Posts Tagged ‘management’
Review of Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy
Title: Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy
Author: Anindya Ghose
Publisher: MIT Press
Copyright: 2017
ISBN13: 978-0-262-03627-6
Length: 240
Price: $29.95
Rating: 100%
I purchased a copy of this book for personal use.
I’m not a reviewer who gives out perfect scores like candy. In fact, I chose to use a 0-to-100% scale so I could provide nuanced ratings. I happily gave Malka Older’s debut novel Infomocracy a 98% because it was outstanding work but, for whatever reason, didn’t ring the bell for 100%. I believe I’ve given one other book, Intellectual Property Strategy (from the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) a maximum rating. Tap, by Anindya Ghose and also from MIT Press, is the second.
The Mobile Landscape
Mobile devices are everywhere, with their spread continuing to gather pace as the prices of the devices and supporting services come down. Originally limited to voice and Short Message Service (SMS) communication due to a lack of bandwidth, smartphones now enable subscribers to make voice and video calls, search the web, and, of critical importance to marketers, engage in commerce. In Tap, Anindya Ghose of the Stern School of Business at New York University relates the results and implications of numerous academic studies of mobile commerce. The results provide a robust framework for marketers working in the mobile arena.
In his introduction, Ghose identifies four contradictions in what consumers want from mobile marketing and how we behave:
- People seek spontaneity, but they are predictable and they value certainty.
- People find advertising annoying, but they fear missing out.
- People want choice and freedom, but they get overwhelmed.
- People protect their privacy, but they increasingly use their personal data as currency. (p. 9)
Success in the mobile arena requires marketers to strike the proper balance among these four tensions.
Studies and References
After reading the first few chapters of Tap, I realized how many studies of mobile commerce have been conducted over the past ten years. As the author points out, tracking user movement and behavior, combined with the ability to test various forms of advertisements depending on context, provides a target-rich environment for academics and industry marketers to experiment. Ghose, who is a lead or co-author on many of the studies he cites, provides useful background on mobile commerce before dividing his coverage of the major forces of mobile marketing into nine chapters:
- Context
- Location
- Time
- Saliency
- Crowdedness
- Trajectory
- Social Dynamics
- Weather
- Tech Mix
Each chapter reviews the literature relating to its force and offers insights into how marketers can use those results to the benefit of their clients and consumers. It’s impossible to cover all of the forces in any detail, but I found the discussion of crowdedness and trajectory particularly interesting. Crowdedness, as the word implies, refers to crowded conditions typically found while commuting. On a subway or bus, commuters typically pay attention to their mobile devices, ear buds in, and tune out their surroundings. Advertisers can take advantage of this focused attention by distributing relevant and interesting advertisements (and advertorials) during those periods.
Trajectory refers to a consumer’s path, either as movement between two major objectives (home and office) or within a larger location (movement within a store). When outside, mobile phones can track user movements based on GPS and accelerometer readings. When inside, the same tracking can be done using wi-fi signals. Each individual’s tendency for future movement based on their current vector can be exploited by marketers to make attractive offers.
The other seven chapters provide similar coverage. In addition to crowdedness and trajectory, I found the chapter on location (Chapter 5) to be particularly interesting.
Conclusions
Marketing is not a one-way street. Consumers are bombarded with ads and advertorial content, raising the mental cost of search and time (and data) spent waiting for ads to load on small-screen mobile devices. Many users employ ad blockers to reduced as much of the clutter as they can, greatly speeding up their usage experience but depriving them of potentially useful information. Also, as Ghose points out in the fourth contradiction listed above, consumers increasingly use their personal data as currency and don’t hesitate to refuse a trade if they feel they’re not receiving sufficient value in return.
Ghose is a leading expert on mobile marketing. His new book Tap summarizes the field’s most important research in a compact, readable package that I believe is indispensable for anyone interested in the subject.
Do You Just Talk About It or Can You Do It?
I just finished reading Gravity’s Kiss, a new MIT Press book by Harry Collins. Professor Collins is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Cardiff. In his book, he details the process by which researchers detected and documented the presence of gravitational waves. Collins himself is a sociologist, but he has been part of the gravitational wave community for more than 42 years. He’s picked up the language and understands the principles involved in gravitational wave science quite well, but doesn’t have the knowledge and training required to advance the science himself.
