Not really a commentary per se, but just some interesting recent research I wanted to share. I am fascinated with the family firm model (remembering, this is the origin of modern business), but also because many development economists support the notion that SME’s and family firms are key drivers of an economy – a theory I also subscribe to. My own research into Chinese family firms in the mid 1990’s also highlighted similar findings – although innovation wasn’t necessarily the keyword back then. 

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Family firms aren’t typically thought of as particularly innovative. More often, they’re viewed as risk averse, traditional, and stagnant.

However, many family-owned businesses are among the most innovative in their industries. Consider Herr’s Potato Chips and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. There are countless other examples of family firms that have brought innovations to market. We wanted to determine how family firms actually compare to their nonfamily counterparts when it comes to being innovative. Our research, conducted with Patricio Duran and Thomas Zellweger, suggests the answer is not simple.

The findings, published in the Academy of Management Journal, show that family firms invest less in innovation than other firms (both public and private) that aren’t family-owned. On average, family firms have a smaller R&D budget than other organizations of similar size, but that does not mean they are less innovative. On the contrary, our study found that family firms are more efficient in their innovation processes. For every dollar invested in R&D, they get more innovative output, measured by number of patents, number of new products, or revenues generated with new products. The level of innovation is higher in family firms.

Why might this be? We offer one explanation: Entrepreneurial families tend to concentrate their wealth in one or few firms — consider, for instance, the Walton family’s huge wealth concentration in Walmart. These families are very cautious about investments, aiming to avoid any waste. Family firm owners can use their powerful shareholder positions to ensure that managers engage only in prudent investments.

Their parsimony extends to their innovation process. In contrast to many other shareholders, family owners have the ability to make sure that money is invested in the right projects and that resources are employed in an effective way. Because of their long relationship with the firm, family owners typically have a deep knowledge of the industry, the firm, and its stakeholders. They also spend considerable time with the organization and communicate frequently with employees, clients, and other stakeholders. Moreover, many family firms profit from their “family-like” culture and their close relationships with a handful of partners, from suppliers to customers, who can help these firms develop their creative ideas, products, and processes.

We also find that the “less input, more output” effect is stronger when family members not only own but also lead the company. In such cases there are fewer conflicting interests between the owners and managers. For instance, family owners and family managers are often aligned with regard to the time horizon of their investments as well as with their appetite for risk. A family CEO can be a valuable resource since they have grown up in the business, socializing in the firm’s network and becoming more familiar with the industry dynamics and the power distribution among competitors.

Yet this finding is not true for all family CEOs. Contrary to what we expected, our results show that firms led by later-generation family members are more innovative than other firms, while firms led by their founders are less efficient with regard to innovation. In other words, the latter spend more money on innovation but have less innovative outcomes. Based on existing theory on family firms, we argue that this is because the advantages of family firms build up over an extended period of time; they do not appear right away or when firms are led by first-generation members. In addition, one might argue that groups of dedicated owners, which most later-generation family firms have, are better able to identify and discard bad ideas, whereas founders may have largely unrestricted discretion to push risky ideas.

Findings from our study reveal that family firms, despite their risk aversion regarding investment, can build on many strengths in order to leverage their innovativeness:

Be a committed and informed owner. As Kammerlander and Ganter show in their case-based work on digitization in family firms, family owners can have a positive impact on firm innovation when they actively participate in the innovation process. They can support innovation by drawing on their personal networks and by sharing industry information with the employees they have worked with over decades. Owners can also foster innovation by allocating budget for long-term innovative projects.

To be able to effectively steer innovation processes, family firm owners need to be informed about what is going on in their organizations. They need to gather as much information on technology developments and customer demands as possible. One example of a committed and informed family firm owner is Simone Bagel-Trah, chair of the board at Henkel, a multigenerational consumer goods firm where some 150 family owners (descendants of the founder Fritz Henkel) possess more than 60% of the company’s shares. According to various interviews with the German press, Bagel-Trah is active in bundling the interests of the family and discussing them with company representatives on a frequent basis.

