Posts filed under ‘Former Guest Bloggers’
Utility Strategy
| Steven Postrel |
Skeleton of a Harvard Business Review article:
How do you get sustainable advantage in a service business today? One approach: Become a new-wave utility. Think about Google or Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc. on the Internet; think about UPS or FedEx, Grainger, Ryder, Public Storage in logistics; think about McDonald’s, Starbucks, 7-Eleven, in convenience food consumption. (more…)
Thanks to Cliff Grammich
| Peter Klein |
Many thanks to Cliff Grammich for joining us as a guest blogger over the last several weeks. We look forward to his continued participation as a regular reader and commentator. Also, Cliff has promised to share the results of work he’s doing on global attitudes toward markets and other research projects of interest to the O&M crowd.
Taxes al Carbon
| Steven Postrel |
Let’s suppose you’ve been swept up in the recent frenzy and decided that it actually makes sense to apply coercive regulations to reduce human carbon dioxide emissions. Let’s further suppose that you’ve caught up to the 21st century and know that imposing specific technology standards on particular sources of emissions is a sign of policy incompetence: (more…)
Toyota at the Crossroads
| Steven Postrel |
The recent NYT article (not the Sunday Magazine story but an earlier business sectiion piece by Martin Fackler) describing Toyota’s struggle to transmit its methods and culture to large numbers of foreign workers, in the face of unprecedented recalls and quality problems, provokes a number of thoughts about the company’s past successes and its current problems. (more…)
Does Catholic Social Teaching Matter in the Classroom?
| Cliff Grammich |
Starting with Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum and continuing notably in the writings of Pius XI and John Paul II (and, to be sure, others as well), the Catholic Church has fostered a tradition of social teaching for application to modern business organizations. During John Paul II’s pontificate, the Church also sought to strengthen the identity and clarify the mission of Catholic higher education.
So what impact does the Church’s social teaching have in the undergraduate business classrooms of Catholic institutions? Roland and Linda Kidwell suggest it is muted; indeed, they “conclude that if Catholic institutions wish to provide an ethics-based business education, familiarity with and use of [Catholic social teaching] appear to be unnecessary at AACSB-accredited schools.” (more…)
18 February 2007 at 10:11 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
An Un-Valentine’s Market
| Cliff Grammich |
Earlier today I followed up an earlier post of Peter’s on the business of weddings. It appears that’s not the only business that might boom around Valentine’s Day — my friend Liz Birge reports the divorce (legal) services market does as well . . .
More on the Business of Weddings
| Cliff Grammich |
In an earlier discussion of the business of weddings, Peter, responding to one commenter, expressed hope that by the time his “daughter is of marryin’ age, some kind of ‘peasant weddings’ will be in style.” I might even encourage elopement, although it’s fascinating how this assumedly cheap option has apparently evolved into the less cheap “destination wedding.” (more…)
15 February 2007 at 10:21 am Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
Religion and the Market
| Cliff Grammich |
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has announced its 2006 Templeton Enterprise Award winners. The awards are “presented annually to scholars under forty who have produced the very best books and articles in the field of humane economics and culture over the past two years.” Many of the honored works, e.g., Thomas Woods’ The Church and the Market, provide an interesting reconciliation of (Catholic) Church teaching with free market economics, drawing inferences one won’t typically see in staff work of the bishops’ conferences.
A Super Chicago Sunday
| Cliff Grammich |
Word on the street here in frigid northeastern Illinois is that there’s a football game being played in south Florida tonight of considerable local interest. (Just one bit of evidence: my choir director selected this as our postlude this morning, something I would not have done — and something, I confess, that I’m not sure I’ve ever sung with as little alcohol as transubstantiated wine provides.)
It’s hard to put a new spin on this game, but here’s some local ephemera that might interest O&M readers. (more…)
4 February 2007 at 5:45 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
Do I Need an (Ideological) Affirmation?
| Steven Postrel |
Arnold Kling has proposed that “libertarian conservatives” form an “Ideological Affirmation Task Force” (IATF) and requested comments on an initial draft of such an affirmation. Borrowing the lingo of Internet governance, he calls this an “IATF RFC.” I loosely qualify to be part of the interested group, so here are a few random thoughts, not a systematic treatise, on his first draft (which is a quick read, so you might want to look at it): (more…)
“Atheist” Academics
| Cliff Grammich |
Peter kindly draws my attention to a study by Neil Gross at Harvard and Solon Simmons at George Mason, released last fall but discussed this week here, here, and here, about religiosity of American professors. Among the findings: (more…)
Night Thoughts of a Strategy Instructor
| Steven Postrel |
1. Exactly what is accomplished by teaching (present or future) managers the five forces framework? It’s useful for investment and diversification decisions, but otherwise isn’t very actionable, unless you’re engaged in cartel management.
