Monthly Archive for June, 2011

True Leaders Are Also Managers

Published on June 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Robert Sutton, Harvard Business Review

Ever have occasion to do an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership? I have — twice in the past five years. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. The second time was for my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.

It is impossible to read it all.

Tens of thousands of books have been written on leadership and there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, including The Leadership Quarterly and The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. Perhaps the most definitive review and integration of the leadership literature was Bass and Stogdill’s 1,200-page Handbook of Leadership, which was published in 1990 (and still does the best job of making sense of the literature, for my money). And if you really want a long book on leadership, you can get the four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership, which at 2,120 pages weighs in at 15 pounds, and costs a whopping $800. Clearly, the task of reviewing the leadership literature — and acting on it as leader — isn’t to understand it all (that is impossible), but to develop a point of view on the few themes that matter most.

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Linking Expert Mouths with Eager Ears

Published on June 24, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

The inside information she gave him was “absolutely perfect”, a former hedge-fund executive testified on June 6th. Winifred Jiau, a consultant for Primary Global Research, an “expert network” firm, is on trial for peddling confidential information about companies to traders.

Ms Jiau’s industry is also undergoing its own trial, of sorts. Expert networks are matchmakers that link clients with experts. A hedge fund that trades pharmaceutical stocks, for example, might use an expert network to find a doctor who can explain how a new cancer drug works. The network would set up a phone call and pay the doctor handsomely.

Such networks have recently caught the eye of American regulators, who fret that investors may be using them to ferret out illegal inside information. Since November more than a dozen people with links to expert networks have been arrested for insider trading.

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Mind Matters: Resilience

Published on June 17, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Irene S. Levine, The Journal Science

The pursuit of a career in science is uber-demanding. Slogging through 6 or 7 years of graduate school, then a postdoc or two, can be exhausting, even for dedicated high achievers. In the current economic climate, prolonged uncertainty about prospects for future employment compounds the stress.

Scores of articles and forum posts on Science Careers (including some previous Mind Matters columns) have described stressors commonly experienced by science trainees: the mismatch between job demands and rewards; lack of support from mentors, supervisors, and employers; the frustrations of scientific setbacks; pressures to compete and excel; the precarious work-life juggle; limited job opportunities — to list a few.

Most trainees are unprepared for what they encounter in graduate school. “For the first time people don’t treat you like the future superstar you always thought you were,” one scientist says. “You don’t make much money, you work extremely long hours, and you begin to worry that you don’t have a future. It’s a bit like being a starving artist but without the personal affirmation you get from those occasional, limited artistic triumphs.”

Why do some succeed while others fail or fade away? Some chalk it up to luck, others to talent. Still others believe that some people are just born to succeed, with immutable innate abilities. However, a growing body of research and practical experience suggest that personal resilience is one reason that some people succeed but others don’t. Two trainees come up against negative research findings, or face a string of rejections from journal editors and grant-review panels. Their challenges are similar, but one feels defeated while the other is inspired to try harder. Guess who wins?

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Overstepping the boundaries

Published on June 9, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From the Economist Intelligence Unit…

(Image found here)

What’s the problem with British managers? This question briefly did the rounds recently after Ratan Tata, Chairman of India’s Tata Group, complained that the British managers at his UK subsidiaries didn’t go the “extra mile”. Mr Tata had flown to Britain for a meeting only to find that several key staff had already gone home. Commentators responded angrily that his acerbic assessment was unfair: in the spirit of English self-deprecation many offered up alternative shortcomings instead, such as elitism, self-importance and parochialism.

The problem with stereotypes, apart from being simplistic, is that there is often an opposite one in circulation to match (indeed in response to Mr Tata, some complained that the problem with English managers is that they work too hard). This should not, however, deter business executives from attempting to fathom cultural differences, especially as companies increasingly operate cross-border teams—a subject covered in a new series of executive training courses to be launched shortly by The Economist Group. More…

Building with Big Data

Published on June 6, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From The Economist

In a short story called “On Exactitude in Science”, Jorge Luis Borges described an empire in which cartographers became so obsessive that they produced a map as big as the empire itself. This was so cumbersome that future generations left it to disintegrate. (“[I]n the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering some occasional beast or beggar.”)

As usual, the reality of the digital age is outpacing fiction. Last year people stored enough data to fill 60,000 Libraries of Congress. The world’s 4 billion mobile-phone users (12% of whom own smartphones) have turned themselves into data-streams. YouTube claims to receive 24 hours of video every minute. Manufacturers have embedded 30m sensors into their products, converting mute bits of metal into data-generating nodes in the internet of things. The number of smartphones is increasing by 20% a year and the number of sensors by 30%.

The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has no Borges-like qualms about the value of all these data. In a suitably fact-packed new report, “Big data: the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity”, MGI argues that data are becoming a factor of production, like physical or human capital. Companies that can harness big data will trample data-incompetents. Data equity, to coin a phrase, will become as important as brand equity. MGI insists that this is not just idle futurology: businesses are already adapting to big data.

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