Use the family firm’s culture to empower employees. One example of a trust-based family firm culture that fosters innovation is the manufacturing firm W. L. Gore and Associates. It gives employees one afternoon per week to come up with new ideas for improving processes and products, and it tries to foster an open, creative, and constructive exchange of ideas within the organization. One of the company’s guidelines is: “If you haven’t made a mistake this week, this means you haven’t sufficiently tried to think outside the box.” It also makes sure ideas are shared openly, without fear, across hierarchical levels and departments by holding cross-functional, cross-hierarchical meetings to exchange ideas.

We’ve found that other family firms facilitate encounters between the CEO and employees. While some innovative family firms formally schedule “idea exchanging” lunches with the CEO and employees, others invest in events, such as anniversaries and workshops, with the family owners and employees.

The CEOs of family firms that empower employees are also frequently in touch with employees — not only electronically but also in person. Many family CEOs we have talked to enjoy walking through their buildings and plants to exchange thoughts and ideas with their employees.

Leverage your trust-based external network. Research has shown that building on a small number of trusted sources can be effective for developing innovative and implementable ideas. When searching for new business models, for example, a German family business invites a diverse group of “friends” of the organization — internal and external managers, politicians, university professors, and other family firm owner-managers — to discuss ideas.

One Swiss family business hosts a yearly innovation competition among its suppliers. The winner, which is the supplier that comes up with the best idea for improving the business’s products or services, is awarded with a certificate and a dinner with the firm’s management team. The benefit for both sides is huge — the family firm receives valuable ideas and the supplier gets a reputation boost — while costs remain manageable.

Source: https://hbr.org/2017/01/research-family-firms-are-more-innovative-than-other-companies

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Are you a dirty consultant? She was.

When she was the consultant two decades ago, she refused to advise until she knew what she was advising on. She would do a night with the night-shift, spend a day with the truckers, work the warehouse, visit different branches and speak to white and blue collar workers about their experiences. She never assumed she could make a good call without knowing how it would impact jobs across the company.

But she couldn’t do it anymore.

The consultants the company now employs don’t do that. They are suited and booted, equipped with shiny laptops and digital tools, promising high-tech solutions for all her woes. But never, ever, doing the dirty work of finding out what was going on in the messy organisational reality.

Instead, they produced engagement platforms, driven by cutting-edge technologies running on pumped up algorithms aimed at discovering who was disengaged and providing real-time data on what they were doing and how they were feeling.

They would then proffer solutions on how to sort it out. But these solutions had no context. They were drawn from best practice models about behaviour that had no relationship with the work the people were actually doing or the contextual complexities of the issues.

Read more here.

All industries are affected by change. The extent of which may not be immediately obvious, but the filter-down impacts of change can be far-reaching and somewhat unexpected. One such case in point is the textbook industry – reacting to changes in the format of tertiary education delivery, the humble well-researched textbook is being phased out slowly and replaced with other models.

Source - Jessica Ruscello

In the early 1990’s when I read Law, our lecturers compiled a printed textbook of excerpts from relevant books, journals, newspaper articles, and case law (online didn’t exist back then) – a very first attempt at faculty-led text resources for students. We didn’t have a prescribed textbook – none was written suitable for the scope of the course.

Nowadays it is somewhat more advanced – online excerpts, blog posts, e-articles and e-books are manipulated (just as I do here with the following article) to provide a concise summary of relevant text; rather than leaving students to be inundated with the plethora of peripheral material a traditional printed textbook may offer.

Source - Alexis Brown

Is this change good? Are we watering down the student experience by focusing student reading too much, or are we simply channelling the right information to the student and hoping for them to explore further on their own? I won’t answer that here – I am guilty of developing courses with bespoke materials for students, just as I am equally guilty of accepting gifts from publishing houses for assigning their mammoth volumes. I know my preference.

This commentary is not about my personal opinion on the educational value of this, but is more towards understanding a fundamental paradigm shift in the textbook industry. Internet, social media, online publishing has generated a different style of reading – short bursts – where we consume minute aspects of knowledge (one or two paragraphs, videos or sound-bytes at a time) – could this render traditional textbooks obsolete into the future? A very possible yes.

