Examples of Fixed Price Strategy With Tips on How to Use It The idea driving the fixed price will be reducing customer doubt associated with a selling price, that could be as a result of market changes, timely factors and … Continued
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A project plan helps to keep your project on the right track. With no project plan, apparently small details might be overlooked, which makes it hard to achieve targets as well as deadlines. Your current project plan enables you to … Continued
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ISO 9000 Certification The ISO or International Organization of Standardization created a worldwide accepted group of standards in order to certify an organization or business that follows quality management functions. These types of standards are usually referred to as ISO … Continued
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How to Track Performance with Excel Dashboard Businesses that monitor their own overall performance can enhance their employees’ effectiveness and boost the performance of the business operations, systems and processes. On the other hand, it may be hard to understand … Continued
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HR Excel Dashboard Publishing HR dashboard in Excel is really a frequent area of the HR supervisor’s abilities and can certainly play an essential factor in influencing far better usage of human resources for smaller businesses, simply such as larger … Continued
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Leadership Training for Employees: Effective leaders evidently state their own strategic perspective. They offer path about what to accomplish although not always the way to achieve a particular job. Successful leaders will lead by example, challenging quality using honesty. Training … Continued
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Customer Focused Marketing Strategy Organizations have to earn money to stay in business and grow. That is the reason why a lot of businesses concentrate on the actual bottom line through going after higher product sales volumes as well as … Continued
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Checklist for Performing Project Audits Any project targets activities beyond the routine procedures of the business and may differ considerably in difficulty, volume and scope. Any time establishing project audit instructions, the actual project’s data records plus reports can provide … Continued
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Call Center KPIs & Key Success Factors Telemarketers try to market their own company’s products and services by using phone calls to potential customers. Call centers and telemarketing continues to be a worthwhile selling technique. Effective businesses conform to regulations … Continued
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New Project Management Strategies Within a fast moving, sophisticated environment, a conventional project management strategy might be way too reserved to efficiently deal with projects. The actual linear plus systematic levels in project management may slow development and prevent innovative … Continued
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Continuously keeping track of and looking out for approaches to increase business operations productivity will help a business remain on the targets. Additionally, it may help offer particular path for workers, which could result in enhanced management and improved … Continued
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Ineffective Marketing Strategies: To have the desired effect, any kind of marketing attempt need to make whole access to the 4Ps which incorporate the actual marketing mix: product or service, price, location and promotion. Failing in just about any one … Continued
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The Key Qualities of a Successful Sales Manager A good sales manager needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people. He has to build up the jobs of his sales staff, make sales plans which boost … Continued
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High Inventory Turnover Rate Companies keep track of all their specific inventory turnover to find out when the quantity of inventory they will purchase has the exact demand for the products. High inventory turnover indicates a company should continuously buy … Continued
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How to Establish Short Term and Long Term Business Goals Your company requires focus and you also should select that path through establishing goals. Many of these objectives include the business mission and vision. This is what motivated the founder … Continued
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Management tips and tools this week: How to Perform QA Audit in Business posted in: Management, Quality Management How to Perform Quality Assurance QA Audit High quality may be the most important issue when your company is in … Continued
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Inventory Control and JIT Management Inventory control is really a main part of effective operations for just about any company which purchases and resells products. Common objectives of inventory control consist of keeping low inventory keeping expenses while at the … Continued
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How to Create Professional Cover Letter for Your Business Plan Business plan is a crucial record for the company. The business plan must be developed prior to launching your business, and you ought to evaluate each and every couple of … Continued
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Human Resources Management in Business Planning and Development HR employees get numerous functions in a company. They may be accountable for creating strategies which concentrate on hiring and keeping best employees and managing initiatives which increase organization-wide efficiency. The majority … Continued
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Product Market Analysis Examples: Before releasing a brand new product or service or even starting up a new company, business owners and organizations carry out substantial analysis on the marketplace. This consists of taking a look at the purchasing behavior … Continued
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Total Quality Management Strategies: Total Quality Management or TQM is a business management approach to continuous improvement which includes all employees in a company coming from top management to manufacturing line employees. The main objective of the continuous improvement system … Continued
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Performance Evaluation Strategies: Managers are able to use regular performance evaluations to offer suggestions to employees, create goals and determine places that require development. The actual annual performance evaluation or review is definitely a chance to provide pay raises or … Continued
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When having inventory, conduct your very best to reconcile variations involving the actual physical inventory along with the documented inventory. One particular important factor associated with making certain your company operates efficiently would be to regularly compare your inventory data … Continued
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How to Create a Call Center Strategy Plan Call center employees take inbound and also make outgoing calls, looking after consumers’ requirements distantly as well as, to do so, planning to ensure that customer satisfaction is at certain level. Since … Continued
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Benefits of a Business Plan: You should go along with a good business plan for a lot of arguments. Business plans support getting financing with regard to initiatives, make simpler making decisions procedures, enable a business owner to satisfy … Continued
