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Most leaders recognize that innovation entails optimizing their existing business while at the same time, innovating to create new value for the future. Professor and author Vijay Govindarajan argues that an important third step must be added: proactively letting go of yesterday's beliefs. In this wide-ranging interview, he describes his Three Box Solution, which addresses all three required steps. The problem, he says, is that most of today's leaders focus on Box 1 and ignore the other two boxes. He also explains the difference between linear and non-linear innovation, the role of 'weak signals' in the environment, and the concept of 'reverse innovation'.

First appearing in China, physical platform crowdfunding is based on the basic formula used online by fundraising sites like Kickstarter, which is a symbiotic system between innovators, platforms, and investors. However, the new model combines these elements in a novel way in conjunction with the Internet and a physical business establishment, such as a café. In October 2013, 100 former students of Peking University formed the 1898 Café, the first crowdfunding café of its kind. It was established to serve the university’s entrepreneur alumni community and to stimulate the university’s entrepreneurial spirit. One of the most revolutionary features of the physical platform model is the concept of investors being members of the establishment, with each investor being a shareholder. The physical platform model emphasizes the equality of shareholders and takes advantage of the human desire to self-organize and self-manage. In this model, a physical establishment is the platform through which investors (shareholders) are sought and selected. That is, the platform, with a pre-specified focus, finds the investors—not the other way around. The second major difference is that the model is not simply about accumulating funds. The blending of investors, operators, and consumers in the business may have numerous applications beyond crowdfunding. Merging three traditionally separate business factions and pooling resources among them makes it possible to efficiently generate business results and do big things with little money. This model could prove revolutionary for existing businesses and industries looking for a different way to operate. A company that adopts it could drastically reduce its start-up risks and better ensure survival beyond the initial self-funded period.

Canada’s current weakness in commodity prices raises the possibility that public investment in private Canadian enterprises, absent in recent years, could make a dramatic return. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing. This article looks at the creation of two heavy-oil upgraders in Saskatchewan that were built to stimulate development of the local oil industry while creating jobs and maximizing royalty income. In both cases, the financial viability of the province was threatened along with the existence of the companies that partnered with government. For business, Saskatchewan’s two heavy oil upgraders show that government can be a risky, duplicitous and opportunistic partner — one with powers that most commercial partners lack. Even if government strives to be a good partner, its presence can politicize operations and increase media scrutiny. Further, people can assume they have privileges that they’d never dream of asserting without government participation. <br><br> If seeking or accepting government as a partner can be avoided, that advice is usually sound. However, government can raise large amounts of capital through non-commercial mechanisms, and can assume risks and provide funds for public policy reasons without regard for commercial targets. If a company has a project that will be solid in the long term, but cannot raise the money on the commercial market, then government can step in. But the author urges companies in this position to a) make sure the project is worth the risk, b) ensure that government partners avoid duplicity when structuring public-sector involvement, and c) make sure that the government has money in the venture first.

In management literature, a psychological contract generally refers to an employee's beliefs about the reciprocal obligations that exist between him or her and an organization. Legal contracts, on the other hand, are agreements that create obligations between the parties that are enforceable by law. Psychological contracts are different from legal contracts in that they are characterized by the belief that both parties have entered into a set of mutual obligations. While marketing scholars and practitioners have largely overlooked the notion of psychological contracts, this article argues that a firm's customers might view the promises they believe a firm has made to them as psychological contracts. Psychological contracts are as relevant to marketing as they are to management. This article expands the notion of psychological contracts to marketing relationships and outlines internal and external strategies firms can employ to manage psychological contracts more effectively.

Social merchants are small business owners and entrepreneurs who adopt social shopping as a new sales channel. They employ social shopping intermediaries, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, to promote their products or services to price-sensitive customers at large discounts. The success of social merchants depends in part on the reputation they gain at merchant review sites (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie's List), via which consumers post online product and merchant reviews. An analysis of social shopping provides insight regarding how social shopping works and what merchants must be aware of if they utilize social shopping intermediaries. This article shares these insights in the context of a set of health and wellness merchants that were studied for five years. Specifically, this article discusses how their Groupon daily deals affect merchant reviews, and how surviving vs. failed social merchants differ in terms of their review scores and number of reviews. Finally, this article provides recommendations about merchant review management to health and wellness merchants.

