Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2008 i Rotman Management

When was the last time you asked yourself where your thinking comes from, and how much of it is good quality?  WITH EACH PASSING DAY, the pace of change continues to quicken, requiring that we continually learn and relearn, rethink our decisions, and re-evaluate the way we work and live. In such an environment, the power of our minds to regularly engage in selfanalysis will increasingly determine the quality of our work, our lives, and perhaps even our very survival. No matter what our circumstances or goals, one simple truth applies: we will be better-off if our thinking is skilled. Unfortunately, serious thinking about thinking is rare. When was the last time you asked yourself where your thinking comes from, and how much of it is good quality? If we…

 BUSINESS STRATEGISTS TEND to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints. But what of possibilities? If the ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs – whether of products, cities or business strategies – what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? Not much, it seems. Business strategy has historically been seen as a largely analytic endeavor, with relatively little attention paid to the creative aspects of strategy formulation. In this article, we will describe eight ways to illuminate new possibilities taken from Engineering success stories and discuss what each might look like if applied to business strategy. 1. Challenge Assumptions Challenging assumptions and defying convention are often the first steps in creative Engineering. To produce something original, an engineer raises questions about the…

 DOES THINKING MATTER TO SUCCESS IN BUSINESS? If so, in what ways? Consider the null hypothesis: ‘the way to success in business lies in hustle and luck – not necessarily in that order. A lucky, thoughtless hustler will outperform a sophisticated, disciplined thinking doer every time.’ If this is the case, the stories we delight in telling about how great business minds are causally implicated in the achievement of great business results are no more than made-up inspirational talk aimed at justifying a costly educational enterprise – which might far more efficiently devote itself to training hustlers and hope for good luck, or co-opting luck by training lots of hustlers and letting the chips fall where they may, than to training ‘thinking doers.’ Which is it? Appeals to ‘evidence’…

THE TERM ‘RESEARCH’ shows up in the context of design and innovation in multiple guises, not all of them positive. For some people it connotes ‘data collection’ – looking to the past and present but not to the future; for others it’s simply a required step before coming up with ideas; for yet others it’s a filter that rejects promising ideas before they’ve had a chance to evolve. The truth is that research can be an immensely positive force in the innovation journey. But to derive value from it, we must be willing to complement, challenge, and evolve many of the approaches and practices that traditionally prevail. Starting out as a human-sciences graduate, I believed passionately that research could help us reach a better understanding of people – their needs,…

What is ‘lateral thinking,’ and why is it such an essential practice for business leaders? Lateral thinking is an operational skill for developing new ideas. It is a deliberate form of idea creativity, based on an understanding of how the brain works as a self-organizing information system. The mind makes asymmetric patterns, and lateral thinking is a way of cutting across patterns laterally, rather than moving along them sequentially. Today the tendency is to believe that ‘information is enough,’ and you just input your data into the computer and let it do the work of setting your strategy and making your decisions. That’s very dangerous. Think of what happened in China 600 years ago: the scholars started to believe you could move from certainty to certainty, and they never developed…

ATTHE ROTMAN SCHOOL’S Designworks Lab, for the past year and a half we’ve been putting our theories into practice, and have witnessed first-hand the power of design-inspired methods to not only open minds, reform habits, and tune up team productivity, but also to deliver high-potential solutions to organizations. Our goals at Designworks are to help integrate design methods and mindsets into the planning and development practices of a broad base of organizations; to contribute to important step-change strategies for these enterprises; and to groom a new generation of ‘design thinkers and doers’ in the field of business design. Combining the efforts of our students and graduates with faculty, practitioners, and forward-thinking sponsors, we are finding that the potential for a design-driven process to fuel a new culture of innovation and…

Studies show that when our thinking is challenged, we tend to resist, and that this intensifies if we are forced to reconsider not only whatwe think but howwe think. Why is this? ‘What’ we think about occurs at a conscious level, where critical, fair play can occur more readily. But how we think occurs at an unconscious level – much like how we walk; it involves habits of mind, and thus is not readily inspected in the way an opinion, belief, or fact might be consciously examined. The problem is, this relative lack of access makes it difficult for us to appraise and alter how we think where necessary. Habits of mind are developed and reinforced over long periods of time and across a wide variety of circumstances. Their neural…

