A Girl in Motion

The Value of Marketing in the New Media Environment

Kelly S. — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:53:29 +0000

McKinsey Quarterly recently published a piece titled, “Measuring Marketing’s Worth“. It’s worth a read for it’s 5 simple questions to ask when getting at the value of marketing as well as its insights on making the shift from traditional media to new media in a risk-adjusted ROI way.

Use Facebook, Eat Organic, Save the Planet

Kelly S. — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:25:25 +0000

Forbes posted an article titled, “What is Good for Facebook is Good for America” last week. The headline grabbed my attention, a reference to political slogans regarding American auto manufacturers in the past. But what is really interesting is that the author argues that Americans moving their entertainment online is actually good for America.

I hesitate to wholeheartedly embrace that idea–my future children will definitely be spending more time playing in the backyard than playing Zynga games (or whatever is cool by then). And there are plenty of angry comments below the article that make for entertaining reading.

But I have to say he has a point.

Spending leisure time online is “greener” than the frivolities we manufactured and shipped to ourselves in the past. Not only do you not need to buy things–things that create waste when they are manufactured, shipped to you, and when you ultimately throw them out–but you don’t need to get in your car to go enjoy it. There may be some offsetting by the energy use of data centers and servers that power our online entertainment, but I have to imagine that those will only get more efficient over time.

Take a look at the article and let me know what you think. Is entertaining yourself online greener than the alternatives?

Green Reading This Week

Kelly S. — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:30:03 +0000

Some articles from around the web that I’m reading this week on sustainability, energy efficiency, and other green things.

Cracking the Smart Energy Market –via NYTimes
Google, Microsoft, Home Depot and Lowes all struggling to get the home energy monitoring market started.

The Future of Clean Tech? Try Hacking Code –via CNET
Colleagues from Tuck, EnerNOC and energysage all took part in this weekend event–would love to see more of this!

Three Areas Where Data Matters for Building Efficiency –via GreenTech Media
Great article on the power of software and data in energy efficiency.

What does the future of sustainability mean for small business? –via GreenBiz
An interesting podcast on Greenbiz regarding an important market.

Standing Out in a Green Crowd: Lessons from Method, Payback and More–via GreenBiz
This article is a few weeks old, but I just stumbled across it, and I love Method, so it caught my eye. Good read on marketing sustainable products.

Start-up Says Toshiba Will Help Propel New Lighting Approach–via WSJ
An article on Bridgelux, a start-up working on fabricating LEDs on “the same sort of inexpensive silicon wafers used to make conventional chips.”

You are What you Eat (or Buy): Being an Informed Consumer Online

Kelly S. — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:00:38 +0000

Being sustainable or socially responsible is a hot topic these days. Companies publish glossy Sustainability Reports and consumers have started to look for labels that indicate whether something is fair trade, organic or natural. While these issues are important and deserve our attention, the lack of standards means it is difficult to sort through all the available information and make informed decisions. Sometimes it feels like in order to do no harm you can never leave your house.

In an effort to tackle one area at a time, I tend to focus on food. What can be more important than ensuring that what you put in your body is as natural and safe as nature intended it? Lifehacker has a great article called “The Common Sense Guide to Organic and Other Food Labels” that helps differentiate between the different categories and labels.

The Good Guide lets you research any product you are thinking about buying for how it performs on the issues important to you–whether it’s apparel, food, cars, or appliances. However, it often doesn’t occur to me to look something up at the time of purchase. That’s why my new favorite download for chrome (it also works for firefox) is their new Transparency Toolbar. When you are on a retail site, like Amazon, it just appears from the bottom of your screen with a personalized analysis based on the issues you’ve told it you care about most. Pretty neat–and it makes being green a whole lot easier.

The other great online tool I’ve recently discovered is from a company called energysage. I’ve actually been doing some consulting work for them recently, which is how I got to know them. They have a wizard that walks you through a much bigger purchase–whether or not buying a renewable energy system for your home makes sense. It’s still in beta, but it’s a space with a lot of promise due to a lack of information and transparency in the space. It’s definitely a company to watch.

A New Strategy for Innovation

Kelly S. — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:00:38 +0000

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!

Jack Covert Selects – The Wide Lens (800ceoread.com)
Review: The Wide Lens by Ron Adner (venture2.typepad.com)
Learning to Innovate (agirlinmotion.com)
Apple’s Biggest Blind Spot – Motley Fool (fool.com)

Energy Efficiency Effectiveness at Home

Kelly S. — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:12:38 +0000

Greentech Media had an interesting article today highlighting a recent study on the results consumers see from home energy efficiency products. The results are mixed–with results ranging from no savings at all to 20% savings. Check out the greentechgrid article here and the original survey results here. I’m checking out a few products myself that I’ll write about in future posts.