Organizations are continually challenged to increase efficiency and improve performance despite frequent cuts to personnel and budgets. These challenges force organizations to identify, develop, and diffuse various management innovations. Diffusion efforts are often met by resistance, reluctance, or ambivalence, resulting in what many consider to be a fool's errand. While management innovation may not be the forte of large, bureaucratic organizations, we present a case of study of a U.S. Air Force maintenance, repair, and overhaul organization that has recently, and successfully, diffused a large-scale management innovation. Results from the case study support the development of a diffusion of innovation framework that identifies important mechanisms associated with the acceptance, routinization, and assimilation of management innovation. The framework informs leaders of the diffusion process, while the recommended actions of relentless leadership, deliberate development of personnel, and enterprise involvement drive diffusion efforts and help leaders achieve desired results in innovation diffusion and associated performance improvement. Overall, we assert that the pursuit of management innovation is not necessarily beyond the art of the possible for business leaders.

Crowdsourcing is becoming recognized as a powerful tool that organizations can use in order to get work done, this by freelancers and non-employees. We conceptualize crowdsourcing as a subcategory of outsourcing, with compensated crowdsourcing representing situations in which individuals performing the work receive some sort of payment for accomplishing the organization's tasks. Herein, we discuss how sites that create a crowd, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, can be powerful tools for business purposes. We highlight the general features of crowdsourcing sites, offering examples drawn from current crowdsourcing sites. We then examine the wide range of tasks that can be accomplished through crowdsourcing sites. Large online worker community websites and forums have been created around such crowdsourcing sites, and we describe the functions they generally play for crowdsourced workers. We also describe how these functions offer opportunities and challenges for organizations. We close by discussing major considerations organizations need to take into account when trying to harness the power of the crowd through compensated crowdsourcing sites.

Client entertainment is a popular business practice that Chinese managers often use to facilitate business relationships and promote sales. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in China, however, have been frequently involved in corruption allegations caused by client entertainment. This article explains client entertainment's purpose, prevalence, and persistence in China and identifies the pitfalls that foreign firms often encounter when they practice client entertainment in that country. Based on field observations and first-hand experience as well as research on public and survey data, this article also provides eight prescriptive guidelines that can potentially help firms manage client entertainment more efficiently and effectively without causing ethical and legal problems.

Marketers are currently facing a 'crisis of immediacy' challenge: how to meet consumers' need to receive content, expertise, and personalized solutions in real time during their shopping experience. Today's digital technologies-such as video conferencing, location-based mobile apps, and augmented reality-provide a highly personalized and immersive environment that allows for interactivity and rich information exchange between the brand and consumer. We conducted in-depth interviews with over 35 retailers, large-scale surveys with international shoppers, and pilot projects with stores and banking institutions to study how companies are leveraging digital technologies to transform the customer experience. Our findings show that there are two main technology-based models that organizations are deploying to support customers' immediate needs: the remote expert and the digital assistant. We provide company examples of both models, as well as when they are most appropriate and success factors to inform managers.

While sustainability is an ethical issue, it is also becoming relevant from a marketing standpoint and can be particularly decisive in stakeholder relationships. Companies can approach this issue in different ways, choosing whether to publicize their good conduct or to project a responsible attitude that does not reflect what they effectively achieve. In this context, the authors propose a self-assessment matrix that identifies a better way to make sustainability a source of competitive advantage through a transparency-based approach. By way of a geological metaphor, four types of companies are presented that are distinctive based on two variables: sustainable commitment and communication. Costs and benefits are analyzed for each quadrant, as well as problems resulting from a lack of transparency. In the final section of the article, the authors discuss whether the choice to communicate sustainability can be considered ethical or whether it is only a question of business. Reflections are reported.