Denise Wydra, Principal of Branch Ideas Consulting (US) gave consideration to how emerging paradigms of tertiary education delivery are impacting on the traditional textbook market. Well worth considering – and, if you’re currently writing a manuscript or two (as I am), you may need to rethink your ultimate publishing medium.

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The state of New York made big news in the education space earlier this year when it announced plans to offer tuition-free college to qualifying families. Part of that plan includes $8 million that will be used "to help defray the prohibitive cost of textbooks."

Both of these moves could have far-reaching consequences, but one of them is far more radical than the other. Here’s why.

The tuition grants are called Excelsior Scholarships. Students who receive them will be going to the same schools as students who don’t, will take the same classes and will have the same instructors. The only difference is that they won’t pay the same tuition.

But how is that possible? Will instructors give up their pay for courses with high proportions of Excelsior students? Will instructors be replaced with volunteers (maybe retired business executives) or have their work outsourced to cheaper sources of labor overseas? Or even robots?

No, the simple answer is that the instructors will get paid, the lights will stay on and the cafeteria will continue to function. The only difference is that the cost will be borne by the state -- that is, by New York state citizens via their tax dollars. Same providers and offerings as before, but the state and taxpayers are picking up the bill.

So what about the other part, the textbooks? Here’s where the radical innovation is found.

If New York were to save students money on textbooks the same way it is saving students money on tuition, then students would have the same textbook providers and offerings as before, but the state would be picking up the bill. This isn’t what’s planned, though. Instead, the traditional providers -- textbook publishers -- are being bypassed altogether. The $8 million, which will be split between the State University of New York and City University of New York systems, will go to continued efforts to use completely different learning materials from a completely different source: open educational resources.

The big excitement hovering around OER is usually because they can be far less expensive than traditional publisher-supplied materials -- or even free. In most cases, they can also be adapted more easily than traditionally copyrighted materials, but it’s the “less-expensive” part that is so alluring to the state of New York. The hope is that by using OER, the cost of not only tuition but also course materials can be greatly reduced -- and not just for Excelsior students, but for every student.

Most likely change won’t happen for all courses, all at once. Early efforts will probably be focused on the big introductory courses where inexpensive textbooks could lighten the burden for the largest number of students.

Still, the approach is deeply disruptive in multiple ways:

1. The work of creating course materials will increasingly be done differently. Fully formed, high-quality textbooks don’t just pop into existence, a natural by-product of the web. They take work to write, to illustrate, to fact-check, to design, to assemble, to review, to update and so on.

This was once the work of textbook publishers, who, along with their authors, performed these tasks pretty much from soup to nuts. The same work exists, but now it’s being broken up and redistributed to a variety of parties who can, collectively, do it more cheaply. Rather than a renowned biologist explaining mitosis and earning a royalty, a freelance writer with a background in biology can write the passage. Rather than an editor within a publishing house assembling materials into a chapter, educators themselves might take on this work.

In the state system, SUNY OER Services provides training and support for faculty members because, in the words of Katherine Pitcher, SUNY Geneseo’s interim library director, "faculty have to be involved -- it has to be coming from them." That’s a new burden for college instructors, but also a chance for creative input and control.

2. There is a "new breed of organization," in the words of David Wiley at Lumen Learning -- publishers aren’t the only ones in the game. Wiley, Lumen’s chief academic officer, argues that traditional publishers will be unable to shift their business models sufficiently to accommodate OER as a central offering, which opens up space for companies that are “only too happy to … provide all the services necessary to make OER a viable alternative to commercial offerings.” Lumen is itself a successful exemplar of this new breed, a group that is being given a boost by New York’s move.

3. Bypassing publishers means all-new course materials. That’s a huge opportunity to sidestep whatever strictures have evolved over the past decades and introduce new content that aligns more closely with the goals of today’s instructors, students and educational organizations.

