MIT on Intelligent Enterprise

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Analytics: the New path to Value reports on what leading firms are doing with analytics. It offers five big recommendations. Whilst reasonable enough, they raise more questions than answers:

  1. Focus on the biggest and highest value opportunities – should be easy enough in most cases, though blind-spots are common .. e.g. if you don’t know how to destroy competitors, the option is not likely to feature in the identified opportunities.
  2. Within each opportunity, start with questions, not data – right, ...
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From CSR to ROI at Nike

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Many firms seem stuck with the idea that Corp Social Responsibility = cost. A free case study from MIT on Nike makes the case that CSR has driven ROI, though also makes clear the challenges of working out what to tackle, at least in their case. It would seem worthwhile for other firms to read this and ask if their might be a case for them also to plug CSR into their strategies, rather than treating it as a ...

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Sustainability and strategy

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Good to see a serious management journal – MIT’s Sloan Management Review – regularly featuring items on this issue. John Sterman’s ‘Sober optimist’s guide to sustainability‘ and an interview with Rebecca Henderson are both good. Rebecca uses the fact that making every shirt uses hundreds of gallons of water to point out that we are just not aware of wider consequences of what we do – and if we don’t know, we are hardly likely to ...

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