Mobile marketing is an ever increasingly important component of a firm's overall promotional strategy. The importance of this medium can be seen through time spent on mobile media, number of searches, and direct and indirect mobile-generated sales. Despite its increased importance, the effectiveness of mobile marketing needs to be improved based on such metrics as bounce rates, add-to-cart rates, shopping cart abandonment, and average order size. Strategies to increase the effectiveness of mobile marketing are discussed. Firms need to capitalize on the three major strategic advantages of mobile marketing: (1) the fact that mobile marketing devices are always on, always connected, and always with the consumer; (2) the ability to generate location-sensitive offers; and (3) the ability to send relevant personalized messages and offers. Firms also need to develop and implement an effective mobile marketing strategy through a series of activities. These include understanding and reacting to the complexity of mobile marketing, designing sites based on ease of use versus 'bells and whistles,' increasing opt-in rates, using effective customer engagement strategies, and developing effective mobile coupons. Criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of mobile marketing are discussed.

Distance learning-that is, providing education to students who are separated by distance and in which the pedagogical material is planned and prepared by educational institutions-is a topic of regular interest in the popular and business press. In particular, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which are open-access online courses that allow for unlimited participation, as well as SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses), are said to have revolutionized universities and the corporate education landscape. In this article we provide a nuanced analysis of the phenomenon of online distance learning. We first provide an overview of its historical evolution, and subsequently define and classify key concepts. We further discuss in detail the optimal target group in terms of participating students and teaching professors and propose corresponding frameworks for driving intrinsic student motivation and for choosing a successful online teacher. We also outline the benefits that institutions can achieve by offering online distance learning. Finally, we speak about the specific connection between online distance learning and social media by focusing on the difference between MOOCs based on traditional lecture formats (xMOOCs) and connectivist cMOOCs.

Bad leadership is clearly expensive. Fraud resulting from mismanagement at Wells Fargo, for example, has cost the bank about US$300 million in fines and pre-settlement investigative costs while wiping out around US$6 billion in shareholder value. Ex-employees, meanwhile, are seeking at least US$2.6 billion in a class action lawsuit related to the Well Fargo corporate culture that rewarded employees who created multiple accounts for customers without permission. And let’s not forget the extra millions lost from the hit to Wells Fargo’s brand value. <br><br> It has been less than a decade since banking-sector leadership and governance failures almost toppled the global financial system, but the lessons embedded in the 2008 financial crisis already appear forgotten as cases of appalling corporate behaviour continue to undermine capitalism. It is no secret that good leadership requires commitment to doing the hard work it takes to look out for all of an organization’s stakeholders, along with the intellect and competencies required to compete in today’s disruptive times. But as research into the financial crisis has made clear, good leadership also requires a balance of identifiable character dimensions. When recruiting leaders and directors, organizations have long invested time and money to ensure they are managed and governed by people with adequate experience and competencies. But all that time and money can be wasted when leadership character isn’t also given the attention it deserves. This is because costly failures in decision making are often rooted in character-based issues such as close-mindedness and impatience, as well as a lack of accountability, empathy, humility, and courage.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In today's world, the traditional news media do not always control how crises unfold. Executives may face stakeholder communities that control their own sources of information and their own media and have their own ideas about how companies should resolve crises. These stakeholder groups wield considerable power to influence other stakeholders, organizations, and the public, and executives who ignore them do so at their own peril. On more than one occasion in the past decade, entire divisions of multinational companies were sold off to competitors after stakeholders criticized those businesses through their proprietary media. Thus, companies need to know how stakeholders gained this power, how they use it, and what to do about them. Stakeholders have become both increasingly active and more diverse. Their numbers now include social activists, expert financial analysts, and liability lawyers in addition to employees, customers, and business partners. To spread their messages and encourage people to connect and interact with one another, stakeholders are now deploying a variety of channels, including websites, user forums, e-newsletters, videos, and social media platforms. By following the connections among their various media, the authors have observed the ways these stakeholder groups find and influence one another, building their communities and aligning with others who share similar objectives. Individually, many of these stakeholders may be powerless, but together, they can have a huge impact on how a crisis evolves. Moreover, by creating their own media, these stakeholders can bypass the "gatekeepers"of traditional media: the editors and journalists who in the past decided what news was fit to publish.

