, and helping them when they get bogged down. But where and how people work has changed — radically and overnight in many companies and, in some, maybe permanently.

None of this year’s best business books on management were written for managers per se. But each focuses on capabilities that can help managers identify and cope with pandemic-related challenges.These developments have given rise to new needs and stresses that affect the people you are responsible for managing — needs such as going to work (or going back to work) safely, and stresses such as working while surrounded by kids instead of colleagues — and thus, they’ve also affected your performance as a manager.

In the year’s best business book on management, Tiny Habits, Stanford University professor B.J. Fogg shows how to change your behavior and help others change theirs, too — an essential skill at a time when we are all being called upon to develop new habits. In Acting with Power, Deborah Gruenfeld, also at Stanford, explains how an unconventional view of power can enable you to support people in ways that far exceed the limits of your positional authority. And in You’re Not Listening, journalist Kate Murphy offers an uncommonly insightful exploration of how to actually meet the dictates of an exhortation we’ve all heard before: “Listen!” Read the rest here.

Uncertainty on the menu

strategy+business, October 16, 2020

by Theodore Kinni




Photograph by Yagi Studio


If you’re a foodie, the research that Vaughn Tan undertook to write The Uncertainty Mindset will strike you as a dream gig. The assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management spent much of the past decade studying — and embedded within — the culinary R&D teams associated with a handful of the world’s top purveyors of high-end cuisine, including José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup, Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, René Redzepi’s Noma, and “Amaja” (a pseudonym Tan uses for a restaurant that sounds a lot like Poul Andrias Ziska’s Koks). Aside from the good eats, Tan came away from his research with unconventional ideas for structuring and stimulating innovation teams.

The innovation challenge facing these rarefied culinary organizations is daunting; the customer expectations of an Apple or a Tesla pale by comparison. Imagine trying to satisfy a discerning gourmand who has waited a year for a reservation and then traveled from Singapore to the Faroe Islands solely for an 18-course meal. It is expected to be one of the best meals in the world. Each course features unusual ingredients prepared in unique ways that not only engage the senses but also impart the identity of the chef and the restaurant, so much so that it couldn’t have come from any other kitchen. Tan calls this elusive quality familiar novelty. “Novelty combined with distinctive familiarity makes for loyal customers — and is nearly impossible to copy,” he writes.

Outside London, at The Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen (FDEK), Tan observes pastry chef Isabel Rodriguez as she creates a dessert that will anchor an entirely new menu. “The team had decided that it would have to convey the feeling, as Rodriguez said, of being ‘dreamy, comforting, surreal. Like how you feel when you are about to fall asleep when you’re small. You’ve been bathed, and you’re feeling clean and tired, and everything smells like baby powder,’” writes Tan. Before the work is done, the dish, which the team calls Counting Sheep, will evolve into two dishes served in quick succession. Among its many fine details is the design and fabrication of a spoon with a fuzzy handle that will be dusted lightly with, yes, baby powder.

At Amaja, the R&D team spends three months figuring out how to cook 200-year-old mahogany clams — an ingredient never before used in high cuisine. In ThinkFoodGroup’s first Las Vegas venture, the company takes on the high-pressure work of launching three restaurants — serving tapas, Chinese–Mexican food, and a tasting menu — on the opening night of a newly constructed gaming resort.

In observing how culinary R&D team members work individually and together on such projects, Tan uncovers six “innovation insights” that serve as the core findings of his book. Two of the insights are particularly intriguing. Read the rest here.

What if every job seeker got a living-wage job?

strategy+business, August 19, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Katja Kircher

It’s usually eye-opening when the economic assumptions that underlie a society are questioned. In The Case for a Job Guarantee, by Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an associate professor of economics at Bard College and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, that assumption is embedded in the concept known as the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU).

NAIRU assumes that when the unemployment rate gets too low, it will force companies to raise wages and then prices, causing inflation. This leads economists to try to suss out the optimal rate of unemployment, and the Federal Reserve to try to slow investment and hiring whenever the ranks of the unemployed grow too thin — cold comfort when you are in those ranks.

“The idea that involuntary unemployment is an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence, and that there is an appropriate level of unemployment necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy, is among the great, unexamined myths of our time,” declares Tcherneva in this concise polemic. “It is also bad economics.”

