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Together, the combination of description and advice provide a good primer for executives seeking a better understanding of this emerging era of sophisticated number-crunching. According to Siegel's estimate, we are adding 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. Words have become data; the physical states of our machinery have become data; our physical locations have become data; and even our interactions with each other have become data. "Data can frequently be collected passively, without much effort or even awareness on the part of those being recorded. And because the cost of storage has fallen so much, it is easier to justify keeping data than discarding it,"observe Mayer-Schänberger and Cukier. Indeed, we are awash in information, but what does it all mean? In their book, Mayer-Schänberger and Cukier explain three new imperatives: 1. Use all the data, not just a sample. In the past, businesses did not have the economical means to capture, store and analyze all the data from their operations, so they had to settle for a sample of it. But now a company like Amazon can economically capture and store data from every single customer transaction. 2. Accept messiness. Inaccuracies in measurements are less harmful than they once were because they can often be smoothed over by the sheer quantity of data. In the authors'words, "more trumps better." 3. Embrace correlation. For many purposes, correlation is sufficient and people don't need to know causality. Quantifying the likelihood that a particular person will do something -whether it is defaulting on a loan, upgrading to a higher level of cable service or seeking another job -is at the heart of Siegel's Predictive Analytics. The author describes how quantitative techniques can be deployed to find valuable patterns in data, enabling companies to predict the likely behavior of customers, employees and others. Even a modest increase in the accuracy of predictions can often result in substantial savings.

Rather than encouraging customers to share their views about the company and its products with managers, the authors found, companies tend to focus on encouraging customers to take part in spreading positive word of mouth. Yet word of mouth is only one type of voluntary behavior that customers engage in. Moreover, it indicates only what people on the outside are saying, not how companies can improve their offerings or what customers may be looking for. The authors, who conducted surveys of customers as well as interviews and roundtable discussions with senior executives in a variety of industries, found that both customer word of mouth and customer- to-business interactions are associated with a customer's propensity to buy more of a company's products and services. While not all satisfied customers become repeat buyers, encouraging them to provide feedback and suggestions helps tie them more closely to the business. Companies can even recapture defecting customers simply by contacting them and encouraging them to participate. In addition, customer-to-business interaction is often more malleable than customer-to-customer word of mouth and more readily within the control of management. In a study of customers of a global bank, the authors found that customers who purchased the most were individuals who participated and engaged in much word-of-mouth behavior. High participation/ high word-of-mouth customers were the most loyal and attached to the brand; customers who did not participate tended to be the least valuable, the least loyal and the least attached to the organization regardless of whether they spread positive word of mouth.

What makes such partnerships -which the author calls adaptive strategic partnerships -counterintuitive is that they are being used in situations where the two most relevant streams of organizational economics would argue for vertical integration. One company that has pursued adaptive strategic partnerships is Bharti Airtel Ltd., the Indian telecommunications services company. Back in 2004, Bharti Airtel's managers found that negotiating and updating contracts with vendors interfered with their ability to focus on satisfying the company's customers and outsmarting its competition. Contrary to what other telecom operators have done, it negotiated unconventional relationships with some of its leading vendors, including Nokia Siemens Networks (now Nokia Solutions and Networks), Ericsson and IBM. Instead of expanding network infrastructure by purchasing increasing amounts of equipment (such as exchanges and cellular antennas), which often results in unused capacity, Bharti Airtel pays the vendors to operate the network; it compensates them based on telecom volume, paying only when equipment is in use. In addition to rethinking its approach to network capacity, vendors take responsibility for network performance and troubleshooting. Typically, companies with outside partners rely on simple tools such as service-level agreements, which specify what is expected from each party and provide for performance standards to assess compliance. But in managing its partnerships with vendors, Bharti Airtel uses a joint governing structure that encourages people at different levels of the organizations to communicate and address problems as they arise. In some cases, such interactions have led the company and its partners to redraw the scope of their collaborations (for example, assign responsibility for building and maintaining the cell towers to a new company), something that would be more difficult to do in a more traditional partnership.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Ethnography has often been portrayed as a "fly on the wall"technique, with anthropologists lurking in people's homes to observe consumers'unadulterated lives. The authors argue that this description does not do justice to the way ethnography actually works in the corporate world or to ethnography's increasingly important role in formulating business strategy. The authors'research across a variety of companies suggests that ethnography -artful in situ investigation into what customers do and feel and how they talk about what they do and feel -is a powerful tool to use to gain insights into your market. To arrive at a more in-depth understanding of how corporations use ethnography to their advantage, the authors conducted interviews with executives in various industries worldwide, including Ford and Wells Fargo. Where data analytics and surveys provide flattened snapshots, ethnography contributes an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and play through gritty and detailed descriptions. Whether conveyed in video format, presentations or reports, these stories describe how people confront and surmount the hurdles they encounter in meeting their responsibilities and fulfilling their hopes in our globalized consumer culture. By delving into the richness of people's life stories, ethnographic research can pivot companies away from less meaningful segmentation parameters, such as demographics or purchase history, and toward those that drive behavior, such as purpose and intent. Quantitative techniques such as factor analysis can subsequently be applied to locate and size market segments.

