The Day The Muzak Died: A Toe-Tapping, Annoying History

fastcompany.com | By Addy Dugdale

its parent company, Ontario-based Mood Media, who today announced that it's killing the brand, launched in 1934, and renaming it Mood (think emotions, not the noise of ruminants). Beginning today, the brand, which was bought in 2011 for $345 million, is to share its name with the rest of Mood Media's sensory marketing tools, including smells, interactive displays, and signs. Mood Media's chairman and CEO, Lorne Abony, called it "the end of an iconic American brand." So, to the sound of Then, let us now pause and remember the passing of a (tinkly, slow-jamming) friend.

Once upon a time, there was a type of music called Muzak. Beloved of hotel owners, shops, and couples d'un certain age, whose love for Manitovani and his magic orchestra knew no bounds, Muzak's rise went largely unnoticed. It was bland, inoffensive, and everywhere--even accompanying the Apollo 11 astronauts on their journey to the moon--and no one cared about it--until the Blues Brothers came along, and made a great joke about it. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Russell Lee

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Emotional breakdown

economist.com | From the Print Edition

SPOTTING a good manager is hard. Some firms think psychometric tests help. An industry has appeared to supply them. No one knows how big it is, but the vendors of such tests estimate it to be worth between $2 billion and $4 billion a year, says Nik Kinley, a co-author of “Talent Intelligence”, a forthcoming book.

Headhunters such as Heidrick & Struggles and Egon Zehnder are trying to get a foothold in the market. Another, Korn/Ferry, paid $80m for PDI Ninth House, a specialist vendor, in December. IBM and Oracle, two software giants, have bought firms with a talent-measurement arm. Consultancies such as Deloitte and Bain are rumoured to be eyeing similar acquisitions.

Firms like psychometric tests because they are cheap (as little as $30 per candidate) and allow an employer to whittle a mountain of job applications down to a shortlist with minimal effort. But do they work? Many seek to measure touchy-feely traits such as personality, leadership potential and “emotional intelligence”. These are hard to measure. Tests that purport to do so are as likely to mislead as to inform, says Mr Kinley.

Unsurprisingly, the firms that attempt to measure personality disagree. Korn/Ferry says that its blue-chip clients are convinced of its test’s efficacy. It assesses candidates for four “leadership styles”: task-focused, social, intellectual and participative. It then compares results against the best talent already working in the position for which they are applying. Your correspondent took the Korn/Ferry test. He was assessed to see if he would make a good director of a publishing firm. He was told that his leadership style was too intellectual. So it’s back to the day job.

Having studied thousands of examples, Korn/Ferry says the one thing good leaders have in common is a willingness to let new evidence change their views. So the firm asks candidates to put themselves in the position of a manager who has been sent to a tricky overseas office, and judges how well they react to different scenarios. Read More

 

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Women Have Better Decision-Making Abilities Than Men, Make Better Corporate Leaders

fastcoexist.com | By Ariel Schwartz

It’s never a good idea to make generalizations about the differences between men and women. But when there’s real data to back these generalizations up, it’s worth paying attention. Take a new study from McMaster University, which found that women tend to be better corporate leaders because of their decision-making abilities. Women, take note: regardless of whether you subscribe to Sheryl Sandberg’s "Lean In" philosophy, this study indicates that your innate abilities make you well suited for corporate power.

The study, published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, surveyed 600 board directors (75% of them were male) and found some striking differences between the way men and women make decisions in corporate settings: the men opted to make decisions based on tradition, rules, and regulations, while the women tended to shirk tradition, consider the interests of all stakeholders, cooperate, and be more inquisitive.  Read More...

 

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Creating rounded managers for a global society

universityworldnews.com | By Santiago Iniguez

There is no magic formula for turning somebody into a consummate manager. Good managers are made over time, based on the systematic exercise of good habits and routines, and through the accumulated experience of their sector and their relationships.

To reach the heights of management excellence requires discipline and hard work. It is not achieved simply through the passage of time.

Nevertheless, universities and business schools can help lay the foundations for this process by providing a more integrated and rounded education to current and future managers.

The extreme specialisation developed in universities in the past has been criticised because of its undesirable consequence, namely ‘silo syndrome’, whereby academics deal only with colleagues in their subject and students gain only narrow perspectives on practical and theoretical knowledge.

Universities can combat this by restoring the value of the humanities in the tradition of American liberal arts colleges. Making the humanities a core part of all degrees will cement the learning experience and develop open-minded and well-rounded graduates.

I also believe that good management is not just about implementing good managerial techniques. It is about leading people, understanding collective behaviour and developing a strategic vision.

These managerial skills are genuinely related to the humanities, which is why I support the integration of different management disciplines within the context of the social sciences and the humanities.

Our experience at IE University shows that including humanities courses in management programmes enhances the whole learning experience. We have introduced subjects and sessions dedicated to the humanities in all programmes, from the bachelor in business to the MBA programme and executive education.

Ours is a two-pronged goal. On the one hand we hope to include management studies within the broad spectrum of the social and human sciences, with the aim of highlighting the inter-connectedness of the models, concepts and theories of a range of disciplines, thus leading to a better understanding of the social role of business. Read More...

Forget The Mission Statement. What’s Your Mission Question?

fastcodesign.com | By Warren Berger

Warren Berger taps some of the most powerful CEOs in the country to reveal the questions that will keep any company on track.

In a previous article, I shared five questions that today’s forward-thinking companies should be asking, based on input from top business consultants. This second installment, on the same theme, presents five more questions--but with a specific focus this time. These are questions that zero in on the mission and higher purpose of a company. Think of them as “mission questions.”

Most companies, of course, articulate their missions by way of formal “statements.” But often they’re banal pronouncements (We save people money so they can live better. --WalMart) or debatable assertions (Yahoo! is the premier digital media company) that don’t offer much help in trying to gauge whether a company is actually living up to a larger goal or purpose.

