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Researchers urge: Learn from (someone else’s) experience
Measuring your performance as a business is critical. If you want to grow and be successful, you need to understand what you do well—and not so well. To paraphrase a couple of old adages, we all learn from our mistakes and our experience. But in today’s bumpy and fast-changing business landscape, measuring performance can be tough; tougher still if yours is a complex organization or industry. Whatever you’re looking at to gauge your firm’s performance—whether it’s customer satisfaction, say, or repeat purchases—your measures might well be less than perfect. And that’s because of noise—abstruse or unreliable data that makes it hard to unpack key metrics accurately and to learn from them. How successful a firm is in negotiating this performance measure noise depends on how that firm learns, said Kristy Towry, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting at Goizueta Business School. She has led a study that looks at the way organizations and the people in them manage their learning. And she finds that we’re way more adept at cutting through the noise when we learn from each other, rather than basing our learning on our own firsthand experience. What the study found: What Towry and her colleagues found was that when there’s a lot of noise in the data we’re working with, our strategic learning is considerably improved when our learning is vicarious—that’s to say, when we learn from each other. This is down to how much of the big picture we see, said Towry. And experiential learning can make us myopic. “We know from psychology and from the results of this study that experiential learning—basing what we learn mainly off our own firsthand experience—can limit us. Experience tends to make us over-focus on what is happening in the here and now or what has just happened. We forget what happened before and don’t build that into our decision-making.” Vicarious learning, on the other hand, helps us to see the bigger picture. “When we’re learning from each other, it’s also experiential, but the learning is augmented by other people’s experience, meaning that we have a broadened perspective," said Towry. "We’re better able to see the big-picture patterns and trends.” When there’s a lot of noise and complexity to negotiate, vicarious learning helps us make better decisions. And this has huge implications for businesses operating in today’s environment. “Our world is not cut and dried at the best of times. Right now we are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and the fallout on world economies and trade. The business context for most firms operating in this context is very far from stable, so we can assume there’s a lot of complexity and noise affecting our performance indicators. And with so much change afoot, the experiences we are all having in the workplace are what I would call fairly idiosyncratic,” said Towry. “Business leaders should be very aware of this.” To optimize strategic learning and thrive in complexity, firms need to find ways to allow vicarious learning to happen, she said. That means thinking about how to break down barriers to knowledge sharing, be they organizational silos or emerging challenges associated with things like remote working. Sharing information, insight, and understanding is essential. Kristy L. Towry is John and Lucy Cook Chair and Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. To learn more about this research or to talk with Kristy – simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
Innovation: Should it always be a team sport?
Conventional wisdom has it that innovation is very much a team sport. To create a breakthrough innovation that is vastly more successful than its predecessors, you need to prioritize teams over the individual. That's not always the case, according to Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. It depends very much on the degree to which the invention can be broken down into discrete chunks of work. Chan and colleagues from INSEAD published a paper, “Revisiting the Role of Collaboration in Creating Breakthrough Inventions,” in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management journal in 2020. In it, they look at more than one million U.S. patents for new products filed between 1985 and 2009. The majority of these patents were awarded for innovations in function—machines, processes or products that delivered some kind of utility. The others corresponded to design; in other words, the distinct visual form or aspect of a product, like Coca-Cola’s iconic curvy bottle or the Apple iPhone. Sifting these patents for breakthroughs (those ranked by citations as being in the top 5 percent of their product class), Chan and his colleagues were able to look at whether standout innovations were the product of teamwork or whether any of them had actually been developed by a lone innovator. And what they found sheds fascinating and useful new light on the dynamics undergirding the innovation process. As a rule, breakthrough functional products—those awarded patents for some kind of utility—do tend to be created by teams. But when it comes to inventions that are centered on breakthrough designs, it’s a whole different ball game. Here, the solo inventor is every bit as likely to create a breakthrough as an entire team. The study looks at a diverse cross-section of industries from computers to cars, Chan and his co-authors found that lone inventors do relatively better on these types of integral inventions. It’s a fascinating work of research – and if you are looking to know more, then let us help. Tian Heong Chan is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. He is available to speak to his research and this important topic – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