Over the past 30 years, she notes, researchers have developed tools designed to help managers understand the drivers of performance in their businesses. But in many cases, managers make assumptions about presumed links that they haven't fully tested. One study found that only 21% of managers who said they implemented strategy maps had tested the links within their own organizations; many of those who had tested the links found their early assumptions were flawed. This article emerged from research related to the "service profit chain,"a well-known body of research focused on the drivers of performance in service industries that was developed by James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser Jr., and Leonard A. Schlesinger. The service profit chain proposes a mirror effect between employee satisfaction and loyalty on the one hand, and customer satisfaction and loyalty on the other, which in turn drives financial performance. However, in analyzing data from two British retail chains -a superstore chain and a home improvement store chain -the author found that the assumptions contained in the model were not always supported by the empirical evidence from the two retailing organizations. "Although intuitively appealing,"the author writes, "strategy maps and models such as the service profit chain have a common pitfall: They encourage managers to embrace assumptions about the drivers of financial performance that may not stand up to close scrutiny in their own organizations."At the superstore chain, for example, rather than finding a positive relationship between employee satisfaction and productivity and profit, she found negative correlations. She found further negative correlations between employee satisfaction and sales growth, and between employee loyalty and both profit and productivity. The service profit chain posits that the most productive, profitable, and highest-growth stores would be the ones where employees are likely to be most satisfied and loyal.

Unfortunately, when decisions are framed this way, the authors contend, the outcome is frequently suboptimal. An effective way to work against this, they say, is to make better use of the classic decision matrix, which allows for the comparison of different options using the same set of predefined criteria. The authors argue that the decision matrix isn't just an evaluation tool but also a process tool that can help executives extend their decision frame beyond the obvious options and criteria and help them think "out of the box." According to the authors, the decision matrix can be useful at key stages in the decision-making process to (1) frame decisions, (2) make concrete choices, and (3) communicate solutions. It allows leaders to identify potential gaps and logical flaws in their reasoning, facilitate dialogue in the executive team, and build support and buy-in in the wider organization. To expand the decision frame in a systematic way, the authors note, executives should understand two concepts: mental buckets and golden cuts. Mental buckets are vehicles for clustering similar ideas into related yet distinct categories. While brainstorming is a common way for teams to generate lots of ideas, ideas need to be organized at some point. Categorizing them into mental buckets helps people spot gaps and overlaps -in terms of both options and criteria. The cognitive act of creating new mental buckets serves to stimulate creativity.

For centuries, plant breeding has been a labor-intensive process that depended largely on trial and error. To find the most successful variety of corn, for example, a breeder might pollinate hundreds or even thousands of plants by hand to see what happened. Syngenta had been involved in a large-scale version of trial-and-error research and development, conducting field tests on hundreds of thousands of plants each year in more than 150 locations around the world. But given that the results of experiments are often shaped by quirks and idiosyncrasies, it was sometimes difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. Syngenta's idea was to use data analytics to study a wide range of plant and seed varieties so it could identify the most desirable plants early and make optimal use of resources (everything from capital to labor to land to time). Rather than investing time and resources on more and more testing, its aim was to make decisions about plant portfolios using hard data and science. The vision, write authors Joseph Byrum and Alpheus Bingham, "was to create a suite of software tools that would replace intuition in plant breeding with data-backed science." The authors describe how open innovation can help companies tackle complex business problems that they can't solve on their own. They also discuss lessons Syngenta learned as the company turned to several online crowdsourcing platforms to find talent that could help it increase its R&D efficiency. The effort paid off: Within eight years, Syngenta tripled the average annual improvement rate of its soybean portfolio. In April 2015, an independent panel of academic and business experts in operations research validated the company's efforts and their applicability beyond agriculture, awarding Syngenta the 2015 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Significant leaps are rare occurrences in most domains, the authors note, and the accepted wisdom involving risk and return has led many to assume that high returns from breakthrough innovations are only attainable with high risk. However, the authors have found that important opportunities can arise when the focus is placed not only on the investment but also on how it is pursued. Rather than looking at so-called "moonshots,"they examine a proactive and comparatively less risky approach to pursuing high-impact innovation -one that strings together "lily pads"of capability-building investments, technical and conceptual advances, and market explorations into what the authors call "enabling innovations." With the lily pad strategy, innovators pursue a series of lower-risk initiatives, rather than risking large amounts of resources on one path. To do this, they must link the current capabilities of their solutions, whether in parts or as a whole, to end-user needs in application spaces ready to accept them. The goal isn't to satisfy a specific end-user or application (although innovators typically do have a long-term target end-user or application in mind). Rather, it's to satisfy any end-user who will adopt now. The reason is simple: Adoption leads to resources and/or cash flow, which allows the work to continue and creates a "lily pad"on which the innovation initiative can "land"on its way to a larger goal. The idea is to jump across lily pads -even in spaces that may seem of secondary strategic importance -as early as possible as a means of building interest in the concept (internally and externally). Drawing on examples such as the development of X-ray and GPS technology, mobile robots, crowdsourcing, and microlending, the authors argue that it's useful to think about innovation impact proactively along four dimensions: reach, significance, paradigm change, and longevity.