In a recent study you found that ‘cognitive skills’ are literally worth more in large urban areas than elsewhere. Please explain. Economists have had evidence for some time that in general, skills are more valuable in bigger cities. The problem is that to date, the definition of ‘skills’ has been very broad, because most of the studies have used education-based measures. So for example, researchers have found that having a college degree is more valuable in a big city than in a small one. That’s fine, but we all know that a degree from a good university and a degree from a lower-grade college are very different things: they provide you with very different sets of skills, and even within good universities, the sets of skills that graduates in Engineering…

DEAN ROGER MARTIN was recently named one of ten ‘B-School All-Stars’ who are revolutionizing business education by BusinessWeek.com. Martin, who has served as Dean since September 1998, was cited for pioneering a business philosophy oriented around design and Integrative Thinking that encourages managers to become flexible problem-solvers. He was the only non-American and the only current business school Dean to make the list. Other ‘all stars’ on the list included Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago, and Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California. In 2005 Martin’s teaching also earned him a spot on BusinessWeek’s list of ‘innovation gurus’. Martin holds the Premier’s Chair in Competitiveness and Productivity and is director of the AIC…

NOBODY ENJOYS IT, but we’ve all experienced it, whether it’s in the hospital emergency room or anticipating that urgently-needed cup of java in the morning: the dreaded long wait. Believe it or not, facility planners care about this too. Their dilemma is how to balance costs for building facilities with minimizing the amount of time people have to wait for a service they have traveled to get. “You can see it almost any night you go to a hospital emergency – some are going to be overflowing, some are going to be very relaxed,” says Rotman Professor of Operations Management and Statistics Dmitry Krass, one of three authors of a recent paper on the problem. “Some of it is due to changes in demand but some of it is due…

A RECENTSTUDYON CANADA’S FREE TRADE experience suggests that eliminating more trade barriers inside and outside Canada could lead to big leaps in Canadian productivity, which in turn would allow Canada to better fund its social programs. The study by Economics researchers Daniel Trefler and Alla Lileeva found that Canadian companies with low productivity levels before the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) made significant productivity gains once the FTA came into effect in 1989. The gains were made because the elimination of trade barriers created the right conditions for these companies to make major investments in productivity, such as becoming more innovative with products and investing in manufacturing technology. Low productivity companies that began to export after FTA adopted new technology at more than two times the rate of their non-exporting…

As president and CEO of Waterfront Toronto, could you describe the range and scope of your responsibilities? I provide direction for the corporation in implementing government policy. Our goal is the revitalization of Toronto’s waterfront, so it’s really about how we operationalize and take this objective and move it forward. Revitalization is about crafting a new kind of city that is focused on public policy; it’s about stopping urban sprawl and promoting transit and sustainability. Our role is to promote the projects and activities that drive revitalization with the Board’s help, and then secure funding from the government to help implement them. I head up the team that does that. We’ve got some great attributes in Toronto, and we want to make sure the quality of place and life are…

January 2008 January 15, 5:00-6:15pm Rotman Operations Strategy Speaker Series Speaker:Mark Foote, (MBA91), President and Chief Merchandising Officer, Loblaw Companies Limited February 2008 February 13, 5:00-6:15pm Martin Prosperity Institute @ Rotman Speaker Series Speaker: Gordon Nixon, President and CEO, RBC Financial Group and “Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2007” February 21, 22 and 23, 2008 annual Rotman International MBA Trading Competition March 2008 March 7, 5:00-6:15pm annual International Women's Month Lecture @ Rotman Speaker: TBA March 13, time TBA Forum on U.S./Canada Exchange Rates Keynote Speakers: David Dodge, former Governor, Bank of Canada Alan Greenspan, former Chairman, Federal Reserve Bank March 14, 12:30-6:00pm annual Rotman MBA Leadership and Social Change Conference and Career Fair Keynote Speaker: Tom McAllister ,(MBA 82), President and CEO, KidsHelpPhone March 26, time TBA annual Rotman MBA Finance…

