Category Archives: MBA

A New Strategy for Innovation

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Tuck Professor Ron Adner is releasing a new book called the Wide Lens on Thursday. You can pre-order it now on Amazon, but in the meantime Fast Company just published a sneak preview.

The excerpt focuses on “The Innovator’s Blindspot”, which is that you can’t innovate unless your suppliers innovate too. In it, he says:

Today’s exemplar firms–from Apple in consumer electronics to Amazon in retail, from Roche in pharmaceuticals to Raytheon in defense, and from Hasbro in toys to Turner in construction–do much more than “just” execute flawlessly on their own initiatives. They follow a distinct set of strategies to orchestrate the activities of an array of partners so that their joint efforts increase the value created by their own initiatives many times over. These leaders have understood the nature of the blind spot and have expanded their perspective. They have deployed a wide lens in setting their strategy and prospered in their embrace of the ecosystem opportunity.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it over spring break–it starts on Friday–perfect timing! Continue reading →

Euro Zone Crisis in One Graph

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At the risk of having all of us walk out of class, Professor Jonathan Haskell showed this graph today and told us that this was a whole term’s worth of his Europe in the Global Economy class in one slide. Luckily for him, no one budged, but unlucky for us it is a little more complicated than that. However, this graph is a fascinating narrative about what happened in Europe from the formation of the European Monetary Union through today and helps one grasp just how we get into the debt situation we are in and why it’s only gotten worse.

What we discussed in class can be summarized like this:

Before the Euro: interest rates varied a lot

After joining the Euro: everyone’s interest rate fell because everyone thoug that different government bonds were equally safe. Low interest rates meant high aggregate demand–lots of investment, increased consumption, some increased government spending too

The crisis: asset price bubble bursts, consumption falls as does confidence. Interest rates return to being driven by individuacountries, with interest rates rising across the board, but especially in Southern European countries. This lowers investment.

Before the Euro, Southern European countries could depreciate their exchange rates. Now, the only safety value left is government spending.

For more reading on this topic, check out Profesor Haskel’s blog here.

Better Late Than Never: 2012 Professional Goals

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I stumbled on Brazen Careerist‘s monthly blog prompts a month too late, but figured I’d jump on the bandwagon anyway. Rather than starting with February’s prompt, I’m doing a catch-up post from January. Their January prompt was: what are your professional goals for 2012?

2012 will be a year of change for me. I’m graduating from my MBA program, moving to a new city, starting a new job (hopefully!) and even planning to get a puppy. So my goals are around going into all of those changes as prepared, confident and organized as I can be, while making sure all those changes actually happen! It’s a lot to accomplish in a year, but it’s been done before–by everyone who’s ever finished an MBA program. So, no excuses.

As a result, I have three main goals professional goals:

  1. Get the right job (or at least go through the right process): My job goal is to get a job, obviously, but it’s not just about any job, which means it can’t just be any job search. I want to have done a thorough research and networking process, weighedby options based on career progression, compensation and company prospects and to make an informed decision I can be confident in. Easier said than done–the temptation is to take the first job that comes along, and you can always do more research…so the big question is how to balance urgency with thorough research and who to talk to for the most informed opinions when it comes down to the final decision.
  2. Make conscious choices about how I spend my time : I get excited about things, want to try everything and love helping out. What this means is that sometimes I forget to say no, and I get overwhelmed. And while I can do a lot of things (people ask me about how I do this all the time), I’ve inherited the ability to read fast from my dad, and I prefer to be a joiner and get involved in my community, that feeling of having too much on your plate is the ultimate energy drainer. So when I start over in a new city and a new job this summer, I want to focus on doing just a few of the right things right.
  3. More knowledge means more money: Since these are professional goals for 2012, I would be remiss to not mention money. Students obviously don’t have a lot of it, which makes it even more important to keep track of. My goal for this year is to remember that knowledge is power, or in this case, more knowledge means more money. Whether this applies to keeping track of bills, budgeting, investing or negotiating salary, it’s pretty much the universal rule of money. I’ve been consolidating accounts, setting up my savings and preparing to be more organized this year. I’ve been trying out some cool new online tools in the meantime, which could warrant another post once I’ve settled on a system.

What are your professional goals for 2012?

Learning to Innovate

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At Tuck, there is an innovation center and a multitude of classes focused on innovation–how to spark it, manage it, execute on it and just generally make sure it happens and gets you results. I’m currently taking Professor Chris Trimble’s class called Innovation Execution. While so much of the learning takes place through the cases and in the classroom–and really can’t be replicated–these classes also come with great reading lists, most of which are publicly available. Chris Trimble and his research partner Vijay Govindaraja (known around here as “VG”) publish a lot of their work over at Fast Company. A few of my classes this term, especially this one, include readings I’d probably do for fun anyway. So, see below an innovation reading list. This list is mostly focused on innovation within established companies, but there are lessons here for innovators in any context. 

If  you want to really get into this topic, Chris Trimble and Vijay Govindaraja have two books out that are worth a read:

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution

The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge

I currently have both downloaded on my kindle but am working through The Other Side of Innovation first…mostly because it’s my homework for next week!