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Example Employee Performance Appraisals Employee performance appraisal can help measure the development of the employee along with his or her potential. Through keeping standard employee performance appraisals, businesses could develop and guide their particular staff members to do their own … Continued
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Developing a Simple Business Plan for Your Company The business plan will help describe your company goal and show the way you intend on creating profit. Setting up all your company objectives as well as financial reports as one document … Continued
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How to Terminate Employee with Poor Performance Firing an employee is among the hardest jobs you may execute being the employer. Choosing to finish the actual employment of the employee can be extremely difficult to achieve in many situations. You … Continued
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Pricing Strategies: High Price vs Low Price Examples Managers have to be experts not just for whatever they sell, however , additionally for the way they sell it. A vital aspect of the way you sell your product or service … Continued
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Reverse Logistics Cost Management and Cost Reduction Tips Reverse logistics can be described as area of the business process built in just about any business which makes and also markets a product or service. Throughout the reverse logistics course of … Continued
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HR Planning Model The HR planning model is a approach organizations are able to use to ensure they have sufficient personnel and also the right personnel to execute the different functions in the business. HR planning model includes several key … Continued
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Inventory Turnover Ratios Metrics Reporting Inventory turnover ratio or inventory turnover metric is a vital measure throughout analyzing the effectiveness of the business operations together with inventory management. Keeping inventory is actually expensive for any organization for all sorts of … Continued
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Quality Assurance Program Quality assurance program or QA program has one particular main focus, making sure that the company is actually pursuing well defined standards. The quality assurance program is ongoing and methodically examines the actual adequacy of the business … Continued
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Planning and Executing a Lean Manufacturing Audit Lean manufacturing concepts derive from the theory that an organization is in its very best any time it reduces waste plus enhances the available assets. Putting into action lean manufacturing plans and techniques … Continued
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Gross Sales vs Revenue in Financial Reports Among the continuing accounting routines a company must exercise is monitoring earnings. Maintaining a report of earnings is not really a hard job on its own, however accounting for various forms of earnings … Continued
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Excel enables you to make charts focused on your particular business preferences by using functions and information which make it distinctive. For example, you can include target lines to your Excel graphs which show targets so that you can … Continued
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Balanced Scorecard Strategy for Project Management Efficient project management usually needs a combination of decisions created depending on analyzing project development. Monitoring information may include keeping some Excel templates and spreadsheets of budget data, however developing a balanced scorecard which … Continued
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Types of Financial Ratios Analysis To measure the development and general financial well being of the business, fundamental understanding of several accounting methods is essential. A specific area involving accounting requires the application of financial ratios, that may explain financial … Continued
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Project Sheet: When you are most likely good at balancing numerous requirements in your time, generally there is not a business person who doesn’t take advantage of using a project sheet to relate to during the day. Generally speaking, project … Continued
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Project Priority Requirements Ranking and Scoring Systems Project management calls for substantial business planning. This particular preparation work requires setting up the requirements regarding project priorities. Identifying priorities will depend on different aspects, like the business where you operate and … Continued
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Advertising is definitely an important cost for just about any business. Identifying the amount you should invest on the annual base might be challenging, especially if you do have a new business or perhaps you are checking out brand new … Continued
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Management tips and tools this week: Quality Plan for Construction Projects posted in: Management, Project Management, Quality Management Construction Projects Quality Plan In a highly regulated industry like construction a quality plan is necessary to not just keep workers … Continued
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Budgeting Templates and Tools for Managers Your business budget is actually a vital application for the success in your business. Initially, simply by monitoring your financial budget, you are able to make sure that you have sufficient cash-flow for the … Continued
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Performance Measurement Templates, Tools and Examples Precise way of measuring organizational performance enables executives to fix inefficiencies, resulting in cost benefits and greater client satisfaction. However without suitable tools is actually challenging to change operations as well as guide employees … Continued
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Gap Analysis To improve your company constantly you will have to try to make ongoing changes. You will find often chances to further improve your current organization’s performance, however, you have to recognize as well as address all of them. … Continued
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How to Plan Manufacturing Warehouse Layout Warehouses are crucial components of the manufacturing function because of their use within keeping raw materials as well as finished products. Effective warehousing procedures take thorough planning and careful focus on details to work … Continued
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The strategic analysis is usually an assessment of the business plan to figure out how upcoming plans could be created more efficiently. Types of strategic analysis are the SWOT analysis which evaluates advantages, disadvantages, possibilities and risks evaluation as well … Continued
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Inventory Rotation Inventory rotation or rotating inventory is vital for many kinds of inventories, not only food products inventories. Although equipment components and material might not age just like foods will, you can usually gain from a FIFO inventory program … Continued
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Logistics is a process associated with moving stock or materials from the place of origin to some place of usage within the most effective possible way. Producers, suppliers and vendors just about all participate in logistics function, as perform governments, … Continued
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Employee performance appraisal can be a crucial career development resource to the manager as well as employee. The supervisor might help slowly move the personnel to company growth, and also the employee will get a good more clear knowledge of … Continued
