RIM Blackberry Falling Behind

When thinking of Smartphones-what jumps out to you?  Immediately in my mind I picture iPhones and Droids, fast, touch-screen, app focused phones, even though just three years ago, I was a proud owner of a Blackberry Curve.  I remember my first days with the Blackberry-going to it from my previous phone was like going from a Mac to a PC…completely different logic in the functioning, leading to several days of frustration and searching through my instruction manual just to find out how to change the ring tone.  Last fall, I bought an Evo 3G (Android); I don’t think I’ve opened the instruction manual to this day.

Why does this matter?  As a consumer, business student, and hopefully future employee of a large organization-Blackberry should care that their phones are falling out of consumer’s evoked set and are challenging to understand for those consumers who do have them.  After reading RIM's Blackberry: Failure to Communicate, it doesn't appear that RIM is positioning themselves to overcome this.  As an example, here is what co-CEO, Jim Balsillie had to say after unveiling the Blackberry RIM’s answer to the iPad,

“There’s tremendous turbulence in the ecosystem, of course, in mobility.  And that’s sort of an obvious thing, but also there’s tremendous architectural distinction.  We’ve taken two fundamentally different approaches in their casualness.  It’s a causal difference, not just nuance.  It’s not just a causal direction that I’m going to really articulate here- and feel free to go as deep as you want-it’s really as fundamental as casualness.”

Did you catch that?  I certainly didn’t.  If this quote is an example of the communication style within RIM, it is easy to see that the sender’s intended message can easily be misunderstood and decoded incorrectly.  It is difficult to see how the marketing department within RIM understood what Balsillie said, and better yet, could take that information and turn it into an appealing message to consumers.  The heavy use of business jargon limits their ability to communicate effectively, even within the organization. 

Blackberry has placed their focus on highly secure, business minded phones and have openly discussed a resistance to the concept of “apps”, but they have failed to connect with the consumer.  The recent success of both Apple and Android in taking over the mobile device market with their app-friendly focus shows that the consumers (even the ones who work in business) value these features.  Currently, Blackberry still holds the top seat for smartphones in business, but that market is dying off as organizations find more secure and cost effective ways to have employees utilize their personal smartphones. 

Now is the time for RIM to diversify their teams, and create customer friendly products.  Although their focus on high quality technology is right, and they believe in being authentic to their consumers, it is evident there is disconnect between the tech-savvy teams creating their products and the consumers who use them.  RIM does not necessarily lack surface level diversity, but rather deep-level diversity in the backgrounds, values, and attitudes of their employees.  RIM is desperately in need of a closer connection with their everyday consumer, the non-tech guru who still wants to check email and have a few fun “wow” factors available on their cell phone.  Increased diversity will lead to a better understanding and ability to satisfy customers, ultimately resulting in higher performance for the organization. 

In a recent article, RIM BlackBerry World Fails to Impress Analysts, RIM was again criticized for failure to innovate and bring revolutionary ideas to the mobile device market.  As Android and Apple are continuing active growth, it is time for RIM to reevaluate their organization’s culture and bring in more innovators that will help them connect with consumer wants and needs.  RIM can take a few lessons from Apple and Android, since I know we all have heard plenty about Apple’s culture, check out this article about Android, 100 Million Android Fans Can't be Wrong. 

What do you think?  Anyone out there still a proud Blackberry user?  What other ideas could RIM use to take back the mobile device game?

Kelsey Umbarger

Do women make better decisions than men?

Referent article: "Women are better investors, and here’s why" 

While first reading this title, perhaps, we might somewhat think about whether the writer has a bias or a stereotype that women make better decision than men do. However, there are many researches support evidences that women are better at everything — including investing. For example, a study in 2009 showed that women made 1% more annually than men did. In addition, women have higher intention to make more in the market. Let’s see what reasons make women have more advantages to make decisions.

Women can be better market investors because they often play it safe and play by the rules of the investing. In other words, we can say that they have high uncertainty avoidance, and they prefer to avoid risky situations and attempt to reduce uncertainty. Mostly when they intend to invest money in property, they search on more information If they find out there is high risky or many uncertainty situations, they would rather go aside.

