To continue this blog series on innovation, today’s post focuses on the Lemelson program at MIT. It is best known for administering prizes that honor innovators:
The 2011 winner is Dr John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who “attributes his entrepreneurial success to appreciation for both science and the creative arts” (his parents are a physicist and a poet). He has over 80 patents to his name and is involved in 4 start-ups. Current interests include biointegrated electronics, with applications in cardiology and neurology, and high-performance semiconductors of relevance for sustainable energy.
He is also very active in mentoring and “manages student-driven programs that span every aspect of science, technology, engineering and math education, from summer day camps to research experiences for undergraduates.” His honors include “the MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Engineering, and selection as one of the Top 100 Young Innovators for the 21st Century by MIT’s Technology Review.”
The 2011 MIT winner is Alice Chen, a biomedical engineer and graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology (HST), "for her innovative applications of microtechnology to study human health and disease", including "a humanized mouse with a tissue-engineered human liver, [which] is intended to bridge a gap in the drug development pipeline between laboratory animal studies and clinical trials". She has also co-founded a biotech company called Sienna Labs (pioneering a new generation of medical pigments) with fellow MIT graduate Todd Harris.
The other 2011 student winners are:
at Caltech, Guoan Zheng for "an on-chip, inexpensive microscopy imaging technology", the applications of which include "many potential applications, including improved diagnostics for malaria and other blood-borne diseases in the developing world and rapid screening of new drugs",
at RPI, Benjamin Clough, for "a new technique that employs sound waves to boost the distance from which researchers can use terahertz spectroscopy to remotely detect hidden explosives, chemicals, and other dangerous materials",
at UIUC, Scott Daigle for "a system that utilizes automatic gear shifting to reduce the efforts exerted by wheelchair operators" (more information on the company he founded, IntelliWheels, Inc). It is worth pointing out that UIUC has wheelchair athletics teams in men's basketball, women's basketball and track, showing a positive example to youngsters with motor disabilities.
The 2011 winner is Elizabeth Hausler, who won for her work in developing "sustainable, safe housing solutions in [disaster-prone areas of] developing countries." She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to India as well as "a 2009 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow and a 2008 Tech Awards Laureate."
The Lemelson-MIT program is named after inventor Jerome Lemelson (1923-1997), funded by the Lemelson Foundation and administered by MIT's School of Engineering. The Lemelson Foundation, which was created in 1993, funds many innovation-related programs and centers throughout the world. To date it has spent $110 million in support of its mission. The application deadline for the 2012 awards has passed. Check out the program webpage in the spring to learn about the winners.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the January/February issue of Technology Review has a fascinating profile of Prof Suzanne Berger (it appears in the MIT section of the magazine and I am not sure if non-alumni can read it in the print version of the magazine, but it is available in its entirety online.) It has the intriguing headline: “In more than four decades at MIT, political scientist Suzanne Berger has shifted from studying French peasants to spearheading research on how to revive US industry.”
Here is a summary of the article (please do read the whole piece on Technology Review's website):
Two of the very best articles I have read in a really long time are in the January/February issue of Technology Review. The first one is: “Can we manufacture tomorrow’s breakthroughs?” The second one, a profile of Prof Suzanne Berger entitled “Standing up for manufacturing” (part of the MIT-specific section of the magazine), will be the focus of the post I will publish on Thursday.
The article, whose title becomes “Can we build tomorrow’s breakthroughs?” once you open the magazine to the correct page, has the following subtitle: “Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That’s bad news not just for the country’s economy but for the future of innovation.” The piece is rather long but absolutely riveting – I highly recommend it. For today’s post, I’ll simply write a point-by-point summary of the article, with hopefully enough details to interest you but also make you want to read the whole thing. Again, this is one of the very best articles I have read in recent memory.
On Thursday: the profile of MIT’s Prof Suzanne Berger, who is “spearheading research on how to revive US [manufacturing] industry.”