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Traditional Costing or ABC Costing Metrics? Manufacturing companies usually employ traditional costing like an approach to identifying what exactly it costs to produce products. This includes a real cost having a factor in order to determine how you can allocate … Continued
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How to Plan, Organize and Track KPIs KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are way of measuring overall performance in a business, that is to assess the accomplishment in the organization when it comes to the main goals. KPIs differ broadly, … Continued
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Creating Annual Sales Targets, Goals and Objectives Salesmen depend on product sales with regard to earnings. Decrease in revenue may considerably influence their standards of living. People who do the job inside sales usually begin each year having a clear … Continued
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Developing Strategic Plans vs Business Plans Often the strategic plan as well as business plan are necessary methods when running a business. These types of plans present information on all the details of the company, out of the products towards … Continued
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Steps to Make Histogram Chart in Excel Develop a histogram, often called the Pareto graph or chart, in order to graphically show the actual distribution together with frequency for your data within an Excel spreadsheet. Histogram chart application is not … Continued
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Employee Appraisal Ideas and Techniques A good employee appraisal must be regarded as a power tool to assist employee growth. Additionally it is the best way for your organization to find out exactly where raises in pay will probably be … Continued
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Developing Benchmarks and Standards for Performance Evaluation It is hard to assess the employee’s overall performance if you do not understand what benchmarks you need to make use of. Benchmarks are generally specifications with regard to employee that the organization … Continued
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Improve Product Profit Margins With ABC ABC Activity Based Costing Strategies: Absolutely no business may survive without having constant financial assistance for the services and products. This particular objective is known as the product margin improvement. With regard to small … Continued
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Typical Activities When Closing a Project Project management requires tracking the actual daily assignments, techniques and employees which direct task management via each and every stage of the project life cycle – from start to finish. Not every task is … Continued
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How to Manage and Track Your Manufacturing Process Supervising the manufacturing process requires focusing on the specific stages in the process along with the actual flow of products and components throughout the various stages that needs to be synchronized to … Continued
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With the Fall 2016 issue, MIT Sloan Management Review launched a new content initiative: Frontiers. The initiative features a collection of essays penned by both scholars and tech leaders, all of whom addressed the same question: How is technology going to transform the practice of management over the next five years in a way we have not yet witnessed?
In a video interview, MIT SMR editor in chief Paul Michelman explains the impetus behind the launch of Frontiers and the value he hopes it will hold for readers. Michelman explains the genesis of the Frontiers idea, the nature of the essayists selected for the program, and why it’s important for MIT SMR to launch this initiative now. He also discusses the themes that emerged from the essays, including the changing nature of the man–machine collegial relationship, the ethical implications of management by algorithm, and the radical transparency that technology is forcing on organizations.
How to Document Management Goals and Report Progress Management goals may be documented to monitor exactly how people and teams do in the direction of attaining the business goals. Documentation may be feasible and less difficult when the goal-setting follows … Continued
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How to Monitor and Estimate the Remaining Work for Your Project A typical approach to respond to the actual subject would be to give a percentage done for the project. A quick solution is generally the easiest method to respond … Continued
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Cost To Sales Ratio Ratios are utilized within accounting in order to calculate overall performance within areas like product sales, costs, resources and financial obligations. Ratios assist in making choices through evaluating the ratio in one time period to another … Continued
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How to Use Rewards and Incentives System in Lean Manufacturing Lean manufacturing, simply by its character, needs synergy coming from virtually all staff members through management to your production floor. Generating process improvements via lean processes may be accomplished along … Continued
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How to Overcome Employee Absenteeism Employee absenteeism results in issues with deadlines, ethics, efficiency and organizing. Absenteeism will cost companies a lot more than just a percentage of the salaries. In case your organization has a challenge having absenteeism, go … Continued
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Even though management and sales carry out a significant part in a business accomplishment, manufacturing strategies often means difference among good results and failing for a lot of companies. Organizations should create a manufacturing strategy which performs up their … Continued
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Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
If you want to see how management is changing, take a look inside today’s high-tech offices. In the past, corporate leaders sat behind closed doors in large private suites. Today, many sit side by side with employees in open workspaces. In the past, workers toiled alone in cubicles, waiting for formal meetings to speak with their managers and colleagues. Today, they turn and chat with the managers and colleagues sitting right next to them, while conversing with others on digital chat systems that connect the entire organization, and with yet others in lounge areas and cafés built to promote informal connection and dialogue.
These changes are surface manifestations of a deeper transformation under way: Long-held assumptions about corporate communication and hierarchy are breaking down. Social media tools allow more open communication up, down, and across the corporate hierarchy. In the coming years, the savviest leaders will tap into the spirit and tools of openness from social media to build what I call conversational firms.
Over the past decade, social media has transformed how people communicate in their personal lives. It is beginning to do the same in our work lives. Millennials who grew up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the like are now the fastest-growing portion of the labor force. They are accustomed to constant connection and information access and engage in more open sharing than generations past. And they are carrying these expectations and habits into the workplace.
Meanwhile, the last several years have seen an explosion of social media tools designed for use inside companies — everything from wikis and microblogs, to multichannel platforms such as Yammer, Slack, and HipChat, to employee feedback tools such as TinyPulse. With workers who increasingly expect to have their voices heard, and with tools to enable that, it is now possible — perhaps even paramount — to build more conversational firms.