Furthermore, interestingly, learning from Jung’s cognitive styles, I analyze that while women make decision to invest, they may represent two obvious characteristics to be investigated; these are namely, sensing and judgment. Since instead of taking many risks and playing it uncertain, mostly they would rather sense on solid information and rules, they make many better decisions. In addition, women take serious concern with investing money as they seem to have well-organized and systematic judgment.

So analyzing those factors, taking an example, let’s say if there is a financial consultant seek female customers to invest their money, he or she need to offer positive suggestions based on solid information and benefits for customers, because women may not take higher risky nor ignore uncertainty before pouring out their money. They have more concerns with whether or not their money sinks into the sea.

Women may not take more risks on making decisions due to conservation and conscientious, while men make quick decision, I guess perhaps resulting from being prone to making intuition decisions. According to the study, people who make intuitive decisions-making, they may scan the environment for cues to recognize patterns. In other words, they would rely on their intuition and hunches, such as feelings and potential solutions based on their prior experiences. As a result, men may not tend to get good outcomes from their decisions.

Therefore, undergoing the dynamic environment, we meet lots of problems and dilemmas in our daily life that make us need to carefully make decisions. There are more unprogrammed decisions than programmed ones that we face because many problems are unique and complicated. So, beyond the implicative insights of the journalist, I would suggest men that taking several ways of using conscious thinking, gathering evidence and information, and considering alternative solutions can also make better decisions.

By Yin-Chin Huang

Where does Poor Communication lead in Business?

Where does Poor Communication lead in Business?

 

 Why is communication important to business? Couldn’t universities just produce graduates skilled at crunching number? Good communication matters because business organizations are made up of people. As Robert Kent, former dean of Harvard Business School has said, “In business, communication is everything.” Here are the numbers: managers typically spend 75 to 80 % of their time engaged in some form of written or oral communication. Let us examine some reasons why good communication is important to individuals and their organizations. 


First, the National Commission on Writing estimates that American businesses spend $3.1 bullion annually just training people to write. According to the report of the National Commission on Writing, people who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired, and if already working, are unlikely to last long enough to be considered for promotion. Corporations with greatest employment growth potential (this is 80% or more of the companies in the services and the finance, insurance and real estate sectors) assess writing during hiring. Besides, two-thirds of salaried employees in large American companies have some writing responsibility. More than 40 percent of responding firms offer or require training for salaried employees with writing deficiencies. Besides, an ability to communicate was rated as the most important factor in making a manager “promotable” by Harvard Business Review. Hence, ineffective communication is very expensive for firms.


Second, the world’s economy is becoming increasingly global. By the end of the 20th century, 80 percent of U.S. products were competing in international markets. The direct investment of foreign-based companies grew from $9 trillion in 1966 to more than $300 trillion in 2002. Many products we assume are American, such as Purina Dog Chow and KitKat candy bars, are made overseas. Brands we may think are international, Grey Poupon mustard, Michelin tires and Evian water, are made in the United States. For managers, having international experience is rapidly moving from “desirable” to “essential.” A study by the Columbia University School of Business reported that successful executives must have multi-environment and multinational experience to become CEOs in the 21st century. Moreover, products have failed overseas sometimes simply because a name may take on unanticipated meanings in translation. For example, the Olympic copier Roto in Chile (roto in Spanish means ‘broken’); the Chevy Nova in Puerto Rico (no va means ‘doesn’t go’); the Randan in Japan (randan means ‘idiot’); Parker Pen’s Jotter pen (‘jockstrap’ in some Latin American markets). This kind of mishap is not an American “monopoly”. A successful European chocolate and fruit product was introduced into the U.S. with the unfortunate name “Zit.”

