Talent flows - Silicon Valley Style
This neat article offers a snapshot of who is winning and losing the talent wars in Silicon Valley among the big players (Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). It offers a great graphic to spark interest and debate. One of the interesting points it makes is that Facebook is a net winner among people moving around various jobs in the Valley. Check it out.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on July 10, 2011
Forget college and change the world?
PayPal founder Peter Thiel thinks he has found a new way to change the world. A recent article describes how his foundation has created $100,000 grants for young superstars to put their college plans on hold, and under the direction of a mentor, work on really difficult problems that require scientific and technical innovation. It's another interesting example of how entrepreneurs give back, and how private money can be used to try to solve major social problems.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on May 30, 2011
More women in top management = more success as a company
Experts and observers have long argued that there is a benefit to firms of having more women in senior decision-making roles. The reasons are many, including the importance of diversity, the fact that senior women more readily represent female customers (the majority of buyers in many industries), and a general openness to talent. Some new research done at Columbia finds that companies with women in the top team do enjoy a performance benefit. Interestingly, this doesn't apply to firms that have a female CEO (rare though they are). Worth a look.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on May 26, 2011
Say It Ain’t So: The Shortening Half Life of the Business School Case Study
We in business school just love to use examples. It's examples, stories and personal insights that make what we teach accessible, inspiring and sometimes game-changing. Along the way, many of these great stories get written up as cases, either formal ones like those created by the Harvard Business School, or less formal ones, such as those captured in articles, stories and books. There is just one problem with all this - the companies lauded as examples of greatness don't keep it up. I've had this experience myself - no sooner do you think a practice or process in an organization is interesting and useful for others to learn about than some strategic disaster befalls them and refudiates all the other great stuff that the company did.
I find the current situation over at Nokia to be particularly poignant. As a recent FT article points out, Nokia was the poster child of high-tech stategic success throughout the 90's and even into the early parts of this century. There must be hundreds of cases written about the company and how it manages everything from training to supply chains to design. Personally, I've worked with and enjoyed interacting with Nokia people for years. Unfortunately, the company missed a few strategic pivot points - lack of progress in the USA and being overtaken by the twin combination of Apple and Android in phones being two notable ones - and it is now facing the grim prospect of radical downsizing and a fight for its future. Will they pull it off? I hope so - I admire the company and think they are now making the tough decisions they probably should have made some time ago. Will their eventual success resurrect the value of those old case studies? Probably not.
Which brings me to an interesting point -- just because a company isn't perennially successful doesn't mean we can't learn anything from them. But it probably means that case studies, like other kinds of perishable goods, probably have to be issued with an expiration date.
For a chart of Nokia's stock price relative to its sector, click here.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on May 02, 2011
Humanities Graduates Bring ...well…Humanity to Bear at Work
I thought this extremely thought provoking blog post by fellow Harvard Blogger Tony Golsby-Smith was a great reminder that although analytical tools and frameworks can help solve certain kinds of problems, they are hopeless facing other situations.
Among the advantages humanities training offers that Golsby-Smith points out are:
- The ability to deal with ambiguity and see richer patterns
- Creativity and curiosity, correlates with innovation
- Skilfull writing and presentation of ideas
I would also argue that students of the humanities are far more likely to be aware of aspects of leadership we don't spend nearly enough time on - for instance, the emotional meaning people make of executive actions. I've written before about the power of symbolism and was teaching about it recently at a company famous for its hard-charging, numbers oriented culture. After the session, not one but about a quarter of the people in the room came up to me with the same basic acknowledgement "I stink at symbolism - I get it wrong every time." Perhaps we should assign those folks a dose of some of the classics to see the meaning that people can make of their actions and how easy it is to be misunderstood.
With respect to writing and communicating, even though some people have a gift for it, there's no substitute for practice and feedback if you seek to get better. Humanities training does that, too.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on April 08, 2011