Conversational firms differ from conventional bureaucratic ones by having a far more open communication environment. Executives use multiple platforms to share information with the entire workforce. They encourage employees to speak up, ask questions, and share ideas and opinions. They saturate the workplace with digital tools and physical spaces designed to encourage dialogue. The result is an ongoing conversation that transcends the formal hierarchical structure.
Forward-thinking leaders are already managing their organizations this way. I profile one such company in my new book, The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. When this company’s SaaS (software as a service) business model was jeopardized by a spike in customer churn, executives used an internal wiki to share 138 pages of detailed analysis with the full 600+ person workforce. The analysis included the sort of information other executives might pore over in closed meetings but hesitate to share with more than a few select employees — such as trends in bookings, customer acquisition costs, competitors’ churn rates, fine-grained profit and loss and cash flow statements, and the complete results of a recent customer survey.
Armed with this information, employees throughout the business responded on the wiki with questions, thoughts, and analyses. The company then extended the conversation offline, hosting an open “Hack Night” for interested individuals to present their ideas in person. Executives sat in the audience listening to employee suggestions and joined small breakout groups to discuss various proposals. In the following weeks, these breakout groups continued to hack away at the churn problem, coordinating their work over the company’s internal chat system and posting updates on the wiki for everyone to see. Within a few months, the churn problem was resolved and the organization had new and improved internal processes to avoid future spikes.
This was not an isolated event. During the 10 months I was embedded inside the company, executives shared information broadly and encouraged employees to offer their input on a range of topics. This fostered a well-informed and engaged staff, willing and able to share their knowledge and insights. In turn, the organization was able to respond rapidly and thoughtfully as problems and opportunities arose.
What organization wouldn’t want this? In today’s markets, customer preferences evolve quickly, and new technologies and competitors continually emerge to unsettle the status quo. Open dialogue is one of the few ways to surface a multidimensional understanding of complex new realities and possible responses. Conversation brings the entire organization’s collective wisdom to bear on issues, and in doing so it helps the organization adapt and learn.
Some managers will worry that giving employees broad freedom of speech will weaken their decision-making authority. But blasting open the communication hierarchy doesn’t have to mean destabilizing all of the corporate hierarchy. Leaders can give employees voice and engage them in dialogue while retaining the right to make the final call. For example, the company I studied maintained a conventional reporting and decision-making hierarchy while supporting the sort of radically open communication I described above. In fact, the decisions executives made had more legitimacy with the workforce because employees had been invited into the conversation and knew their voices had helped shape the decision-making context. In the customer churn case, executives retained final authority over which ideas the company pursued. However, the ideas themselves were better because they had been shaped by the group’s insights and opinions. When done right, open communication can complement formal control.
Doing it right is hard, though. There are challenges to creating conversational companies. For one thing, executives need to see that the point of conversation is to surface a range of opinions. This awareness must guide their approach to everything from the people they hire to how they lead. After all, for valuable dialogue to occur, an organization can’t hire a workforce of clones who think and act exactly alike; a diversity of perspectives is required. What’s more, employees need to know that their leaders won’t punish them for expressing dissenting opinions; absent that trust, people will say only what they think management wants to hear.
Through it all, executives and managers will need patience and a thick skin. Some comments will sting, not every thought shared will be an insightful one, and some conversations will get derailed; these are unavoidable costs. However, leaders willing to invest in truly open dialogue with their workforce will be well positioned to face — and shape — the ever-evolving future.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
Currently, only top managers have human executive assistants, but in the near future, everyone who has a smartphone can have a digital executive assistant. This will be made possible by the “mobile cloud” — technology that integrates the convenience of the mobile phone with the power of cloud computing. The mobile phone interface will shift toward interactive voice communication — just like communicating with a human assistant — but your digital agent will be able to access and search vast amounts of information in the cloud almost instantaneously, enabling quicker and better decisions.
Setting up meetings, making appointments, organizing trips, coauthoring documents, and accessing databases and dashboards will all become much simpler, more intuitive, and more convenient.
Today, the low-cost communications and computing power available to even small enterprises is dramatically more powerful than what even the largest multinational corporations could afford 20 years ago. This has led to the growth of “micro-multinationals” — small startup firms that are born global. Real-time machine translation will make global operations even easier. One person can speak English while the other hears a real-time translation into Chinese. This is now possible in the lab but will be available to everyone within the next few years.
Management inherently involves organizing groups of people to get things done, and communication is a key piece of organization. In the future, there will not only be more person-to-person and person-to-agent communication, but more agent-to-agent communication.
How will this work? Suppose that you want to meet with a colleague. You will ask your digital agent to negotiate with his or her digital agent to schedule a meeting. When the meeting happens — either in person or online — both of your agents will listen in on the meeting and transcribe the results into text that can subsequently be searched and accessed as needed. The meeting notes can be algorithmically edited and summarized.
But workday meetings are only part of the story; sometimes you want to get together just for fun. Your digital agent will send a note to your friends — really your friends’ agents — suggesting a get-together after work. The agents will pull together a list of suggestions about where to meet, and your friends can indicate their preferences, allowing the agents to find a consensus location. The agents can remind their masters when to leave so as to arrive on time, and if someone is late, his or her agent can notify the others.
