The Impossibility of Keeping Up With Change - April Editor’s Note from MIT Sloan Management Review

This is a great editorial from the MIT Sloan Management Review on the impossibility of keeping up with change. "...I want to pass along a story about a Cray supercomputer and your computer — a story that’s partly about change but mostly about our inability to keep up with it. First, though, some context. In the new Spring 2010 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review you’ll find five loosely linked stories that spring from one far-reaching trend: the smart-tech explosion. The continued exponential increases in computing power, storage capacity, communications speed and, now, “smart-world” instrumentation have produced both a flood of new data and also new ways to analyze and use the data in that flood.

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The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions - Dan Ariely - HBR

The heat of the moment is a powerful, dangerous thing. We all know this. If we’re happy, we may be overly generous. Maybe we leave a big tip, or buy a boat. If we’re irritated, we may snap. Maybe we rifle off that nasty e-mail to the boss, or punch someone. And for that fleeting second, we feel great. But the regret—and the consequences of that decision—may last years, a whole career, or even a lifetime. At least the regret will serve us well, right? Lesson learned—maybe. Maybe not. My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made. When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off.

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Why Businesses Don't Experiment and How To Fail to Succeed

A few years ago, a marketing team from a major consumer goods company came to my lab eager to test some new pricing mechanisms using principles of behavioral economics. We decided to start by testing the allure of “free,” a subject my students and I had been studying. I was excited: The company would gain insights into its customers’ decision making, and we’d get useful data for our academic work. The team agreed to create multiple websites with different offers and pricing and then observe how each worked out in terms of appeal, orders, and revenue.

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What the Creative World Needs Now Is Organization

Our featured article for April from CHANGE THIS is by Scott Belsky

"Great execution starts with supreme organization. Ultimately, organization comes down to how you manage your energy. Contrary to popular belief, organization is not about “neatness,” it is about efficiency and allowing yourself to take action as swiftly as possible."

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Management by Imagination - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't count"; "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"; "If you can't measure it, it won't happen"? We like these sayings because they're comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it. But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a "reality" that is in fact an edifice we've unknowingly constructed around ourselves.

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