Collins is the head of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise, and Science, so he can offer keen insights into his role in the scientific community. Specifically, he distinguishes between interactional expertise and contributory expertise. Interactional expertise, as the name implies, allows individuals to converse with experts in a field using specialized vocabulary and accurate knowledge at a reasonably advanced level. Contributory expertise, by contrast, entails sufficient training and experience to further the study of a field through analysis and experiment. It’s the difference between being able to talk about something intelligently and knowing what to do with that knowledge.
I’m in the iMBA program offered by the University of Illinois, which is an online master of business administration program designed for individuals who want to advance to the senior management and executive levels of industry. In that sense, the iMBA program is similar to an EMBA (Executive MBA) program than a traditional program, which I refer to as a “practitioner” MBA. For me, the difference is that students learn a variety of skills in areas such as finance, economics, organizational structure, and marketing. The goal is to provide us with the knowledge to make strategic decisions about a company’s direction and to understand enough of the basics in our focus areas to interact with subordinates in everyday charge of those functions. In other words, we gain a fair bit of practitioner expertise and a lot of interactional expertise.
As the owner of a small business, this level of interactional expertise translates to having more intelligent conversations with my accountant and investment advisers. On the practical level, my studies will help me make better decisions about the projects I take on. As a speaker and author, however, it means I will be relatively fluent in the language of business and have a credential to back it up. Now when I make contacts with individuals around the business world I will have the knowledge from my MBA, interactions with colleagues from industry, and experience as a business owner to draw on. Properly applied, those resources will serve me very well indeed in the coming years.
Unexpected Rewards
My first lynda.com course went live on August 25, 2009. As of this writing, very early in the morning on February 17, 2017, I have 48 courses available with two more recorded and in editing. As I told a good friend last week, I’m a sucker for round numbers and milestones. For whatever reason, odometers hitting the next thousand mile mark, new decades, and reaching the next ten on my writing projects means a lot to me. I figured I’d get a card or maybe a small plaque when I hit 50 live courses on lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning, but I wouldn’t have been upset if it was just my wife and I raising a toast the night number 50 went live.
Late last month, a couple of weeks after course number 48 was released, I received a package from a company I didn’t recognize. The package contained a lovely portable game set with chess pieces that looked like real pieces, checkers, dice, and a pack of playing cards, all enclosed in a good-sized box with a two-sided chess/backgammon board that hinged in the middle and was trimmed with the finest Corinthian leather. The package also contained a card from the LinkedIn Learning crew congratulating me on reaching 50 courses.
No, they hadn’t miscounted. I’d had two other courses published, but one had been retired because the online resource it described changed drastically and the other for a combination of reasons that are both esoteric and boring. Those courses no longer appear on my author page, but they do in the LinkedIn Learning internal database. I was going for 50 live, but the team in Carpinteria cared about 50 total.
Researchers who study motivation make the point that unexpected rewards can have a positive impact on worker satisfaction. I love writing and creating online courses, particularly with the LinkedIn Learning team. Their attention to detail and counting my courses in the most favorable way possible makes their gift that much more special.
Sometimes the Secret is Effort
I was recently accepted into the University of Illinois’ iMBA program, which offers students the opportunity to earn an accredited MBA degree in a fully online setting. I’m currently in my fifth class, but have supplemented my reading with studies and articles on business topics outside of the required reading. As you might imagine, process measurement and management come up frequently; references to Lean, Six Sigma, and other methodologies abound in the literature.
These frameworks use precise measurements to analyze the defect rate, or the rate at which failures occur. Those defects could be missed deliveries, flights arriving more than fifteen minutes late, or products failing within the standard warranty period. Analysts spend hundreds of hours examining processes in an attempt to squeeze a bit more productivity out of the system, whether by reducing the number of movements autoworkers make when attaching a door to a frame, picking items from warehouse bins, or building algorithms to limit the number of miles traveled by delivery vehicles.