Organizing groups of people — even small groups — has always involved work, some of which has been tedious and repetitive. But tedious and repetitive tasks are what computers do best. In the next five years, we will see dramatic progress in computer-supported cooperative work.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
Workers on the factory floor have suddenly gathered at a point along the production line. Some are scratching their heads. Others are gesticulating wildly. Most stand with their hands in their pockets. Something is wrong, and no one has thought to call management.
In the near future, scenes like this one will be obsolete. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), managers will be alerted to workplace anomalies as soon they occur. Unusual behaviors will be identified in real time by cameras and image-processing software that continuously analyze and comprehend scenes across the enterprise.
The hunch-based bets of the past already are giving way to far more reliable data-informed decisions. But AI will take this further. By analyzing new types of data, including real-time video and a range of other inputs, AI systems will be able to provide managers with insights about what is happening in their businesses at any moment in time and, even more significantly, detect early warnings of bigger problems that have yet to materialize.
As a researcher, I learned to appreciate the value of early warnings some years ago, while developing algorithms for analyzing data from hospital emergency rooms and drugstores. We discovered that we could alert public health officials to potential epidemics and even the possibility of biological warfare attacks, giving them time to take countermeasures to slow the spread of disease.
Similar analytic techniques are being deployed to detect early signs of problems in aircraft. The detailed maintenance and flight logs for the U.S. Air Force’s aging fleet of F-16 fighter jets are analyzed automatically to identify patterns of equipment failures that may affect only a handful of aircraft at present, but have the potential to become widespread. This has enabled officials to confirm and diagnose problems and take corrective action before the problems spread.
With AI, we can have machines look for millions of worrying patterns in the time it would take a human to consider just one. But that capability includes a terrible dilemma: the multiple hypotheses problem. If you sound an alarm whenever something is anomalous at a 99% confidence level, and you check millions of things an hour, then you will receive hundreds of alarms every minute.
Statisticians and AI researchers are working together to identify situations and conditions that tend to sound false alarms, like a truckload of potassium-rich bananas that can set off a radiation detector meant to identify nuclear materials. By reducing the risk of false alarms, it will be possible to set sensor thresholds even lower, enhancing sensitivity.
The predictive benefits of AI will stretch well beyond equipment and process analysis. For instance, researchers are having great success with algorithms that closely monitor subtle facial movements to assess the emotional and psychological states of individuals. Some of the most interesting applications now are in the mental health sphere, but imagine if the same tools could be deployed on checkout lines in stores, lines at theme parks, or security queues at airports. Are your customers happy or agitated? Executives wouldn’t need to wait weeks or even days for a survey to be completed; these systems could tell you the emotional state of your customers right now.
Other researchers are deploying AI in the classroom. When I taught, I couldn’t tell whether the lecture I was giving was any good — at least not when it would still benefit me or my students. But simple sensors like microphones and cameras can be used by AI programs to detect when active learning is taking place. Just the sounds alone — Who’s talking? Who isn’t? Is anyone laughing? — can provide a lot of clues about teaching effectiveness and when adjustments should be made.
Such a tool could also be used to gauge whether your employees are buying in to what you’re sharing with them in a meeting, or if potential customers are engaged during focus groups. A “managerial Siri” might take this even further. If you asked your digital assistant, “Do the folks in my staff meeting seem to be more engaged since we had the retreat?” you might receive an answer such as, “Yes, there is an increase in eye contact between team members and a slight but significant increase in laughter.”
As a manager, I absolutely detest being surprised. And like everyone else, despite the petabytes of data at my fingertips, I too often am. But AI doesn’t get overwhelmed by the size and complexity of information the way we humans do. Thus, its promise to keep managers more in the know about what’s really happening across their enterprise is truly profound.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
Three technology-driven forces are transforming the nature of management. Automation is making it more and more possible for companies to do work without humans involved. Data-driven management supplements intuition and experience with data and experimentation. Resource fluidity matches tasks to the people who can best perform them, whether inside or outside the organization.
Taken together, these three forces are helping leaders rethink the way work is organized and managed. Tasks that were previously considered the sole domain of humans — like handling customer requests, driving vehicles, or writing newspaper articles — can now be done by machines. Employees at all levels have the information they need to make decisions and adjust their practices. Computers can diagnose situations and identify challenges that humans don’t see. Real-time information makes it possible to run experiments rather than guessing what might work. Employees can self-organize, obtain help from experts inside and outside the organization to get a job done. And companies can manage fluctuations in their resource needs through outsourcing, whether through long-term relationships, hourly hiring, or gigs and piecework.
On the whole, these forces are a good thing. They will help managers to increase productivity, innovation, and customer satisfaction in the coming years. However, if you lead a traditional company, be careful not to let these forces push your management approach to extremes. Taken to their logical conclusion, the three digital forces could transform management for the worse. Accelerating resource fluidity could make all workers contractors, paid only when the company needs them and earning a living only by cobbling together many different gigs. Data-driven management could become Big Brother, evaluating employees’ every action, and hiring or firing people rapidly based only on the numbers. Automation could replace workers and constantly ratchet up the pressure on those that remain. If left unchecked, the three digital forces could transform the employment relationship into an emotionless market transaction — a logically interesting approach that could have negative long-term implications for both workers and companies.
