Michael Seaver

Thunderbird School of Management

On July 10th, Thunderbird alumnus Jon Kailey ’76, retired Director of International Business Development at Owens Corning Building Materials, visited campus and gave a talk entitled “Corruption: Corporate and Citizen Costs.” Mr. Kailey served in that capacity from 1979 – 2012 and lived outside the United States for 18 years in Saudi Arabia, Chile and Mexico. At the time of his retirement, his passport had 192 pages, visits to all seven continents, and he spent time in over 70 countries. Kailey is a classic T-bird.

Although his interactive talk allowed those in attendance to relive and ask themselves “What would I have done?” in many of the cross-cultural situations he encountered, I remember one thing he said quite clearly. When asked by a student how to best leverage a Thunderbird degree and a desire to work in a variety of places globally, Kailey responded by saying, “Take assignments no one wants. In short order, you’ll become indispensable.” Sage advice, I’d say.

Lee Simmons

Entrepreneurship can be personally rewarding and good for the economy, if we wipe the stardust from our eyes. Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur… The myth of footloose 25-year-olds changing the world while incidentally becoming deliriously rich has intoxicated a generation. And governments are eagerly handing out tax breaks to help them get started. After all, those new companies are engines of economic growth and job creation, right?

Well, maybe, says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor George Foster. He suggests that policymakers and would-be tycoons alike could do with a sobering belt of reality. In a new multi-country study, he finds that most startups never take off — and among those that do, setbacks destroy a sizable share of the employment and revenue gains in the sector.

Yaniv Dover

Former Professor at Tuck School of Business

Yaniv Dover says a product’s early sales data may reveal how consumers influence the buying decisions of others.

Picture a tired hiker stopping to rest beneath a tree on a windy day. Before she sits down, she looks up to see if there are any loose branches the breeze is likely to dislodge. Just by studying the way a branch moves in the wind, she may observe how strongly connected to the tree it is and the likelihood that a gust of wind may cause it to fall on her head.

Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Dan Denison & Anand Narasimhan

Professors at IMD Lausanne (External contribution by Jorrit Volkers, Dean, Deloitte University EMEA; R&D by Ivy Buche)

The design of an organization serves to align the organization’s capabilities with the demands made by its environment. The rate and pace of change, restructuring, globalization, and the move from a product- to a service-driven business model often involve redefining the logic of the organization design in a way that is compelling for employees. In the past, an organization structure – once mapped – could remain intact for decades.

Nowadays, it is essential to continuously restructure to protect the core business and adapt to new opportunities. This is because employees increasingly have to deal with the complexities that come from oscillating between centralization and decentralization, exerting influence without authority, operating with virtual teams and so on. To cope and thrive in such dynamic environments, an organization needs to apply distinctive design criteria.