Both the Route 128 area outside Boston and the Silicon Valley outside San Francisco provide excellent examples of innovation hotbeds, which benefit from local research universities of international reputation and a thriving start-up culture with R&D office parks.
Silicon Valley
Stanford's then-dean of the School of Engineering and MIT graduate Frederick Terman (1900-1982) played a key role in the development of the Silicon Valley, along with William Shockley (1910-1989), who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for co-inventing the transistor.
Terman led the creation of Stanford Industrial Park in 1951 (now renamed Stanford Research Park), supposedly the world's first technology-oriented office park, with tenants such as Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Lockheed Corporation and Eastman Kodak. Terman was also Stanford's Provost from 1955 to 1965, overseeing the expansion of science and engineering departments, which cemented Stanford's reputation as a leading university in high tech. He is also a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Shockley, who invented the junction transistor in 1951, directed the Shockley Semiconductor Lab at the Beckman Instruments company in Mountain View, CA starting in 1955. He is alleged to have had an abrasive management style, which led 8 of his employees to resign in 1957 and started Fairchild Semiconductor instead. One of the eight was Gordon Moore, who would later found Intel. Other companies later created by some of those eight employees include Molectro, later acquired by National Semiconductor (which recently became part of Texas Instruments) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel's rival.
Interestingly, Fairchild Semiconductor is viewed as the first venture-backed startup, receiving investment in 1959 by what would become Venrock Associates ten years later. This came shortly after the passage of the Small Business Investment Act of 1958, which created Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs), "privately owned and managed investment funds, licensed and regulated by SBA [Small Business Administration], that use their own capital plus funds borrowed with an SBA guarantee to make equity and debt investments in qualifying small businesses". This act ushered in a new era in the professionally-managed venture capital industry. More information to request SBIC financing for a small business is available here.
Shockley Semiconductor and the companies formed by these eight former employees created a core of high-tech companies in the area to the south of San Francisco that later became the Silicon Valley.
According to a recent report by the National Venture Capital Association, from 1970 to 2010 venture capitalists have invested over $210 billion in almost 10,000 companies in California. Public companies headquartered in CA that were once venture-backed account for almost 3 million US jobs. 23% of venture capital in CA goes to the software industry, 22% to energy and 15% to biotech.
Route 128
This highway around Boston, has been dubbed "America's Technology Highway" because of the large number of high-tech firms that set up in its vicinity from the 1960s onward, including Digital Equipment Corporation. The dotcom boom saw the venture capitalists' attention shift to software stronghold Silicon Valley, but the boost of innovation in the life sciences has benefited Boston with its world-class hospitals such as Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Route 128 area is now also a stronghold of biotech innovation.
A venture capitalist in a Boston firm explains in an interview with FastCompany.com why the area offers prime opportunities for innovators, from the presence of Harvard and MIT (but also, unmentioned in the article, Babson College, whose programs are regularly ranked as among the best in the nation for budding entrepreneurs, Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University and many others) to the strong hospital system to the presence of large companies and even the many intellectual property lawyers and the proximity of New York City.
The website of the Martin (1958) Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship mentions that, according to a recent study, "there are currently 25,600 companies in existence founded by living MIT alumni that employ about 3.3 million people worldwide. Those companies generate annual world revenues of $2 trillion, producing the equivalent of the 11th-largest economy in the world."
This report by the National Venture Capital Association states that:
But Boston is not resting on its laurels: under the stewardship of Mayor Thomas Menino (the longest-serving mayor in the history of the city, who took office in 1993), it created in 2010 an Innovation District on the waterfront, so that companies no longer have to move to the suburbs to benefit from the innovation ecosystem pioneered by Route 128. Maybe the biggest threat to Route 128 comes from Boston itself rather than San Francisco. Babson College recently opened its Boston campus in the Innovation District, and many companies have already set up shop in the neighborhood, such as DataXu, Boston Technologies, Fundraise.com, Apperian, Greentown Labs and NPR Digital Services.
