40 Posts found for Source: Rotman Magazine

Bureaucratic institutions in both the private and public sector break up knowledge and its components, storing and processing them in separate compartments, or ‘stovepipes’. Over time, these stovepipes multiply, as ever-more narrow specialization increases the number of uncrossable boundaries. This makes it extremely difficult to cope with fastchanging new problems requiring knowledge that falls beyond artificial departmental borders.To complicate matters, guarding each stovepipe is an … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Bureaucracy, Knowledge

About 95 per cent of all the sensors in our eyes are devoted to peripheral vision, while the remaining five per cent are used in focal vision. Most organizations flip that ratio, so that most of their sensing resources are devoted to focal vision: they focus on current markets, products, and competitors, and very little is devoted to the periphery.

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: Management

The Fall 2006 issue of Rotman magazine contains 120 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
– Identity and the Economics of Organizations by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton
– Loyalty Myths by Timothy Keiningham,Terry Vavra, Lerzan Aksoy and Henri Wallard
– The Big Picture:Tom Stewart
– The Trust Development Process by Mark Weber, Deepak Malhotra and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Management, Miscellaneous

People respond almost too well to monetary incentives. That is, ‘firms get what they pay for’, but since these schemes cannot be targeted well, what firms get is often not what they want.

If an organization is going to function well, it should not rely solely on monetary compensation schemes. The ability of organizations to place workers into jobs with which they identify and the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Akerlof, Rachel Kranton | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Motivation, Organizational Behavior

In a model of utility, a person’s identity describes gains and losses in utility from behaviour that conforms or departs from the norms for particular social categories in particular situations.This concept of utility is a break with traditional economics, where utility functions are not situation-dependent, but fixed.

Identity is useful to economists because it suggests a natural way in which behaviour can vary within a population. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Akerlof, Rachel Kranton | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Economics, Organizational Behavior

The central task of management is getting things done in situations in which you cannot do everything yourself, which means getting things done through others. To carry out this task – and solve the concrete problems it poses – managers need a causal map of their employees’ beliefs, intentions and actions.

Editor’s Note: this is one article of the entire Fall 2003 issue found in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mihnea Moldoveanu | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

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A key challenge for today’s companies – and for the individuals within them – is to build a culture of action, says Jeffrey Pfeffer. He describes some of the common obstacles that can get in the way of knowing what needs to be done, and actually doing it.

Editor’s Note: this is one article of the entire Fall 2003 issue in this .pdf file – find … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Current approaches to business education are based on an identifiable model of knowledge creation,representation and dissemination – a model that cannot bridge what political scientist T.Homer Dixon calls ‘the ingenuity gap’ – the gap between the problem-solving means of the past and the problems of the immediate future. A new model is needed – one that stresses optimization over correctness, integration over specialization and adaptive … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mihnea Moldoveanu | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: MBA Related

Most people agree that globalization and the introduction of a market economy have the power to do enormous good. But for many in the developing world, they have not brought the promised economic benefits – and in many cases, they have made things much worse. Three key players in the globalization debates – 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences Joseph Stiglitz, renowned philanthropist and president … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: George Soros, J.F. Rischard, Joseph E. Stiglitz | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Economics, International

Michael Spence’s work on signaling and his analyses of markets with asymmetric information – along with that of his fellow researchers Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University and George Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley – was honored with the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. He spoke at the Rotman School in the Rotman Integrative Thinking Seminar Series. (Note: starts on page 36) … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: Management

Because design solutions are always matters of invented choice, rather than discovered truth, the judgment of designers is always open to question by the broader public.

…this notion of the inevitable need to justify to others the ‘rightness’ of the design choices made – is perhaps the most significant implication for the design of strategy processes in business organizations. Because strategic choices can never be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Design, Strategy

Strategic thinking is hypothesis-driven. In an environment of ever-increasing information availability and decreasing time to think, the ability to develop good hypotheses and test them effectively is critical. Strategic thinking is both creative and critical in nature, and figuring out how to accomplish both types of thinking simultaneously has long troubled cognitive psychologists, since it is necessary to suspend critical judgment in order to think … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: Strategy

Strategic thinking is dialectical. In the process of inventing the image of the future, the strategist must mediate the tension between constraint, contingency, and possibility. The underlying emphasis of strategic intent is stretch – to reach explicitly for potentially unattainable goals. At the same time, all elements of the firm’s environment are not shapeable, and those constraints that are real must be acknowledged in designing … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: Strategy

Because knowledge generation is guided by the same basic philosophy that guides the development of expertise, there is littler opportunity to escape its straitjacket: if we wield the logic of specialization and simplification, every phenomenon looks simple and easily decomposable.

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Expertise, Knowledge

Think about what business schools do:They train people to talk about ideas and concepts and to solve problems. But the one thing they typically don’t do is train students how to actually do anything – not just analyze problems but implement their solutions in the messy world of real people.

Ask yourself this question:Would you undergo heart surgery if the surgeon had been trained in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subject: MBA Related

One of the most pervasive emotions in the workplace today is fear.The reason that there is so much fear is that everybody wants to build a learning organization, but nobody actually wants anyone to learn. Learning requires tolerating inefficiency and failure. If you genuinely want to build a learning organization, you have to accept the fact that learners are never as proficient as experts. Learning … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Fear / Doubt, Learning

Many a business has fallen in love with the idea that the best way to get people to do things well is to have them compete with one another.That mindset derives from a sloppy sports analogy: People run faster if they run against someone else. That may be true for track, but when it comes to learning, people learn best when they’re operating in a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Management, Motivation

What you want is better than, not optimal. Your job is to do something today that’s better than what you did yesterday. And to do something tomorrow that’s better than what you did today.

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Achievement, Goals

When it comes to innovation,business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Decision Making, Innovation