Tag / network
Case Study: When You’re Successful, Stretched Too Thin, and Indispensable
Marion Barraud for HBR Carla was killing off her leading man. And it felt good—but not perfect.
She drummed her fingers on the editing desk and squinted at the monitors in front of her as she scrolled through footage from the season finale of Dope, her production company’s long-running drama series about DEA agents.
“What’s wrong?” asked Melanie, who had directed the episode.
Editor's NoteThis fictionalized case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you’d like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and email address.
“In that last scene, we need quicker cuts between the fire at the lab and the flashbacks. And the song isn’t right. Viewers should be sad, yes, but mostly shocked. This is their hero dying—without any warning.”
Melanie looked upset, and Carla felt a pang of guilt. Dope was supposed to be Melanie’s n..
Friendly, Frictionless Work: Best Practices For Enterprise Messaging UX, From Slack
Creating good user experiences for apps inside messaging platforms poses a relatively new design challenge. When moving from desktop web to mobile interfaces, developers have had to rethink interaction design to work around a constrained screen size, a new set of input gestures and unreliable network connections.
Like our tiny touchscreens, messaging platforms also shake up the types of input that apps can accept, change designers’ canvas size, and demand a different set of assumptions about how users communicate.
The post Friendly, Frictionless Work: Best Practices For Enterprise Messaging UX, From Slack appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Success with the Internet of Things Requires More Than Chasing the Cool Factor
Many companies begin an internet of things (IoT) journey with great expectations, only to end up with disappointing business results. Gartner recently estimated that through 2018 “80% of IoT implementations will squander transformational opportunities” and fail to monetize IoT data. And a new survey by Cisco found that one-third of all completed IoT projects were not considered a success. In my experience with dozens of organizations implementing IoT solutions, those that achieved their expected ROI changed their traditional business approaches in one or more of the following ways:
They Developed a Partner Ecosystem The essence of IoT is interconnectivity. Interconnectivity is about more than the connections between devices — it is about the connections between customers, partners, and suppliers.
Accordingly, IoT is driving a shift in business structures from a one-company-does-it-all model to a let’s-work-together approach. This means that companies must leave behind traditional mod..
What to Do When You’re Returning to a Company You Used to Work For
The idea of boomerang employees — workers who voluntarily leave a job at an organization and then rejoin that same organization at a later date — is gaining more and more acceptance from hiring managers and in the labor force. If you’re one of these employees, how should you handle your comeback? What’s the best way to get back into the fold? Do you try to pick up where you left off? And what do you say to people about why you quit in the first place and why you’re back?
What the Experts Say
The increasing acceptance of boomerang employees is partly due to the “tight job market,” according to Michael Watkins, chair of Genesis Advisers, professor at IMD, and author of The First 90 Days. “It’s natural for companies to look for employees who have a track record,” he says. “Former employees are known quantities.” For both workers and employers, the boomerang represents “a positive development,” says Karen Dillon, coauthor of several best-selling titles, including How Will You Measure Your..
Deloitte’s Radical Attempt to Reframe Diversity
Deloitte has started a major debate in diversity circles by turning its approach upside down. The firm is ending its women’s network and other affinity groups and starting to focus on…men. The central idea: It’ll offer all managers — including the white guys who still dominate leadership — the skills to become more inclusive, then hold them accountable for building more-balanced businesses.
“A lot of our leaders are still older white men, and they need to be part of the conversation and advocate for women,” is how Deepa Purushothaman, national director of Deloitte’s soon-to-be-disbanded women’s employee resource group (ERG), puts it.
This is a reversal from the strategy large companies have been trying for decades: focusing on empowering “out groups” through dedicated networks, known as affinity groups or ERGs. This approach was pioneered in 1970 when Xerox launched the first one, now called the National Black Employees Association. Today many large companies have ERGs for employees ..