This new employment vision is already starting to play out at some companies. Amazon.com Inc. has an intense, data-driven approach to managing people. As The New York Times reported in 2015, it hires only the best, pays them well, works them very hard, and regularly culls its workforce to remove those perceived as lower performing. Uber Technologies Inc. has a relatively small number of very talented, full-time employees, and it engages most of its drivers through contracts that adjust to meet minute-by-minute changes in market demand. Uber is now piloting a fleet of self-driving vehicles.
When making sense of fast-moving digital innovation, it can be tempting to see great born-digital companies like these as aspirational archetypes for management. Certainly we can — and should — learn a lot from these companies. But think twice before adopting every Silicon Valley management technique as your own. Most companies don’t have the resources to attract and pay the world’s most talented workers. And many high-performing workers would not be happy in transaction-based work schemes, preferring more security or better work-life balance instead. Traditional companies, even those in non-technology industries or less-than-sexy locations, can attract great people with the right combination of income, mission, and working conditions.
Beyond the simple question of finding employees, a question remains whether market-based employment contracts are the right kind of social contract for the typical business. These practices, which work well in some fast-growing digital companies, may not be as effective when growth slows or a disruption strikes. Paying people only for time spent on task reduces opportunities to foster innovation and employee cohesiveness. What’s more, such practices do very little to promote loyalty. Many Uber drivers work for its competitors too; they are Uber drivers only until a better offer comes along. Amazon is one of the industry’s most innovative companies, but it also has a reputation for high employee turnover. Loyalty helps companies to thrive when they cannot pay world-leading wages; employees work hard and create innovations because they believe in the company and its leaders. And when times get tough, loyalty is what helps companies keep their best people.
As a strong proponent of digital transformation, I do not want to discourage traditional companies from adopting digitally powered management practices. However, when building a vision for the future of your company, think of the digital forces as you would vitamins or prescription drugs: The right amounts, applied under the right conditions, can yield fabulous results. But using too much, or in the wrong conditions, can be poisonous.
To summarize, digital transformation needs a heart. In an age of digital innovation, leaders in every industry should strive to transform every part of the company, from customer experience to business models to operational management. But we cannot forget that it is people who make companies work. The vision of management in five or ten years should not be one where all employees are seen as contracted resources laboring under tight, machinelike supervision. It shouldn’t be a world in which automation squeezes workers — and managers — out of the system. It should be one where computers help employees to collaborate fluidly, make decisions scientifically, and manage better with automation than they ever could without it. In the long run, digitally savvy companies that engage the hearts and minds of employees will outperform those that treat people like machines.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
If you watch movies or television, you’ve likely seen Stefan Sonnenfeld’s work. It’s on display in “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens,” three “Mission Impossible” movies, four “Transformer” movies, the “Cold Case” TV series, and dozens more. In a 2007 article, Entertainment Weekly listed him alongside creative luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep as one of the “50 Smartest People in Hollywood.” Unlike some others on the list, however, Sonnenfeld’s creativity is digitally enabled.
Sonnenfeld is a “digital intermediate colorist.” He uses computers to alter the colors in movies and TV shows until they look spectacular. Without the technology, his artistry would not be possible. Nor would the profits that Sonnenfeld and the company he cofounded, Company 3, have generated for its parent companies, Ascent Media (from 2000 to 2010) and Los Angeles-based Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc. (to whom it was sold in 2010).
Digital color artistry like Sonnenfeld’s is an example of a general principle: Technology can be deployed to augment the creative abilities of people and organizations and make new and valuable forms of innovation possible. Today’s digital technologies have reached a level of maturation that enables, across many domains, a practical capability that I have, in my research, called cheap and rapid iteration.
To iterate is to try something different from what you tried last time. Sonnenfeld iterates when he tries out many different color effects on a movie. Sometimes he tries this, then that, then another thing, until he hits on something brilliant. He can do this cheaply and rapidly only because he works at a high-powered computer console with fiber connections, huge amounts of storage, and specialized software for making subtle adjustments to specific areas of a picture and across time in a film. Yes, all that equipment is an investment, but once he’s made it, the cost of trying something new — of the next iteration — is nominal.
Iteration is the process that enables most forms of artistry. Painters often create numerous versions of a painting; Pablo Picasso, for example, created dozens of “studies” prior to his famous “Guernica” painting. Theater artists rehearse, trying a scene this way, then that. Designers iterate by building quick-and-dirty prototypes.
Processes often become more creative when rapid iteration is affordable. Unfortunately, this is not the case in a lot of business domains; often, in business, it’s costly to try something new, especially if it doesn’t work out. That was the case in the film-coloring business before digital technologies, when the process involved painting directly onto film or all-or-nothing photochemical processes. Just as digital changed the game in film coloring, so it can in many areas of business where it’s been too expensive to experiment much.