IF YOUR ORGANIZATION DEMANDS knowledge work from its people, then you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of sheer brainpower. You probably recruit high-intellect people and ensure they have access to good information. You likely also respect the power of incentives and use formal compensation systems to appropriately channel that intellectual energy. But you might be overlooking another crucial driver of a knowledge worker’s performance: their inner work life. People experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday. As we arrive at our workplaces, we don’t check our hearts and minds at the door. Unfortunately, because inner work life is seldom openly expressed in modern organizations, it’s all too easy for managers to pretend that private thoughts and…

 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has made the most ambitious claim in his field: that brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia; that brain ‘plasticity’ exists from the cradle to the grave; and that radical improvements in cognitive functioning – how we learn, think, perceive, and remember – are possible, even in the elderly. Merzenich claims that when learning occurs in a way consistent with the laws that govern brain plasticity, the ‘mental machinery’ of the brain can be improved so that we learn and perceive with greater precision, speed, and retention. Clearly when we learn, we increase what we know; but his claim is that we can also change the very structure of the brain itself and increase its capacity…

THE MOTIVATING QUESTION IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT IS, ‘how can a firm differentiate itself from competitors in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage?’ Different theoretical frameworks offer guidance as to how this task can be accomplished: Michael Porter’s influential Five Industry Forces Theory, for example, contends that competitive advantage resides in the structure and positioning of organizations; a ‘resource-based perspective’ attributes the chief source of competitive advantage to a firm’s unique access to scarce resources; and the ‘core competence approach’ assigns competitive advantage to the technological and organizational strengths that firms cultivate over time. Although differing in their specifics, the various strands of Strategic Management theory all focus on the alignment (and realignment) of firms’ internal strengths and weaknesses with their external opportunities and threats. Given this theoretical orientation, and…

You have done extensive research on ‘thinking styles.’ How do you define this term? Simply put, a thinking style is a way of thinking. It is not an ability to think, but rather a preferred way of using the abilities one has. In my research I have found that what happens to us in life depends not just on how well we think, but also on how we think. People think in very different ways, and they overestimate the extent to which others think like they do. As a result, misunderstandings often develop. That’s why it’s so important to recognize and understand different styles of thinking and learning. Describe your Theory of Mental Self-Government. The forms of government that exist in the world are not accidental: they are an external…

You have said that “as we learn to see, we learn to be blind.” Please explain. What I meant is that our expectations lead us around in life, more than we are willing to admit, and they tend to determine what we ‘see.’ The more tightly we learn what something ‘should be,’ the more sure we become of it, and the more difficult it becomes to notice slight deviations. Let’s say you’re approaching a stop sign: after a while, you just see ‘red’ and ‘octagonal,’ and you presume that it means ‘stop.’ The problem is that if that sign suddenly said something entirely different – like ‘danger ahead’ – you would be blind to that. I once did a study where we gave people an index card that said, “if…

HOW SHOULD DECISIONS BE MADE? Easy, we figured that out long ago: first define the problem, then diagnose its causes, next design possible solutions, and finally decide which is best. And, of course, implement the choice. But do people always make decisions that way? We propose that this rational, or ‘thinking first’ model of decision making should be supplemented with two very different models – a ‘seeing first’ and a ‘doing first’ model. Healthy organizations, like healthy people, have the capacity for all three; and when managers use all three, they can improve the quality of their decisions. The Limits of ‘Thinking First’ Years ago, one of us studied a host of business decisions, delineating the steps and then laying them out. A decision process for building a new plant…

ALMOST EVERY DAY, sometimes many times a day, I read an article about some organization or see a company or its leaders in action and exclaim, “What were they thinking?” It frequently seems as if modern management is something drawn from a Dilbert cartoon, except with serious consequences for both companies and their employees. But organizational leaders are hardworking, serious people, often expending enormous amounts of time and effort trying to do a good job. The problem is not one of intelligence or effort. Why do so many companies and their managers do so many things that seem so incorrect? In the spirit of the quality movement that has taught us to look for the root cause of problems so they can be fixed at the source, it is important…

