Jessica Love
At its core, Dell has always been about customization. We tell Dell what we want from our hardware, and Dell delivers. In the company’s heyday in the late 1990s, its direct-to-consumer retail strategy—which put the right products in the right hands quickly and affordably—was... More →
Harry M. Jansen Kraemer, Jr.
Apple CEO Tim Cook made headlines this week when he publicly apologized to customers in China for complaints over its customer service policies. What’s more, that apology was accompanied by very real changes to improve those policies. This is actually the second public apology he’s made... More →
Jessica Love
Deep in the footnotes of Facebook’s financial statements, where few casual investors dare to tread, Anup Srivastava, an assistant professor of accounting information and management at the Kellogg School, has found some perfectly legal—yet to his mind troublingly inscrutable—accounting maneuvers. Some Background When companies... More →
Jessica Love
“Every organization needs the right balance of caves and commons,” writes Leigh Thompson, the J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, in a recent blog post. When Marissa Mayer announced an end to telecommuting at Yahoo, she engendered a vibrant... More →
Jessica Love
Though Cyprus’s predicament is nothing out of the ordinary for a member of the troubled eurozone, recent developments in the small nation have nonetheless managed to take economists by surprise. Cyprus was originally offered a ten billion euro bailout to stave off bankruptcy, but the money came with... More →
Jessica Love
These days, corporate America is doing some soul-searching. Are corporations really only accountable to their shareholders? And, if so, should they be? Last week the Kellogg School’s Public-Private Initiative, together with the Aspen Institute, hosted a conference about the purpose of the corporation—hence last week&rsquo... More →
Jessica Love
It is fair to say that Sandeep Baliga, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School, and Jeffrey Ely, a professor of economics at Northwestern, do not stop thinking like economists when they leave the office. Last year, Baliga and Ely noticed that the new Chicago... More →
Jessica Love
Banking and politics often mix in insidious ways. Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, has shown that politics can influence the lending practices of state-owned banks: Italian banks where top executives are affiliated with a political party actually charge lower interest rates to... More →
Jessica Love
Last week one overheated; the week before one caught fire. Concerns about the Boeing 787's lithium-ion batteries eventually led safety regulators to ground the entire fleet. As the days pass, it appears increasingly unlikely that this current round of malfunctions will prove to be mere “teething problems" for the... More →
Jessica Love
Oh the irony! First introduced in 1979, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter’s Five Forces analysis of competitiveness has continued to make its mark. The forces—which include the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of customers, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products, and the... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Gianfranco Zaccai, the designer of the Swiffer, in FastCompany: Focus groups aren’t useless. They can be insightful for fine-tuning something for the short term. But true innovation is about more than just incremental improvement, it’s about revolutionizing a product or a service; in fact, it should... More →
Patricia Ledesma
From an article in the New England Journal of Medicine: Chocolate consumption enhances cognitive function, which is a sine qua non for winning the Nobel Prize, and it closely correlates with the number of Nobel laureates in each country. It remains to be determined whether the consumption of chocolate is... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Left: Lloyd Shapley (left) and Ehud Kalai, ca. 2004 (Photo courtesy of Ehud Kalai). Right: Alvin Roth during the 2010 Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lecture (Photo © Nathan Mandell). Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics this week. Even though the Kellogg/NU poll did not predict... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Nobel Prize season is upon us. For the fourth year, we polled faculty members in the Kellogg School of Management as well as the Economics Department in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University about their predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. In... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Over the last two months, some of our marketing faculty has published thought provoking articles in the Sloan Management Review and in strategy + business. Most recently, Kellogg School Professors of Marketing Philip Kotler and Bobby Calder coauthored an article in the Sloan Management Review with Edward Malthouse (a Professor at... More →
Tim De Chant
As an American, I sometimes eye with envy people who hold a passport from a European Union country— with one, it’s so easy to travel to, from, and within the continent. But an EU passport also represents far more mobility than just the tourist kind. Citizens of EU countries... More →
Tim De Chant
In early February, when Facebook's IPO seemed imminent, Anup Srivastava, an assistant professor of accounting information and management, put together an interactive valuation tool that let people explore how tweaking different projections would affect the stock's valuation. Built into that were Srivastava's own projections. Projections that, as the stock's price... More →
Tim De Chant
Last week's massive blackout in India put the spotlight on one of the country’s open secrets—its infrastructure is antiquated and crumbling. Over 600 million people in India were without power for days—that’s nearly 1 in 10 people on the planet. “The fundamental cause is a supply-demand problem. Too much... More →
Tim De Chant
From a video at Big Think: People tend to frame things very narrowly. They take a very narrow view of decision making. They look at the problem at hand and they deal with it as if it were the only problem. Via professor of marketing Galen Bodenhausen. More →
Tim De Chant
Tony Dokoupil, writing for the Daily Beast: But this past March Russell struggled to turn off anything. He forwarded a link to “Kony 2012,” his deeply personal Web documentary about the African warlord Joseph Kony. The idea was to use social media to make Kony famous as the first step to... More →
Tim De Chant
Loretta Chao, reporting for the Wall Street journal The factory, which assembles desktop computers and servers, resembles thousands of others across China. Robotic arms are in constant motion, moving parts and pieces around. Rows of workers clad in blue pop parts into place as computers make their way down the... More →