Does inequity induce cheating?

University of North Carolina Professor Francesca Gino has conducted some fascinating research on unethical behavior. For instance, her studies have shown that people may be more likely to engage in unethical behavior if they perceive certain unjustified inequities. In short, people become upset and envious in these situations of perceived inequity, and consequently, they may be more willing to cheat as those emotions affect their behavior. The question for managers: are there inequities in your workplace that really seem unfair to some employees? If so, beware the potential dangers.

Amazon: Making Tradeoffs in Razor & Blades Strategy

Today, we learn from the Wall Street Journal that Amazon will be selling its newest Kindle for $189 with 3G and an incredibly low $139 for wi-fi only service. Without a doubt, Amazon is moving to an aggressive razor and blades model, hoping to get Kindles in as many hands as possible, with e-book sales to follow, hopefully in large numbers. What's also interesting is how clearly Amazon has chosen to make a series of trade-offs that distinguish it from the competition, particularly Apple. Here's an excerpt from the article that clearly defines the trade-offs that are at the heart of Amazon's strategy:


Mr. Bezos takes pains to distinguish the Kindle from the iPad, saying the company is committed to making a single-purpose piece of consumer electronics. Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare. "For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets," he said. Underscoring that, Mr. Bezos said he wasn't interested in making an Amazon tablet computer. "There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets," he said. "Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution."

Talk about the essence of competitive strategy being what you choose NOT to do! Naturally, no one knows who will be the eventual winners in the e-reader/e-book space, but one certainly cannot accuse Amazon of following a me-too strategy, or of exhibiting herd behavior. They are clearly setting their own path, choosing not to do what others are doing. They might not end up being the biggest winner, but they certainly look to be a player with such a distinctive strategy.

Brady & Manning: Lessons for Obama

What can President Obama learn from National Football League contract negotiations? Currently, stars Tom Brady and Peyton Manning have not signed new long term contracts with their teams. Why? Well, the teams are reluctant to settle on contracts given the massive uncertainty regarding what rules will prevail under the new collective bargaining agreement. They are reluctant despite the fact that the teams love these two players. The lesson for Obama? The new legislation and massive new regulatory regimes, coupled with questions about new tax hikes possibly coming in 2011, have created huge uncertainty which is making firms reluctant to invest, even in what otherwise might be attractive opportunities. He has to reduce uncertainty and complexity to spur private investment. Less complexity, less ambiguity: that's the key. Thousand page bills are not helpful.

Hayward, BP, and Symbolic Leadership

One major lesson from the fall of Tony Hayward as BP's CEO: Executives must attend to the symbolic aspects of leadership very carefully, particularly when the public spotlight shines upon them. Clearly, Hayward stood on rocky ground on substantive matters related to the accident's causes and the deficiencies of the safety culture at BP. However, he made things far worse through his inability to manage symbolic dimensions of the crisis. His attendance at a yacht race off the English coast in June, for instance, sparked outrage from politicians and the general public. Failing to see the damaging symbolism of such an activity at that time constituted a major leadership failure.

Of course, this yacht race represents an extreme example. However, leaders often fail to attend sufficiently to symbolic matters. They either make mistakes in that regard, or they fail to take the opportunity to use symbolism to their advantage. Small gestures can have a big impact, both positively and negatively. As Alfred North Whitehead once said, "Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt egerneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life."

GM's Free Ride?

More on the GM acquisition of AmeriCredit... I recommend reading this column by the "Deal Professor" over at the New York Times. Note that the Deal Professor is Steven M. Davidoff, a former corporate lawyer and now a faculty member at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

GM Making Subprime Loans?

Forbes reports that General Motors has agreed to acquire AmeriCredit, an automobile financing company. Here is how Forbes explained the deal:

GM executives have said for months that they were missing sales opportunities due to lack of credit for lease deals and financing for subprime buyers, those with credit scores below 620 on a 300-to-850-point scale. About 40 percent of U.S. customers have below prime credit scores, said Chris Liddell, GM's chief financial officer. "Clearly there's an opportunity to bring more people into our showrooms and help them with finance," he said after the deal was announced on Thursday.

Hmmm... Let's put aside the issue of sub-prime lending for a moment (I know, you are probably shaking your head at those comments!). The article goes on to explain that, "The two companies have had a financial relationship for years. AmeriCredit, which already works with about 4,000 GM dealers, now gets about one-third of its business from financing new and used GM vehicles, GM said." That comment actually intrigues me, because one has to then question why GM needs to acquire the firm in order to accelerate sales. When a merger occurs, we should always ask: Why do these firms need to join together to cooperate? Why would a simple contract not do the job just as well? In this case, these firms appeared to be cooperating and working together quite a bit. What is it about that arrangement that was insufficient? Why the need to now merge? Perhaps there is a very good explanation, but I didn't see it in this article.