Businesses must have a strategy for a messy tomorrow
John Kim is a Senior Lecturer in Organization & Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He is a management consultant with more than 20 years of experience working with executives to make difficult decisions and implement sustainable change. Recently, John published a piece that details a ‘Strategy for a messy tomorrow’ where he outlines how businesses must have a strategy development and implementation for an unpredictable business world. The piece is attached and a must read, especially in these turbulent and unpredictable economic times. In the article, he focuses on three key points: 1.Beware of False Choices “One thing we try to teach here at the business school is to be careful of false choices. Business is incredibly dynamic. Every industry is now a technology business, and the corporate playbook that evolved to protect profits is quite outdated.” Kim notes that Thomas Friedman poetically described this new normal in his 2005 book The World is Flat, and over the last 15 years, competition has only accelerated because of the explosion of two resources: cheap money and data. Kim notes that it’s a great environment to start or fund a business because interest rates have been low for the last 10+ years. There are dozens of new entrants in all industries, and all parts of the value chain, who are often well-funded, flexible, and are not weighed down by legacy business models and assets. The big winners are the customers who have increasing choice, lower prices, and great value capture. 2.The Challenging Environment From his corporate experience, Kim sees two significant challenges to strategy implementation. First, senior leaders turn over quickly. “It’s hard to have consistency of vision and leadership and implementation when there is such a movement in the C-suite with someone moving in and someone moving out every 5–6 months. So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of strategies either don’t follow through or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and strategy gets a little bit muddled as a result.” Secondly, when the strategy does eventually make it to the ground-floor and needs to be executed, things have often moved on, and the market responses are rarely the ones you expect. Riffing on Peter Drucker’s famous quote on uncertainty, Kim explains to his students that, “Instead of trying to think of something brilliant to do tomorrow, why don’t you think of something very actionable today that prepares us for what we know will be a totally messy, crazy, unpredictable tomorrow.” 3.A Business Executive’s Response The business executive’s job is to not only set the direction, build a climate of trust, and create the energy for change—but also to be willing to test the assumptions and constraints around a given problem. Increasingly the answers will lie outside of a given industry, and thus require leaders to be broader in their horizon-scanning and more open to alternative paths forward. If you are interested in learning more about why business do indeed need a a strategy for a messy tomorrow – the let us help. John Kim is available to speak regarding this topic – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
October is Disability Awareness Month - contact a UMW expert if you are covering
One in four Americans lives with a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the University of Mary Washington, it’s one in eight. “With those sorts of numbers, it’s mind-boggling [that] disability doesn’t have more automatic inclusion when people think about diversity,” said UMW Professor of English Chris Foss. As the Americans with Disabilities Act’s 30th year and October’s Disability Awareness Month shine a light on one of the country’s most underrepresented groups, so does a new UMW course. Offered for the first time this fall, Intro to Disability Studies (IDS) delves into the 21st-century experience of a diverse population, exploring cognitive, sensory, mobility and other differences as just as essential to the human condition as gender and race. The 16-week course fans out across disciplines, examining disability throughout the lifespan in historical, political, social and other contexts. Years in the making, the class is team-taught by faculty and staff – from art history, education, English, historic preservation, psychology and the Office of Disability Resources (ODR) – who’ve poured their time and passion into the topic in hopes it gains traction. “It took a lot of meetings, discussion and work on Google Docs to pull this together,” said Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey, who borrows from her first-year seminar, “The Beauty Difference Gives Us,” to deliver an IDS session on how disabilities affect artists’ work. If you are a journalist looking to cover Disability Awareness Month and the Americans with Disabilities Act’s 30th year, then let the experts from the University of Mary Washington help with your story. Dr. Julia DeLancey and Dr. Chris Foss are available to speak with media about this important topic – simply click on either icon to arrange an interview today.
