Making Innovation Happen
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 09:21PM Think of famous brands you know: Hallmark cards and Coca-Cola soft drinks, for example. What do these products have in common for consumers? An emotional meaning that taps into thoughts and feelings related to the positive aspects of transformation, according to Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 09:15PM Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inauguration Day, 1933 Creativity, a quality more traditionally associated with artistic endeavors, has been slow to find its acknowledged place in the business world. Yet any entrepreneur can attest to the creative power required to build an organization where none existed before. "Look, I made a hat…/Where there never was a hat," sings Georges Seurat in the musical Sunday in the Park with George, a fictionalized account of the French pointillist painter, and it's easy to imagine Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey humming the same tune. But if creativity is integral to business, and to entrepreneurship in particular, how exactly does it occur? Where does this unicorn-like creature come from, and what exotic conditions will help it thrive in captivity?
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 09:05PM Companies often manage strategy in fits and starts. Though executives may formulate an excellent strategy, it easily fades from memory as the organization tackles day-to-day operations issues, doing what HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan calls "fighting fires."
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 08:59PM For the school that so boldly launched the MBA 100 years ago and went on to become the bluest of blue-chip brands in business education, it seemed only fitting that Harvard Business School should mark its centennial year by examining the future of the degree it invented. "It was our view that you need to think critically about what you are doing every 100 years or so, whether you need to or not," Dean Jay Light wryly observed in opening remarks to an unprecedented campus gathering last March of business school deans, corporate recruiters, and executives. It was a welcome moment of levity given the seriousness of the topic at hand. Some of the schools represented had already implemented major MBA program reforms. Others were considering them. But everyone had one thing in common: Each had assisted HBS professors Srikant Datar and David Garvin in their painstaking research to render the most complete contemporary picture of MBA education.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 08:22PM Jeffrey Immelt, GE's CEO, has received a lot of publicity recently for fostering "imagination breakthroughs" by encouraging managers to think deeply about innovations that will ensure GE's longer-term success. He has vowed that he will protect those working on the breakthroughs from the "budget slashers" focused on short-term success. Questions that this effort raises include: (1) Why so much publicity? (2) Isn't "deep thinking" what leaders are paid to do? and (3) Why do these kinds of effort require so much protection? In their new book, Marketing Metaphoria, Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman suggest some answers to the questions.