2. It’s a good bet that the term “barriers to entry” adds zero (or worse) to student understanding of when an incumbent has advantage over a new player (and when the anticipation of that advantage deters entry). Also, students are rightly confused about the distinction between entry and rivalry because realized entry contributes to future rivalry. At least in logical terms, I can avoid this confusion by stressing the “threat of entry” as a force separate from rivalry, but then we’re supposing individual firms coordinate their price and capacity decisions to keep out entrants, a view of industry collaboration and statesmanship that was musty in the 1980s (and often involves incredible threats). Maybe it would be better just to talk about the elasticity of long-run supply and not worry too much about whether new capacity comes from incumbents or from entrants.
3. Is it a good idea to teach positioning analysis using cost drivers without having a cost function that combines all the drivers together? Scale, learning, scope, product features, etc. — shouldn’t we worry a lot more about how they reinforce or conflict with one another in a given case?
4. Does it matter that it’s really hard to find good examples that fit the technical definition of economies of scope? Is it OK if I just keep passing off multiproduct scale as if it were scope since the students don’t know the difference?
5. Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly, or does it seem like the newer Harvard cases are more pre-digested than the classics? What’s up with constructing all the pro forma tables for the students instead of scattering the information around in the text and exhibits?
6. Will I be able to teach effectively tomorrow if I don’t fall asleep soon?
In Which I Rise to the Bait
| Steven Postrel |
So I’m browsing some old posts on orgtheory.net, and I see a little discussion about whether organization theory has done much since 2000, and it mentions neo-institutionalism. And since neo-institutionalism kind of gives me the hives, I toss in a little comment about how what little I know about it seems to have been falsified by an empirical paper by Kraatz and Zajac.
What do I get for my troubles? Not exactly a gauntlet to the face, but since their post has such tempting flaws, I’ll bite. (more…)
Virtual Veneration
| Cliff Grammich |
Earlier this week, Peter asked about “the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations.” Yesterday, Liz Birge had a story in the Newark Star-Ledger on “virtual veneration,” including “how houses of worship use the Web to reach old members and attract new ones.”
12 January 2007 at 2:54 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
How Does Management Affect Capabilities?
| Steven Postrel |
What contribution does management make toward producing output? If you watch Federal Express commercials, or read Dilbert, or listen to many technical workers when they talk to each other, the answer is “nothing.” Management is seen as purely an obstruction to the accomplishment of useful work.
If we take “management” as a sociological category, denoting a set of pointy-haired individuals disconnected from actual technical problem solving, then one could perhaps defend this position. But if we think of “management” as a collection of activities and practices, those practices seem essential, and many people, from computer programmers to chemists to special effects wizards, engage in them. But just how does management increase output? (more…)
Macroscope
| Steven Postrel |
Peter’s recent post about macroeconomics and macro vs. micro approaches in organization theory stirs up not-so-fond memories. From my first exposure to Samuelson’s version of the Keynesian synthesis, I found the whole thing off-putting. This feeling was a mixture of impatience with the aggregation assumptions and frustration with the seemingly backward causality of the Keynesian worldview, where production is a trivial matter and the only problem is making sure there is enough effective demand. The latter frustration was somewhat alleviated by learning about adaptive and then rational expectations, aggregate supply, sunspot and other coordination theories, and the host of microfoundation arguments that either got rid of the Keynesian assumptions or at least made some of them plausible. The impatience about aggregation never really went away. (more…)
Physics Envy and All That
| Steven Postrel |
We often hear (sometimes on this blog) that mainstream economics suffers from an excess of mathematical modeling. Supposedly, math is distracting, or misleading, or limits the questions one can study. Occasionally it is asserted that math serves the purpose of disguising the triviality of one’s thoughts, or that it serves as a guild’s protectionist barrier against the worthy but unschooled. In my view, all of the same critiques may apply to any use of technical language (say in philosophy); one can find examples of all of these pathologies even when no math is involved.
Our problems, when they occur, do not lie in our tools but in the quality of our ideas, and our honesty in expressing them. And given the extreme difficulty in thinking clearly or precisely without mathematics about things like supply and demand, or optimal investment, or contingent contracts, or network structure and growth, I’m more than willing to entertain mathematical approaches. At least I can figure out what people’s assumptions are. (Of course, once you have the mathematical intuition down, it’s a good idea to try to translate your new understanding into verbal form, as long as everyone understands that something is always lost in translation.) (more…)
Introducing Guest Blogger Steven Postrel
| Peter Klein |
It takes at least two people to fill Nicolai’s shoes, so Steven Postrel will be joining Cliff and myself while Nicolai’s on holiday this month. Steve is an economist who studies business strategy and organizations at SMU’s Cox School of Business. He has also worked at UCLA, UC-Irvine, and Northwestern. His research focuses on two areas: first, the fundamental meaning and sources of competitive advantage, and second, the mechanisms by which management choices affect firm capabilities, with a particular interest in the costs and benefits of knowledge specialization in different contexts. Welcome, Steve!
The Virtual Church
| Cliff Grammich |
Peter asks below about research “on the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations.” This is, to my knowledge, a nascent field, but there are some resources on this, listed below, of greater and lesser relevance to Peter’s question. (more…)
Gladwell on Enron
| Cliff Grammich |
Something more germane, perhaps: Malcolm Gladwell on Enron in the January 8th issue of The New Yorker. (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
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