71 - 80 of 85 results for: GSBGEN

Why is it so difficult to change human behavior? Why is it that more than 80% of individuals who sign up for fitness classes drop out within a few weeks, even a few days? Why is it that despite the dramatic increase in devices and apps that are geared for changing behaviors, people still struggle to adopt and maintain new behaviors? The issue is not about a desire to change--it is about using the right methods and techniques to bring about habit change. The primary goal of this seminar is to gain a rich understanding of changing behaviors through frameworks and concepts that are grounded in neuroscience. In this seminar, we will examine (1) ways of characterizing different domains of behavior change, each requiring different methods and techniques, (2) why methods that often work in one domain are often unsuccessful in others and (3) how companies create habits in users and how one can leverage the power of technology to bring about behavior change.

This course will examine the world of wine with a fresh and contemporary lens. It will explore the market dynamics of this fascinating global industry. The goal of the course is to provide insight into the branding, marketing, and distribution dynamics that shape what consumers can buy and consume with a focus on the strategies of some of the world’s leading wine brands. Attention will also be paid to the legal, regulatory, and market dynamics that define the U.S. wine industry as well as to issues of contested authenticity in the world of wine.

This entrepreneurship course is designed to teach students the basic processes and tasks required to construct a business plan en route to the creation of a new venture. nnThe course is designed not only for students with immediate entrepreneurial aspirations, but for any student considering being involved in an entrepreneurial venture at any point in his or her career.nThe course is organized around a number of business concepts that we have selected. With your team, you will study one of the concepts, analyze it and evolve it into a business plan. The class comprises multiple student teams, each working on a different business concept. Each team will also review and critique the work of the other two teams.

This course is designed to expose second-year MBAs to research on creativity in problem-solving. The course has straightforward practical goals: it will explore ways in which individuals, groups, and organizations can become more creative, in useful ways. In order to do this effectively, we will study hardnosed research on problem-solving. We will not read articles entitled "The five-fold path to creativity." If there really were recipes or algorithms for reliably increasing creativity, I would certainly teach them. (Or more likely, I wouldn't need to: they would routinely be taught in the core curriculum of every MBA program.) Instead, we will study what cognitive and social scientists have discovered about novelty and effectiveness in problem-solving. Some of this work---e.g., Scott Page's examination of the value of cognitive diversity in teams---will have relatively direct action-implications. The pragmatic implications of other research---e.g., on organizational norms for resolving conflict---will be more indirect. Because the course's practical goal is easy to state but hard to achieve, some patience is required. nnnAs indicated above, we will study creativity at three levels: individuals, groups and organizations. Because there is pretty good evidence that different kinds of factors are prominent at these different levels, the course's approach is multi-disciplinary. We will read articles and books by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists, social psychologists, organization theorists, and perhaps historians who have studied industrial innovation. Disciplinary boundaries are irrelevant: any work that articulates a significant claim about pragmatically useful creativity and backs up that claim with a good argument is grist for our mill. nn nnBecause the course focuses on creativity that makes a difference---i.e., that ultimately makes some organizational stakeholder better off---we will also study how innovations get selected. This inevitably means studying how new ideas get criticized and sometimes discarded. This process is less fun than generating new ideas, but given that brand-new ideas are usually flawed in one way or another, critical and hard-headed scrutiny of innovations is vital. Hence, we will examine psychological, political, and organizational obstacles to the effective criticism and evaluation of novel solutions, and we will also look at some ideas on how these obstacles might be reduced. nnnClasses will be run seminar-style: they'll focus on examining the readings closely and critically. Understanding what a study does not establish is sometimes just as important as understanding what it does establish. Hence, I will expect everyone to read carefully; skimming won't cut it. This effort will probably result in a rather deep and sophisticated comprehension of the topic. Given the importance of creativity and innovation in modern organizations, that should be adequate return for hard effort.

