Discovery Driven Planning: Different from conventional planning
Discovery Driven Planning was developed because years of research showed that companies using conventional planning methods to invest in new opportunities were systematically failing. When we researched the reasons, we found that conventional planning leads to systematically poor decision-making in a new venture, or other uncertain situation. With a conventional plan, projections are made based on whatever is known at the time, and the metric for the worth of the plan is how close actual outcomes came to projections. When you think about it, this is crazy, because when you have very little knowledge about a situation, the primary objective should be to learn. Instead, conventional plans lead people to blind themselves to emerging realities, desperately trying to make a flawed plan happen as they had anticipated.
The fundamental thing to remember when you are venturing into uncertain territory is that your ratio of assumptions that you have to make to knowledge that you have is quite high. Human beings are terrible processors of assumptions! First, we tend to forget them. Indeed, research conducted by Russ Ackoff, who was at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, found that in an average company the length of time required to forget half the assumptions underlying an important decision was about 6 weeks.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 06, 2008
The case against case studies
In a terrific article which just came out in the February 4, 2008 edition of Business Week, author Geoff Gloeckler describes how Columbia Business School is getting away from conventional case studies, instead using ‘decision briefs’ that are more like the situations managers would face in real life than the detailed, deeply researched cases that often form the basis of a business school curriculum. The goal is to help MBA’s develop better skills at making sense of ambiguous information. You’ll find the complete article here.
The move away from cases in the MBA program actually mirrors what we’ve been doing in Executive Education programs for years. We find that executives have so much interesting and rich context that they bring into the classroom that cases aren’t that useful (besides who wants to wade through 30 or 40 pages of a lengthy case?). We tend to use a lot of short case-ettes, actual stories from the company, and even clips from newspapers and magazines to get the discussion started. Not only is it more interesting for the participants, it does force the frameworks and tools you use to be very real-world.
Among my favorite short cases are the “Spinbrush” story from Proctor and Gamble and a short case detailing the end of life of the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 04, 2008
Business School Rankings: Hungry for Lists?
Anyone who enjoys watching the various business schools get sliced and diced by reviewers will get a kick out of the Financial Times report on business school rankings.
Absolutely no shortage of lists in their story “A League of their Own”
Got your own list to add? Or perhaps a list you would like to see developed? I’m sure that’s possible.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of rankings, the FT’s whole 2008 list for American schools can be found here. I’m delighted to see that our own Columbia Business School is ranked at #2.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 04, 2008
The Despair of Entrepreneurship Professors are perennially popular but doomed business ideas
One of the most dreaded aspects of being an entrepreneurship professor are the hundreds of times that students will come up with the same - bad - business concept when tasked with building businesses of their own. A perennial favorite is dog-walking services. Comes up every semester! Now, I don’t have a problem with dogs or dog walkers, just with a Columbia MBA deciding to put the degree to use in that occupation - doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, every so often a bright idea comes along that defies the common wisdom of the entrepreneurship professor. Just such an inspiration appears to have visited our colleagues over at the Kellogg School, as I read the following story from Business Week.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 30, 2008
Tricks of the mind - and why proofreaders have such a difficult time
Sent to me by my brother, with observations from my mom that the power of the human mind to capture information is quite remarkable. It also helps us understand why good proofreading is so difficult.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 29, 2008