More resources
A good book comparing the Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 up to the early 1990s is Regional Advantage by AnnaLee Saxenian, the Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley. She finds significant differences in culture, with the Silicon Valley companies being in her opinion more open to collaboration and sharing of innovation. Because her book was published in 1996, it does not cover the recent breakthroughs in the biotech industry and the way life sciences companies have affected the balance between East Coast and West Coast.
The MIT Entrepreneurship Review recently published a post by a Principal with Redpoint Ventures entitled "What is really going on with venture capital". It explains a lot of the basics, including the difference between general partners (the "individuals investing in startup companies") and limited partners (funds that provide capital because they seek returns and, in the current climate, have "retrenched from investing in venture funds"), but also depicts in detail the state of venture capital today and provide a lot of interesting data such as the median time to IPO and M&A, which have increased from 4.5 and 3 years in 1998, respectively, to 9.6 and 6.5 a decade later.
In the author's view, "[t]he costs of regulatory compliance imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX, is a hefty drawback for vibrant private companies eyeing IPOs [because] SOX regulations meaningfully impact profitability margins." He argues that the recently introduced Reopening American Capital Markets to Emerging Growth Companies Act would alleviate this problem by creating a category of Emerging Growth Companies, which would have up to five years to comply with certain regulatory requirements, including Section 404(b) of SOX, of which companies with market capitalization below $75 million are already exempted.
Such an act would hopefully affect both the Silicon Valley and the Route 128/Innovation District areas by fostering the continued growth of the companies in their fold.
For today’s post, here are a few articles on social media.
The first one, “Decoding Social Media” in the November/December 2011 issue of Technology Review, explains how discovering patterns in tweets will affect TV, ads and even politics. An example of “social-media analytics firm that attempts to track comments on shows and ads”, including comparing amount of tweets with Nielsen ratings, is Bluefin Labs. While traditional surveys only represent respondents’ opinion at specific times, social-media data can be analyzed continuously, which represents a fascinating opportunity for start-ups.
This has piqued the interest not only of TV companies such as CBS, but also of conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble, which oversees brands such as Tide, Duracell and Pringles. The journalist comments: “While Procter & Gamble carefully vets ads with consumers before airing them, it has never known whether the same viewers would respond differently to an ad depending on what show surrounded it.” Bluefin Labs hopes to elucidate precisely that sort of issue. This would allow the placement of TV ads to be tailored to viewers’ responses, similarly to what is happening to online ads today. Other companies tracking social-media conversations include:
The TR article really focuses on Bluefin, which is headquartered in the Kendall Square section of Cambridge, MA near MIT. The company was co-founded by MIT professor Deb Roy, currently on leave from the famed Media Lab, and his former doctoral student Michael Fleischman. (Among many things, the article provides a great background story on how analyzing TV-related social media came about for the company.) Today, Bluefin’s clients include Pepsi, Mars, Comcast, CBS, Fox Sports, A+E Networks and about ten others. Its business model hinges on selling subscriptions to its custom analytics, generated by uploading raw TV data obtained from their data center to Amazon’s cloud computing service. (This also seems to be the business model of the companies listed above.)
Bluefin generates two key metrics based on all the social-media responses: response level and response share, which refer to the number of tweets or public Facebook posts on a given TV show and the share of these tweets compared to the total volume of TV-related tweets and public FB posts. Much remains to be done to extract as much information as possible from this social-media goldmine, maybe generating one day the social-media equivalent to the Nielsen ratings.
Another interesting article is “What’s your social media strategy?” in the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review. It reveals that companies’ social media strategies can be divided into four groups: the “predictive practitioner” (connecting with customers to ask them what feature they’d like to see included in a new product, for instance), the “creative experimenter” (listening to customers on Facebook and Twitter in a less scripted way than the predictive practitioner), the “social media champion” (involves joint efforts of various functions at a company, for instance asking customers with large social-media following to discuss their experiences with a new car) and the “social media transformer” (allowing large-scale interactions extending to external stakeholders).
