Some aspects of Bangalore's growth 1941-1991

"Relying on census data from 1941 to 1991, the study examines the patterns of population growth in Bangalore city [India] and its extensions. To the extent possible, data have been adjusted for boundary shifts and changes in the definition of workers. After assessing the contribution of migration to the growth of Bangalore, the paper reviews the changes that have taken place in the economic base of Bangalore. The paper notes that urban infrastructure development has not kept pace with population growth."     

Interpretive management: what general managers can learn from design

The past two decades have seen a dramatic acceleration in the pace of marketplace change. Companies have abandoned the old hierarchical model, with its clean functional divisions and clear lines of authority, and adopted flatter, less bureaucratic structures. But if most organizations have begun to adapt to the uncertainty of rapid change, most managers have not. They remain locked into the mechanical mind-set of the industrial age--that is, they assume that any management challenge can be translated into a clearly defined problem for which an optimal solution can be found. That approach works in stable markets and even in markets that change in predictable ways. Today's markets, however, are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they're trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can't even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. The challenges facing the general manager in these circumstances, the authors argue, resemble those typically confronted by design managers. In the unpredictable world of research and design, neither the flow of the development process nor its end point can be defined at the outset. Rather than the traditional analytical approach to management, the design world requires an interpretive one. And that approach is equally well suited to rapidly changing, unpredictable markets. The authors describe how companies such as Levi Strauss & Company and Chiron Corporation have stayed at the top of their industries by adopting just such an interpretive approach to management.     

Social strategies that work

Although most companies have collected lots of friends and followers on social platforms such as Facebook, few have succeeded in generating profits there. That's because they merely port their digital strategies into social environments by broadcasting their commercial messages or seeking customer feedback. To succeed on social platforms, says Harvard Business School's Piskorski, businesses need to devise social strategies that are consistent with users' expectations and behavior in these venues--namely, people want to connect with other people, not with companies. The author defines successful social strategies as those that reduce costs or increase customers' willingness to pay by helping people establish or strengthen relationships through doing free work on a company's behalf. Citing successes at Zynga, eBay, American Express, and Yelp, Piskorski shows that social strategies can generate profits by helping people connect in exchange for tasks that benefit the company such as customer acquisition, marketing, and content creation. He lays out a systematic way to build a social strategy and shows how a major credit card company he advised used the method to roll out its own strategy.