I have a paper just published in Customer Needs and Solutions on stereotyping and market entry strategy. This paper has quite a history, with early versions arising from my dissertation (13 years ago). It was quite a journey. The final paper looks nothing like where it started. (For example, it contains a minor nod to…
Category: Management Theory
Governing The Commons
Elinor Ostrom had a profound impact on research about institutions. She got the Nobel Prize in Economics. This was for her work thinking about how social affairs could be governed: Governing The Commons. Common Pool Resoruces This goes much wider than corporate governance. It speaks to how communities deal with the control of their valuable…
“Rational” Decision Making in Practice
Behavioural Economics (and related marketing research) has great potential for practical application. There are a number of things that people reliably do that cause them problems. So advice can help improve this. Presh Talwalkar has a book on improving decision making — The Irrationality Illusion — that offers some tips for making decisions more rational….
Advertising Budgeting And Managerially Relevant Research
Academic research occasionally desires to be practical. Various journals therefore often have sections that allow for the reporting of the results of practical work with managers. The journals publish such studies even where there aren’t significant theoretical contributions. In the past the Marketing Science journal has published work under “Applications”. In this vein Doyle and…
The Data Gender Gap
Caroline Criado Perez’s book focuses on the challenges facing women in a world where the primary gatherers of data have been/usually still are men. It highlights the problem of data heavy systems not being as fair as the idea of impartial ‘math’ might imply. (See also here). The problem of what Perez calls the data…
Thinking Differently About Business School Cases
Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin in their 2016 paper about the case method tell us that the conventional history of the development of business case teaching is missing some vital elements. Cases nowadays come from the perspective of management. There exists a management objective that the students are trying to deliver. This excessively managerial perspective is…
Leadership In Politics
Real-world examples often provide concepts that apply in business. I worked in politics for many years and I think that there are lessons for educational and commercial leadership. Good political leaders try and seize temporary opportunities. Their dramatic actions make for exciting highs when successful and dramatic lows when not. So what can we learn…
Improving How We See The World
Today I’ll share some advice from Hans Rosling’s wonderful book Factfulness. (He founded the Gapminder educational not-for-profit, see here). This advocates that the world is getting better. Despite the obvious challenges remaining we need to understand this to see what is working and do more of it. Rosling shows a positive view from the data…
A Positive View Of The World Using Facts
I thought Han Rosling’s book (written with his son and daughter in law) ‘Factfulness‘ was wonderful. It was engagingly written but the real joy was the author’s ability to explain the world using data rather than hunches and pre-conceptions. It may come as a great surprise to many that Rosling’s take on the world is…
Evolutionary Thinking in Business
Evolutionary thinking in business can be a fascinating topic. A key thing to bear in mind is that business evolution is a little different from biological evolution. Market competition is not the same as competition in nature. This is, not least, because business has much more rapid timeframes. Business changes regularly. On the other hand,…