The HBR special report on “Social Media and the New Rules of Branding” in the December 2010 issue was particularly fascinating. It consisted of four articles:
But my favorite article of the lot remains the Technology Review one. Extracting insights from the enormous, shapeless mass of tweets and Facebook posts is one more reason the field of analytics has a bright future ahead.
This will be my last post for 2011. Look for a new post on January 9, 2012. Happy New Year!
Here are links to a few articles on scientific publishing, especially related to problems or misconduct, that appeared in The Economist over the past year or so. This is obviously not an exhaustive discussion of the topic. I also wrote about an ethics scandal at Duke in May 2008; the reader might find a January 2007 article in Nature about recent cases of academic misconduct particularly interesting. One of those cases is described at length in the 2009 book "Plastic fantastic: How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world."
Let's start with an August 2010 article about Harvard researcher Mark Hauser ("Monkey business?"), "who made his name probing the evolutionary origins of morality, [and] is suspected of having committed the closest thing academia has to a deadly sin: cheating." The issues are described in a New York Times article as pertaining to "data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results."
While both The Economist and the NYT took pains of upholding Hauser's presumption of innocence from deliberate wrong-doing at the time, The Chronicle of Higher Education painted a darker portrait: "An internal document... tells the story of how research assistants became convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data and how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or asked for verification." Hauser resigned from Harvard in July 2011, about a year after being found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct.
“An array of errors” (September 10, 2011) focuses on the work by Duke University researchers, who reported in 2006 that they were able to “predict which chemotherapy would be most effective for an individual patient suffering from lung, breast or ovarian cancer” using a technique based on gene expression, which seemed to hold tremendous potential for the field of personalized medicine.
Unfortunately, a team of researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston quickly ran in trouble as they attempted to replicate the results. They also realized that the paper was riddled with formatting errors, for instance in the tables, for instance.
The Duke University team decided to nonetheless launch clinical trials based on their work. Another researcher at the National Cancer Institute expressed concerns about the work, and Duke launched an internal investigation but the review committee, having “access only to material supplied by the researchers themselves,” did not find any problem and the clinical trials resumed.
But “in July 2010, matters unraveled when the Cancer Letter reported that Dr [Anil] Potti [of Duke University] had lied in numerous documents and grant applications,” for instance lying about having been a Rhodes Scholar in Australia. This led to Potti’s resignation from Duke, the end of the clinical trials, and the retraction of several prominent papers. A committee was formed at Duke to investigate what went wrong.
The most interesting part of the article, I found, was the description of the academic journals’ reaction: “journals that had readily published Dr Potti’s papers were reluctant to publish [a scientist’s] letters critical of the work.” The article also touches upon Duke’s being slow to deal with potential conflicts of interest by the researchers, and the fact that “peer review… relies on the goodwill of workers in the field, who have jobs of their own and frequently cannot spend the time needed to check other people’s papers in a suitably thorough manner.”
An editorial in Nature Cell Biology was written with Potti's case in mind, but extends to scientific misconduct in general. Sadly, it takes the easy way out, by stating that "Although journals can do much to promote integrity and transparency in the practise and presentation of research... it is not our mission to police the research community." This lack of responsiveness seems unfortunately in line with the paragraph I quote above.
The topic of “Scientists behaving badly” (October 9, 2010) is about a Chinese scientist and a blogger who publishes claims of scientific allegations on his website, some that “undoubtedly… shine a light on the often-murky business of Chinese science” while others “are anonymous and lack specifics.” While the article is on the specific and long-running feud between a urologist and a self-proclaimed “science cop”, with one casting doubts on the validity of the other's research results, it can also be viewed as a call for an independent expert committee investigating allegations of misconduct in China.
Here is the quote that most caught my attention: “Measured by the number of published papers, China is the second most productive scientific nation on Earth. Incidents like this, though, call into question how trustworthy that productivity is.”
