Babson College is known internationally as a leader in business and entrepreneurial education. The Babson Insight e-magazine is brought to you by Babson Executive Education. Here you will find leading-edge ideas and commentaries from thought-leaders, top executives and opinion makers with the latest thinking on strategy, tactics and the outlook for the future to help business leaders and managers stay ahead of the competition.
On this page you will find introductions to articles from our most recent edition. We also invite you to take a look at popular past articles in a variety of featured sections:
Interview Section
Entrepreneurship Section
Leadership Section
Many companies capture and regularly apply detailed market and operating data in ways to improve their strategies and decisions. But if many companies can do this, any insight your company may gain can eventually be adopted by competitors. Where is the gain? How can you use business analytics to create sustainable competitive advantage? Preliminary research shows that there are five factors that will help you turn your company’s business analytics into powerful advantages that last. February 2008
Herb Kelleher, Co-founder and Chairman of Southwest Airlines shares his views on the skills, characteristics and personal tools needed to successfully build new enterprises and develop new business ideas even in larger companies. Feb. 2003.
Some people are surprised to learn that many entrepreneurs work successfully in larger, established companies. Among them is a particular type of leader we call explorers, who take an active role in the market paying attention to the latest trends, competitor moves, and customer opportunities. Their efforts often produce industry or market changing new business ventures. In this article Prof. Thornberry reviews the nature of entrepreneurial explorers through the story of John Kilcullen’s success in creating the Dummies book series. June 2006
Global account management (GAM) has been used by many international firms over the last 20 years to better coordinate sales and service. A set of key success factors has become widely recognized for this process, but a recent survey uncovered some new factors to consider when managing your global accounts. This month we review how GAM works at companies like Marriot, IBM, De LaRue and Citibank.
When you think of fun services you think of the experiences provided by Disneyworld or Southwest Airlines. But most services are so routine that users don’t even remember doing them. Can fun experiences be built into these neutral services to create a market advantage? This month we look at successful funsters like Commerce Bank and Jordan’s Furniture to draw some lessons on how to
add fun in even the most routine services.
Over the last 30+ years there has been only one airline that has showed strong growth and been consistently profitable: Southwest Airlines. In a business where execution is everything, whether its customer service, operations, or marketing, success depends on committed people who make it all work every day. How do Southwest’s people do it?
We spoke to Herb Kelleher recently about his people-focused company and he talked candidly about how the company builds its people into leaders, the important elements of Southwest’s people-culture, what makes it work and how is it sustained. March 2005.
Wherever people work together there will be conflict and sometimes these result in difficult confrontations that do significant harm to the people involved and their organizations. What if there was a way to constructively use confrontations that would help to overcome the immediate problem, while building stronger future relationships? Professors Cohen and Bradford call this the art of “Supportive Confrontation” and present methods to use it for resolving interpersonal tensions in the workplace and enhancing joint problem-solving. July 2006
How can you gain more responsibility, get coaching, gain acceptance for your ideas and make disagreements more manageable? The starting point is to create a partnering relationship with your boss. Many business professionals are surprised to learn that they are responsible for making their boss a better manager. In a very real sense you and your boss are partners in success. This month we’ve excerpted a chapter on influencing your boss from the new edition of Influence Without Authority . Here you’ll find highlights that show how you can overcome a variety of common problems and build a mutually beneficial relationship with the boss. Concrete examples drawn from real-world situations and case studies are used to illustrate principles and concepts providing a blueprint for building your influence skills by becoming a partner with your boss. April 2005.
In the last of his recent interview series Southwest Airlines Executive Chairman Herb Kelleher speaks with the Insight about the challenges faced by the airline in its early entrepreneurial years as they worked to create a new market segment in air travel, how they managed the strategy, people and growth as the company transitioned to become a large organization, and his thoughts about the future of his famous company. In closing, we
present our own view of Southwest Airlines people, culture and strategy drawn from a field visit with one of their airport operations. July 2005
By Prof. Allan Cohen and David Bradford.Even if you have the greatest ideas business is so complex today that you can't succeed without the help of many people who you must influence. Yet it's so hard to create and maintain influence. This month we're providing another abstract from Prof. Cohen and Bradford's new book Influence Without Authority focusing on methods and cases for gaining influence with your colleagues? Some of the issues covered include: the traps that can trip you up and handling interpersonal issues and reciprocity? June 2005.
