Move the Needle

27.02.12 | mormonclayton christensenhbsharvard business schooltatatata consultancyhealthcareillegal immigrantspreventative carefranklincoveysustainabilityRobyn Tsukayama

I hadn’t heard the term Move the Needle until I attended the HBS Dynamic Women in Business conference on Saturday. This was my second time attending; I first went as a new writer at 25. The world is a different place for 20 somethings and 30 somethings. The world is a different place for HBS students.

There’s a cold, aloof feel to the place, furnished with leather chairs, accessorized with sleek women in black sheaths, sans pearls. It seems, at times, like a factory for Bain, Boston Consulting, and the major banks and that’s not necessarily a negative descriptor. Those are coveted positions for most. But I find Babson is the place for me. It encourages students to think differently and so far I’ve found my classmates’ skills complement mine. Still, at any Harvard event, there are at the very least a few interesting nuggets one leaves with that inspire more research. 

Move the Needle is used almost as much as innovation and disruption in the HBS buildings. Apparently the disruptive approach to business is a theory HBS pushes, thanks to the man I assume coined the term, Clayton Christensen. As a former journalist I feel the need to note that among his list of links is Church of Latter-Day Saints. No judgment just was surprised to see this affiliation alongside Tata and FranklinCovey. 

Christianson’s research came up at the healthcare panel. The group of five spoke about the $3 trillion industry, which some may divide into separate sectors – manufacturing (drugs/pharma), delivery (care facilities, hospitals, DRs, etc),and funding (for-profit and nonprofit).

In my opinion, there are three main issues in healthcare: 1) co$t, 2) interoperability, and 3) privacy. One panelist described the industry as the “meeting of public policy and business.” She also described the current state as a “bubble under a rug,” meaning industry execs are aware of the problems and know that there’s enough waste in the system to reallocate dollars to underserved areas, but getting to the waste and taking action is a huge undertaking. One might argue that getting people to engage in more preventative care could help lower costs over the long term if more people got regular checkups and engaged in healthier lifestyles, but creating industry standard metrics and finding proper encryption would still remain big issues.

The same issue of a lack of standards plagues the arena of sustainability. Moderator Robyn Tsukayama, assistant director of occupant engagement, Harvard office of Sustainability, mentioned that many industry members have survey fatigue and noted that the sector is lacking one standard of metrics. 

The main takeaway from the sustainability forum was that while some wonder if major companies will devote a position to sustainability, the long term will likely result in no one person spearheading sustainability, but an overall aim to lower one’s carbon footprint in a way that will improve the bottom line. This is likely b/c there’s still a negative association for many big businesses because sustainability is like marketing in that both are often viewed as money suckers not revenue drivers. 

And so the same issues remain:

• Internet security (even more important with social media and cloud computing)
• Standardization (how do industries establish base metrics all players must meet)
• Cost of moving toward triple bottom line (make sustainability holistic not add-on)
• Lack of female leadership
• Struggle to keep up with government policies
• How to improve efficiency by eliminating waste

Highlights

• I casually turned around to chat with the man behind me while waiting for the first keynote speaker, expecting that he was a professor supporting the conference planning team. I asked if was a professor, to which he responded, “no, I’m the Dean.” Sorry, I said, to which he responded, “That’s OK, I think of myself as a teacher first.”
• While at the healthcare talk I asked if anyone on the panel had thought about how INS and DHS policies impact healthcare. They stared at me dumbfounded. I said, well, everyone in Mass. needs healthcare and … To which they said, well only legal immigrants can be insured. “OK, I responded, everyone knows there’s a lack of preventative care and everyone knows that ER visits drive up insurance costs. So if you have a huge number of undocumented immigrants without insurance and at some point they visit the ER, isn’t that an issue?” 

No one had anything to say until someone from J&J reponded by saying that preventative care is a huge issue in America and that the biggest healthcare issue facing the U.S., India and China is type 2 diabetes. At first I felt as though I asked a stupid question but then I realized I stumped them. The care/coverage of illegal immigrants in the healthcare system is a variable that is obviously unaccounted for.