This provides a great transition into the third article, “Climbing Mount Publishable” (November 13, 2010), subtitled: “The old scientific powers are starting to lose their grip.” Quick summary: “In 1990 [North America, Europe and Japan] carried out more than 95% of the world’s research and development. By 2007 that figure was 76%.” Elsewhere in the article, we learn that “America’s share of world publications, at 28% in 2007, is slipping. In 2002 it was 31%.” The article also discusses metrics regarding gross domestic expenditure on R&D, share of national wealth spent on R&D, number of researchers and share of world patents.
Because countries view R&D output as a measure of their intellectual capital and prowess, the risk of plagiarism from researchers pressured for ever-more output is real. I wrote about this in a recent post on impact factors. In particular: "The following [excerpt of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed] caught my attention: "In China, scientists get cash bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, and graduate students in physics at some universities must place at least two articles in journals with a combined impact factor of 4 to get their Ph.D.’s." Is putting so much pressure on scientists really a good idea? Maybe such high stakes explain some egregious cases of plagiarism over the past few years, such as the one Prof Alice Agogino of UC Berkeley was recently a victim of. You can find her paper (from 2004) here, and the other paper (from 2007) there."
I do not know why those two researchers decided to do this, but as developing countries pressure their scientists to excel on the international stage as a way of demonstrating the value of their education and the brainpower of their citizens, it has to be tempting for scientists struggling to come up with ideas to just take someone else’s paper and publish it elsewhere under their own name, hoping not to get found out. This also discredits the hard-working researchers of the same country who are actually putting in time and effort to come up with innovative ideas.
It is therefore very important for journals to take an aggressive stance toward plagiarism. All articles identified as plagiarizing others’ papers (in Agogino’s case the paper is word for word hers from beginning to end, except that there are other people’s names on top, so it is a very clear-cut situation) should have a highly visible mention added online that this paper has been found to be a plagiarization of another paper (leaving out the issue of who among the authors plagiarized the paper and who just marveled at his co-author’s sudden perfect mastery of English). Maybe that would make would-be plagiarizers think twice before they act.
Finally, “Of goats and headaches” (May 28, 2011) discusses the very lucrative field of academic publishing. The focus is on academic journals, whose business model involves getting university libraries to pay for very expensive subscriptions with little information as to whether these journals are useful or often consulted, since the librarians are not the primary consumers. As a reminder, academic journals get their articles for nothing (authors receive no royalties) and reviewers review for free. A few journals such as the Journal of Economic Dynamic and Control actually charge a submission fee of $100 for authors hoping to be published in their pages.
Personally, I feel that my institution’s subscriptions to the journals I consult online have been useful (my favorite journal is Interfaces), but I wonder how many journals are rarely browsed; besides, there are only a few journals I consult regularly and I can find many pre-prints available for free download on researchers' websites. A mechanism to rein in subscription prices would certainly be useful. This would start by having librarians share the price of subscriptions with researchers so that researchers can help them decide which subscriptions are simply not worth it and which ones should be kept. In addition, librarians should track how many times a given journal is accessed online to gauge its usefulness.
But what I dislike the most about academic publishing is the business of textbooks. Professors, whose royalty rates - according to one of my former colleagues - “aren’t going to make anyone rich”, write the whole textbook by themselves. There is simply no editorial help in the way a book of fiction or nonfiction would be revised by an editor with a keen eye. The marketing around textbooks is minimal – frankly, the emails and newsletters I receive about new textbooks vaguely related to my area of expertise feel a lot like spam. And for that, publishing houses charge upward of $100 (often closer to $200) and change editions every few years to limit the market for used textbooks.
In France we paid the cost of the photocopies for a course packet put together by the professor. Showing up in the United States and learning how much money we were expected to spend on books definitely came as a culture shock. (Campus bookstores add a sizable premium for the privilege of putting all the books in one convenient location too.) It should come as no surprise that I do not require textbooks for my courses. But, in contrast with the cases mentioned earlier in this post, the practice of the academic publishing business is completely legal.