For the most part, consumers have faith in online ratings and view them as trustworthy. But, the author argues, this trust may be misplaced. The heart of the problem lies with our herd instincts -natural human impulses characterized by a lack of individual decision making -that cause us to think and act in the same way as other people around us. When it comes to online ratings, our herd instincts combine with our susceptibility to positive "social influence."When we see that other people have appreciated a certain book, enjoyed a hotel or restaurant or liked a particular doctor, this can cause us to feel the same positive feelings and to provide a similarly high online rating. The author describes an experiment that he and two colleagues conducted on a social news-aggregation website. On the site, users rate news articles and comments by voting them up or down based on how much they enjoyed them. The researchers randomly manipulated the scores of comments with a single up or down vote and then measured the impact of these small manipulations on subsequent scores. The results were striking. The positive manipulations created a positive social influence bias that persisted over five months and that ultimately increased the comments'final ratings by 25%. Negatively manipulated scores, meanwhile, were offset by a correction effect that neutralized the manipulation: Although viewers of negatively manipulated comments were more likely to vote negative (evidence of negative herding), they were even more likely to positively "correct"what they saw as an undeserved negative score.

As these examples illustrate, MSPs include some of the largest and fastest-growing businesses of the past decade. Why? Successful MSPs create enormous value by reducing search costs or transaction costs (or both) for participants. As a result, MSPs often occupy privileged positions in their respective industries; most other industry participants revolve around and depend on MSPs in important ways. This article begins with a description of how MSPs work and why they can erect such high barriers to entry for new participants. It then offers an analysis of four fundamental strategic decisions and associated trade-offs that set MSPs apart from other types of businesses and that every MSP entrepreneur and investor should carefully consider. These challenges are as follows: •the number of sides to bring on (deciding whether to bring on two or more); •design (ensuring the interests of the different platform sides are not in conflict with each other or the MSP); •pricing structures (determining which platform side or sides should be charged more, based on the groups'relative value from interacting with each other); and •governance rules (regulating the participation and activities undertaken by the various platform sides to ensure a high level of quality, or outsourcing that function to users through ratings systems).

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. A study by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting finds that companies now face a digital imperative: adopt new technologies effectively or face competitive obsolescence. While there is consensus on the importance of adopting digital technology, most employees find the process complex and slow. Many say their leaders lack urgency and fail to share a vision for how technology can change the business. Companies that succeed tend to have leaders who share their vision and define a road map, create cross-organizational authority for adoption and reward employees for working towards it.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In this 2013 report, new research by MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group looks at companies that "walk the talk"in addressing significant sustainability concerns. So-called "Walkers"focus heavily on five fronts: sustainability strategy, business case, measurement, business model innovation and leadership commitment. For them, addressing significant sustainability issues has become a core strategic imperative and a way to mitigate threats and identify new opportunities.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. What does it take to transform an organization before a crisis hits? How can leaders initiate major transformations proactively? The key often lies in strategic renewal - a set of practices that can guide leaders into a new era of innovation by building strategy, experimentation and execution into the day-to-day fabric of the organization. It's not easy: leaders find it much easier to resist change than to embrace it.

Seven years of research into how teams work shows just how great the benefits are when team members have lots of experience working with one another. Five steps can help managers take advantage of team familiarity, a surprisingly underutilized tool.

Companies that have what the authors call two-dimensional (2-D) diversity--their leaders exhibit both inherent and learned diversity traits--are much more likely to understand their clients and unlock innovation among their workers.