Nobody Has the Answers

12.02.12 | mmommorpgpiracyIPfingerprintingfanbasecooptitionHBSharvard business schoolFrederick HuntsberryMark GillGoogle Youtube

This is what I learned at the Entertainment and Media Conference of 2012, put on by the Harvard Business School Entertainment and Media Club. Nobody has the answers. Everything costs a ton of money and while we may have data that clues us into consumer interests, most companies don’t yet know how to quickly analyze that data. But, even if they do, they then have to figure out how to harness the data to market well to either the masses or various focused demographics.

So here are some observations from a series of talks and panels on new media as it impacts the following markets: TV, Internet, Games, Movies, Music and Publishing.

1) The YouTube (Google) folks might call it experimenting. In my opinion, that means they are using the millions at their avail to test new models and ideas because they don’t really know what the industry will look like and what the model should be. Better yet, they and their competitors alike, probably don’t yet know how to market to consumers so they have to experiment- ie guestimate.

2) Everything is headed the way of the Hourglass theory. People kept talking about small and/or startup companies and huge companies making up most of the marketplace, at least in the near future. Meaning that in addition to the TV and film industries contracting as they navigate the new technology-fueled zeitgeist, the market may only allow huge survivers and bootstrappers.

Part of the struggle comes from industries trying to operate while morphing. For example, for some in film, it’s a case of transitioning to a new distribution medium so companies don’t ride the wave past obsolescence. Or as Millennium Films President Mark Gill said: “We are the new radio.” He did add, though, that there is a bright side — video on demand.

Paramount Pictures COO Frederick Huntsberry devoted his talk to the struggle studios face with online piracy, which could be costing studios about 20% of their annual revenue. The problem with rogue websites such as movieberry.com and cyberlockers like those at the center of a major legal case, is that most, according to Huntsberry, are located outside the U.S. (Russia), so the U.S. government can’t touch them.

3) What’s sexy at 25 is no longer sexy at 33. None of these sectors seem sexy to me. Not film, not publishing, not TV. Sure, I miss the swag, the fashionistas, the parties, but it’s probably OK I don’t get comped drinks three nights a week and being in science by day and immersed in technology at school makes me realize there’s more potential in those areas than the “sexy” ones. Content creation is hard, but what’s even harder is to monetize it. If there were any industry highlighted at the conference I’d choose to get into, it’d be online games. But, it doesn’t seem like there’s room for anyone beside money guys and developers.

I’ll leave the media management jobs for the young, hopeful, linear HBS ladies and gentlemen. For me, I’d rather take all the technology, science, and IP and business law classes I can and do something that will create jobs and products in healthcare and technology. But, my biggest goal will be to create a startup that will appeal to moms working outside the home. My ultimate goal or challenge will be: can we have a positive triple bottom line while creating opportunities that will help our employees achieve balanced lives?

I’ll close with the buzz words and phrases of the day.

Fear * Cooptition * critical * piracy * social media * fingerprinting * fanbase * *Earned Media Value * MMO (massively multiplayer online game) vs. MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) * 

Babson: Semester Two

25.01.12 | 15 notes | dataapplegoogleAmazoncloudcloud computingAlaska airlinesebscohbshbrharvard business schoolbabsonmba

I just started my second semester of graduate school at Babson. I waited until I was really ready to apply to an MBA program, until I wanted it only for me and not for my parents, for my employer, or for society. And now I have to say I love it. It feels like hope and education and fuel to me.

My econ professor apparently jokes that people go to HBS for the name and they come to Babson to learn. Still I derive joy from trolling the EBSCO database for pearls from HBR and I have to toot my own horn because HBR included a company I’d been thinking about while on holiday — Alaska Airlines (AA). I was fascinated by the fact that AA offers healthy food onboard and has its flight attendants collect all recyclables, which is more than I can say for Sir Richard Branson’s airline Virgin, despite the billionaire’s talk about fostering the search for renewable energy sources.

Alaska Airlines, though was mentioned in a different light in the Jan/Feb 2012 HBR piece entitled Creating Sustainable Performance, which notes that around 2000 AA was lagging so they decided to do something about. To oversimplify, they made the shocking decision to launch a plan that partially involved- wait for it - seeking input and suggestions from their employees and actually letting them act on those suggestions.

Today in class, though, one main message was that marketing is all about pleasing the customer and that marketing  = company strategy, apart from its various other definitions. But one point that came up that echoed one of last semester’s main messages was that one of the driving forces in big technology business these days is data. Amazon, Apple, and Google are all after consumer interests and we give up our consumer interests when we give them our virginity data.