RGM

BNet.com's article quotes Rita McGrath extensively in its discussion of uncertain business conditions.

Don't Think You Know What to Think: When studying data or trends, watch out for confirmation bias. Simply put, managers are often drawn to theories or data that confirm what they already think. "Managers delight in new data that confirms their preconceptions," says Rita Gunther McGrath, associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. To avoid that trap, ask questions like, Could my answer be wrong? Could another answer be right? If so, why?

Review responses to likely and unlikely scenarios with your team. Don't be too rigid about your approach to meeting new challenges. Sticking to only one plan or solution path can lead to "dangerous escalation of commitment to a failing operation," McGrath says. If what you're doing isn't working, make changes quickly.

To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Friday, May 08, 2009

BNET has listed some key tools for managing under uncertainty. Discovery Driven Planning is one of them!

Dates: May 6, 2009

• Posted: Wednesday, May 06, 2009

To fix business schools, we academics should focus less on our reputations among our peers, and more on the connection between our research and real managers in real businesses.

One consequence of the quest for academic legitimacy amidst business school faculty is what one observer called a "relentless quest for status." Academics in all fields gain status by publishing articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, particularly the top four or five outlets in the field that really count. Status also stems from those self-same articles being cited in other articles, to show 'impact' or 'influence' on other academics.

In my own field of management, status comes from being recognized as a contributor to a base discipline, such as sociology, economics, or psychology. It's not about making a contribution to management thinking, with its unique emphasis on the jobs of - you guessed it - real managers. As Rakesh Khurana observed in a 2007 article in the Academy of Management Journal: "...many of the disciplined-trained scholars joining business school faculties were not intrinsically interested in business...Few [younger faculty members] were motivated in their research by a desire to examine the real problems that managers faced..." To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Sunday, May 03, 2009

At Columbia Business School's Public Offering, Rita McGrath has posted... "One of the companies I studied for my dissertation research, which dealt with how established companies build competences to tackle new areas, was Citibank (as it was then known). Citi was kind enough to sponsor my three-year research program on their corporate ventures that yielded many insights into the corporate venturing process (and which helped me get through graduate school). I studied their successes and the failures and tried to figure out what made the difference...[To read the entire article, click here.]

• Posted: Sunday, May 03, 2009

For companies planning to launch new initiatives during uncertain times, it's important "to know from the start that the plan is wrong," according to Ian MacMillan, Wharton professor of innovation and entrepreneurship and co-leader of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs . Assumptions are what get most companies into trouble, MacMillan and co-author Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, argue in their new book, Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, McGrath and MacMillan describe how firms tend to approach growth in ways that hurt them, and what they can do to make the most of new opportunities, even during the current downturn. It's not failure that companies need to avoid, they say, but rather "failing expensively." To read the entire article and view the video, click here.

• Posted: Sunday, May 03, 2009