June marked the 100th anniversary of IBM. Here is what The Economist had to say about Big Blue’s longevity: “IBM’s secret is that it is built an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses… Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry platform shifts occur.” Based on this idea, the weekly argues that Apple, Amazon and Facebook are well-positioned to reach the 100-year mark, while Dell, Cisco and Microsoft are in a more precarious situation.
A detailed analysis of IBM’s longevity is provided in the briefing in the same issue. It is hard to fathom now, but IBM’s business started with punch cards in the late 19th century. The business has witnessed three significant platform shifts so far:
IBM has become focused on services (its services arm employs more than half its workforce of over 425,000) and less hierarchical. It also endeavors to make “the output of its 3,000-strong research division… relevant to its business” and “ditch[es] businesses that are about to become commoditized” to keep its profit margins high. But in the end it is clear that the main ingredient of IBM’s success is its “human platform”, built upon “close relationships between customers and supplier”.
In a provocative article, The Economist also compares IBM to the Carnegie Corporation (which also turned 100 in June) and asks: “Has the multinational business or universal philanthropy done more for society?” Or, echoing Sam Palmisano in a new book celebrating IBM’s birthday: “One simple way to assess the impact of any organization is to answer the question: how is the world different because it existed?” You might argue this question applies to people too, and the article indeed compares Andrew Carnegie with Thomas Watson Sr, who ran IBM for four decades. The Economist’s verdict – read the full article for interesting historical facts – is that “in the first 50 years, the impact of the Carnegie Corporation on society dwarfed that of IBM… in their second 50 years the two institutions’ impact has arguably been reversed.” The article also raises the question of the appropriate maximum age for a foundation: is 100 too old? As an example, “the Gates Foundation will have to be wound down 50 years after the second of Bill and Melinda Gates dies.”
Bill Gates, mentioned in passing as “the Andrew Carnegie of today, [who] is busily giving away the fortune he earned in business”, is also the focus of another Economist article, that one from June 2010, about his attempt with Warren Buffett to convince other billionaires to take the “giving pledge”, “promising to donate 50% or more of their wealth.” As of mid-2010, 4 other tycoons had followed Gates’s and Buffett’s lead. By The Economist’s calculations, “half of the total net worth of the American billionaires on the 2009 Forbes 400 list is over $600 billion.”
Returning to IBM, an October 2010 article from, you guessed it, The Economist again, describes its impressive track record in corporate volunteering through the IBM Corporate Service Corps, which is portrayed as a “corporate version of the Peace Corps” and is supposed to involve 500 IBMers a year, albeit for much shorter engagements than the Peace Corps. Those activities also help IBM polish its brand name and maintain good relationships with key actors in foreign markets. Companies that have followed IBM’s lead include Novartis, Dow Corning and FedEx.
For more information on IBM, I recommend Lou Gerstner’s book, “Who said elephants can’t dance?”
I recently came across a fascinating article by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce in an old Harvard Business Review (December 2006). Their article, entitled “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek”, describes a little-discussed subset of the workforce, where “extreme professionals” – with workweeks of at least 60 hours and exhibiting at least 5 of 10 characteristics, such as unpredictable flow of work, fast-paced work under tight deadlines and availability to clients 24/7 – feel exalted rather than exploited, and view “get-a-life dedication” as a badge of honor.
While the focus of Hewlett and Luce is on analyzing whether women are disadvantaged by this mindset, they offer an insightful picture of high-earners enthusiastic about their (not too sustainable-looking) lifestyle because of the impact their work has on their company. The authors describe this as “the American Dream on Steroids.” Since their survey was done over 5 years ago, I wonder how the financial crisis has affected these employees’ outlook and their work hours. (Back in 2006, Hewlett and Luce found that 56% of high-earners in extreme jobs worked more than 70 hours a week, but 66% of extreme jobholders in the U.S. sample and 76% in the global companies survey “say they love their job, which suggest at least one third of international extreme jobholders are happy with their situation.)