Even though these analytical methods have led to substantial process improvements, there is a lot to be said for the empirical knowledge you gain from working within a system. Long-time workers have often developed their own efficiencies (management-speak for shortcuts) they share with their co-workers out of earshot of their supervisors so they don’t get in trouble for deviating from protocol. One prominent example of applied empirical knowledge is the dabbawalas, or tiffinwalas, who deliver hot lunches in Mumbai, India. Customers who want home-cooked meals at work often can’t bring their own food because the trains are too crowded for the containers or because their water supply isn’t available in time for cooking in the morning. Rather than eat at the company canteen, they order their meals from cooks around town. The meals are picked up and delivered by the dabbawalas through an intricate system of hand-offs that uses trains, buses, carts, bikes, and human muscle to get the aluminum lunch containers (the tiffins) to their destination on time.
The dabbawalas’ marking system uses color and single characters to distinguish district, neighborhood, building, and floor, in part because most of the dabbawalas left school after their eighth year. Transfers happen quickly and with minimal errors. As a testament to the strength of their system, consider that a process is considered Six Sigma certifiable if its defect rate is less than 34 out of 1,000,000 opportunities. The dabbawalas’ miss a delivery target at a rate of 1 out of 6,000,000 opportunities. That’s astonishing. And, yes, the dabbawalas are Six Sigma certified, but they didn’t find out about the award until a couple of years after it happened!
To what may we attribute their success? Their system is amazing and has been the subject of numerous studies, but remember how the tiffins are delivered. Once the containers come off their final train ride, they’re transported by humans on bikes, carts, and the traditional method of grabbing a bunch of lunch pail handles and lugging them up several flights of stairs. And the walas work hard. When you watch one of the YouTube videos showing the process in action, you can’t help but notice the focus, determination, and sheer effort required to move the tiffins on and off trains, sort them accurately, and get them to their destination on time.
Less than 100 years ago, my grandparents worked in a shoe factory without the benefit of union protection. Steelworkers, pipefitters, plumbers, and construction workers work hard and for long hours at difficult jobs today. Along with the tradesmen and women who drive our economy forward, the dabbawalas reinforce the universal truth that the best system is worthless if you’re not willing to make the effort required for success.
MOOC Review: Wharton’s An Introduction to Corporate Finance
I recently completed a four-course sequence from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School which included courses on operations management, marketing, financial accounting, and corporate finance. I’m happy to say the courses were fulfilling and have provided substantial support to my professional career.
I fully expected An Introduction to Corporate Finance, taught by Professor Franklin Allen, to be a challenge. In many ways, MBA-level corporate finance is equivalent to organic chemistry for chemistry and biology majors, dynamics for mechanical engineers, and quantum physics for physics majors. It’s the course that separates students with a firm grasp of foundational material from those who don’t.
That’s not to say that someone who wants to be a marketer isn’t qualified if they don’t ace corporate finance, but anyone who wants to be taken seriously as an elite-level financial analyst must do well in this course and its successors.
Course Overview
This six-week MOOC took participants through the mid-term exam of the on-campus course FNCE 611. There were five problem sets worth a total of 25% of the grade, a business case worth 25%, and a final exam worth 50%. MOOC students had to earn 60% of available points to receive a certificate, based on our best results from three attempts on each problem set, the case, and final. At least, that’s the way things ended up (more on that later).
Each week added skills to our analytical toolbox, starting with determining the object function for corporations, calculating present values, valuing stocks and bonds, using net present value to analyze cash flows, measuring risk, pricing assets, and applying the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).
I’m familiar with net present value and bond calculations from my work with Excel, but I gained a deeper understanding of the mathematical mechanisms underlying those basic methods from Professor Allen’s explanations. I must admit that I struggle with geometric explanations of indifference curves, production, possibility curves, and other concepts. I knew the course would start with those topics, so I buckled down and did my best with them. The rest of the material came…I won’t say easily, but the insights I gained from that first week helped quite a bit.
Production Notes
One of the alleged benefits of MOOCs is that it allows instructors to move away from the “sage on the stage” paradigm, where the professor lectures from a podium, often with the help of visual aids. In An Introduction to Corporate Finance, Professor Allen allowed the University of Pennsylvania to record his classroom lectures. The reason for this choice is quite simple: his lectures consist of meticulously prepared and explained motivational examples that he works through in detail. I’m not certain how he could have provided the same content without essentially rerecording his lectures in a different format.
