The strategy setting process in any organization is always an interesting one. Given its centrality to the idea of managing an organization you might think people had the process down. You would be wrong. Vikas Mittal and Shridhari Sridhar look at the strategy setting process through extensive interviews and surveys. It isn’t always a pretty…
Category: Management Theory
Virtue Signaling And Balancing Reasonable Perspectives
Geoffrey Miller‘s Virtue Signaling is a compilation of some of his work. All pieces are relatively popular and accessible. In addition to sexual selection this tackles problems related to virtue signaling and balancing reasonable perspectives in speech. The Coddling of the American Mind was a clearly written thesis. Miller’s book is a little different to…
What Drives Customer Equity?
Around the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of interest in the idea of customers as financially relevant. Thus work started to concentrate on the idea of customer equity. Customer equity was sometimes equated with the idea of customers as assets. This is an important aim (even though I have some measurement quibbles)….
A Unified Theory Of Marketing
One of the challenges with marketing is that there are so many bits that don’t fit together. As such let me put on record that I appreciate the potential for customers to be put at the center of all the marketing approaches. CLV, the value of a customer to the firm, has potential for a…
The Pseudo Profound Statement
I have previously written about how disappointed I was by Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics, see here and here. Today I will look at a broader problem that his book exhibits. Namely ‘The Pseudo Profound Statement’. I see this in a lot of places not just in Muller’s work. Be Careful With A Pseudo…
Anecdotal Evidence Is Problematic In Justifying Arguments
Jerry Muller’s book on The Tyranny of Metrics argues that metrics are overused. (I have discussed other frustrations with the book here). Muller, however, very neatly illustrates the problem with his approach. Anecdotal evidence, by this here I mean stories not rigorously detailed, is problematic in justifying an argument. Basically he throws some numbers into…
The Problem Of Understanding Others
A second post on Gad Saad’s, The Parasitic Mind. I’m not sure this was his central aim but he did make me think about the problem of understanding others. Is Society Really Collapsing? I really wanted to know why he thinks society is collapsing. I have never known why people think this. It is not…
Scientific Thinking Is Hard (Especially For Academics)
I must confess to being disappointed with Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind. Before purchasing the book I knew I would disagree with many of his points given his robust public profile. (For background, Saad is the sort of evolutionary psychologists your mother warned you about. Lots of sex differences in consumption). That I would disagree…
Strategic Change And Stakeholders
A recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review looks at how we can analyze strategic change. The model by Tom Hunsaker and Jonathan Knowles (a coauthor of mine) looks at the nature of change needed by firms. The model helps us focus on strategic change and how this fits with stakeholders. Specifically, the authors…
Are American Minds Coddled?
The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt‘s book, is a great read. It is full of interesting stories about where society, and universities in particular, are going wrong. I have a decent amount of sympathy with their arguments. It is important that we preserve free speech. The cost being that sometimes…
