HBR May 2013

Normalde aldığım notları ufak ufak Twitter üzerinden paylaşmayı planlıyordum fakat bir arkadaşım, aldığım tüm notları bir bütün halinde blogda yazmanın daha güzel olacağını önerince burada da yazmaya karar verdim. Ve Harvard Business Review'in Mayıs 2013 sayısından aldığım notlar:

What Would Ashton Do - and Does It Matter?

• Ever since Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of influencers in his 2000 book, The Tripping Point, companies have been obsessed with the idea that if they can get their product to a select group of connected, vocal customers, it will be only a matter of time before it goes viral. Marketers are spending millions on social media strategies to that end; they're working to gather followers, and they're using "influence scores" devised by companies such as Klout and PeerIndex to try to understand how much leverage each follower exerts. Over time they hope to shift away from traditional, expensive, inefficient methods of mass advertising towards peer-to-peer, word-of-mouth companies.
• Getting it right can improve sales and profits or adherence to social programs. Getting it wrong can lead to marketing practices that simply target users who were already likely to buy.
• The main reason it's hard to understand influence is that people confuse correlation and causation.
• One possible explanation is the socio-logical phenomenon called "homophily"- people's propensity to associate with others who are like them. By definition, this means that our preferences, interests, and behaviours are highly correlated with our friends'.
• We found that 6% of those who received a personal invitation downloaded the app-three times more than among those who received an automated notification.
• The generous and fair incentives generated more sends than the selfish incentive did. It turns out that people don't like spamming their friends unless they can pass a benefit along. These results conform to the socio-logical notion of a "gift economy", in which generosity confers status.

3 Humans + 1 Computer = Best Prediction

• New research suggests that the best approach isn’t either-or; it’s both. But “both” doesn’t mean a simple 50/50 mix. In relatively unambiguous contexts, rely more on computer analysis. In highly uncertain ones, average the opinions of three experts and give greater weight to their combined judgment than to the machine’s results.

Size Does Matter (in Signatures)

• Companies led by CEOs who have large signatures-an indicator of narcissism- performs worse than ones led by CEOs with small signatures.
• The findings make sense because big signatures indicate narcissism, and narcissistic leaders often behave in ways that lead to poor outcomes-for example, by dominating discussions, ignoring criticism, or belittling employees.

Marriot's Executive Chairman on Choosing the First Nonfamily CEO

• Every company develops some level of bureaucracy as it grows, and for a senior executive, managing that bureaucracy is an important part of the job.

What Entrepreneurs Get Wrong

• Salesmanship is central to the success of any young company, and entrepreneurs ignore this at their peril. Yet many do ignore it, in large part because they have little sales experience and have probably not taken classes in how to sell, even if they have formal business education.
• Starting late: "Don't make anything until you sell it" advised one entrepreneur. "Get people really interested in buying it before you invest too much time and effort."
• Offering discounts: And if you're going to offer temporary discounts, they told us, it's smart to put terms in writing.
• Selling to family and friends: But you never know why relatives are buying from you-often their motivation is love, pity, or a sense of obligation, not compelling product quality. In retrospect, founders believed those sales created a false sense of validation.

In Search of the Next Big Thing

• HBR: Do you see the danger of a new bubble out there?

Marc Andreessen: It's in the nature of venture capital and start-up investing that there are always stupid investments. The problem is that you never know which ones are which. I get these things as wrong as anybody else. But if you're afraid to make any investments that might be stupid, you'll never get any big winners-because the big outlier winners tend  to look crazy at the start.

• HBR: You've talked about having launched some big ideas that didn't fly because they were ahead of their time.

Marc Andreessen: The technology wasn't ready. Reid Hoffman started a social networking company in 1997 called SocialNet.com, long before Facebook or LinkedIn (which Hoffman cofounded in 2003) existed. For 20 years people laughed at the Apple Newton and said it proved that nobody had any interest in a tablet. And then along came the iPad. A lot of ideas that failed in the dot-com era were actually winners. They were just too early.