More than just money – what corporate America needs to do to motivate today’s workforce
In a modern workplace no longer characterized by rigid hierarchies and where power is more diffused, traditional methods of motivation may no longer be enough. We have come to understand the value of providing people with ‘intrinsic motivation’ – a sense of purpose, the importance of creative, interesting work, and maintaining work-life balance. We have naturally moved away from a sole dependence on monetary incentives. However, in a New York Times opinion piece, management author Alfie Kohn asserts that “science has confirmed” that monetary rewards amount to “bribes” that don’t work. Somehow this doesn’t ring true. Has science really confirmed this? Would businesses continue to incentivize performance with monetary rewards if they did not work? And aren’t we all, at least to some extent, motivated by money? To understand if Kohn is right, or if there is a more nuanced answer, Karen Sedatole, Professor of Accounting at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School says we need to look at patterns of human behavior. The classical economic theory, which gave us ‘homo economicus,’ assumes people always behave in a rational way and, as with Gordon Gekko in the ‘Wall Street’ movies, selfishness predominates. Findings from psychology and particularly behavioral economics have started to show this to be incorrect. In fact, people tend to make illogical choices contrary to self-interest. Our capacity to think – via a mix of deep reflective thinking and rapid automatic thinking – can lead us to what economists might consider to be irrational behaviors – albeit with the cognitive biases behind our thinking staying mostly predictable. Do monetary incentives work? We all value money, but our perception of its value is influenced by the importance that we also place on reciprocity and fairness, social norms, trust, and trustworthiness. When it comes to monetary rewards for performance the results will also greatly depend on the quality of the performance measures, along with the type of task being rewarded, and the type of reward. Contrary to Kohn’s assertion, Sedatole points out there are many real-world examples that show monetary incentives can deliver big performance and productivity improvements. In fact, if uncontrolled, bonus incentives can be too powerful a motivator, causing damage – as the UK’s PPI and the Wells Fargo mis-selling scandals both firmly attest. There is also strong academic evidence that monetary rewards can have a positive effect, and equally strong evidence that, when over-used, they can elicit bad behavior. Based on relevant academic research in this area, Sedatole identifies four core principles for the use of monetary incentives: Payment for performance can certainly lead to people making a greater effort than when they are rewarded by salary alone, but only if these core principles are followed: 1. Performance targets – Performance targets should be difficult to hit but not too difficult. 2. Performance metrics – The way performance is measured should be sensitive to the employees’ perceptions and sense of control. Employees should believe that their increased effort improves performance, improved performance leads to greater reward, and reward is valued. Metrics must be precise and not prejudiced by external factors. And, from the organization’s perspective, metrics should be set to meet its objectives. 3. Fairness and social norms – Monetary rewards must be seen to be fair and to comply across organizations. They should also conform to social norms. 4. Characteristics of the task – The efficacy of monetary incentives can depend on the nature of the task and to what extent the task provides intrinsic incentives. Here Alfie Kohn has a point; in some cases, monetary rewards tend to undermine intrinsic incentives. ‘Boring’ tasks have little or no intrinsic motivation, whereas creative tasks – the work of a physician, designer, scientist, etc. – are intrinsically motivating. Where there is intrinsic motivation money can be less relevant and in extreme cases can be seen to devalue the intrinsic factors. Professor Sedatole’s recent webinar: ‘Irrational but Predictable! When to Use Monetary Incentives to Motivate Employees’ explains her findings in further details: simply visit it to view and watch for here: If you are journalist covering this topic – Professor Sedatole is available to speak with reporters – simply click on her icon today to arrange an interview.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- During the pandemic, the amount of screen time for many people working and learning from home as well as binge-watching TV has sharply increased. New research finds that wearing blue-light glasses just before sleeping can lead to a better night's sleep and contribute to a better day's work to follow. "We found that wearing blue-light-filtering glasses is an effective intervention to improve sleep, work engagement, task performance and organizational citizenship behavior, and reduced counterproductive work behavior," said Cristiano L. Guarana, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. "Wearing blue-light-filtering glasses creates a form of physiologic darkness, thus improving both sleep quantity and quality." Most of the technology we commonly use -- such as computer screens, smartphones and tablets -- emits blue light, which past research has found can disrupt sleep. Workers have become more dependent on these devices, especially as we navigate remote work and school during the coronavirus pandemic. The media have recently reported on the benefits of blue-light glasses for those spending a lot of time in front of a computer screen. This new research extends understanding of the circadian rhythm, a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. "In