 A RECORD-SETTING 15 NEW FACULTY MEMBERS have joined the Rotman School for the 2007/2008 academic year, helping to prepare for the continued expansion of the School’s suite of graduate programs. As announced in our last issue, Richard Florida has joined the School as a professor of Business and Creativity and academic director of the newly-established Martin Prosperity Institute. In addition, • Anita McGahan has joined the School as a professor of Strategic Management. She was previously on the faculties of Boston University and Harvard Business School; • Sabrina Buti is an assistant professor of Finance with expertise in the areas of corporate finance, market regulation and microstructure. • Tiziana Casciaro joins the School as an assistant professor of Organizational Behaviour. Previously she was a faculty member at Harvard Business School.…

THE RECENT GROWTH OF THE 144A EQUITY MARKET points to a heated demand among U.S. investors for privately-placed securities, and a desire among issuers to raise capital quickly. Making the most of this trend, last May Goldman Sachs introduced its own system to allow hedge funds and other institutional investors to invest and trade in private companies. On November 8, Gregg Weinstein, head of the firm’s markets desk and co-head of its convertibles and derivatives desk, visited the Rotman School to discuss Goldman’s newest trading platform in a presentation sponsored by the Rotman School’s Capital Markets Institute, entitled “The Rise of Unregistered Securities Markets in the U.S.: Will Canada Follow?” The new system, GS TrUE – short for Goldman Sachs Tradable Unregistered Equity – is open only to qualified institutional…

Junia Freitas (MBA ’96) Director, Corporate Strategy, Celestica Lives and works in: Toronto BESTTHING ABOUTMYJOB: My work has a profound impact on the future of the company, its customers and more than 40,000 employees around the world. MY BIGGEST CHALLENGE: Getting people to align, agree and move forward. MOST IMPORTANT SKILL(S) FOR MY JOB: Ability to create the context for strategic thinking, which requires listening, talking straight, confronting and transforming divergent thoughts into effective dialogue; making choices, acting on the choices with velocity; and being constantly on the lookout for what’s changing so we can adapt quickly. THE MOST INNOVATIVE THING I’VE EVER DONE IS: Took a 40-day career break in Spain to rethink my life. Those 40 days changed everything. HOWI RELAX: Basking in the sun (yes… with sunscreen),…

You have dedicated your career to studying the connections between thought and action. What are some of your key findings? What I am most interested in is how people produce action that is effective, and by effective I mean action that leads to the consequences people desire – consequences that persist. In our minds, all human beings hold what might be labeled ‘micro theories’ of action that specify what ‘effective action’ is and how to produce it in any type of situation, whether it be as a leader, a follower or a peer. How do we produce behaviour? Through the use of our minds. How does the mind produce behaviour? By designs that are programmed into it, which can be warehoused and then retrieved. These are ‘causal’ designs, whereby doing…

IN A HIGHLY-CONNECTED WORLD, peripheral signals are initially difficult to capture, but they can be vital early warning signs of both threats and opportunities. Unfortunately, most of us are ‘passive scanners’ of our environment: we wait for information to reach us, and deal with it as it arrives. The danger in this practice is that it is all-too easy to miss unexpected and unfamiliar weak signals on the periphery – that blurry zone at the edge of our vision, where not many people or firms focus their attention. Active scanning, in contrast, typically occurs in response to a specific question and is driven by organizational curiosity. The primary zones of the periphery that should be scanned on a regular basis include the macro-economic and political zones; customers and channels; competitors…

ARE YOU A MANAGER OR A CHEF? Think about it. Picture a restaurant kitchen on a busy Saturday evening. It’s a hubbub of noise, clatter, shouts, flying utensils, spilled sauces, broken eggshells. For those unfortunate individuals who have to clean it up afterwards, it’s a nightmare: it’s a mess. Now switch to the average corporate boardroom. What comes to mind is just the opposite: a mahogany table, middleaged men and women in dark suits, white shirts, writing pads in neat leather binders, Mont Blanc pens, open laptops, quiet, polite discussion. Mess gets a bad rap in business. Yet mess, I’d like to submit, is good. Designer and professor Horst Rittell once claimed that many problems facing society are ‘wicked.’ As distinct from ‘tame’ problems, wicked problems are difficult to define.…