Naming a product is communication at its simplest level. The overall implications of intercultural communication for global business are enormous. Take the case of EuroDisney, later renamed Disneyland Paris. For the year 1993, the theme park lost approximately US $1 billion. Losses were still at US $1 million a day in 1994-95. There were many reasons for this, including a recession in Europe, but intercultural insensitivity was also a very important factor. No attention was paid to the European context or to cultural differences in management practice, labor relations, or even such simple matters as preferred dining hours or availability of alcohol and tobacco. EuroDisney signals the danger for business practitioners immersed in financial forecasting, market studies and management models when they overlook how culture affects behavior. Few things are more important to conducting business on a global scale than skill in intercultural communication.

Poor communication in business (both written and/or oral), can obstruct the efficiency of an organization. For example, vague email messages that require clarification, documents that need rewriting due to errors, and uninformed presentations and speeches, can greatly affect the flow of work in the company. Business communication skills impact the motivation of employees. Communicative and collaborative work environment promotes emploess productivity, creaticity and inspiration. Employees will lack enthusiams, if communication skills are poor. They will question the value of the thing they are doing. Poor communication skills can demoralize employees, since in this case they are forced to listen to a boring presentations where the person who presents is not able to provide clear objectives and instructions, which will as a result lead to monotony and total confusion. Consequently, lack of enthusiams will lead to decreased innovation. 

Therefore, before hiring an employee, companies should think twice whether they really need the employee who lacks communication skills that might lead to the consequences I mentioned above.

Based on http://smallbusiness.chron.com/effects-bad-communication-business-2880.html - “The effects of bad communication in business”

http://groupbrain.wjh.harvard.edu/jrh/pub/JRH1975_2.pdf - FRANK, HACKMAN (unknown). A Failure of Job Enrichment: The Case of the Change That Wasn't. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 12 (3), 413-436.

Tamar Khechoian.

Good, Bad and the Ugly

Bad Leadership and Communication Blunders

‘I like to be the center of attention’, ‘I am better than others’, ‘I demand the respect due to me’. What do all those sentences mean? Are these signs of a good leader or a bad self obsessed leader or a narcissistic trait? Yes, it is the voice of a person who is arrogant, authoritative, filled with self admiration and superiority complex. Be it Politics, Military or Business, such leaders are spread everywhere. According to McClelland’s Theory of Needs, Need for Power and Achievement is the highest for these types of leaders. If we talk about the past there were numerous leaders whose decisions devastated themselves and people around the world. I am sure you all will agree with me on this:

Ayatollah Khomeini – He was a religious leader of Iran from 1979 to 1989. He implemented the Sharia Law with Islamic dress code enforced on men and women.30, 000 political activists were killed and thousands were killed in the prisons swiftly.

Adolf Hitler – Do I need to say anything about him? Not even hundreds or thousands, millions yes millions were brutally killed, no, actually slaughtered to death! 

Idi Amin – He was an army officer and president of Uganda. His rule was characterized by judicial killings and expulsion of Asians from Uganda. Number of people killed ranged from 80,000 to 500,000. 

The list doesn’t end here of bad leaders. This is just the trailer of the movie about to begin. The main reason for their bad leadership was there narcissistic approach to everything and their ultimate need for power. They never learned to compromise and collaborate for a good cause and need for admiration was high as well. A good leader has a strong character and people should look up to them unlike these leaders. 

“Leaders do not command excellence, they build excellence”.

Let’s get back to the present - Lehmann brothers, Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, BP and Satyam in India. What would you like to say about them?  What is common among them? Big organizations but bad leaders. Like for Tyco it is hard to believe that top level chief executives, chairman and former CFO were accused of theft of more than $150 million. Where were their Ethics at that time? Leaders of big organizations talks about Ethics but never follows them. WorldCom CEO, CFO, Comptroller and director of General Accounting were accused of using fraudulent accounting methods and finally declared bankruptcy. How can they be a role model for other employees by portraying such unethical behavior and leadership style? I wish they had followed more of an authentic leadership style and had a moral compass.