general, the effects of wearing blue-light-filtering glasses were stronger for 'night owls' than for 'morning larks,' said Guarana, who previously has studied how lack of sleep affects business decisions, relationships and other behaviors in organizations. "Owls tend to have sleep periods later in the day, whereas larks tend to have sleep periods early in the day. "Although most of us can benefit from reducing our exposure to blue light, owl employees seem to benefit more because they encounter greater misalignments between their internal clock and the externally controlled work time. Our model highlights how and when wearing blue-light-filtering glasses can help employees to live and work better." The findings appear in the paper, "The Effects of Blue-Light Filtration on Sleep and Work Outcomes," published online by the Journal of Applied Psychology. Guarana is the corresponding author; his co-authors are Christopher Barnes and Wei Jee Ong of the University of Washington. The research found that daily engagement and performance of tasks may be related to more underlying biological processes such as the circadian process. "Our research pushes the chronotype literature to consider the relationship between the timing of circadian processes and employees' performance," the researchers wrote. A good night's sleep not only benefits workers; it also helps their employers' bottom lines. "This study provides evidence of a very cost-effective means of improving employee sleep and work outcomes, and the implied return on investment is gigantic," said Barnes, professor of management and the Evert McCabe Endowed Fellow at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. "I personally do not know of any other interventions that would be that powerful at that low of a cost." Across two studies, researcher collected data from 63 company managers and 67 call center representatives at Brazil-based offices for a U.S. multinational financial firm and measured task performance from clients. Participants were randomly chosen to test glasses that filtered blue light or those that were placebo glasses. "Employees are often required to work early mornings, which may lead to a misalignment between their internal clock and the externally controlled work time," the researchers said, adding that their analyses showed a general pattern that blue-light filtration can have a cumulative effect on key performance variables, at least in the short term. "Blue-light exposure should also be of concern to organizations," Guarana said. "The ubiquity of the phenomenon suggests that control of blue-light exposure may be a viable first step for organizations to protect the circadian cycles of their employees from disruption." Researchers received no financial support or compensation for this research. The glasses were donated by the Austin, Texas-based company Swanwick.
Taking SD-WAN QoS to the Next Level
Backhauling traffic to a corporate data center has been a defacto approach for ensuring full security treatment across all users and applications. But QoS took a hit when services started moving to the cloud. Michael Cooney, Senior Editor at Network World describes how SD-WANs have provided a solution for that in his article entitled "Fannie Mae’s journey to SD-WAN means less reliance on MPLS and VPNs." In that article, Ken Reddick, Director of Network Engineering at Fannie Mae says “What we are moving to is a cloud-edge environment where user traffic is now sent directly where it needs to go without hitting the data center, and what that has brought us is a four-fold increase in network performance and cut latency by 50%.” SD-WANs are providing a valuable new approach for delivering optimal connectivity between end-users and cloud services, however QoS is still ultimately determined by the underlying physical networks. To take QoS to the next level will require a next generation physical network that is designed to deliver highly predictable end-to-end bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Network designs such as AcceleRoute achieve this through a bufferless architecture that eliminates congestion in the network core. Low latency bandwidth can be dynamically scaled up or down in real-time based on traffic load. Networks such as AcceleRoute provide an ideal underlay network option for SD-WANs by delivering consistently superior service levels regardless of traffic and geography For more information about AcceleRoute, contact: Lesley Gent Director Client Relations, InventionShare™ lgent@InventionShare.com (613) 225-7236, Ext 131 Or visit our website at www.InventionShare.com
In the introduction to his new book, Greg Fisher and his co-authors note that strategy used to be the domain of only those at the very top of an organization. Many would attend management retreats and forget what was discussed soon afterward, much like unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions. “It used to be that strategy happened at off-site retreats, often coupled with golf, cigars and scotch. It used to be that strategy was only discussed as part of an annual planning cycle … was about grand, long-term plans that stretched way into the future,” they wrote. “Strategy was largely cerebral.” Fisher, the Larry and Barbara Sharpf Professor and an associate professor of entrepreneurship at the IU Kelley School of Business, says those days are over. