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| October 2007 |
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The global business leader Leadership has nothing to do with titles. J. Frank Brown, the Dean of INSEAD, has met a lot of CEOs in his two-and-a-half decades in business and many of them are nothing more than LINOs – Leaders In Name Only. “A lot of people talk about leadership and not that many actually do it,” Brown said in an interview with INSEAD Knowledge. Brown believes there are seven hallmarks of a great leader. “I think the most important one is how you communicate and how you listen because if you’re going to be a successful leader you’ve got to be a really aggressive learner,” he said. |
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Family business on the couch In August, the Bancroft family gave up control of Dow Jones, the publishing group it had owned for some 105 years. The group, which includes the Wall Street Journal, has been taken over by another family-controlled business, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for US$5 billion. According to Randel Carlock, the Berghmans Lhoist Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurial Leadership and Director of the Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise at INSEAD, the Bancrofts had a clear idea of the values they wanted associated with the Wall Street Journal brand – a strong sense of editorial integrity and independence. However, they had been unable to steward the Wall Street Journal into the 21st century as other competitors passed them by and Dow Jones’ stock price fell sharply. |
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Writing books at the push of a button INSEAD professor Phil Parker has been granted a US patent for his software programme that writes books. It took him seven years to get the patent, and while the registered patent name is decidedly scholastic: Method and Apparatus for Automated Authoring and Marketing, the implications for the information age are not. It’s not “creative intelligence.” It’s “reverse engineering” – deconstructing books into “genres” and then writing software programmes to fit those genres. |
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In search of blue oceans: The Starwood experience Are companies using Blue Ocean Strategy to search for ‘uncontested market space’ and, if so, how? One group which has been exploring blue ocean thinking for the past three years is Starwood Hotels and Resorts. However, as INSEAD Knowledge has been finding out, the company has so far been taking a step-by-step approach to implementing the concept, rather than try to realise any sort of ‘grand vision’. As Starwood Vice President Robyn Pratt puts it, it’s more a question of finding ‘blue puddles, lakes or rivers’ at this stage rather than ‘blue oceans’ as such. |
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Social responsibility: Greater access to capital? Practising social responsibility can give companies improved access to capital. That’s according to Brendan May, International Head of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability at PR firm Weber Shandwick Worldwide. Key financial centres are always thinking in terms of risk and investible propositions, and as May notes, “the chances are, that a truly investible proposition in the 21st century is not a company that is chopping down rainforests, (or) exploiting its workforce.” This is resulting in a proliferation of both mainstream and niche institutions looking to invest in socially responsible companies, as financial firms choose to steer clear of dubious, risky companies. |
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Leader or follower? The future of the chemical industry in Europe A survey has found that an overwhelming majority of managers of chemical firms in Western Europe hold negative views about new regulations governing the industry. However, according to Baptiste Lebreton, a postdoctoral research fellow at INSEAD, and Luk Van Wassenhove, who holds the Henry Ford chair in manufacturing, the latest EU directive can be used to create value and increase competitive advantage.
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Advertising on the web: How content affects the buying and selling of ad links The internet has become an important medium for doing business internationally. The opportunities are enormous, yet there are still many practical questions that managers of commercial websites need answering. Zsolt Katona, an INSEAD PhD candidate in marketing, addresses some of these questions in his doctoral thesis on advertising on the World Wide Web. “The www is the largest network in the world - there are more pages on the www than the population of the world, and online advertising expenditure is growing at a rate of 18 per cent,” Katona says.
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