Are You in The New-Wave Utility Business?

Posted: October 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: competitive advantage, current events, Stakeholders | Leave a comment

A long time ago, in a blog far, far away, I outlined the idea of a “new-wave utility.” The idea was that some innovative high-growth service businesses were transitioning into utility-like systems whose large and diverse customer bases implicitly depended on them for ubiquity, reliability, and stability of offering. One example I mentioned in passing was Starbucks. Apparently, in Manhattan, Hurricane Sandy has revealed the truth of this classification. From the story in the link, access to bathrooms has been a key issue in the Big Apple. That’s less of a factor in L.A., but power outlets, WiFi, and table space in a congenial environment have certainly put Starbucks (and its smaller rivals such as the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Co.) in the category of utilities for the city’s horde of writers, students, and deal-makers.

Strategic Human Capital Paradoxes…

Posted: August 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: competitive advantage, human capital, rents, Stakeholders, theory of the firm | 3 Comments

For a PDW, I was asked to develop a short list of paradoxes linked to the strategic human capital (spoiler alert for those of you planning to be at the session at 8am on Friday). I’m sure some of them would not surprise you in the least. Others might spur some discussion though. Here is the short list:

  • Rent from human capital may not show up in profitability
  • “Who” is a firm?
  • Firm-specificity isn’t as important as we might think
  • HR Departments may not matter much
  • High performance work systems don’t tell us much about such advantages

Rent. The first point is what you would expect from me so let me dismiss it quickly. Obviously, if rent is linked to human capital, some portion of it is likely to be captured by people. Nuff said.

Who is a firm? A sharp distinction is made between hiring on the spot market and an internal labor market. Rightly so. However, one might think that once labor is “internal” such people are part of the firm. Read the rest of this entry »

Crowd-sourcing Strategy Formulation

Posted: May 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: collective behavior, competitive advantage, current events, entrepreneurship, incentives, innovation, networks, open innovation, organization design, research, Stakeholders, technology | 24 Comments

The current issue of McKinsey Quarterly features an interesting article on firms crowd-sourcing strategy formulation. This is another way that technology may shake up the strategy field (See also Mike’s discussion of the MBA bubble). The article describes examples in a variety of companies. Some, like Wikimedia and Redhat aren’t much of a surprise given their open innovation focus. However, we should probably take notice when more traditional companies (like 3M, HCL Technologies, and Rite-Solutions) use social media in this way.  For example, Rite-Solutions, a software provider for the US Navy, defense contractors and fire departments, created an internal market for strategic initiatives:

Would-be entrepreneurs at Rite-Solutions can launch “IPOs” by preparing an Expect-Us (rather than a prospectus)—a document that outlines the value creation potential of the new idea … Each new stock debuts at $10, and every employee gets $10,000 in play money to invest in the virtual idea market and thereby establish a personal intellectual portfolio Read the rest of this entry »