The authors discovered five unexpected features of meaningfulness at work: (1) it is often self-transcendent, in the sense that individuals tend to experience their work as meaningful when it has an impact on others, (2) it can be associated with poignant or difficult experiences, not just happy ones, (3) the experience of meaningfulness at work tends to be episodic rather than sustained, (4) it is often only appreciated upon reflection rather than in the moment, and (5) it is personal, and managers and organizations matter relatively little in individuals'experience of meaningfulness. The authors also found that meaningfulness appears to be driven up and decreased by different factors. Whereas meaningfulness was something individuals tended to discover for themselves, meaninglessness at work was generally a function of how people were treated by managers. Seven factors within the control of managers emerged as destroyers of meaningfulness: disconnecting people from their values; taking employees for granted; giving people pointless work to do; treating people unfairly; overriding individuals'better judgment; disconnecting people from supportive relationships; and putting people at risk of physical or emotional harm. The authors note that, given meaningfulness's personal and intangible nature, organizations cannot effectively control or mandate meaningfulness, but rather should focus on creating an ecosystem that is conducive to meaningfulness at work. They argue that there are four elements to a holistic meaningfulness ecosystem: organizational, job, task, and interactional meaningfulness. Experiencing work as meaningful can be a moving and even uncomfortable experience, but organizations that are successful in fostering holistic meaningfulness are more likely to create the kind of workplaces where human beings can thrive.

When managers believe their company is a meritocracy because formal evaluative and distributive mechanisms are in place, they are actually more likely to exhibit the very biases that those systems may seek to prevent. The very belief that an organization is meritocratic may open the door to biased, non-merit-based behavior when managers make key individual-level career decisions. The good news, the author reports, is that establishing a more meritocratic workplace doesn't require an inordinate amount of time or resources. It is a matter of establishing clear processes and criteria for hiring and evaluating employees. It is also a matter of monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of such company processes and bestowing an individual or group within the organization with the responsibility, ability, and authority to ensure that those formal processes are fair. The collection and analysis of data on people-related processes and outcomes -often referred to as "people analytics"-can enable companies to identify and correct workplace biases. The author conducted a longitudinal investigation of the translation of employee performance evaluations into compensation decisions at a large service organization in North America. He found that, over the long run, women and minorities received lower salary increases than white men with the same performance evaluation scores, even after controlling for job, work unit, and supervisor effects. The company's solution was to adopt a set of organizational procedures that incorporated both accountability and transparency into its performance reward system. The intervention consisted of introducing three key changes. First, a performance reward committee was appointed to monitor the fairness of pay decisions. Second, all senior managers had to follow a formalized process for assigning rewards based on employee evaluations. This process required the senior managers to briefly justify how much was awarded