Great articles on Innovation by Tuck Professors: 

Our Wish for 2005

Planning Not to Learn

By the Numbers: You Can’t Quantify Learning

Experimentation is Easy, Learning is Not

Strategy, Execution and Innovation

Is Innovation in Your Organizational DNA?

Ideas Are Not Enough

Innovation and the Inevitable Break-the Rules Backlash

Amnesia by Design

Borrow–In Moderation

Shooting for the Moon

The Monster in the Closet: Reliable Unpredictability

Innovation Ecosystems and the Pace of Substitution

Disruptive Technologies and the Emergence of Competition

And a few that are not by Tuck Professors, but get assigned for good reason: 

Learning from Samples of One or Fewer

Customer-Centered Innovation Map

Discovery-Driven Planning

Mining Patent Gold: What Every CEO Should Know

Personal Finance Resources

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Personal Finance

Last night I spoke on a panel for Dartmouth undergraduate students, specifically women from two of the sororities on campus, about personal finance topics. We had prepared a brief presentation for them covering the basics: the importance of saving, account types, taxes and investments. Our presentation took about 15 minutes but an hour and a half later we were still fielding questions from these smart women who were trying to get a handle on everything from which credit card to get, how to prioritize paying off loans versus saving for retirement and what a reasonable budget really looked like. They were surprised by the level of taxes they’d pay right off the bat and had varying levels of understanding of financial topics. There were women in the room that didn’t know what the S&P 500 was and others who were teasing out the differences between investment strategies and vehicles.

One take-away I had from last night is that we need to do a better job educating young people about their money. Decisions you make early in life can set you up for years of enjoying financial security, flexibility and freedom to do the things you want or they can set you up for ever growing challenges including managing debt, credit scores and struggling to make ends meet. Setting it up right the first time saves you money and time in the long run, as well as a lot of stress.

Luckily for these women and for everyone else, the online resources in these category continue to grow and improve. I left them with my favorite websites to start digging into these topics, and I thought I’d share them here as well. The first two sites here, Dailyworth and LearnVest are aimed primarily at women, but have useful tools for anyone who wants a structured way to move forward with education and planning. Both the sites are free services. The rest are tools to keep you on track and learn more about the investment world. Also, note that all the websites I list here are free to use. I strongly believe you shouldn’t have to spend money to save money.

Please share any other sites you love!

Top Personal Finance Websites

Women’s Budgeting and Education:

LearnVest

**START HERE** In my opinion, this is the best site on the web for getting started, getting educated, getting a plan and sticking to it. Whether your goal is to start saving, pay off debt, start investing or just figure out your first budget, they have a plan for you–and it’s all free! You can also pay very modest fees to get an expert involved in helping you shape your plan.

Continue reading →

Negotiation Toolkit for B2B Sales

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Vector image of two human figures with hands i...

This is a follow-up to my previous post about Jeff Weiss’s Negotiations Class.

As I’m considering a career in B2B sales after Tuck, one of my biggest concerns is successfully navigating internal politics and relationships at companies to ensure a sale gets made. There are a few tools we have learned about in class that when combined are starting to form a theory for me around how to best understand and use those connections to close a sale. In sales, we often talk about making your customer a hero within their organization. In the language of Negotiations, this is an interest—and a particularly powerful one because it relates to the relationships that potential customer has within their organization. Giving a potential customer the tools to frame your product or service in a way that makes them look like they have made a smart decision that has saved their company money or helped them excel on some other metric enables them to not feel like they were sold, but rather found a solution to a real problem they had. As a result, there are a handful of tools we learned that when combined I believe set up a great foundation for a B2B sales process, particularly focused on the people aspect.

Part 1: Separate Relationship and Substance

There was a slide in class that said “Maintain the relationship by how you treat them as you discuss the substance”. One of the keys in this kind of relationship is not to get caught doing things like giving discounts for “good customers” or to maintain a relationship when something has gone wrong. Consistently insisting that relationship and substance remain separate (and in the best case scenario developing a reputation for doing so), allows you to avoid a situation where you are pressured into giving concessions for the relationship.

Part 2: Understand their interests

Asking a lot of questions has classically been part of the sales process, but asking questions with the specific intent of understanding their interests thoroughly brings the consultative sales approach to the next level. By asking questions you can understand their interests in this negotiation, including how other parties affect their interests and what other parties within the organization’s interests might be. Spending significant time thinking about their interests before the negotiation and digging further into their interests at the table and away from the table sets a strong foundation for the sale.

Part 3: Relationship Mapping

Relationship mapping is taking the chart we did of related parties during seven element preparation to the next level. The exercise of identifying parties and their relationship in itself can be a useful exercise, but I found relationship mapping to be particularly helpful for two reasons. First, it can sometimes remind you of someone you haven’t been able to reach or influence. Second, it can help you think about how to sequence negotiations. These kinds of negotiations don’t happen in one sitting with one person. Having a map and a strategy for how you approach which parties and in which order can make the actual negotiation sessions much smoother.