Euro Zone Crisis in One Graph

Kelly S. — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:33:36 +0000

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

Kelly S. — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:15:12 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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

Kelly S. — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:00:43 +0000

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

The Middle East A Year Later: Business as Usual?

Kelly S. — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:00:35 +0000

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by Dirk Vandewalle, Dartmouth college associate professor of government at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth last week. He spoke about what has been happening in the Middle East since the Arab Spring–and with authority. He travels to the region regularly (he was there last week) and his research is focused on the region. I have written up my notes and key takeaways from his talk here. It will be interesting to watch the region over the coming years and see which of his predictions come true.

A Quick Recap on the Arab Spring/Revolution

It all started in the public mind when a man set himself on fire. That set off a series of uprisings that show no sign of slowing. People were surprised by the uprisings–the region had historically been ruled by authoritarian regimes which had destroyed any political or other social life in the region. Libya has been the bloodiest so far. Professor Vandewalle thinks Saudi Arabia is the country to watch for the next uprising.

What sparked these revolutions?

The press speak about poverty and political exclusion as having sparked these revolutions, but Professor Vandewalle does not think these are good explanations. He spoke about an overall lack of economic opportunity, with economic inequality getting progressively worse over the past 10-15 years, but he also hit on three points that he thinks are even more poignant:

Corruption: permit and police pay off (3 dinars a day each)
Inability of the government to create meaningful jobs
Totally inadequate educational system for young peoples aspirations

4 quick points to orient how Professor Vandewalle thinks about the Middle East today:

No coherent plan–almost spontaneous. These young people will not be the ones that eventually consolidate all the changes going on in the area due to a lack of goals and plan to achieve them
This is far from done. Need to build a new state all the way from the bottom up. This process will occupy these countries for years to come.
We shouldn’t really call these revolutions. We haven’t really seen the leadership class replaced–jury is still out.
There are really two different middle east: core traditional countries with productive economies and the Arab gulf states–relatively unproductive economies and relatively undisturbed by these uprisings

How do countries get in this kind of mess?

1950-2000: became independent in 1950, really revolutionary figures at the time in leadership, 5 decades of highly centralized economic decision making, one party fully in control, extensive patronage systems, poorly regulated–no rule of law, enormous corruption, lack of transparency
Status economies no longer sustainable–realize this is happening in the late 1990s–start moving towards markets
Exclusionary regimes, but income levels have been rising for the last 15 years–economic liberalization was working–it’s relative not absolute levels of income that are the problem

Business as Usual?

Professor Vandewalle sees us as at the beginning of this whole process. The major concern here is political backsliding due to a lack of an organized party to take over once the uprisings occur. However, the Arab world continues to become more integrated economically and socially with the rest of the world, which should moderate any backsliding or significant political swings.

Professor Vandewalle spoke about two groups of countries. The “core” Arab countries including Tunisia and Egypt are doing relatively well. Islamic parties are coming to power and people are relatively optimistic. He says that the Arab gulf countries are very different. There, he sees much less change due to a higher standard of living, ability to buy support with oil money, a relatively small and homogenous population, and US support. He named some staggering facts regarding the kind of support these countries can provide their people including that Qatar just gave every citizen $3500 outright. There have been small uprisings in Bahrain and among the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia, but not enough to make significant changes.

There are still calls to reform in the Arab Gulf States, however, due to the fact that they want to be seen as modern economic players. With this desire comes new rules that they haven’t had to abide by in the past. Professor Vandewalle believes that Qatar has become a voice of conscience in the region, pushing for reforms and collaboration between the Arab League and the UN.

Reasons to be optimistic:

Developments in the region we’ve never seen before
- Modern polling being done: Libya did one after Qaddafi was killed–answers indicated that Libyans knew what they wanted and expressed their viewpoints
- HSBC/economist study building evidence for the strength of the economy and regions importance in trade
- Arguments for new economic arrangements and interactions between citizens
If some of these economic reforms are pushed through, they will create a modern middle class (250 million people) in these countries
This is a region that needs investments and international expertise
The direction that the region takes will not just be determined by people in the region, but the international community.

Conclusions:

Region has seen an introduction of a new set of ideas and forces. Whether or not they can cause a revolutionary impact is still unclear. At least the Arab spring has forced movement forward on issues including youth unemployment, role of women, education…
Can’t underestimate the obstacles. Need to restructure entire countries…it won’t be easy, but there is a demand for greater transparency and accountability
In the end, this is truly an extraordinary time for the middle east…countries could still go either way, but what started last year has the opportunity to truly have a lasting impact on the region.