Can you actually prepare for unexpected make or break career challenges you will face in the years ahead? By definition, the future is unpredictable, but understanding and grappling with the types of challenges seasoned leaders describe as the toughest they've faced can help to prepare one for the emotional demands that come with increasingly broad leadership responsibilities. Those challenges include role and team transitions, confrontations and conflicts, turning around poor performance (in individuals or groups), and recruiting or developing talent. This class will draw from a collection of video cases, role plays and exercises, based on real-life examples that are the product of hundreds of interviews conducted with leaders by the school's Center for Leadership Development and Research. The goal is to help students prepare for some of the gut-wrenching choices they will make in leadership roles, while evaluating how their mental and emotional responses influence their own managerial judgment.

This seminar considers the economics, development, and growth of emerging networks that use technology to connect people (typically sharing a purpose) to one another. Each day of the seminar will focus on a different company (or a few companies) and a different theme. The set of companies is preliminary, and is shown here just to illustrate a potential example.nn- Network Platforms/Zynga: Zynga is one of the leading and most advanced network-based consumer services. It has been struggling recently with growth and monetization on Facebook. We'll examine Zynga's business model, Zynga as an application vs. Zynga as a platform, and the choices Zynga has made along the way.nn- Metrics/LinkedIn: We'll examine the use of metrics to track application growth, engagement and monetization. We'll also compare the use of a proprietary social graph vis-a-vis Facebook's, considering the choices made by LinkedIn vs. a few Facebook apps. nn- Growth and Evolution: We'll discuss how network-based consumer services can grow and evolve their business models using a few company examples. nn- Monetization/Pinterest: We'll analyze interest and content networks, focusing on how they may be monetized vis-a-vis Facebook.nnSome of the seminar topics overlap topics covered in OIT 256 or OIT 356. Students who took one of these courses will not be allowed to take this course.

The food system in the United States has contributed to a number of societal and ecological problems, from increasing rates of diet- and food-related illnesses, to "food deserts" in our inner cities, to the loss of farmland to urban sprawl, to agricultural chemical runoff into our water sources, to unjust farm labor practices, to the overuse of antibiotics, to an enormous amount of food waste, to questionable animal husbandry practices, and more generally to a diminishing level of diversity among the people, plants, and animals on whom we rely for our sustenance. These problems create both dilemmas and opportunities for business. This course will focus on how some companies (both for-profit and non-profit) are working to try to repair the damaged food system in the United States. Topics include (but are not limited to): organic and biodynamic agriculture, the economic demise of the family farm, the health effects of our current system of food production and the habits it has engendered, and opportunities for entrepreneurship and new modes of food distribution. We will have several guest speakers, field trips, and cooking/food preparation workshops and demonstrations.

An organizational change approach to the development and introduction of new corporate strategies and product lines that have a sustainability benefit. Students will be given the opportunity to work on real-world cases to help them effectively incorporate sustainability strategy into their chosen career path.nnLearning Objectives: na. Articulate the sustainability challenges facing today¿s corporation in terms that will make executives receptive to actionnb. Employ organizational change management techniques to spur environmentally-friendly product and process innovationnc. Expand the repertoire of techniques for priming the market for new sustainability offeringsnd. Refine collaboration skills within multi-disciplinary teamsne. Improve oral and written presentation skills for executive audiencesnnThis class is appropriate for those seeking positions within large enterprises or business consultancies, or those seeking to refine their thinking on social entrepreneurship.

Organizations are often designed for efficiency or optimization of workflow, not for user empathy. How do you design for both? This pop-up class is geared toward the design (or redesign) for empathy-based organizations. It will teach early-stage leaders about the three basic levers they have for organizational design/re-design: organizational culture, organizational structure (informal and formal), and organizational routines. Emphasis will be placed on how to align these levers to facilitate communication and to structure workflows for empathy-based organizations. The class will work with a fast-growing, design-driven startup, which will articulate to students its goals as a business, as well as its challenges in designing the business. Students will interview and observe multiple stakeholders from diverse teams and use design thinking to address uncovered needs and insights with respect to organizational design.