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic began seemingly disrupting every aspect of life, including business processes, the rapid pace of social change meant that companies could no longer wait or slowly adjust. His book, “Strategy in 3D: Essential Tools to Diagnose, Decide & Deliver (Oxford University Press),” co-authored with two former Kelley School faculty members, presents insights into how companies can broaden and include more people in the strategic process. “Anyone with career ambition in the business world needs to become a strategist. We hope this book will serve as a useful resource for everyone willing to take that leap,” he wrote along with John Wisneski of Arizona State University’s W.P. Carrey School of Business and Rene Bakker of Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University. The first section of the book discusses strategic concepts and ideas and how they can be enacted in different ways and at different levels of an organization. Then they discuss the “three elements that are central to being strategic within a business – the 3Ds of diagnose, decide and deliver.” The second section outlines tools that should be part of any manager’s strategy toolbox. The authors see strategy as being about diagnosing a wide array of complex issues or opportunities facing organizations, deciding on solutions to address those challenges or opportunities and then taking action. But the process of forming such strategies is messy. “There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to applying tools in tandem,” they note in the book’s conclusion. “What does stand out, though, is that making combinations that ‘click’ with the specific problem in focus adds more value than simply adding tools in isolation.” The book’s 218 pages cover a great deal, but here are three important takeaways from Fisher, Wisneski and Bakker: Let the problem define the parameters – Preconceived preferences for certain tools or frameworks offer fewer useful insights than the application of tools developed to address specific issues. “In other words, start from the problem or question you face,” they said. Combine strategic tools that offer complementary insights – It makes sense to select tools that will investigate different sides of a problem, “making sure no stone is left unturned.” It makes sense to often include at least one external and internal strategic tool in tandem. “We want to know generally whether this new market is attractive, but the more important question is whether the market is also attractive for us,” they said. “Strategists are everywhere,” Fisher and his co-authors write. “We are aligned in our dismissal of the view of the chief executive as the almighty, all-knowing strategy designer.”
Georgia Southern University saw a significant increase in grant and contract funding awarded to its faculty for research in the 2020 fiscal year. Georgia Southern faculty and staff received 144 awards totaling $10.7 million, which represents nearly a 67% increase over the previous year. The University received $6.4 million in FY2019 and $5.6 million in FY2018. This year marks the first time that faculty-led research at Georgia Southern broke the $10 million threshold. Vice Provost for Research Christopher Curtis, Ph.D., praised the faculty for their achievements. “These are highly competitive awards from the state, the federal government and private enterprises,” he said. “To grow our research portfolio in a national environment of diminishing funding is truly remarkable and a testament to the intellectual firepower and creativity of our professors. Georgia Southern is a Public Impact Research university, which means that the success of these researchers will be felt well beyond the confines of the University and will extend across the region.” Faculty engage in research that contributes significantly to the University’s $1.4 billion economic impact on the coastal region and that makes Georgia Southern a leading Public Impact Research university in the Southeast. The Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing, the College of Science and Mathematics and the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health each received over $2 million in sponsored awards in FY2020. If you have any questions about the faculty research being conducted at Georgia Southern University, or if you are a journalist looking to cover this topic - let us help. Christopher Curtis is the Vice Provost for Research at Georgia Southern University. Simply click on his icon to arrange an interview today.
A new program being offered by the Waters College of Health Professions at Georgia Southern University is helping soldiers with the 3rd Infantry Division (ID) rank up their readiness by offering a new Tactical Athlete Certificate (TAC) program. This program is designed to help soldiers improve their performance, avoid musculoskeletal injuries in physical training, receive college credits and points toward promotions. The program comprises three courses including a basic course, trainer course and programming course. “The Tactical Athlete Certificate is a beneficial program for both the military as a whole and the individual soldier,” said Nancy Henderson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences. “The military gains more knowledgeable soldiers who can develop science-based and comprehensive physical training plans, and the individual soldier benefits by receiving college credits, which can help them as they advance in their military careers.” Each course is a three-week hybrid course with two weeks online and one week of face-to-face instruction and could be completed in one semester. Institutional fees are waived for active-duty military, and the admissions process does not require a minimum GPA or SAT/ACT score. If you are a journalist and are looking to cover this topic or learn more about how Georgia Southern University is working with the armed forces, the let us help with your stories. Dr. Nancy Henderson is an assistant professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at Georgia Southern University. She is an expert in injury prevention, running form and assessing meaningful change of interventions. Nancy is available to speak with media regarding this topic – simply click on her icon to arrange an interview.