GE CEO Jeff Immelt has concluded that the future of global business will present a slow-growth environment and if you’ve been reading the papers or watching TV you can’t have missed the fact that GE has responded by betting big on growth through innovation. To spur this, the company, which is famous for its disciplined and focused management, has recently begun to apply this same top-down approach to foster innovation across all of its business lines. Can top-down innovation work? Will it crowd out bottom-up innovators in the organization? Is there room for both? GE is betting a lot of money on this. August 2005
Do you have an idea for a new product, or a way to enhance your customer’s experiences, or a method for improving operating efficiencies? Are you using the best approach to succeed as a leader of innovative ideas? As Prof. Neal Thornberry reveals in his new book, Lead Like An Entrepreneur, the answer depends on where you choose to look for new ideas, the type of opportunities you’re seeking and the role you take in moving these ideas forward. Together, these factors combine to form 4 distinct leadership types, each of which fit different company environments and goals. In this article, our first in a series drawn from the book, we begin to summarize aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset and describe the four types of innovation leaders and their methods. March 2006
What does it take to build great customer service and experiences? According to Colleen Barrett at Southwest Airlines the answer is not in creating pages of rules, but rather in the way you treat your people. How do they make this work and how do they keep the spirit alive throughout the more than 30 cities served and across more than 30,000 employees? Well, she says you have to work at it every single day, but we’ll let Colleen tell you in her own unique way. April 2006
If product and technology innovation starts with someone that disagrees with the acceptability of current solutions, then we can’t be surprised that Dean Kamen thrives on it. He and his team at DEKA Research have used a contentious, non-corporate approach to innovation that has produced a stellar record of results, including creation of the first wearable medical infusion pump, the portable dialysis machine and the Segway Human Transport. Read on and learn more about this inventive rebel and the way he leads innovation.
August 2006
Often we think of entrepreneurial leaders as the people who start companies or who run them, but in his recent book: Lead like an Entrepreneur Prof. Neal Thornberry says that many of these people do not work at the top of the company, but instead manage a unit, division, or branch of the business. Here they continuously stir the pot, challenging and pushing their people to think and act entrepreneurially and creating a culture for successful innovation. Professor Thornberry calls these people entrepreneurial “accelerators” and this month we review a real-world example from Siemens Medical.
You've won that new promotion, but with all the change afloat in every organization, do you really know how to succeed? In our first article drawn from her new book, Elaine Eisenman, Ph.D. describes approaches that will help you develop the critical insights, effective tools, and instincts necessary to succeed with that recent or next promotion. Among the important problems discussed this month we cover sizing up your new team, handling a promotion from within the ranks and remembering to say “I don’t know”. May 2007
Most of us who manage people have had difficult subordinates. Often the greater their ability, the more irritating or disruptive they may be to the work of your organization. But you can’t succeed without them, so how can you influence their behavior? Drawn from the book Influence Without Authority, this article examines the factors that affect your ability to influence subordinates, some practical approaches to consider using in your work situations and reviews two case examples that put these concepts to work. June 2007.
We’ve all used data to make business decisions, but a new approach to analytics is dramatically changing company strategies and the science of decision-making. In his new book Prof. Davenport looks at how companies like Netflix, Capital One, Harrah’s Entertainment and even the Boston Red Sox are changing the game through the use of very focused, data-driven insights that create competitive advantage through better decisions and execution. September 2007
Summer 2007 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II, the first true personal computer. Driven by a belief that everyone should be able to use a computer, its inventor, Steve Wozniak, pioneered an ingenious combination of low-cost design solutions to create a machine that set the standard for all following PC’s and began a business and societal revolution that is still going on today. What did he learn along the way about how to innovate and create great products, how to spot and work with the most inventive engineers and what are his views about the future of computing? Read our interview with this passionate innovator for answers to these questions and much more. October 2007
One of the most difficult challenges in business is to innovate from within a large organization, where each department and division competes for resources and attention. These internal forces exert a powerful drag, yet some companies seem able to overcome this and successfully produce and employ new ideas. In this his fourth article in the series, Professor Neal Thornberry shows us how an entrepreneurial manager worked to overcome many obstacles inside giant IBM and successfully built a new business line.
December 2007
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