Well, enough said about bad leaders, let’s get to some who can get even worse!  Communication is the real key to success for a Leader. To be a good and successful leader, one needs to master the skill of communicating and listening in the process of communication. Recent communication blunder by a leader that was a big hit was …..Rolling drums…..Sarah Palin. 

a)      a) Sarah Palin's recent interview with Glenn Beck, when she kept referring to "our allies, North Korea," even after he tactfully corrected her the first time. This implies listening is so important in communication, she didn’t even listen what the interviewer was saying.Will US people like to follow such a leader who doesn’t know such basic things about her own country? One who doesn’t communicate effectively? Who is not a charismatic leader?

b)      b) President Barack Obama told Jay Leno the President had bowled a mediocre score of 129 in the White House bowling alley. Obama’s lament: “It was like—Special Olympics or something.”. It might seem to people that he aimed at mocking children with disabilities. Are Leaders supposed to be ignorant and communicate in such a manner?

c)       c) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented a symbolic button to Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov, thinking the Russian word on the mock button meant “reset.” Her hope was that Russia and the United States would reset the direction of their relationship. Right away, Lavrov explained that an accurate translation would be “overloaded” or “overcharged.” This is one of the examples of cross cultural communication blunder performed by a leader. Russian culture is a high context culture and uses high context messages in communication.Words and Word choice becomes very important so a leader must understand how to communicate, with whom to communicate and what to communicate.

I am sure all of us might have faced many communication blunders – be it cross cultural or written communication. Can you share some incidents or ideas so that we can avoid that happening to all of us – the future leaders!

Some interesting and cool thoughts: Have a look!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6aplxjVFuE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfCUxeQ2VSE

http://www.joehealey.com/trustAnim.swf

Source: Higgs,M.(2009)."The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Leadership and Narcissism". Journal of Change Management. 9:165-178.

By:
Sheena Bedi

Launch of @United Falls Short

In March 2011, United and Continental Airlines began planning their merger into United Continental Airlines.  The official merger launched on May 18, complete with new signage and a “Customer Day One” campaign at Chicago O’Hare to bring excitement to the day.  As with most “change” and “transition”, there were bound to be bumps in the road along the way.  As blogger "Flying With Fish" reported here: http://bit.ly/ki6Viu there is a major social media oversight in their planning.

Historically, United Airlines and Continental have successfully used their @UnitedAirlines and @Continental accounts to quickly respond to customer tweets, promote giveaways and new flight information, and promote their public relations pieces such as their earth day giveaway.  The impressive and shocking information is that @UnitedAirlines had 195,972 followers and @Continental had 145,884 followers.  Now what was the blunder?  Neither @UnitedAirlines or @Continental are being used post-merger.  Rather than renaming one of the two accounts previously held by the two airlines (as easy as adjusting a setting in Twitter), on May 18, a new account @United was launched.  That’s right, 341,856 followers left on the table. Twitter would not allow the accounts to be merged, thus, a decision would have had to be made.   Rather than making that difficult decision of selecting which account to update with a new name, United Continental chose to avoid the conflict altogether. 

Maybe it isn’t fair to say “341,856” followers were left on the table, maybe a more accurate number would be “195,972” or “145,884”.  Additionally, since the launch of @United, neither of the previous accounts have been deactivated or heavily utilized to transition customers to follow @United.  Because this is a “fresh” situation, it’s difficult to say exactly what organizational error caused this, but here are a couple speculations:

1.    Lack of Consistency.  I don’t want to undermine that mergers are hard, but the twitter failure does not align with the plan.  United Continental has released plans to merge the two airlines down to the new on-board beer selection and coffee lines, but failed to integrate a comprehensive plan for their Twitter presence.  Align your social media presence with your corporate image, if you are going for a seamless transition, plan for it. 

2.    Someone didn’t speak up.  Between the two marketing, public relations, or customer relations departments-someone (maybe lots of people) did not speak up to point out the time, money, & effort it took to reach 140,000+ followers for each airline.  How could this have been avoided?  Beyond the use of common sense, it is important that especially during times of great change, open communication and constant feedback are being sought within the organization.  Maybe the “someone” that foresaw this blunder was an intern, not sure if his opinion would matter…make sure that intern feels empowered to speak up @United. 