Book Review by Daniel Price

Thank you to Daniel Price of the University of the Rockies for this wonderful review of my book, Know What You Don't Know!

Trading Places

The Boston Globe reports on an "trading places" initiative at Conover Tuttle Pace, a public relations and advertising firm. The company runs a Summer Sublet desk swap, in which the company's employees (approximately 35 people) trade office spaces for the summer months. The initiative includes all employees, even the firm's president. The company chose to implement this initiative to help people communicate more effectively and to break down barriers between silos, particularly to foster better integration between the creatives and the account executives. Here's one interesting result, as reported by the newspaper:

"The department heads, on the other hand, have found that they enjoy sitting next to their employees. The president of the company liked the experience so much last summer that he stayed out on the floor all year. 'I just become a little bit more aware of what’s going on here,' Conover said."

Fooled by a Small Token?

Dan Ariely has a new blog post about a concept that behavioral economists called "medium maximization." Ariely writes in response to a note he received from a certified financial planner. The planner express surprise that his clients often choose Fidelity over other mutual fund companies because of an offer to receive 25,000 frequent flyer points. The planner is amazed that these points, which have a fairly limited value - perhaps several hundred dollars, tilt people's decision-making about how to invest very, very large sums of money.

Ariely responds by pointing to this academic paper by University of Chicago Professor Christopher Hsee and his colleagues, which outlines the concept of "medium maximization." The authors refer to something like the frequent flyer point offer as a token or "medium" that has no value itself, but can be traded for something of value in the future. Hsee and his co-authors show that a "medium presents an illusion of advantage to an otherwise not so advantageous option." Why does this occur? Essentially, individuals tend to focus on optimizing the near-term goal, rather than focusing on the bigger, long term picture (which is often more cognitively complex to analyze). Thus, the seize the opportunity to take the option which enables them to grab the value of the small token right away. The question for us: Are we allowing such small tokens to distort our decision-making? Are we making suboptimal long term choices in some situations in which we are presented an option with a small token?

Redbox vs. NetFlix: Strategy Convergence?

Over the past few years, NetFlix and Redbox have both been very successful, each taking aim at Blockbuster from different directions. NetFlix provided a deep movie library and great recommendations that matched consumer tastes quite well. It did not focus on renting new releases. Blockbuster, with its brick and mortar stores, could not match the selection offered by NetFlix. Meanwhile, Redbox took aim at the new release business at Blockbuster. It went with a very lean product inventory, only carrying a very small number of recent hits. Redbox offered incredible convenience at a very low price. Blockbuster found itself attacked from each flank, and it has suffered as a result. Redbox and NetFlix thrived in part because they were each attacking the weakened Blockbuster, but not threatening each other much at all. They had distinct strategies, meeting quite different consumer needs.

Now, that may change. Business Week reports that Redbox is contemplating a move to the web. We don't know the details of such a web strategy yet, so it's impossible to judge the chances of success. However, we do know that the two firms could be moving toward increased head-to-head competition. A collision could harm profits for both firms.

Nissan: Dangers of a Lean Supply Chain?

Nissan has been forced to stop production at six manufacturing plants in Japan and the United States this week due to a supply chain disruption. This episode illustrates one of the downsides of some efforts to develop lean and efficient supply chains. As firms drive efficiency in their supply chains, they can make those systems much more tightly coupled (i.e. each element of the chain is much rigidly interconnected with the other elements). That tight coupling means that one small disruption can cause major negative consequences for the entire chain. That is precisely what happened to Nissan. A problem at a Hitachi unit that supplied engine parts has actually shut down a large amount of Nissan's production capacity, because Nissan did not have an alternative supplier for that component. That problem pertained to a scarcity of semiconductor chips needed for the manufacturing of the engine components at Hitachi. As other firms observe this incident, they must consider the trade-offs that they are making when trying to drive efficiencies in their supply chains. Are efforts to drive out costs in the short term potentially enhancing the risk of a major disruption at some point?

Leadership Transitions

Tom Magness has some great posts recently on his blog about leadership transitions, based on his own experience this summer as he transitions to Kabul, Afghanistan to lead an Army Corps of Engineers unit there. Good luck to Tom, and may you stay out of harm's way.