As I mentioned earlier, we had to earn 60% of the available points to pass and had multiple, untimed attempts at the weekly assignments, case, and final exam. When the course launched, those terms were 70% or more to pass and a single attempt at each graded activity. I don’t mind admitting that my eyes started crossing and uncrossing when I realized what I expected to be the e-learning equivalent of a harder-than-normal Wednesday New York Times crossword puzzle had turned into a serious academic endeavor. I imagine a significant push-back against these requirements led to their relaxation, but it did water down what might have been a significantly more rigorous test of our abilities.
My commentary might make it sound like Professor Allen is a demanding, unfriendly presenter, but that’s not the case. He adopted a matter-of-fact delivery with an emphasis on clarity, but whenever a student raised a hand or asked a question, he looked at them, smiled, nodded his head, and said “Yes?” His manner indicated the query was welcome because, as he noted in the first lecture, it was likely the questioner wasn’t the only person in the room who needed a point clarified.
He also shone when discussing student life and the history of the Wharton School. In particular, his eyes lit up when discussing the Wharton Olympics, a now-discontinued competition where student teams, each with a faculty participant, ran relay races, threw paper balls into trash cans, and performed other bits of office-related skill in a day that must have been a welcome break from the rigors of the coursework.
I’ve no doubt Professor Allen demands great work from his pupils, but I’m equally certain he wants them to succeed.
Conclusions
Based on my experience in An Introduction to Corporate Finance, I’m not sure I have the skill set and temperament to do this sort of work on a high level. Perhaps I’ve psyched myself out after a poor showing in my undergraduate microeconomics class at Syracuse, but some concepts just haven’t stuck. That’s not to say I didn’t benefit greatly from Professor Allen’s course. I certainly did, and believe I could make a solid run at passing the on-campus version of this class. I’ll go into more depth on why that’s the case in my final, summary post on the Wharton MOOCs.
In the end, An Introduction to Corporate Finance turned out to be a highly challenging and eminently rewarding course. To my knowledge it hasn’t been offered since I took it in Fall/Winter 2013, but I hope it will be soon.
I’ll wrap up my discussion of the Wharton MOOCs with a final post on my overall impressions of the courses and how they represent the school in the online learning milieu.
MOOC Review: Wharton’s An Introduction to Financial Accounting
I recently completed a four-course sequence from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School which included courses on operations management, marketing, financial accounting, and corporate finance. I’m happy to say the courses were fulfilling and have provided substantial support to my professional career.
Course Overview
Professor Brian Bushee note that his goal in creating his course, An Introduction to Financial Accounting, was to give students the ability to understand information provided in company financial statements. Accounting is a complex and at times arcane practice area, but I thought Professor Bushee did a great job of breaking the topics into manageable chunks and providing detailed explanations of each segment.
Bushee starts out with the standard statement that debits go on the left and credits on the right, but of course it’s much more complicated than that. Some accounts have their balances increased by credits, some by debits, and how some intermediate accounts serve as bridges to relieve the tensions inherent in double-entry bookkeeping. As the course progressed, he described the tools accountants use to document corporate operations for managers, financial analysts, and tax authorities. It might not surprise you that these various audiences don’t always desire the same information.
Each week’s lectures ended with a tour of 3M’s annual report, allowing the professor to demonstrate how the document’s contents reflected the accounting practices taught during the week. I thought these segments provided useful context for the material and helped me get a better handle on concepts I didn’t grasp during the initial presentation.
Production Notes
Professor Bushee spent most of his time switching between a “talking head” single shot of the professor and screen grabs of either Excel or PowerPoint, but he also used computer-animated “students” to be the voice of the viewer. He had his virtual students ask questions that were alternatively probing, wondering, insightful, and (occasionally) stupid. At first I thought the virtual students would be hokey and horrible, but they grew on me quickly. Each virtual student had a distinct personality with likes, dislikes, and preferences based on their background. The students ranged from a grumpy old man to a surfer dude to international students from Hong Kong and the U.K., which allowed the professor to address the differences between accounting practices in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. Their interactions also developed along an internal narrative, which pleased my inner storyteller.
Material was divided into eight main modules, each of which had an associated quiz, plus two exams covering the first and last halves of the class, respectively. We could drop our two lowest quiz scores, which made reaching the passing threshold of 60% much easier. Professor Bushee also offered a certificate “with distinction”, which could be earned by scoring over 90%. I appreciated the possibility of earning a more prestigious credential, but I fell just short of that mark.