What are heuristics? Asynonym for heuristics is ‘rules of thumb’: heuristics involve using short cuts to make a decision, rather than following a rational, step-by-step, analytical process where we assign values to each step and then calculate ourselves toward the right choice. Heuristics have been traditionally seen by psychologists and organizational theoreticians as a bad thing, or at least as inferior to the pure-calculation method. Many people are now re-evaluating that judgement and saying, “Heuristics is how we work and make decisions in real life.” The notion of simple guiding principles, which I’ve helped develop with David Oliver [of HEC Montréal], is a helpful kind of heuristic. These are shortcuts, based on our experience and what we intuitively feel is right, that are valuable in making decisions. Whenever you’re dealing…

Your book A Whole New Mind makes frequent references to right- and left-brain thinking. What’s the difference between the two, and why is the distinction important for today’s business people? Over the course of evolution, our brains have done a very elegant job of dividing up tasks. The left side of the brain specializes in tasks that are logical, linear, sequential and analytical, whereas the right hemisphere specializes in understanding things all at once rather than in sequence; in processing that’s about context rather than text; and in synthesis rather than analysis. The truth is, we use both sides of our brain to do everything that we do, but that divide offers us a powerful metaphor for understanding the thinking styles and set of abilities that are going to be…

 DESPITE GROWING AWARENESS of the threat of global warming, many individuals feel helpless to avert a climate change crisis, says Dr. Ron Dembo, founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, an environmental not-for-profit. “The question is, what can I, as an individual do? How can I do all these wonderful things – save energy, reduce greenhouse gas, preserve the natural world – and still live a decent life?” On September 12, Dembo presented his company’s contributions to the global debate on climate change in a presentation titled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Carbon Offsets But Were Afraid to Ask”, part of the Rotman Business of Green Speaker Series. The good news for those concerned about ecological issues, says Dembo, is that, collectively, individuals can make a genuine impact. “If 660 million…

A BOOK CO-AUTHORED BY Rotman Adjunct Professor Don Tapscott was recently nominated for one of the world’s most prestigious business book awards: Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Prof. Tapscott and Anthony Williams, was named as a one of the six finalists of the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. It is a first time that a Canadian has been nominated for the award. Wikinomics, which has been on best sellers lists around the world since its release last year, is an explanation of how internet-based collaboration can be harnessed to produce even more innovative content, products and services. Prof. Tapscott is chief executive of international think tank New Paradigm. Founded in 1993, New Paradigm produces groundbreaking research focused on the role…

IN OCTOBER, Rotman adjunct professor of Marketing David Dunne received the University of Toronto’s President’s Teaching Award for 2007. This award recognizes sustained excellence in teaching, research in teaching, and the integration of teaching and research. The 10 winners from throughout UofT have been designated as members of the University’s Teaching Academy for a period of five years, and receive an annual professional development allowance of $10,000 for five years. Members of the Teaching Academy are called upon to meet on occasion as a body to discuss matters relevant to teaching in the University, offer advice to the Vice President and Provost and the Director of the Office of Teaching Advancement, assist in the assessment of teaching when required and function as advocates for excellence in teaching within and…

What kind of new thinking and creative measures are going to help us avoid a climate change crisis? We have many of the tools and technologies that we need to address climate change. What we do not know, and what is critical to know, is this: what is the price of a ton of carbon? Finding the answer to this question is the best outcome you can hope for from a greenhouse gas market approach. Once you’ve determined the price of carbon, you need to apply additional policies and measures to avert climate change. Time is running out. If you believe what the scientists are telling us, we’re working on a tight schedule. We’re going to need additional funding and policies that will encourage the development of new technologies, from…

A new year, a new alumni web portal, a new golf event, a new alumni logo – and lots of alumni news in the following pages. But we still haven’t heard from all of you – so now’s the time to start writing YOUR Class Note for the next issue. That edition, titled “The allconsuming issue,” will hit your mailbox in May. Your all-consuming deadline for new submissions will hit in early February. Don’t be left out! Keep them coming! – Jack MBA / MCOM / DBA Full & Part-Time 1956 Neil Bryson has had a very active career as chairman, president, CEO and director of significant companies in a number of countries. Following his retirement as a vice president of Westinghouse and CEO of Transelectrix Technology Inc., he continued…