It’s most natural to think about such opportunities in product businesses, using technologies like computer-aided design (CAD) and 3-D printing to try out a design and then tweak it. But the phenomenon is also occurring in service businesses. A bank I know is using social media technologies to do quick and rapid trials of new customer offerings. To pull this off, a company must use digital technologies to lower the cost of the processes associated with the iterative cycle: setting up a new try (reconfiguration), trying it (simulation or testing), and examining and interpreting the results (visualization).
In the next five years, managers will awaken to a wide range of new possibilities. They’ll act to improve creative capabilities, by figuring out how to deploy technologies to replace expensive physical trying with cheap virtual trying. In effect, they’ll be constructing virtual rehearsal spaces, virtual laboratories, and inexpensive prototyping facilities. The aim won’t be to design machines to take over people’s jobs, but rather to augment human capabilities.
This is not a new idea. In the 1960s, Doug Engelbart proposed using computers to augment human intellect. Also in the 1960s, Internet pioneers J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor emphasized the potential of computer networks to enhance creative work. Michael Schrage, in the late 1990s, described how simulation allowed companies to engage in “serious play.” My own recent research and that of others point to a coming new age of organizational creativity — an era that may, I believe, finally be here.
National Public Radio once called Sonnenfeld the “da Vinci of the movies.” In the coming few years, managers will begin to realize that they can create such da Vincis throughout their companies. And that will be a very profitable thing to do.
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Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
In the coming years, both business leaders and their employees will face a number of challenges as they deal with changing digital technologies. In particular, they will need to learn three important new skills: (1) how to partner with new digital “colleagues”; (2) how to create a mindful relationship with increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies; and (3) how to develop empathy for the varying technology preferences of their human coworkers. Organizations, for their part, will need to design programs and processes to support these efforts.
1. Partnering With Digital “Colleagues” Employees across a wide spectrum of industries will be working with what are, in effect, “digital coworkers” — algorithms that help them tackle a range of tasks such as answering call-center help desk questions, making financial investment decisions, diagnosing medical conditions, scheduling and running manufacturing assembly lines, and providing dashboard advice regarding important performance indicators. These digital colleagues will embody intelligence that evolves cognitively and learns continuously about the specific task it is applied to, by incorporating new solutions learned from experience and applying them to future problems.
Given the complexity and often real-time application of this sort of intelligence, it may be unnecessary and indeed impossible for human professionals to verify the veracity of an algorithm’s solutions. However, as the data become denser and algorithms get faster and more complex, there is a danger of “runaway algorithms” that become disconnected from the reality of the phenomenon they represent, eventually leading to wrong solutions. To prevent this, managers will need to retain their expertise and control over their tasks and processes. They should provide context for the decisions and recommendations of their digital partners by monitoring those decisions from time to time and recalibrating them against their own experience, insight, and intuition — even going against their digital coworkers if necessary.
While digital colleagues will, for the most part, independently handle routine aspects of their tasks, exceptions — that is, those cases where their digital intelligence does not have a satisfactory solution — will require human decision making. At the same time, cloud-based intelligent algorithms for relatively narrow and contained tasks — for example, understanding niche buyer behavior — will make it possible for managers to solve everyday problems more effectively.
Leveraging such opportunities will require managers to be alert to opportunities and problems, to have deep process knowledge and to explore, innovate, and engage with their digital coworkers. In short, managers will be confronted and challenged by digital colleagues — just as they are by their human coworkers. They will need to learn how and when to question, agree, compromise, and stretch.
2. Becoming Digitally Mindful Because digital technologies enable remote work, the nine-to-five workday is becoming less and less meaningful in many settings. Ironically, current management mindsets still focus on the separation of work and nonwork time. Consequently, because managers find it difficult to establish boundaries between work and nonwork, organizations face the fallouts of “techno-stress,” technology addiction, and information overload. However, technologies will only increase in flexibility, richness, and seamlessness, and that will lead to their greater use at home for work and vice versa.
The emphasis on work-home conflict ignores the possibilities of such flexibility. It points employees toward managing a conflict rather than leveraging work-home seamlessness. Technology use that enables a continuous flow of meaningful tasks — irrespective of whether they are work-related or not — may be more beneficial for managers’ well-being and productivity. Managers should start thinking about cultivating a mindful relationship with the technology — one that embodies their individual preferences about what constitutes such flow. Rather than being troubled about work-home boundaries, which perhaps cannot be maintained in the future, organizations will need to support employees in managing the possibilities of flexibility. The paradigm should shift from conflict to flexibility, from technology detox to flow-driven use, and from the digital dark side to digital mindfulness.
3. Developing Empathy for Others’ Technology Preferences Even as leaders and managers learn how to work with digital colleagues, they will need to understand and develop empathy for the technology choices and preferences of their human coworkers. A colleague recently objected to me writing work emails to her late at night. On seeing the time stamp the next morning, she felt pressured to answer my messages immediately, to the exclusion of other, more important emails. My first reaction — that she was supposed to prioritize her own email and not be perturbed by what I did with mine — is typical of current organizational mindsets about technology use. Individual managers are so busy managing their own use of technology that they have given little, if any, thought to the preferences and habits of coworkers. However, this goes against an important tenet of management, which is that individuals work best together in teams and departments when there is some level of fit along important aspects.