The actual nature of the relationship between unemployment and inflation is an unsolved mystery, according to Tcherneva. Moreover, the Fed has no “reliable” theory of inflation — even though the Fed began to claim, starting in 2014, that the U.S. economy was at full employment. (Never mind the 3 to 4 million people who were unemployed and seeking work.)

The assumption that there is an optimal level of unemployment comes with harsh ramifications. Unemployed people are less healthy and suffer higher rates of suicide and mortality. Their lifetime earnings shrink, and they often must be supported by social welfare programs as they try to find to work. Chronic unemployment causes communities to decline and collapse. In macroeconomic terms, unemployment depresses GDP growth — Tcherneva cites an analysis by Australian economist Bill Mitchell, who calculated a decline of nearly US$10 billion in output per day caused by unemployment during the Great Recession in the U.S. (versus output if the “full” employment rate at 2.8 percent per annum average GDP growth of 2003–07 had held).

“What if we changed all that,” asks Tcherneva, “and made it a social and economic objective that no job seeker would be left without (at a minimum) decent living-wage work?” The solution she strongly advocates is a job guarantee: a commitment by the government to provide everyone who wants to work with a job. If a job is not available in the private sector, it will be provided in the public sector...read the rest here

Restoring craft to work

strategy+business, August 4, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by RubberBall Productions

You’ve probably heard these stories before. There’s the proud janitor at NASA who tells President Kennedy that he isn’t just sweeping up; he is helping put a man on the moon. And the gung-ho stonemason who tells architect Christopher Wren that he isn’t just hammering rock; he is building a cathedral to God’s glory. The stories are popular, even though they probably never happened. And they get told and retold to support the power of purpose. It’s the subtext that bothers me.

Invariably, the moral of these stories is that employers (a label that literally defines the rest of us as something to be used) need to provide employees with a purpose. This suggests that many jobs are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It also implies that people don’t care about the work they do — that they are wastrels.

I don’t know if the relationship between meaningless work and aimless wastrels is one of correlation or causation (or in which direction it might run). But a high-flown and inevitably vague corporate purpose — don’t be evil! — isn’t the solution to either problem. It’s more likely the solution lies in the concept of craft, which Richard Sennett, senior fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, described in his erudite and engaging 2008 book The Craftsman.

“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake” [italics added], wrote Sennett. “Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all of these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself.”

Craft resonates for me in a way that corporate purpose never does. One reason is the fact that I’m a self-employed business writer and editor, who needs to be good at a craft to make a living. Another reason is plain orneriness: Why should I internalize a company’s purpose? Especially when I may only work there for a few years. That’s somebody else’s business (and profit), not mine. Read the rest here.

Fit-for-context leadership

strategy+business, July 6, 2020

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by wildpixel

From Herodotus and Machiavelli to Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, most leadership writers have followed the same basic approach: They study successful leaders and try to derive practices from their lives and careers that aspiring leaders can adopt. Amit Mukherjee, a professor of leadership and strategy at Hult International Business School, rejects this approach in his intriguing new book, Leading in the Digital World.

As Mukherjee tells it, the technologies that gave rise to the industrial era — mass manufacturing, electric power, and scientific management, among others — created the context for authoritarian leadership. Then, in the mid-20th century, new technologies, starting with statistical process control, which was pioneered by Walter Shewhart at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1920s, gave rise to the quality movement and spawned empowered leadership. Today, new technologies with a long arc of impact are giving rise to the “digital epoch” and creating the need for a new set of leadership practices.

In a variation on the theme of contextual leadership championed by Harvard Business School’s Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, Mukherjee contends that the practices of business leaders must evolve with and from the technological context of their times. “Periodically, technologies appear that have long arcs of impact into the future,” he writes. “When introduced, they require dramatic changes in the nature of work, which, in turn, require profound changes in how people are organized. That changes how people must be led. Companies — and executives — who fail to adapt are cast aside by those who do.”

It’s been clear for several decades that digital technologies are driving the transformation of entire industries. As an example, Mukherjee points to the pharmaceutical industry, in which technologies such as genomic medicine and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking have driven a fundamental revamping of R&D and distribution models.

Instead of focusing on digital technologies themselves, however, Mukherjee examines their ramifications for work and organizational structures, which he categorizes as seven principles...read the rest here