Leading Digital Transformation Is Like Urban Planning
Most companies want their businesses to keep pace with digital startups, but end up bogged down by the need to fix the daily challenges that their decades-old IT systems create. How do you redesign and rebuild major infrastructure while keeping the day-to-day work going? This kind of challenge is often referred to as “repairing the airplane while you’re flying it.” But a more instructive analogy might be the redesign of a major city’s infrastructure.
Specifically, there are three urban planning strategies, commonly followed by major metropolises, that leaders can use for inspiration in the race to keep up with digital competition. They include building glistening landmarks that anchor their digital strategy (as Dubai has done), removing roadblocks and bottlenecks to improve their underlying speed and agility (Boston), or changing course altogether to construct an entirely new city (Shanghai).
Dubai: Erecting Modern Landmarks Targeted investments in striking new sights, like Dubai’s E..
6 Digital Strategies, and Why Some Work Better than Others
Digital technology has been roiling markets and disrupting companies for more than two decades, but despite that lengthy history, incumbents are still struggling to enact and deliver on digital transformations.
The first challenge is disruption; digitization is enabling new, disruptive models that aggressively compete with legacy models, putting material pressure on incumbents’ revenue and profit growth. As incumbents fight back with their own digital strategies, our research shows that they often trigger a second wave of competition, closer to the notion of Schumpeterian imitation where incumbents start themselves to innovate, sometimes aggressively, against the threat of entrants slashing yet more revenue and profit growth. We estimate that on average, both waves of digital competition has taken out half of the annual revenue growth and one third of the growth in earnings from incumbents that have failed to respond to digital.
The second challenge is that, even when companies do la..
Being Too Busy for Friends Won’t Help Your Career
Friendship matters.
Everything we do to succeed in our careers is improved when we’re supported by a foundation of strong, stable friendships. Basic research tells us this is so, yet many who focus on their careers run the risk of losing touch with their closest social connections.
Psychologists define close friends as those nonrelatives whose birthdays we celebrate, with whom we discuss intimate matters such as work or marital stress, and whom we might call upon for help with a move or a medical emergency.
These people are critical for both our psychological and physical well-being. The number and strength of our friendships has long been a consistent predictor of emotional well-being. And beyond the psychological benefits, friendships can influence our basic physiology, as shown by studies that link social connections to cellular-level protection against disease. We are less likely to catch a cold or suffer from acute stress responses if we have a solid network of friends. In a re..
How AI Will Change the Way We Make Decisions
With the recent explosion in AI, there has been the understandable concern about its potential impact on human work. Plenty of people have tried to predict which industries and jobs will be most affected, and which skills will be most in demand. (Should you learn to code? Or will AI replace coders too?)
Rather than trying to predict specifics, we suggest an alternative approach. Economic theory suggests that AI will substantially raise the value of human judgment. People who display good judgment will become more valuable, not less. But to understand what good judgment entails and why it will become more valuable, we have to be precise about what we mean.
What AI does and why it’s useful Recent advances in AI are best thought of as a drop in the cost of prediction. By prediction, we don’t just mean the future—prediction is about using data that you have to generate data that you don’t have, often by translating large amounts of data into small, manageable amounts. For example, using ..
Making Sense of Our Very Competitive, Super Monopolistic Economy
In the 1980s and 1990s, Blockbuster modernized the movie rental business. It offered far more movies than its smaller rivals, used computers to better manage that inventory, and designed its stores to be bright and family friendly. By 1993, just eight years after its founding, Blockbuster was the global leader in movie rentals, with more than 3,400 stores worldwide.
Then Netflix happened. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010.
Economist Luigi Zingales mentions the Blockbuster story in a recent paper as an example of how the economy ought to work. A company has an innovative idea, which for a while provides competitive advantage. Later on, a new innovator comes along and pushes it aside.
But Zingales fears that this isn’t happening as often as it should. Instead, he argues, the U.S. economy may be succumbing to what he calls “the Medici cycle,” named for the powerful family of medieval Florence. Their motto — or at least the motto often attributed to them — was “Money to get power. Power..