Living In The Future

• But Shell-style scenario planning has never really been about predicting the future. Its value lies in how scenarios are embedded in—and provide vital links between—organizational processes such as strategy making, innovation, risk management, public affairs, and leadership development. It has helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present. As unthreatening stories, scenarios enable Shell executives to open their minds to previously inconceivable or imperceptible developments.
• Bain’s most recent survey showed that 65% of companies expected to use scenario planning in 2011.
• From the beginning, those engaged with Shell’s scenario practice maintained that scenarios are not predictions but can provide a deeper foundation of knowledge and self-awareness in approaching the future. They also felt that the “official” view of the future—the business-as-usual outlook—both reflects an optimism bias and is based on the human tendency to see familiar patterns and be blind to the unexpected.
• By acknowledging that subjective judgment and intuition are an integral part of the leadership process, scenarios create a safe space in which to acknowledge uncertainty.
• As Shell became more centralized, scenarios provided a way to manage disagreement about group strategy or priorities and helped disturb the business-as-usual view that tends to result from wishful thinking or the linear extrapolation of current trends.
• And he believed that scenarios, because they follow a rhythm distinct from the annual strategy cycle, allow an organization to see realities that might otherwise be overlooked.

Understanding the Arab Consumer

• The Arab world, runs the stereotyped assumption, is a closed society of mullahs and militants, fatwas and jihad, whose leaders hate foreigners and whose young men and women are taught to despise Western products and culture. Add the political turmoil and armed conflicts of the Arab Spring revolutions—which ousted rulers in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen—and it’s easy to conclude that the region is unstable, chaotic, and closed for business.
• Moreover, Sunnis, Shias, and Ibadis rely on different set of hadith, so companies operating in the Arab world must understand the nuances of each.
• Arab consumer are quick to forgive: After Arla (Scandinavia’s largest manufacturer of dairy products) appealed to to Islamic values of tolerance, justice, and forgiveness, it became the first Danish company to be exempted from the boycott.
• Although Islam is the bedrock of their culture, Arabs often prefer businesses to draw a line between religion and commerce. Advertising with overtly religious tones hardly ever works.
• While my extremely conservative calculations suggest that the annual collection (of zakat) could be around $3.3 billion, local experts claim that it easily tops $25 billion a year, or about 1.3% of the region's economy in 2010. By comparison, individuals, companies, and foundations in the United States together donate around 2% of GDP every year to charity.
• Although official figures are scarce, reports estimate the hajj's impact on the Saudi Arabian economy at $42 billion in 2011-almost 7% of GDP.

Join The Global Elite

• Observe. Cultivate a curiosity about how places operate. Ask questions repeatedly, and don't assume you know the answers.
• Study. Formal education-in world history, economics, international affairs, politics, and international business- helps you broaden your perspective. Those subjects fascinate global leaders. But informal study is vital, too: Read international literature, take in foreign films, and so on.
• Go. International travel is vitally important, and it's never too late to start. Firsthand experiences in foreign contexts will contribute the bulk of the knowledge you need to be a global value creator. While abroad, make sure you leave the hotel-and stay an extra day or two to explore. Accept an invitation from a local partner to attend a get-together with friends or family. Even if your agenda is fully packed, squeeze in a visit to a museum or attend a cultural event-it could be the most productive investment of your time.

Life's Work

• HBR: Your latest book is about your mother. What did you learn from her?

Angelou: To develop courage. And she taught me by being courageous herself. I realized that one isn’t born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things—in the way that if one sets out to pick up a 100-pound bag of rice, one would be advised to start with a five-pound bag, then 10 pounds, then 20 pounds, and so forth, until one builds up enough muscle to lift the 100-pound bag. It’s the same way with courage. You do small courageous things that require some mental and spiritual exertion.