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Two discussions about the interaction between data analytics and competitive analysis have been taking place in the past decade: one focusing on micro-level firm capabilities and the other on macro-level industry competitiveness. We seek to integrate the micro- and macro-level analyses via the lenses of firms in agricultural input markets. Agriculture is undergoing a tremendous transformation in the collection and use of data to inform smarter farming decisions. Precision agriculture has brought a heightened degree of competition for input supply firms, forcing greater interactions among friends and foes.

In today's turbulent business environment, innovation and organizational renewal are key. Employees are encouraged to act as intrapreneurs (entrepreneurs within their employing unit or organization) and instigate change from the bottom up. However, accomplishing this company wide is highly challenging. In this article, we examine the case of Wehkamp, a Dutch e-tailer that overcame these challenges and succeeded in creating a flourishing climate for intrapreneurship. We describe the three-step chronological process for intensive change wherein the initiatives of some intrapreneurs can produce widely held organizational value for intrapreneurship. Key to this change process are three insights: (1) Team leaders can feed the incremental and radical initiative of the few; (2) top management can give meaning and guard fairness to stimulate overall intrapreneurship; and (3) corporate entrepreneurship can be used to continuously revive widespread intrapreneurship. Organizations seeking to encourage intrapreneurship from their employees can benefit from these guidelines.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of microfinance institutions (MFIs) has grown tremendously, with more than 10,000 worldwide varying in size and approach. Despite their continued growth and variety, the value of MFIs has been hotly debated. Furthermore, managers and founders of MFIs have also faced the challenge of balancing social and financial objectives and understanding effective ways of evaluating their organization's effectiveness. Hence, in this article we closely examine the operations of three distinct types of MFIs and offer a framework of how they collectively create value, with each playing a unique role in a symbiotic relationship: Namaste, an interactor; Kiva, a connector; and Accion, an institutionalizer. Interactors build relationships with clients and facilitate the flow of information to connectors and institutionalizers that disseminate this data to capital markets, build confidence, and fuel capital flow into the MF industry. The latter disseminates innovation and best practices. Thus, it is critical that each MFI recognizes its symbiotic role and evaluate itself accordingly instead of spreading itself across roles.

Service failures, once handled quietly by customer service departments, are now played out on a highly public social media stage. These failures can result in not only the loss of a loyal consumer but also can negatively affect relationships with those watching the dialogue between disgruntled customers and organizations. The phenomenon of seeking resolution to service failures online is distinct from both traditional word-of-mouth and voice behaviors. This article introduces social voice: public complaining behavior that aims to change the behavior of the organization. A qualitative methodology defines eight dimensions of social voice and categorizes them by the strength of the relationship to the organization. Results indicate that appropriate response strategies differ based on social voice segment.

In June 2016, the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD) appointed Rahul Bhardwaj—an accomplished executive and director with a long, successful track record in the business, community, and non-profit sectors—to lead the national association for board directors. The self-proclaimed “governance geek” sat down with Ivey Business School Professor Gerard Seijts to discuss what boards must do to help firms navigate turbulent waters. With improvements in boards following the Enron, Volkswagen, and Wells Fargo scandals, Bhardwaj sees more of a board focus on corporate culture than ever before: “The need to be more careful about what you reward has been brought to the forefront of governance thinking.” He says the biggest public misconception about a board’s governance role is that it is a cushy job. Given the increased complexity of the director role, the speed with which a crisis can develop, and the challenges created by technological and political disruption, the level of engagement required for directors has increased dramatically. It used to be fairly common for a director to serve on four or five boards, but today that seems hard to justify. Finally, Bhardwaj sees Canadian companies as the most trusted in the world, because trust in firms from other nations has fallen.

