MIT Sloan Management Review

This matrix maps the digital initiatives companies most often take into relevant categories across dimensions of value potential and degree of feasibility. Learn more ???? https://mitsmr.com/39yuaCl

Sustainability has become a powerful driver of consumer behavior. People are changing what they consume, how they consume, and how they lead their day-to-day lives, motivated by a concern for sustainability. Our research has identified a consumer-driven megatrend that holds tremendous strategic opportunity for companies if they change how they think of consumer preferences for sustainable options. The belief that there is only one type of sustainable consumer fails to recognize the diversity of consumer preferences. The stereotypical sustainable consumer who has an intense passion for all things sustainable and a high willingness to pay for sustainable goods and services across all categories accounts for only a small portion of the world’s consumers. Sustainability is now a present and influential factor in how most consumers make their lifestyle and purchasing decisions. But the influence of sustainability on consumers is not uniform, neither in its intensity nor its extent. To understand these differences and make them actionable, we conducted two core studies on consumers in North America and Europe and segmented them by performing a cluster analysis based on two dimensions. https://mitsmr.com/3YPFpSt

One of the biggest obstacles to effective decision-making is failure to define the problem well. Invoking the power of narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that teams are solving the right problem. https://mitsmr.com/3WPaJOc

In this brief video, learn what the latest research and current examples say about return-to-office mandates — and what leaders can do instead to boost productivity and retain talent. https://mitsmr.com/3Z6pmjx

Underlying assumptions are the foundation of organizational culture, driving the values that, in turn, drive behavior. Learn more about applying new skills to meaningful problems: https://mitsmr.com/41XJPpY

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This matrix helps frame discussions of how to monetize data. Start by considering whether your organization wants to use data for improving, wrapping, or selling (as shown on the horizontal axis). Then discuss where in the value creation process you will participate: by offering data, insight, or action (as shown on the vertical axis). The first example shows an improving/data decision, the second a wrapping/insight choice, and the third a selling/action approach. Note that your company could pursue one type of product, three in a row — or even products for every single matrix square. The key is for your team to understand the implications of each choice. https://mitsmr.com/3RwJMQp

This framework is designed to help organizations focus their resilience investments on building long-term supply chain robustness. The figure above illustrates how our approach compares with existing methods for valuing resilience investments. Best-guess calculations rely on a single value obtained simply by multiplying the potential impact by the probability of the event. A company generating a profit of $10 million exposed to a 2% chance of a total loss will conclude that a disruption would cost $200,000 and would be willing to invest up to that amount to mitigate the loss. However, this approach only approximates the likelihood of a disruption and its potential loss. Its utility for assessing low-probability, high-impact events is limited. It yields an average exposure to risk for a single point in time — a useful measure for insurance companies, but not for firms looking to make effective investments in resilience. Value-at-risk methods take a more analytical approach but still give little guidance about when and how much to invest in resilience. They expand on classical supply chain models designed to maximize the return on assets or minimize total supply chain costs but, like best-guess methods, can obscure events that have a low probability yet are plausible. This may lead managers to focus on an event’s probability more than its disruptive consequences. In particular, value-at-risk methods aren’t helpful in recognizing the upside value of actions that increase resilience. While they can quantify vulnerabilities in the supply chain, they do not provide guidance for when and how much to invest in resilience and fail to give managers the tools to justify resilience investments. This shortcoming can amplify the boom-and-bust cycle by focusing investments on the obvious risks following an event and allowing them to quickly fall off as memory of the event fades. https://mitsmr.com/4fIyRwI

Vaccine developers certainly had strong motivations for joining COVAX. We heard from various stakeholders that there was genuine altruism on the part of some participants. Some companies and their respective leaders wanted to do the right thing. There were also more instrumental considerations. COVAX provided access to extra funding for vaccine development — COVID-19 vaccines were not yet developed when some corporate leaders directed their companies to join — and a route to market through the UNICEF distribution pipeline if the vaccines were successfully developed (and secured WHO emergency use approval). COVAX also offered reduced liability exposure. Another significant factor evident in our media analysis as well as our interview data was the pressure from external stakeholders and company leaders looking to protect their public image as responsible corporate citizens. https://mitsmr.com/3AZ6TNc

Product management is one of the fastest-growing roles in business, having gained increased scope and importance in Silicon Valley. While product managers used to be hired almost exclusively by technology companies, they are now being recruited in growing numbers by service-oriented businesses as well, with firms such as Accenture, Chase, JPMorgan, Optum, and Vanguard adding product management functions in the past few years. Why are services companies looking to add product capabilities to their organizations? Professional services firms, which span a wide range of sectors, including IT, legal, marketing, and tax and accounting services, face two major growth challenges. Owing to the significant human involvement in service delivery, their gross margins are low, and their head counts scale linearly with increases in revenue. Product companies enjoy much higher growth margins and revenue per employee. This explains why startups that offer software-as-a-service products are valued at six to eight times their annual revenues, whereas startups that offer project-based services are valued at one to two times their annual revenues. Recognizing the challenges of margins and scalability, professional services firms are trying to evolve into product-like companies by productizing their services. This involves automating, standardizing, and packaging aspects of a service into a tangible, repeatable, and scalable offering that is efficient to produce and easier to scale. https://mitsmr.com/3Tco7x5