Harvard Business Publishing

Dr. Robert Ballard and his team have used robots to explore the mid-Atlantic ridge where our earth births her new "skin" by oozing out lava more than15,000 feet below the sea's surface — an environment of 300 degree Celsius sea water, full of metals and toxic acids. The team expected to find no life, due to the harsh condition and lack of light. And yet to their wonder, they found life teeming around these volcanic vents, discovering creatures from tube worms to large clams living by chemosynthesis — not photosynthesis, the process which was thought to be central to all life on earth. How did Ballard's team do this? By having new probes that explored things beyond the reach of normal human perception, and, just as importantly, by bringing to bear the best talent in the planet — rapidly. Advanced digital devices allowed for the craft to be created to... Keep Reading »

The four fundamental principles of the agile, "edge-based" organization are situational awareness, skills, values, and decision rights. For instance, special forces teams are able to deal effectively with the most complex and dynamic situations because they have been designed to be able to be extremely agile. In other words, these troops are able to dynamically adjust to their predicaments so well because they share information broadly, train their people how to use that data appropriately, imbue them with the right values so that they act with integrity, and allow for them to take action — by giving the rights to make decisions to the very skin of the organization. The idea is to deal effectively with an asymmetric and dynamic set of opponents. This thinking has been articulately documented in many places including the excellent book Power to the Edge by David Alberts & Richard Hayes. Unfortunately, despite the fact... Keep Reading »

As my friend Sanjiv Mirchandani has noted, when the United States was founded, our population was about 2.6 million people and the Chinese had about 286 million. Our country's success rests not on size, but on being the world's best immigrant reprocessing facility. I am usually not so US-centric in my comments on this blog, but I am concerned that in all the discussion in the United States about our economic recovery, we have forgotten our most important import — brilliant people from other lands. If a country wins the mind war, all else follows. Why should we worry now? A few reasons. First, we have made it more difficult for people to enter the country on H1B visas, limiting the number to 65,000 — with just an additional 20,000 for holders of advanced degrees. Why would we restrict this at all? We know that over the long term we... Keep Reading »

Google tapped into an existing set of mental relationships to make their model work. Think of Andy Warhol; Andy worked with Campbell Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe. Google did similar work with page links. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is comparable to Avon Products — Avon, which just reported that they have 5.8 million representatives across the globe, has thrived for the past 123 years because it has a well-designed architecture of participation, as Tim O'Reilly so brilliantly termed it. Wikipedia took off because their method to harness user contribution was also facile and effective. So where does Wolfram Alpha, the new knowledge search engine which is scheduled to launch this month, fit in? It was created by the genius Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica — a spectacular tool to work with, visualize, and even embed complex mathematical functions and scientific data. Some have said his new project may rival... Keep Reading »

By John Sviokla and Dan Ariely Sometimes asking someone to do something for nothing is more powerful than paying them. In a research paper entitled "Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets," James Heyman and Dan show that people are willing to help move a couch or perform an experiment just by being asked. Moreover, these individuals feel good about their "gift". Most interestingly, the experiments show that contrary to standard economic theory, paying a small incremental incentive does not increase effort, but actually lowers it — because meager compensation profanes the gift effect and disincents the giver. Bringing money into the relationship takes the giver's work out of "gift" market, and brings it into the "pay-for-effort" market. When it was done for nothing, the protagonist was a "donor." When small money was on the table, he or she became an underpaid employee. The easiest way to think about... Keep Reading »

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." — Justice Lewis Brandeis A day before Lehman went bankrupt, they carried an A rating from Moody's on their debt. Likewise, AIG was rated AAA only 24 hours before they begged for their first multi-billion dollar tranche of bailout cash. Worse yet, the rescue bills have not created a new way of improving risk assessment for bonds, but rather have put a heavier reliance on the oligopoly of existing bond raters — Moody's, S&P, and DBRS. Many articles have called for increased transparency in financial markets. A recent Wall Street Journal article by L. Gorgon Crovitz points out that FDR wisely opted for transparency rather than overburdening regulation. Crovitz also notes that XBRL, the more flexible and intelligent data standard for sharing financial information, might help make things more open. S&P itself has recently published a white paper suggesting three different models: issuer pay, subscriber... Keep Reading »

Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap. Twitter shares all these attributes. Just like duct tape can be used to repair a chair or make an artificial flower, twitter is a means of communication that can be layered over anything and everything, By now, most of us are familiar with Twitter and its 140-character long tweets. Anyone can use the web and their phone to both send and receive tweets for free. It enables people to send messages directly to one person, groups to self-form, or to send a tweet to everyone who follows you. While some people only follow a few dozen compatriots, Guy Kawasaki follows over 100,000 people and has almost 100,000 followers, as well as creating (with some help) over 28,000 tweets. As a pundit, Guy is using Twitter to build an ongoing audience. By way of... Keep Reading »

My older brother Skip is a doctor who started and runs a substance abuse clinic in Rhode Island. His business is booming! But if you are not in the cheap food business, pawn brokerage, bankruptcy law, or other counter-cyclical activities, you and your firm are probably looking very carefully at where you can help to find new demand and grow your business in this tough market. Many of us are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data available about the marketplace, competitors, and internal reports. Having been an art student before going to get my business education, I have always been struck by how poorly people represent information for decision making. In order to turn a flood of complex data into an easily interpretable form, the lowly map is not a bad place to start. Everybody can relate to a geography, and many forms of data can be "mapped" onto... Keep Reading »

Many pundits are railing about Cisco's move into the server market because the company's current gross margins are 10-20% less in the server market than in their core router market. What these critics miss is that the evolution of computing is to create corporate clouds of functionality and storage — and those who control the architecture of the cloud will dominate the commercial relationship. What the heck does it mean to have a "cloud"? It means that the functions you want like storage, communications, and applications, don't need to live on the device you have in front of you. You can get them on demand from the network. This is an old idea and aspiration, but it is starting to come to fruition for four fundamental reasons: first, there is much more demand for portability, and due to power and weight constraints, the device you carry with you will continue... Keep Reading »

When you share information on a social site: Who owns the content? Who controls it? This question at is the core of Facebook's current turmoil around its terms of service. Last week they tried to keep more rights on content for themselves, but a few days later they backed off. Why should your company care? Well, I believe every firm will eventually have a social media strategy - and all executives will face some of the same issues Facebook navigates today. Of course I have enormous respect for Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, who at the age of 21 turned down about a billion dollars for his rocket-growth company. How many of us would have been able to turn down that sum, at that age? Facebook has over 175,000,000 members - which makes it the 6th largest "country" on the planet, all done in five years. (For a formal theory of... Keep Reading »