I laughed a bit to myself when the professor said that the material on the time value of money would be the hardest because it involved math beyond addition and subtraction. I actually found this material to be the easiest to grasp, both because of my extensive use of Excel and relative unfamiliarity with accounting principles. Accounting is a formal language that is no doubt comfortable to individuals who have spent their adult lives mastering it, but I felt safest when able to retreat to my NPV formulas.
Final Thoughts
Professor Bushee is, like his colleagues who taught the other Coursera MOOCs, an engaging presenter. He also revealed some details about the production process in his 20-minute goodbye video and posted detailed statistics about the course participants’ demographics and engagement levels. I think this kind of information adds substantial value to students who complete a MOOC. Knowing that I was part of the 6% of students who signed up for the course to successfully complete it is worth almost as much as the certificate.
I just finished An Introduction to Financial Accounting, so Wharton hasn’t had the opportunity to offer it again as of this writing. Professor Bushee indicated that he planned to rerun the course in the future, so it should be available to anyone looking to improve their financial knowledge and gain a better understanding of the accounting practices that help us document our businesses.
MOOC Review: Wharton’s An Introduction to Operations Management
An Introduction to Operations Management
I’m lucky that MOOCs (massive open online courses) came along when they did. I’ve had the opportunity to sample content from a wide variety of institutions and topics either for free or, if I wanted to receive a slightly spiffier “signature track” (from Coursera) or “identity verified” (from edX) certificate, a small fee.
I recently completed a four-course sequence from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School which included courses on operations management, marketing, financial accounting, and corporate finance. I’m happy to say the courses were fulfilling and have provided substantial support to my professional career.
Course Overview
I started the sequence by taking Professor Christian Terwiesch’s course An Introduction to Operations Management. This course combined analytical techniques from operations research and process management, with specific movies showing students how to identify bottlenecks, evaluate the effects of potential changes to a process, estimate customer wait time, and build production errors and rework loops into our process models.
Terwiesch starts out each module with a conceptual overview of the topics to be covered before moving to detailed analysis in Microsoft Excel. I spend many hours in Excel for my writing and online course development projects, so I had no trouble following him as he worked through the formulas. I assume students of an MBA-level course, even one offered for free, will bring some spreadsheet skills to the table, so I believe anyone approaching the course in a serious manner could follow along easily.
I haven’t seen a syllabus for the full intro to operations management course at Wharton, but the professor noted that he covered about 60% of the material in his book (co-authored with G. P. Cachon) Matching Supply with Demand: An Introduction to Operations Management. The most recent (third) edition runs at least $96 used from Amazon, but the publisher created a custom ebook students could buy for $30. I purchased a previous edition of the book for reference, but I got along just fine with the free materials provided through Coursera.
Production Notes
This course is offered in the MOOC-standard format of switching between a “talking head” single shot of the professor and screen grabs of either Excel or PowerPoint. Professor Terwiesch is an engaging speaker who has tremendous command of this course’s material, so he was able to cover the topics efficiently while explaining concepts and applications clearly.
Material was divided into five main modules, each of which had an associated homework assignment, and a comprehensive final. Each homework was worth 10% (with essentially unlimited attempts) and the final exam 50% (two attempts allowed). The passing threshold was set at 50%, which I thought was too low. It’s hard to strike a balance between enticing students to stay and challenging those who do, but for future sessions the professor might consider raising the bar to 60% so even a student who misses a homework would have to score at least 20% on the final to earn a certificate.
Final Thoughts
As with the other Wharton courses I took through Coursera, I found An Introduction to Operations Management to be engaging and interesting. Professor Terwiesch is a solid presenter who comes across well. Even though his production values didn’t extend beyond good video and audio quality, he held my attention with well-executed movies of appropriate length for each topic.
Wharton has re-run this course through Coursera at least once since I took it, though future sessions haven’t been announced as of this writing. If you work in a manufacturing or customer service-oriented firm where knowing the heartbeat of your operations would help you improve your business, or if you’d like to sample Wharton’s MBA courses, I highly recommend taking An Introduction to Operations Management.
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