For example, Thomas Carey has argued that the creation of OER textbooks can be used to “make visible the way faculty work with knowledge in [their] teaching,” which will in turn help educate students about knowledge making -- a valuable skill in today’s economy.

The state of New York is taking bold steps to make high-quality higher education more accessible to more people than ever before. Reduced tuition is nice, but the state’s pursuit of inexpensive textbooks is disrupting the familiar landscape in fundamental ways.

Link: OER Disrupting Textbook Marketplace

Craig J Selby | Craig is a long-time proponent of structured and measured change. His early career saw him teaching marketing and management at a variety of Universities and PTE’s in his native New Zealand, where he quickly climbed the management ladder to head several private sector institutes. Needing to do that little bit extra, Craig formed his own consultancy firm and was engaged by many in the sector as a trouble-shooter - responsible for internal auditing, restructuring and redevelopment of many departments and institutes in order to remain competitive in a highly contested market. This involvement motivated him to branch out and work with other industries - focussing on change and development as a core theme in business survival. When Craig moved to Malaysia, he went back into the Education sector to share his ideas with local private sector educational facilities. In 2009 Craig co-founded Orchan Consulting Asia, an award-winning Public Relations agency. His areas of specialisation are Crisis Management Communications and Change Management.

Revolution is more a function of evolution than anything else. At least, in the marketing world. The simple evolves into the complex; conversely, complex into simple. One such evolution was the humble #hashtag – a simple, almost obscure symbol which championed an entirely new method of targeting, connecting, and tracking customers; and offered marketeers new avenues of exploration to claim aspects of cyberspace for their brands. 

The humble #hashtag celebrated its tenth birthday recently. This signifies ten years of how something so simple as a # can transform how we connect and opened up new realms of possibility. #goodjobhashtag #change

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It started ten years ago as one man’s suggestion to group messages and ideas with the # symbol and now over 125 million hashtags are used on Twitter every day.

The symbol is older than keyboards and telephone keypads, stretching back to when the English started writing lb, short for libra – the Latin for pound.

Skip forward a few hundred years to 23 August 2007 when Chris Messina wrote the following tweet:

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⌗ChrisMessina 

✔@chrismessina

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

3:25 AM - Aug 24, 2007

•  333333 Replies
 
•  4,8044,804 Retweets
 
•  9,7199,719 likes

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The rest, as they say, is #History.

Now celebrating its tenth birthday (#hashtag10), the hashtag has become part of everyday lexicon and was added to Oxford English Dictionary in 2014:

hashtag n. (on social media web sites and applications) a word or phrase preceded by a hash and used to identify messages relating to a specific topic; (also) the hash symbol itself, when used in this way.

The BBC has compiled a list of some of the most popular hashtags, including #BlackLivesMatter, #EdBallsDay, #TheDress, #HeForShe and #PutYourBatsOut. While we think of these stand out moments and trends (#IceBucketChallenge anyone?) as being very popular on Twitter, it is the everyday hashtags that dominate the platform, the most popular being #FF, or Follow Friday, with hundreds of millions of tweets.

EvolutionThe little hatch mark (that’s right, ‘hash’ came from the word ‘hatch’), has evolved over time. Its original purpose, as suggested by Chris Messina, is still the dominant usage but hashtags have evolved written (and in some cases spoken) language to create clarity of meaning, especially with irony. An increasingly common usage is a hashtag modifying a statement so its obviously ironic and as such it’s become an extension of punctuation, giving meaning to text.

View image on Twitter

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Andrew Wortman @Amoney666

Here's Trump's Chaotic Last 4 Weeks on One List #Winning

4:57 AM - Aug 19, 2017 · Ronkonkoma, NY

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And it’s not just Twitter, other social networks picked up the # as the de facto method of collecting conversations, grouping posts and creating searchable content. Instagram, which relies on hashtags for growth but doesn’t have the character limit, is perhaps now king of the hashtag.

On Twitter, two hashtags is the sweet spot for engagement, but on Instagram the most engagementcomes from posts with 11 or more.

And the most popular hashtag on Instagram? #lovewith 1.1bn uses and counting.

Article by Jake O'Neill