Appointed president and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada in 2014, McKay is leading Canada’s biggest bank as the Digital Age and fintech revolution force the industry’s old business models into extinction. As a champion of Canada’s innovation ecosystem, McKay spearheads RBC’s support for and partnerships with universities, start-ups, and accelerators, particularly in technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. McKay sat down with Ivey Business School Professor Gerard Seijts to discuss how his organization is harnessing disruptive forces to reimagine banking. McKay sees two major macro drivers of disruption in our time. First, we’ve entered the platforms era in which people’s lives are interconnected via social media, e-commerce, online entertainment, workplace networks, etc. The second is climate change, which impacts how societies organize and feed themselves. Creating transformational change in response to a crisis, McKay claims, is relatively easy, and yet creating a sense of urgency when business is thriving is difficult. Some of RBC’s most successful products over the past 10 years have come out of employee surveys. RBC’s old way of working was a matrix, with everyone focused on their roles, but it has flattened the organization and created agile teams that are cross-functional and own the entire process, and where everybody has input across a project’s journey. Ultimately, McKay does not see machines and automation as a threat, but cautions that continuous learning must be entrenched in formal education programs.

According to research into what makes leaders great, executives can leverage the power of music to improve performance while taking a taxi or flying on a plane, or even in the shower. “Having established the importance of leader character for sustained excellence in organizations,” says Ivey Business School Professor Mary Crossan, “the next frontier is researching how to activate and develop character on a daily basis.” Crossan has been exploring how music can activate dimensions of character that may lie latent. In particular, Ivey has been exploring how music can exercise the character dimension of humility and its associated behaviours in future leaders. But while Crossan’s research explores the positive and negative impacts that music can have on character development, she notes that it is misguided to think that one person’s positive playlist will work for another individual. The key to deploying music for leadership development is reflection and self-awareness. Indeed, you first must adequately explore the current state of your strength of character to determine imbalances among your character dimensions. This can be done using a Leadership Character Insight Assessment tool developed by Ivey researchers in partnership with SIGMA Assessment Systems. You then design a song library to promote character dimension balance based on what moves you emotionally in the areas that require development.

In 2014, Randy MacEwen was named CEO of Ballard, where he leads the company’s focus on providing innovative clean energy solutions with fuel cell vehicles. In 2017, Ballard became the first fuel cell company to power buses for more than 10 million cumulative kilometres. In this Ivey Business Journal interview, MacEwen talks with Ivey Professor Gerard Seijts about the leadership skills needed to navigate disruptions in today’s changing business environment. With the exception of the United States, MacEwen says, we have global consensus on the need to keep the global temperature increase by the end of the century below 2 degrees Celsius. That will require deep de-carbonization and major transformation in the energy, transportation, and industrial sectors. The need to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and improve air quality is driving the trend to electrify propulsion systems in cars, buses, and trains. There’s also a push to make vehicles lighter and equip them with autonomous driving. These efforts are complicated by the trend of transportation as a service. Yet another disruptor is China. Significantly, these mega-trends are not temporal; they are global and converging. MacEwen explains how Ballard reflected on its cultural values and distilled them to five: “Listen and Deliver” (customer centricity); “Quality”; “Inspire Excellence” (urgency, passion, and showing leadership); “Row Together” (trust); and “Own It” (accountability).

The world needs great leadership like never before. And contrary to popular belief, strength of character can be developed. This article explains why people tend to underestimate the need for leader character and overestimate their personal strength of character. In a recent executive development course, participants from a company took the self-assessment version of the Leadership Character Insight Assessment. The authors noticed that an inordinate number of respondents had self-assessed as 5 out of 5 on all dimensions. These results were at odds with the briefing received from the company’s CEO before the workshop. The CEO had serious concerns about his employees’ performance. After experiencing a change in senior management, the company had moved from a hands-on, command-and-control leadership style to a more open, collaborative approach. After the shift in leadership, employees still functioned in silos, with little collaboration. Despite these problems, participants believed that their self-reported character assessments were true. This allowed the authors to “start an excavation for self-awareness.” As part of an experiment agreed to by the CEO and a pre-selected participant, the authors bullied this participant. This offered an opening for a discussion on the interconnected dimensions of leader character. How was it acceptable to watch and do nothing while a colleague was bullied? Developing character is different than developing competencies. It is like strengthening your body by working out. Unlike physical training, however, there is no limit to how much we can exercise character.

