Can we really tell who will succeed in competitive business situations without knowing what they have to offer? - MIT Study

The finding: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. It’s possible to predict which executives will win a business competition solely on the basis of the social signals they send. The study: Sandy Pentland and colleague Daniel Olguín Olguín outfitted executives at a party with devices that recorded data on their social signals—tone of voice, gesticulation, proximity to others, and more. Five days later the same executives presented business plans to a panel of judges in a contest. Without reading or hearing the pitches, Pentland correctly forecast the winners, using only data collected at the party. The challenge: Can we really tell who will succeed in competitive business situations without knowing what they have to offer? Professor Pentland, defend your research.

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Digital Accounting : Business Model Changing innovation - David Birch, Digital Money Blog

[Dave Birch] One thing that struck me about PayPal's "Innovate 2010" conference in San Francisco, in (I have to say) fairly stark contrast to many of the events I attend in the more traditional banking world is just how much innovation was actually going on. Too often I'm tempted into a presentation on radical innovation in international payments only to find that the radical innovation being discussed is changing field 27 of message type 94 from two bits to three bits. At Innovate, though, the innovation was real: entirely new products and services that depend on the existence of the new payment platform underneath them.

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What is The Role of the Chief Innovation Officer - Mark W.Johnson, Innosight - BusinessWeek

Innovation isn't new, but appointing a C-suite member to oversee it is. Mark Johnson looks at how the CIO's role should be executed Ten years ago, you'd have been hard-pressed to find a chief innovation officer on any company's leadership team. Today such leading companies as AMD (AMD), Citigroup (C), Coca Cola (KO), DuPont (DD), Humana (HUM), and Owens Corning (OC) each have one. Many others, including Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), have senior leaders who are tasked with heading innovation in effect, if not in name. Not that innovation is new: Organizations have been innovating as long as companies have existed. Why the new role now? There are many reasons. Three stand out.

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The Eight-Word Mission Statement - Eric Hellweg, Editor - Harvard Business Review

One of the many presenters who spoke on a topic of real interest to the HBR community was Kevin Starr, the executive director of the Mulago Foundation. Mulago channels investments to socially minded businesses. It looks for opportunities to invest in "lasting change that goes to scale." The social sector is a young sector, and as such, is awash with many different ideas, companies, and approaches. There's also a strong amount of investment in the sector, and like any burgeoning field, there's a range of quality when it comes to the approaches to and efficacy of the various companies.

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How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? - An Alarming Statistic from Information is Beautiful

Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy (including withdrawing broadband access for persistent pirates). Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenue and livelihoods. But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?

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