Your company's secret change agents

Organizational change has traditionally come about through top-down initiatives such as hiring experts or importing best-of-breed practices. Such methods usually result in companywide rollouts of templates mandated from on high. These do little to get people excited. But within every organization, there are a few individuals who find unique ways to look at problems that seem impossible to solve. Although these change agents start out with the same tools and access to resources as their peers, they are able to see solutions where others do not. They find a way to bridge the divide between what is happening and what is possible. These positive deviants are the key, the authors believe, to a better way of creating organizational change. Your company can make the most of their methods by following six steps. In Step 1, Make the group the guru, the members of the community are engaged in the process of their own evolution. Step 2, Reframe through facts, entails restating the problem in a way that opens minds to new possibilities. Step 3, Make it safe to learn, involves creating an environment that supports innovative ideas. In Step 4, Make the problem concrete, the community combats abstraction by stating uncomfortable truths. In Step 5, Leverage social proof, the community looks to the larger society for examples of solutions that have worked in parallel situations. In Step 6, Confound the immune defense response, solutions are introduced organically from within the group in a way that promotes acceptance. Throughout the steps, the leader must suspend his or her traditional role in favor of more facilitatory practices. The positive-deviance approach has unearthed solutions to such complicated and diverse problems as malnutrition in Mali and human trafficking in East Java. This methodology can help solve even the most extreme dilemmas.     

Housing Policy in Developing Countries: Conjectures and Refutations

This article discusses housing policy in developing economies.It examines recent research findings in light of earlier argumentsas to the benefits of more market-oriented approaches. It alsolooks at whether the recommendations of earlier work have beenrefuted or developed in subsequent analyses and policy measures.In particular, it reviews the empirical analysis of the effectsof policy on housing supply, the richer understanding of theeffects that land market regulations have on housing affordabilityand the functioning of urban areas, and the alleged mysteriouseffects that researchers claim effective property rights haveon housing policy and on development more generally. It alsoexamines the effects of the increased emphasis on communityparticipation, showing how it helps to more fully reconcilethe incentives faced by beneficiaries of housing policy anddonors. Finally, it examines recent literature on the welfareeffects of rent control. The article shows that some of theconjectures as to the likely benefits of more market-based policyhave been refuted, but large welfare gains for poor people canstill be realized by adapting this approach. Furthermore, thisapproach appears to be gaining ground as the consensus approachto effective housing policy.      

How do successful scholars get their best research ideas? An exploration

We interview 24 marketing professors to ask how they got the ideas for 64 of their papers. More than three-quarters of the papers were inspired by holes in the literature, by a “stylized fact” that the current literature cannot explain, or by an interaction with a manager. The rest fall into several smaller categories that to a large extent can be seen as special cases of the three big ones. We describe how papers from each of the three big categories help move the literature forward. We also illustrate the range of situations contained in each category by way of several examples. Among the authors we interview, most do not use a single source. As these authors become more senior, managerial contacts play an increasing role, while the balance between literature and stylized facts appears to be unchanged.

     

The performance of reverse leveraged buyouts

Reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs) have received increased public scrutiny but attracted little systematic study. We collect a comprehensive sample of 526 RLBOs between 1981 and 2003 and examine the three-year and five-year stock performance of these offerings. RLBOs appear to perform as well as or better than other initial public offerings and the stock market as a whole, depending on the specification. Evidence exists of a deterioration of returns over time.     

Moral Repair in the Workplace: A Qualitative Investigation and Inductive Model

The topic of moral repair in the aftermath of breaches of trust and harmdoing has grown in importance within the past few years. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that offers insight into a series of key issues related to offender efforts to repair interpersonal harm in the workplace: (1) What factors motivate offenders to make amends with those they have harmed? (2) In what ways do offenders attempt to make amends? (3) What outcomes emerge from attempts to make amends? Drawing from the findings, we build an inductive model intended to guide future business ethics and management inquiry and research in this area.     

The Exploration of Crisis Management Strategies: Looking Back and Ahead

With the chaotic nature of disasters and the uncertainty that surrounds them, the understanding of how to achieve effectiveness in crisis management remains limited. This paper investigates how government applies various capabilities in the crisis management process contingent upon the nature of different disasters. By demonstrating the crisis management process from a contingent perspective, the capabilities that government should emphasise can vary according to the nature of the disaster. This study develops a framework for crisis management to serve as a guide when government is facing a crisis.     

Telecommunication in the US: From Regulation to Competition (Almost)

Alfred E. Kahn was an observer and practitioner of telecommunications regulation as technology changed the industry from a natural monopoly to a platform-based oligopoly among telephone, cable, satellite, and wireless carriers. Regulation and legislation were slow to recognize these changes, and large welfare losses occurred, some of which could have been avoided if regulators, legislators and economists had followed Fred’s economic advice: Prices must be informed by costs; the relevant costs are actual incremental costs; costs and prices are an outcome of a Schumpeterian competitive process, not the starting point; excluding firms from markets is fundamentally anticompetitive; a reliance on imperfect markets subject to antitrust law is preferable to necessarily imperfect regulation; and a regulatory transition to deregulation entails propensities to micromanage the process to generate preferred outcomes, visible competitors, and expedient price reductions.     

A Poisson mixture model of discrete choice

In this paper, we introduce a new Poisson mixture model for count panel data where the underlying Poisson process intensity is determined endogenously by consumer latent utility maximization over a set of choice alternatives. This formulation accommodates the choice and count in a single random utility framework with desirable theoretical properties. Individual heterogeneity is introduced through a random coefficient scheme with a flexible semiparametric distribution. We deal with the analytical intractability of the resulting mixture by recasting the model as an embedding of infinite sequences of scaled moments of the mixing distribution, and newly derive their cumulant representations along with bounds on their rate of numerical convergence. We further develop an efficient recursive algorithm for fast evaluation of the model likelihood within a Bayesian Gibbs sampling scheme. We apply our model to a recent household panel of supermarket visit counts. We estimate the nonparametric density of three key variables of interest-price, driving distance, and their interaction-while controlling for a range of consumer demographic characteristics. We use this econometric framework to assess the opportunity cost of time and analyze the interaction between store choice, trip frequency, search intensity, and household and store characteristics. We also conduct a counterfactual welfare experiment and compute the compensating variation for a 10%-30% increase in Walmart prices.     

Profit Without Copyright

An elite consensus appears to have formed around the strengthening of IPR regimes. At the same time, many people, particularly in developing countries, are questioning the idea of paying for what they intuitively sense might possibly be free. In view of the potential for global dissensus on this issue, businesses that produce and distribute explicit knowledge, or digital sequences, would be quite prudent to start making contingency plans for a new form of global capitalism: one characterised by much weaker IPR regimes. Competitive business strategies based upon rival-complementarity (i.e. physical goods and human services that complement digital products) indicate the feasibility of a global economy-of-things, resting upon a freely accessible ecology of knowledge. This might be built in the future, in much the same way that an industrial economy was built, historically, upon a natural ecology of available land and biosystems. Such an arrangement conforms to several rather fundamental political intuitions.     

Latin America: Environmental and firm-level challenges

During the last decades Latin America, as the rest of the world, has gone through a process of increased commercial openness and due to the commodities price boom of the last years the region has grown significantly. However competitiveness hasn't improved much, mostly due to lack of concern from governments. Companies, though, cope with the increase in competition resulting from the greater openness by refining their management practices in the different management areas: marketing, finance, information technology and strategy. Academics study these effects in the papers that comprise the special issue of the Journal of Business Research with the best papers from the conferences of the Business Association for Latin American Studies (BALAS).