Marketing-wise, there are two things that could have or could still be done:

1.    Pick one!  Pretty self-explanatory, but pick one to change the name and launch a campaign to the second one with an apology for the inconvenience & find a way to promote-now that choice isn’t really an option-do #2.

2.    Soft Transition.  Once the decision to launch @United was made, it is wrong to assume 341,856 followers will move in one tweet.  You need to launch a campaign to move your followers over time.  This isn’t going to happen overnight and will take some work-but not nearly as much as finding 340,000 brand new followers. 

Although Social Media is a relatively new concern during mergers, it is no less important in establishing a new company culture and online image.  United Continental can still save something of the situation, but they need a plan and action to start soon.  Would you have made the same decision as United Continental?  Or, would you make the same decision with a different plan of action? 

-Kelsey Umbarger

Decision-Making Systems Give Benefits to Managers

In late 1970s, a new idea emerged from academics who worked with applications of information technology. Fortunately, decision-support systems involving the use of complex computer algorithms to support and enhance human decision making helps managers report, analyze, and interpret data rather than execute business decisions. The concepts of numerous kinds of decision support capability basically is that a computer program would churn through data and with human interpretation would reveal previously hidden trends and patterns that would allow an executive to make smarter and faster programmed decisions.

However, initially, there were some issues resisted the development of this new approach. Such as the notion of computer-augmented decisions never really exploded like some other categories of computer software since it often was difficult to extract decision rules or algorithms from human experts. Also, these systems are very complex, and typically only a few people in an organization can understand and work with them. So, the shortage of managerial time and analytical expertise caused the rise of automated decision making. These new systems came about not only because technologies have matured, but also in response to business needs.

Perhaps, although many executives may somewhat doubt the type of the computational decision making ability but rather prefer to rely on gut feelings or other traditional approaches to make decision, the automated decision-making systems and processes can still involve some human review along with adopting the rational decision-making model. A physician, for example, either initiates an order following the system checks or is able to override the recommendation of an automated protocol. Patients are safer when an automated system need to combine with physician knowledge and rational professions. As a result, while adopting computer systems to make important decisions, both implementing the decision making systems as well as human involvement checking can expectedly reduce as many mistakes as possible. Ultimately, the company will benefit not only by extracting the rules into a common rule base but also by integrating automated decision-making capabilities into workflow and transactional applications while maintaining a separate rules base.

Yin-Chin Huang

Publish Post

Referent Article Source: Harris, J. G. and Davenport, T. H. (July 1^st, 2005) Automated Decision Making Comes of Age. MIT Sloan Management Review.

“What went wrong with Cathie Black”

http://blogs.forbes.com/frederickallen/2011/04/08/what-went-wrong-with-cathie-black/

A recent article of April 8, 2011 named “What went wrong with Cathie Black” talks about the newly appointed New York schools chancellor Black, who was dismissed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York after her three months holding the position. The explanations of what went wrong has broadly fallen into tow camps: inexperience and personality.

To start with, I should mention that Black proved herself as being a top notch leader. Her record of success as a President of USA Today, The Newspaper Association of America and then Hearst magazines as well as her contributions on the boards of the Coca-Cola Company and IBM attest to that.

Despite of the fact that Cathie Black was quite a successful leader in business realm and was motivated to succeed in her new job, she could not fit the realm of public sector. One of the main differences in the leading government and private sectors is that leadership in government requires diplomatic skills, which leaders can often get by without in business. It is obvious from the mentioned article, that she had a lack of the required skills. Let us look inside the issue more deeply.

First of all, in her previous positions she was used to actively participate, make decisions, control the organization as a whole in a different way than she was required to do while working in public sector. Secondly, she was used to communicate differently with others, differently solving conflicts, rewarding her staff for good performance, and she was required to change her ability, skills, attitude toward the routine on a daily basis facing the problems of the NYC schools. Thirdly, probably she failed while trying to understand the culture of the local community of how people see each school's goal. Those views, the whole environment might have been different from what Black was used to. As a result, after just three months of working she was dismissed by the Mayor who appointed her to the current position and hoped she would would have been a great fit to the organization.

Tamar Khechoian.