Questions, on the other hand, can provide a reality check on whether or not a business is staying true to what it stands for and aims to achieve. So herewith, derived from interviews for my forthcoming book, A More Beautiful Question, are thoughts from a couple of top CEOs (Panera Bread’s Ron Shaich and Patagonia’s Casey Sheahan) and a trio of leading business thinkers/consultants (the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie, and SY Partners’ Keith Yamashita). The following five “mission questions” are designed to keep a business focused on what matters most. Read More...

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Companies’ moral compasses

economist.com | From the Print Edition

COMPANIES are the building blocks of the modern world. America has some 6m of them employing 120m people and controlling $30 trillion-worth of assets. Emerging markets are catching up: the number of Chinese companies increased by 80% in 2004-08. Globally 3m new firms are registered each year.

But are companies so good for the world? Enron and Lehman Brothers were not. Corporate debacles have scorched the global economy: the IMF calculates that the financial crisis produced total bank losses of $2 trillion. They have also led to a collapse of trust in business: a recent survey of trust in the professions found that businessmen and bankers came last, along with politicians.

Why have so many prominent companies gone up in flames? In a new book, “Firm Commitment”, Colin Mayer, of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, takes a familiar argument—that shareholders have too much power—and gives it new life. The idea that the main function of companies is to boost shareholder value rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of the firm, he says. Companies are not owned by shareholders in the way that ordinary goods are owned. They are artificial persons with a distinct legal identity. Companies are not just devices for lowering transaction costs or bundling contracts together. They are devices for getting groups of people—workers and managers as well as investors—to commit themselves to long-term goals.

The doctrine of shareholder primacy is particularly dangerous when combined with dispersed ownership, he believes. Dispersed ownership (which often occurs when founding families sell shares to finance growth) leads to a separation between ownership and control. Managers exploit this separation to feather their own nests. Owners respond by relying on two devices—shareholder activism or the market for corporate control. Read More...

 

Teaching crisis

economist.com | by J.L.H.D

EVEN if today’s MBA students are somehow spared the repercussions of a melting euro, natural disasters and political instability, odds are at some point they will be in a company in crisis. Thus the Journal of Management Education has devoted its entire February issue to the topic of teaching crisis management.

“Learning about evidence-based management becomes interesting and engaging to students when it is applied to a teachable moment involving a natural disaster,” argues a group from the University of Queensland Business School. Their teachable moment was the 2010-11 flooding around Brisbane that killed nearly 40 people and cost A$2.3 billion ($2.4 billion). Giving students something tangible to think about as they read peer-reviewed management journals allowed for more thorough discussions of the literature. Still, many may prefer a less hands-on an assignment: several Queensland students had to request more time for their papers, as their homes were flooded.

By contrast, Dennis and Moira Fischbacher-Smith, who developed a crisis-management course for the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, make it a point to stop students telling only stories of personal experiences. What constitutes a crisis, they point out, is culturally specific, and students need to put aside their own war stories to hear about disasters in other contexts. Other professors like to use role-playing and simulation. Laura Foote, teaching an MBA elective at Babson College in Massachusetts, used a series of mock scenarios based around social media, such as asking students to tape video announcements on behalf of a hypothetical company attacked by hackers.

Many of the contributors encourage students to see crises in a larger context. An organisation’s culture, set in place long before the first stirrings of a disaster, will later determine how the company reacts (and who gets blamed). Students are also reminded that, despite the MBA curriculum’s understandable focus on the manager’s role, many aspects of a crisis will be out of their control. Read More...

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What’s Your 4G Marketing Plan—Interruption or Disruption?

fastcocreate.com | By Chris Baylis

Chris Baylis of Tribal DDB Amsterdam issues a strongly worded challenge to the ad industry: Agencies need to innovate far beyond current models and marketers need to ditch their marketing departments.

You can skip this ad in 15 seconds. Your article will be ready to read in 5, 4, 3, 2…1. Welcome to the world of advertising, a world of endless interruptions where brands, at best, try to borrow your attention for a few moments, and at worst, steal your time.

The result, the clock is ticking for the ad industry. Most agencies have been trying to innovate around their own business model for years--but have they been asking the right questions to allow them to innovate? Let’s use the analogy of mobile phone networks: you could say that a lot of agencies are stuck with 2G thinking--traditional teams, linear processes that result in linear output and at best, cool videos for the internet. Let’s call it interruption advertising. So agencies ask themselves, “How do we move from 2G to 3G? How do we innovate?” Like most sectors they look to their nearest competitors and ask, “What are they doing? Ah, they’re doing digital!” So now all agencies think innovation = digital. As a result, we’re not seeing genuine innovation; instead we’re seeing more interruption, in more places, on more devices. Read More...

 

3 Companies You Hate But Investors Love

mashable.com | By Charlie White

 

There's a disconnect between companies that are popular with consumers and companies that are popular with investors.

This infographic sets out to show you a microcosm of that phenomenon, picking out three companies that are loathed by many but the favorite of many investors, and three companies that are loved by consumers but might cause investors to be more wary.

Created by GreatBusinessSchools.org, the infographic taps sources such as BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, resulting in a boatload of illustrated data. It shows how well the stocks of those disliked companies have done over the past three years, and explains why they've ended up in this list of questionable corporations.

For instance, Philip Morris might be one of the companies you hate. Why? Because it makes cigarettes, a product that kills people. But even though its product (and that of other cigarette companies) causes 5 million people to smoke themselves to death each year, investors seem undaunted. They're apparently more interested in the fact that Philip Morris stock is up 95% over the past three years, beating the S&P 500 index by a mile (it only climbed 19% in the same period). Read More...

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