Evaluating Emerging Markets

London Business School Professor Don Sull has a good post over at his blog about how companies evaluate emerging markets. Sull based his post on a panel discussion that he moderated with Paul Bulcke, CEO Nestlé; Anshu Jain, who runs Deutsche Bank’s investment banking business; Vittorio Colao, the CEO of Vodafone; and John Connolly, the global chairman of Deloitte. Sull argues that firms cannot evaluate emerging markets simply based on GDP growth. Instead, they should consider other factors, such as industry structure, regulatory and political environment, etc.

Honest Tea and Coca-Cola

The New York Times ran an intriguing article recently about Honest Tea's relationship with Coca-Cola. Coke purchased a 40% stake in the company two years ago, with an option to acquire the entire firm in 2011. The article describes the tensions and challenges that inevitably emerge when an entrepreneur sells a small, highly authentic, "natural" food/beverage brand to a large consumer products company. Not surprisingly, challenges center on the issue of how to capitalize on the scale and scope economies offered by the corporate parent while staying true to certain values and principles that made the small up-start quite distinct in the marketplace from its larger rivals. In this case, Honest Tea had explicitly marketed itself against some of the larger beverage giants, celebrating, for instance, the lack of high fructose corn syrup in its drinks. Coca-Cola managers apparently worried that Honest Tea was essentially condemning an ingredient that it had in many of its own Coke products.

The story illustrates an important lesson for entrepreneurs considering a sale to a larger player in their marketplace. To me, the days before an acquisition takes place serve as the critical time for important conversations about brand values and positioning. Entrepreneurs should not wait until after the deal to then learn about potential tensions around values and principles. Both target firm and acquirer need to have these conversations upfront, and to the extent that it is possible, some firm commitments need to be made by both sides about how they want to work together. Entrepreneur-founders have the most leverage BEFORE the sale. Once they have been acquired, their ability to stake out their ground on certain core values drops precipitously.

Bryant University Alumni Venture Contest

I'm very excited that Bryant University has launched its first alumni new venture contest, modeled after the very successful competition created at Harvard Business School. Business plans are due December 1st. Finalists will be announced on January 15th, and the final round of the competition will take place on campus in the spring of 2011. The cash prize equals $10,000. We hope that many alumni will enter this exciting new contest.

New Markets for Teen Retailers

The Wall Street Journal reports today on the attempts by various teen retailers, such as American Eagle, to develop retail store brands aimed at younger children. The article points out that several teen retailers have stumbled in their attempts at broadening their reach to an adult demographic. Thus, they are now turning to the children's market.

I don't know whether these efforts will succeed, but I do find the approach taken by American Eagle to be quite intriguing. The firm has branded its children's unit as 77kids (1977 is the year in which the firm began). What's most interesting is how American Eagle has experimented with the concept before opening retail stores. First, the company has spent 18 months marketing the 77kids line via its online store. Secondly, it also used a pop-up store in the Pittsburgh market to test out the 77kids concept. These low cost, low risk experiments have presumably enabled American Eagle to learn a great deal before sinking a substantial investment into 77kids retail stores. I think using online and pop-up sales as a means of experimentation does seem like a very desirable and fruitful approach, one surely to be used more often by other retailers as they try to minimize the risk of major new expansions in their brick and mortar locations.

Looptworks: An "Upcycling" Story

Fast Company has an article about an interesting company called Looptworks. The firm buys excess fabric from textile factories, and then uses that scrap to create a line of outdoor clothing. It's a wonderful story of reducing waste and enhancing sustainable business practices.

However, that's not the entire story. To me, two additional aspects of the business are worth considering for a moment. First, Looptworks has chosen to focus on outdoor clothing. To me, that demonstrates a very smart choice of target market. Why? Many outdoor enthusiasts care a great deal about the environment. Thus, they are quite inclined to purchase these "upcycled" products. There's a perfect match between the upcycling aspect of the production process and the target customer for outdoor clothes.

Secondly, the company commands a premium price not simply because of the "green" dimension to the business, but because they produce many limited editions given the finite amounts of certain scrap fabric that they are able to acquire. Of course, producing limited editions and small batches of clothing also means that they are much less likely to have to employ markdowns to sell off excess inventory of less popular items. Markdowns often prove to be a major profit killer for apparel producers and apparel retailers. All in all, it's a creative business model with great potential.