Research shows that mobile banner ads can be effective for some products--those that are both utilitarian and "high involvement" (bought only after much deliberation on the consumer's part). Marketers who understand this can spend their mobile dollars more wisely and tailor and time their ads for maximum impact.

"No" doesn't necessarily mean "never." In fact, new research from Stanford shows that people who've refused your first request are much likelier to agree to your second one than anyone would expect.

Since the global financial crisis, speculation has been rampant about the dollar's looming if not imminent displacement as the world's leading currency. The author makes the case that the crisis has actually strengthened the dollar's position.

The numerous gains in health and wealth over the past few centuries have had the unintended effect of widening inequality gaps: Every breakthrough makes some people better off than others. Although some amount of inequality may be necessary for growth, inequality becomes intolerable when the successful use their advantage to pull even further ahead of the rest.

Data about hours worked per employee, productivity per employee, and per capita GDP in several countries around the world. The bad news: Even "hot" emerging markets like Brazil have seen little growth in productivity in recent years, so even if labor markets recover, those gains might not result in much added GDP.

For decades, businesses have sought competitive advantage in "upstream" activities related to making new products--building bigger factories, finding cheaper raw materials, improving efficiency, and so on. But those easily copied sources of advantage are being irreversibly eroded, and advantage increasingly lies "downstream"--in the marketplace. Today the strategic question that drives business is not "What else can we make?" but "What else can we do for our customers?" This new center of gravity demands a rethink of long-standing strategy principles: First, the sources and locus of competitive advantage now lie outside the firm, and advantage is accumulative--rather than eroding over time as competitors catch up, it grows with experience and knowledge. Second, it's no longer about having the better product but about how you position yourself in the market and which companies you choose to compete against. Third, the pace of change in markets is now driven by shifts in customers' purchase criteria rather than by improvements in products or technology.

Conglomerates once dominated the U.S. business world. But by the 1980s, they'd been laid low by poor performance, inspiring the belief that focused corporations created more shareholder value. Today conglomerates are largely considered dinosaurs--except, that is, in emerging markets, where diversified business groups, comprising numerous unrelated enterprises, are flourishing. The authors, who studied Indian business groups for five years, believe that the key to these organizations' success is their structure. Unlike corporate divisions, a group's affiliate companies are legally independent. That allows them to raise capital, set strategies, and create incentives more effectively. Affiliates don't report directly to the leaders of the business group but are overseen by the group center, a management layer in the group chairperson's office. It coordinates the identity work that unites and inspires affiliates' employees, and helps affiliates spot and seize opportunities, share resources and talent, and collaborate on strategic activities. Business groups using this model are not only profitable; they also outperform other companies in their markets.

Companies in developing countries are often so focused on chasing growth that they fail to invest in improving their innovation, operations, and brand management. So despite enormous reach and revenues in the billions, they're unprepared when demand growth slows and competition from increasingly savvy developed-world multinationals intensifies. The once high-flying Chinese automakers BYD and Chery have landed hard. In contrast, another automaker, Great Wall, and the appliance maker Haier have won early competitive advantage. In their efforts to compete, emerging-market companies should consider four stages: (1) Seize the moment and invest in the basics, such as payroll, finance, factory operations, and employee management. (2) Build strength by learning (through licensing or contract manufacturing, for example) from established companies. (3) Scale and consolidate, keeping product lines and markets relatively narrow. (4) Move up and out, with a strong portfolio of brands, innovation capabilities, advanced technology, marketing, and sales.

When a new work group forms, people often make snap judgments about who is qualified to lead. If the players don't already know one another, they tend to afford status to teammates on the basis of factors such as age, gender, race, attractiveness, and rank. These are characteristics beyond your control, but they don't necessarily predetermine the influence you can have on a group. Anyone, the authors say, can achieve higher status and more influence by getting in the right mind-set before engaging with new teammates. There are three psychological states that can increase the optimism, confidence, and proactive behavior that people associate with leaders: promotion focus (defined as a focus on goals and positive outcomes), happiness, and a feeling of power. And all it takes to help you enter one of these states is a simple five-minute exercise before starting a group task: Write about your ambitions or a time when you felt happy or powerful. The authors report that study subjects who did exactly that were more likely than others to speak up, steer decision making, and be viewed by their teammates as leaders--both in initial group meetings and in follow-up meetings two days later.