It is difficult to find evidence that Canada’s finance sector is serious about keeping up with the fintech revolution happening in other parts of the world. Of particular concern is the fact that Canada is falling behind in robo-advice solutions. A major reason for this is a fear of a killing off of industry jobs. But in reality, the future of the advice sector won’t be dominated by robots. It will be a hybrid market in which human advisors use digital techniques to gather data and generate recommendations faster and more objectively than they do today. The conclusion that financial advisors are moving to a “behavioural-based” world was laid out in Financial Advice in Canada: A Way Forward, an Ivey paper written with Ivey’s Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab. With the industry about to change, the following five things need to happen: 1) finance education needs to include more behavioural (and not just technical) skills; 2) regulators need to change their licensing and proficiency requirements to include more skills in interpreting and explaining numbers; 3) firms need to add to their hiring criteria a new component that demonstrates a candidate’s capacity to learn and deliver behavioural-based insights; 4) existing advisors need to go back to school to be as up to date as new recruits; and 5) product providers (e.g., fund companies) will need to nudge their value propositions.

When appointed chief executive in 2014, Mary Barra was tasked with completing the company’s post-bankruptcy recovery while shifting GM’s strategic gears. Shortly after, GM’s restructuring was threatened by a defective ignition switch scandal linked to over 100 deaths. In this Ivey Business Journal interview, topics include the automobile industry’s new trend towards software validation (with an emphasis on constant upgrades and minimum viable products), versus the old approach of mechanical validation (with an emphasis on heavy retesting and seeking initial perfection). Barra has been surprised by autonomous driving, and says that due to emerging technologies, workers of all education levels must be prepared to change careers multiple times. When GM faces a crisis, she assembles a team guided by three principles: doing the right thing for customers, being honest and transparent, and doing everything possible to ensure the issue never recurs. Barra has seen significant positive movement in terms of corporate responsibility versus when she attended business school in the late 1980s, and sees an opportunity for business scholars to study the importance of long-term perspectives over short-term results.

Charles Brindamour is the CEO of Intact Financial Corporation, an insurance firm that makes profits purely from selling insurance—unlike most insurance firms, which rely on investing insurance premiums to make profits. In this Ivey Business Journal interview, he explains how for the last five years, Intact has been focused on three trends: changing customer expectations, software, and data explosion and democratization. Besides technology, the most important change in the industry has been customers’ expectations of their suppliers, which have been amplified by social media. Software has changed how people access information and share expertise and experience. Other changes affecting the industry are resulting from increased data generation and climate change. In Brindamour’s view, disruption and preparing for disruption constitute a continuum. The first step is dealing with the basics of disruption that can occur. The second step in the continuum is to invest in enabling technology and skills. The third step is to invest in innovation. The fourth stage is “research and venture.” Brindamour says that a gap in business school learning is the process of learning not just as an individual or leader, but as an organization. Disruptors, he claims, are not software geniuses; they are the ones who see the gap between what is and what is expected and provide strong design ideas.

If you want to capture the hearts and minds of globally dispersed virtual team members, you must consider two key factors: situated learning and identity construction. Situated learning encompasses questioning, proposing ideas, discussing issues, and seeking feedback, whereas identity construction is “a process of understanding who one is, what one can do, and to what extent one becomes more or less legitimized and valued by the other members.” As individuals engage in situated learning and identity construction, they move from being peripheral participants to central players. Although individual reasons for joining a virtual community (such as an open-source software community) vary, the authors question: “What motivates and propels people to continue to actively contribute?” Though many open-source software (OSS) projects have failed, others have yielded world-class software like Linux, WordPress, and Firefox. <br><br> The authors split a 715-member community OSS community into three groups of participants: highly active/sustained (9), partially active/unsustained (7), and inactive (699). They suggest four steps to increase virtual team member engagement. First, the success of the project relies on sustained contributions from a few core contributors with strong expertise and skills. Second, to identify and foster the development of core contributors, every contribution must be recorded, tracked, and publishable. Third, to retain core contributors, special privileges should be granted to them. Finally, for contributors to gain recognition and reputation within the community, both direct contributions (e.g., solving software coding problems) and indirect contributions (e.g., offering advice) are needed.