Part 4: Systematic Approach to Influence

Finally, the frameworks presented in taking a systematic approach to influence allow you to think deeper about interests and frame them in a way that help you figure out how you might need to re-frame your arguments to make them acceptable to the other party. Thinking about the consequences of them saying yes or saying no to your proposal puts the decision in a very clear, rationale light that can change the way you would frame your proposal. Creating a “yesable” proposal as a result of the interests, relationships and current perceived choice is the final step in navigating the interests and relationships you would have come to understand by using this series of tools.

Negotiation: The Power of Preparation

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The Negotiation

Office Space: The Negotiation

This is a follow-up to my previous post about Jeff Weiss’s Negotiations Class. My #1 evolving theory of how to become a great negotiator is prepare, prepare, prepare.

What I have found most helpful so far in improving my negotiations has been preparation. While I don’t yet completely have confidence in my negotiating skills as far as communication or having the right framing at the table, I know that I can out prepare anyone I come up against and therefore be a strong negotiator even if I don’t seem like the most skilled or eloquent negotiator at the table. The power of preparation is such that it can give me confidence and a hidden edge going into any negotiation and that if I have thoroughly prepared I’ll never take a deal worse than my BATNA and I can walk away with confidence from any table knowing I can come back and negotiate another day. Having seen the power of preparation, this is a step I won’t skip for any negotiation. Below is how I now prepare for negotations.

Step 1: Research

The first step in good preparation for negotiation is to do your homework (or research in the real world!). Topics to research include:

  • Standards: industry benchmarks, previous deals, common practice and other data that can support a number of options
  • The other party: their relationships, potential interests, history of past negotiations, their BATNA, etc…
  • Options: additional areas for adding value, how these might relate to standards, etc…

Step 2: Don’t Brainstorm Alone

One thing I have learned from the class is how important it is to bounce ideas off another person when preparing. Two people will always come up with a deeper set of interests, especially for the other party, which is a key element to thoroughly understand heading into the negotiation in order to avoid surprises. Further, brainstorming around options will generate a longer list to pick from than one person sitting and thinking of the first three or four options that might satisfy them.

Step 3: Role Play

Role play in some form can be extremely helpful to start to set expectations for how the negotiation might play out. Having the opportunity to test different messages or approaches to the initial parts of the negotiation is a valuable exercise. Outside of negotiations class, my sales class and a sales competition I recently participated in reinforced the value of practicing approaches, questions and strategies ahead of a negotiation or sale (which is often the same thing).

Further, it can take away some of the power of a hard bargainer if you have already seen that before in a role play and practiced staying focused and firm in response.

Step 4: Use a series of tools

Fully filling out a series of tools allows you to look at the situation from a number of angles and be as thoroughly prepared as possible: seven element preparation, relationship mapping and choice analysis are all strong tools for preparation and using multiple can help you more thoroughly fill out the others. We saw in class how, for example, choice analysis can help you more thoroughly understand the other party’s interests in order to help flesh out a seven element prep.

Powerful Negotiation

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One of my favorite classes at Tuck this term was Negotiations. Our Professor was a man named Jeff Weiss, a fellow Dartmouth alum and professional negotiator (kind of like the Priceline guy but way cooler). He teaches Negotiations at the Tuck School of Business and at West Point, so we are in good company learning about negotiations from the guy who teaches those who serve us in Iraq and Afghanistan how to negotiate on a daily basis.

In fact, one of the jobs I have on campus is an admissions interviewer and one of my favorite moments this fall is when I was telling a candidate about the class and he had taken the same class from Professor Weiss during his undergraduate years at West Point. Professor Weiss gives out negotiations cards that are more valuable than gold: they are two-sided laminated cards that contain all the wisdom you  need for a lifetime of negotiations. The candidate told me that he kept these on his desk and used them every day that he was in Afghanistan. Talk about real-world applicability.

Instead of a classic midterm and final exam, Professor Weiss asked us to do two things, both of which are powerful lessons for future success in negotiations: (1) Keep a negotiation journal and (2) Practice.

Continue reading →

Girl in Motion Update

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During second year at Tuck there is a six week break between Thanksgiving and New Years meant for travel, consulting, recruiting and maybe even some relaxing.

I’m hitting the road (and plane, boat, train, maybe even helicopter) and headed to Australia and New Zealand for a whole month!

I’ll post updates on this blog, but I’ll also be blogging for a start-up I’ve been working for: ethos. Four other members of team ethos are traveling with me so we will update the ethos blog with lots of fun pictures and stories.

The blog is already up and running, so check it out!

If you have suggestions for our travels down under, we’d love to hear them! Please leave them in the comments here or over at the ethos blog.

Maximize Your Energy

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What if you could operate with high energy at all times, expand your capacity to do work, accomplish more and have a balanced, healthy life?

It’s pretty much everyone’s dream, as far as I can tell, particularly among the high-achieving type A’s here at Tuck with me.

And believe it or not, this is what a workshop in my “Leadership Out of the Box” class promised last night.  Continue reading →