Everyone has different preferences and habits for using technology. Some may prefer to be contacted by text, others by email, still others by phone or face-to-face. Some may prefer the flexibility afforded by constant email connectivity, while others may favor allotted email time. A clash between preferences can break down communication between teammates and increase misunderstanding, conflict, and stress. Going forward, managers need to not only be proactive about communicating their own technology preferences but also empathetic about their coworkers’ choices, particularly when they are working on the same teams and projects.
In terms of future work design, employees with similar preferences should ideally be put on the same projects and teams. For instance, individuals who like multitasking might appreciate frequent synchronous interactions on instant messaging systems when working on a team together. Those who enjoy constant connectivity might work well with supervisors who share such preferences. More generally, the key to handling this and other similar workplace challenges brought about by digital technologies is for managers to be both flexible and thoughtful in the way they respond.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:
“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”
In today’s economy, we are seeing companies, business models, products, and processes undergoing major transformation. Enterprises and governments are rapidly “becoming digital” as they seek to capture the cost savings, agility, and collaboration enabled by cloud, analytics, mobile, and social technologies.
However, digital is not the destination. Rather, it is laying the foundation for a much more profound transformation to come. Within five years, I believe all major business decisions will be enhanced by cognitive technologies.
I sensed the magnitude of the transition for the first time in 2011, when I watched IBM’s Watson system win on “Jeopardy!” At the time, I felt that I was watching history in the making: The technology known as artificial intelligence (AI) was finally moving from the lab into the world.
Why are we seeing this now?
First, the technologies required for cognitive systems — not just AI, but a broad spectrum of capabilities that include natural language processing, human-computer interaction, deep learning, neural nets, and more — have made exponential advances in recent years.
Second, the abundance of data being generated throughout the world today requires cognitive technology. Much of this data is “unstructured”: video, audio, sensor outputs, and everything we encode in language, from medical journals to tweets. However, such unstructured data are “dark” to traditional computer systems. Computers can capture, move, and store the data, but they cannot understand what the data mean (which is why cognitive systems are so vital).
Finally, and most important, we will see systems that learn. We need systems that learn. Think of the challenges and issues we face today: predicting risk in financial markets, anticipating consumer behavior, ensuring public safety, managing traffic, optimizing global supply chains, personalizing medicine, treating chronic diseases, and preventing pandemics.
The challenges today go beyond information overload. In many ways, we live in an era of cognitive overload, characterized by an exponential increase in the complexity of decision making. It’s impossible to create protocols, algorithms, or software code to successfully anticipate all the potential permutations, trajectories, and interactions. But cognitive systems are not simply programmed. They actually improve with use, as they receive expert training, interact with clients and customers, and ingest data from their own experiences, successes, and failures.
Some people think of cognitive systems as supercomputers, and there is no question that the computational power behind systems like Watson is considerable. But thanks to the increasing prevalence of application program interfaces (APIs) — which can be encoded into digital services and easily accessed or combined in new ways in the cloud — it’s possible to build a kind of thinking into virtually every digital application, product, and system.
And because we can, we will. If it’s digital today, it will be cognitive tomorrow — and not a distant tomorrow. IDC Research Inc. has estimated that by 2018, more than half of the teams developing apps will embed some kind of cognitive services in them, up from 1% in 2015.
Cognitive systems are already transforming everything from the world-changing to the everyday. For example, cognitive oncology is a reality thanks to technology developed in partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City that helps oncologists identify personalized, evidence-based treatment options based on massive volumes of data. This breakthrough technology is now helping scale access to knowledge at Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand, Manipal Hospitals in India, and more than 20 hospitals in China. Cognitive assistants are at work helping build more intimate, personalized relationships at the Brazilian bank Banco Bradesco, the insurance company GEICO, and the retailer The North Face. Dublin-based Medtronic plc, a global health care solutions company, is creating a cognitive app for people with diabetes to predict a hypoglycemic event hours in advance. These are just a few examples of organizations that are using cognitive systems today.
It’s important to note that we are not talking about the AI we see in movies. This isn’t about creating a synthetic brain or an artificial human. Rather, this is about augmenting human intelligence. Indeed, there is nothing in either cognitive science or its application that implies either sentience or autonomy.
Of course, anyone familiar with the history of technology knows that technological breakthroughs often have major effects on work and jobs. Some jobs are eliminated, while others are created. With cognitive systems, we are already beginning to see the emergence of new disciplines — from data curation to system training, as well as new fields of scientific knowledge and new kinds of work — quite possibly more than in any prior technology revolution.
Data can be seen as the world’s great new resource. What steam power, electricity, and fossil fuels did for earlier eras, data promises to do for the 21st century — if we can mine, refine, and apply it. Thanks to the new generation of cognitive technologies, we can. Intelligence augmentation — IA as opposed to AI — will change how humans work together, make decisions, and manage organizations.