What Women Want

Today's Wall Street Journal offers a review of Paco Underhill's new book, What Women Want. As readers of this blog may recall, I recommended Underhill's earlier bestseller, Why We Buy. Underhill is an expert on retail shopping, and he has unearthed his insights by anthropological study, i.e. close observation, of consumers in stores. In this new book, he turns his focus to female consumers in particular. Here's an excerpt from the review:

What do women want? Cleanliness, as we've learned. Also control, safety and considerateness. Give women these intangibles and a few others, Mr. Underhill suggests, and they will give your business their custom. As a case study, he invites us into Best Buy, the chain of cavernous electronics stores with the big blue-and-yellow sign. While its competitors Circuit City and Comp USA have disappeared into bankruptcy, Best Buy has survived, Mr. Underhill says, by adapting itself in distinctly female-friendly ways. Digital cameras are laid out on tables that are curvy and organic- looking rather than hard-edged and angular. Employees reassure the customer that they don't work on commission (women dread being hustled). Giant photos on the walls show people warmly enjoying the store's products. The central concept that Best Buy gets, Mr. Underhill says, is this: "Men buy instruments of technology, whereas women buy instruments of relationship."

I look forward to reading the book, and I'll have some observations once I've completed it.

Social Security Reform: The Power of Compounding

In today's Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes writes about a proposal by Robert Pozen, former vice chairman of Fidelity Investments. For several years now, Robert Pozen, a Democrat, has offered a bipartisan approach for restoring Social Security to long term solvency. His proposal calls for using the historical inflation rate, rather than wage growth data, to index earnings as part of the calculation of Social Security benefits. He would exempt lower income individuals from this shift, and instead, continue to use wage indexing for them. That's why Pozen calls it "progressive indexing."

How does indexing work? Indexing occurs as Social Security takes your earnings from each year of your life, and then converts them into "current dollars" for the year of your retirement. Then, they use this average earnings in current dollars number as the basis of their benefit calculation.

Historically, wages risen over 1 percent faster per year than prices. Thus, shifting to wage indexing would shave benefits. Your average earnings in current dollars is significantly lower if we gross up your wages by 1% less per year. Barnes explains that this subtle change would "erase more than two-thirds of Social Security's long-term shortfall of $4 trillion."

At first, I was shocked by that claim. Yet, I then spent some time thinking about how that 1% slower growth per year in the indexing calculation might affect benefits. Of course, the power of compounding turns out to be enormous. We all know this, of course, but until you actually run the numbers, you often do not realize how great an impact compounding can have. Over a 35 year career, if we index each year's earnings at a 1% less growth rate per year, we end up with quite a different number for average earnings in current dollars. It's substantially lower, and thus, benefits are significantly lower as well.

Overall, Pozen's proposal seems like a sensible reform that could help put Social Security on much more stable footing, all without raising taxes at a time when the economy cannot tolerate an added distortion in the labor market. Let's see if the deficit commission moves forward with a recommendation to embrace this idea.

Simulation as the Means to Integration

Chip and Dan Heath tell the fascinating story in Fast Company magazine of how JetBlue recovered from the February 2007 fiasco when the company angered customers due to its poor handling of disruptions associated with snowstorms in the Northeast. They describe how JetBlue created a simple simulation scenario in which thunderstorms forced the cancellation of many flights at JFK airport in New York. It brought together a cross-section of front-line employees in many different functional areas to examine how the airline would typically respond to such a situation. Here's the result:


In total, the group identified more than 1,000 process flaws, small and large. Over the next few weeks, the group successively filtered and prioritized the list down to a core set of 85 problems to address. Most of them were small individually, but together, they dramatically increased the risk of a dropped baton. JetBlue's irregular-operations strike force spent nine months in intense and sometimes emotional sessions, working together to stamp out the problems.

The effort paid off. In the summer of 2009, JetBlue had its best-ever on-time summer. Year over year, JetBlue's refunds decreased by $9 million. Best of all, the efforts dramatically improved JetBlue's "recovery time" from major events such as storms. (JetBlue considers itself recovered from an irregular-operations event when 98.5% of scheduled flights are a go.) The group shaved recovery time by 40% -- from two-and-a-half days to one-and-a-half days.

Many companies can benefit from creating these types of simulation experiences. In fact, firms can create these for a wide variety of situations, not just "crisis" situations. The key, though, is to get the people who actually do the work involved in such scenarios, and to make sure that you have people focused not just on what they do in their functional areas, but also on how on how they interact with others in various "silos" in the organization. You want to watch particularly for "fumbled hand-offs", i.e. occasions where critical information does not pass smoothly from one unit to another, thereby causing a lack of effective integration.