Weekly Links (Week of Jan.18, 2010)

Find a Bright Spot, and Clone it (Fast Company, Jan.2010) - An excerpt from the upcoming book "Switch" by the Heath brothers (authors of "Made to Stick"). I highly recommend the book to all my classmates that are faced with leading changes in their business or their lives.

Shareholders vs. Stakeholders vs. Communities (January, 2010) - A follow-up to a case study in Global Strategy II, looking at the challenge of pharmaceuticals in emerging markets. This specific item looks at the trade offs between shareholder value, crowd-sourcing Intellectual Property and giving back to communities that can benefit from their older R&D.

New Pampers giving P&G Diaper Rash (January, 2010) - Following up to our Crisis Management discussions with Rick Amee, intertwined with the speed and power of Social Media. This looks at the mistakes P&G made in introducing their "new" Pampers without properly communicating to their customers about the changes and benefits. Plus this article seems especially relevant to teammate Portia Mount and her newborn baby :)

Pepsi Brings in the Health Police (Business Week, Jan.2010) - The current Dean of the Wake Forest Schools of Business hired current Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. It's interesting to see how an international CEO is taking such dramatic steps to shift the company from US-centric lifestyle foods (soda, chips, pizza), which are less healthy, to a more International-centric approach to nutrition.

Will Walmart's "Sustainability Index" Really Work? (Fast Company, Jan.2010)- An initial look at the impact that Walmart's "Green" initiative is having on their suppliers, their product mix, and the future of supplier relations. It also looks at the difficulties of creating a universal "sustainability index" and labeling model across a breadth of products.

The "Gap Theory" of Curiosity

At the top of my current non-school reading list is Made to Stick (Dan & Chip Heath). For an innovation and ideas junkie such as myself, it's almost impossible to put down. I highly recommend it to anyone that needs to influence people, or drive new ideas. I plan to buy one for each person on my team at work, and probably my MBA team.

[NOTE: I would have much preferred this book to the one we used in StratMktg last semester.]

On page 84 (hardcopy version), they introduce a concept called "The Gap Theory of Curiosity", which was created by George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon, 1994). It argues that gains in knowledge causes pain for intelligent people, and that they strongly desire to fill that gap. It's like having an itch that needs to be scratched. Heath & Heath suggest that purveyors of new ideas should use this human behavioral instinct to their advantage when presenting new concepts. The person with the concept should look for ways to present it such that it leaves the audience wanting to ask those questions that satisfy their need to have the gaps of knowledge filled.

I bring up this concept because at this point in the MBA program many of my classmates have reached a level where they have put together quite a bit of knowledge, but now the gaps are starting to become more important than the workload. This creates challenges within team projects, as interest levels vary based on how much of a gap each project fills for each person. Combine this with the willingness (or lack of willingness) of professors to fill gaps during classroom discussions, and you have a difficult situation for any team that is trying to motivate teammates to participate or complete projects.

Business School is like Business Books - Useful in Snippets

Let me preface this by saying that some (or much) of this may not make sense to many people reading it. I have a strange way of processing information. I'm sure there is a psychological name for it, but I've never found it. It essentially goes like this.

• Read a lot, almost anything you can get your hands on, in all formats (newspapers, blogs, magazines, books, etc.). Sometimes read the entire piece, and sometimes scan it.
• Listen a lot, to people from many of different backgrounds and social levels.
• Ask questions that sound broad, but are typically only looking for a partial answer.
• Do not consciously coordinate the things you read or hear or ask.
• Periodically have a whole bunch of facts, ideas, concepts, quotes and other relevant pieces come together into ideas or pictures. Scratch your head wondering how they all came together.

This piecing together sometimes happens on purpose, like when it's time to finish a paper or analysis. And sometimes it just "clicks" in the middle of a sentence as I'm talking to someone. The latter are the ones that I can never quite figure out, but occasionally I let it flow and it sounds like a reasonably intelligent set of thoughts (note: that's not bragging...I honestly don't know how it pieces together).

So what's the point? So what? Hang on a second, I'm getting there.

As I mentioned before, I read quite bit. Since I pay my mortgage by doing things that are semi-business related, I often read books on business. I'm currently reading Made to Stick, Innovation that Fits, and Free. I'm also reading Serve the People and The Blue Sweater, not so much for their business content but rather as a way to gain some inside into foreign culture to help augment this semester. Each one of those books is sitting on my nightstand, and each one is somewhere between 10% and 60% finished. I rarely seem to finish the books, but I always find a few interesting snippets from one that relates to one of the others. It's my favorite part of reading these various types of books, when one snippet connects to another and seems to create something new. A new idea, or a bigger concept.

As we've moved farther into our MBA program, we're now at that stage when more and more snippets from various courses or experiences are piecing themselves together in my head. The broader concepts these create are becoming interesting, useful and fostering a bunch of ideas for new businesses.

I'm not sure if this is the case for many (or any) of my classmates, as I often get blank stares when I try and explain some of these conjoined snippets. I'm not sure if they don't see things the same way, or if I still needed to work on explaining the new concepts, or if I'm just off base. Many of them are incredibly knowledgeable about specific topics, so it's quite possible that it could be the latter.

Either way, more and more pieces are starting to connect with each other or are at least in each other's gravitational field. For me, this is when fun stuff happens. Now the challenge becomes not over-thinking things.