The necessity for organizations to embrace “speaking up” is broader than “speaking truth to power.” Speaking up is about improving group performance by engaging in open dialogue—across all levels of rank, position, and tenure—to ensure that organizations have all available knowledge when addressing challenges. Unfortunately, people often refrain from speaking up and voicing new ideas in order to avoid contradicting a superior or embarrassing a colleague. But while keeping quiet can work for self-protection, it does little for group problem solving and helping organizations avoid mistakes. Leveraging her experience across industry, government, and academia, the author debunks two myths: that speaking up is about having courage, and that only lower-level employees worry about speaking up. This article explains how members of an organization can embrace speaking up by developing dialogue skills and increasing psychological safety while implementing teaming routines (e.g., quarterly dinners and council meetings) that provide the opportunity to speak up. It highlights the author’s work with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to illustrate the benefits of speaking up in a real-life setting. Ultimately, when an organization’s members have dialogue skills, feel psychologically safe, and work in a group where teaming routines support speaking up, needless mistakes are avoided, time is saved, and knowledge is available to make informed decisions.

To survive—and even thrive—amid big bang disruption, companies must learn the new shape of new product diffusion and the four stages of this curve, one that loosely tracks the metaphor of the big bang theory of the universe. They must also embrace the new rules of strategy and competition that follow.

The first rule of customer service--when something goes wrong, apologize--can backfire. New research based, uniquely, on videos of actual customer interactions shows that after a point, apologies only heighten unhappy customers' frustration. Employees should worry less about displaying empathy and instead focus on creative, energetic attempts to solve the problem at hand.

The idea behind performance feedback is that to help people grow, we need to shine a light on the things they can't see about themselves. But a recent study shows that when employees receive critical appraisals from their peers, it mostly makes them seek out colleagues who will give them positive reviews instead.

The idea behind Muji was to manufacture and sell beautiful, inexpensive housewares, food, and apparel that every Japanese consumer might need. In the late 1980s Muji sparked interest among British retailers at an exhibition of Japanese products, and a joint venture with Liberty ensued. By 1991 the brand had stand-alone stores in London and Hong Kong, and since then it has grown to 418 stores in Japan and 403 in 27 other countries. Yet the company has moved cautiously, adding stores only when existing ones in the country or region are running profitably, and trusting the intuition of local managers. Operations outside Japan now account for 35% of the business, and the company intends to keep expanding globally. But its aim is to be tenacious in trying to deliver on the Muji promise and to live as part of a community--simply, conscientiously, and in harmony.

Data gathered on the web has vastly enhanced the capabilities of marketers. With people regularly sharing personal details online and internet cookies tracking every click, companies can now gain unprecedented insight into individual consumers and target them with tailored ads. But when this practice feels invasive to people, it can prompt a strong backlash. Marketers today need to understand where to the draw the line. The good news is that psychologists already know a lot about what triggers privacy concerns off-line. These norms--and the authors' research--strongly suggest that firms steer clear of two ad-targeting techniques generally disliked by consumers: using information obtained on a third-party site rather than on the site on which an ad appears, which is akin to talking behind someone's back; and deducing information about people (such as a pregnancy) from analytics when they haven't declared it themselves. If marketers avoid those tactics, use data judiciously, focus on increasing trust and transparency, and offer people control over their personal data, their ads are much more likely to be accepted by consumers and help raise interest in engaging with a company and its products.

Companies say they want their employees to learn and grow, but in practice, they skimp on training. In a recent study of 1,481 employed learners, more than one-third of them said they had received no training from their companies in the previous 12 months. Instead, many acquire work-related skills through MOOCs (massive open online courses)--usually without their employers' knowledge or support. This represents a missed opportunity for companies to harness their employees' efforts in the service of organizational goals. Managers can help team members put their learning into context by providing study time and informal guidance before and during the courses. Having employees pilot courses for one another helps ensure relevance and quality. And tracking completion reinforces the value of learning while increasing the odds that people will stick with their coursework.