Hewlett and Luce explain the rise of extreme jobs through the following factors: competitive pressures, the embrace of the “extreme” ethos in popular culture, new levels of connectivity that make managers expect their employees to be available at any time, the workplace as social center, more knowledge-based work (which is highly portable). I hope the authors run a follow-up survey; I would certainly read the results with interest.
In the meantime, I will also point out two less positive, and more recent, articles about all-consuming jobs – demanding many hours, but not necessarily with the exhilarating features that define extreme jobs in Hewlett and Luce’s article. The first article is a Schumpeter column in The Economist, dating from May 2010 and focusing on employees’ being overstretched, after a mention of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, which seems an appropriate if dark parable in many respects. (The suggestions to help companies deal with employees’ dissatisfaction are rather bland: 1. Redouble efforts to make staff feel valued. 2. Make more use of “empowerment”. 3. Pay attention to high performers. Yawn. But Schumpeter churns out enough great columns week after week that we can forgive him/her for a trite one. That and the fact that mentioning of "Animal Farm" earned him/her enough bonus points in the first half of the column to coast through the rest.)
The second one is an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Superjobs” with the subtitle: “Why you work more, enjoy it less”, published in May. An excerpt: “Some workplace experts say the superjob is the logical next step in management's quest to make the workplace more cost efficient… 53% of workers surveyed said they've taken on new roles, most of them without extra pay (just 7% got a raise or a bonus).” Although the article points out that many successful leaders grew from “stretch experiences”, it also provides worrisome figures: in a recent survey, only 43% of Americans were satisfied with their jobs. Similarly to The Economist, the WSJ mentions “recognition programs that reward employees for taking on extra work” and emphasizes good workload management practices, the most useful one but probably hardest to implement being to “manage up”, i.e., let your boss know when your workload is becoming unmanageable.
For more recent takes on extreme jobs, check out this August post by Hewlett on her Forbes blog, as well as a August 2007 HBR blog post, also by Hewlett, and recent articles in the mainstream press (online) by bloggers: "Balancing Act" in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and "Do you have an extreme job?" in Psychology Today.
This post is a rerun of a post I wrote for the official blog of the INFORMS 2011 Annual Meeting, which just took place in Charlotte, NC. Because of Charlotte's recent ascent - and struggle - as a financial center and renewed renaissance as a hub for energy companies, and because both finance and energy are themes of interest to many operations research practitioners, I thought that learning a bit more about Charlotte would be of interest to many INFORMS 2011 attendees.
First, the basics, thanks to Wikipedia: Charlotte is the largest city in North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County. With a population over 730,000 in the latest US census, it is the 17th largest American city in population. (The metropolitan area counts about 1.75 million residents.) Charlotte is viewed as a major financial center because Bank of America is headquartered there; Wachovia also had its headquarters in Charlotte before its demise during the financial crisis and merger with Wells Fargo (which is said to bring its headquarters of East Coast Operations to Charlotte). Charlotte is also the home of the Carolina Panthers (NFL), the Charlotte Bobcats (NBA) and the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Charlotte was ranked No 8 in the 2008 rankings of "Best cities to live and launch" compiled by Money Magazine. The pros included "Steady influx of young educated workers, business-friendly banking community, local sports entertainment", as well as the proximity of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus, while the main con was the increase in housing costs due to the influx of new residents. (Charlotte's fortune as a banking center originated in new laws passed in the 1980s lifting restrictions about banks operating in multiple states, which explains it only rose to prominence relatively recently. For an article explaining Charlotte's trajectory, I recommend the article "How Charlotte became a banking giant, outpacing Pittsburgh's banks" in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 2006.)
The appeal of Charlotte - a vibrant city that is also an airline hub in a sunny climate with great opportunities both job-wise and leisure-wise - has also brought its share of challenges during the economic crisis. Many people moved to Charlotte in the hope to find a job but were unable to gain employment, leading to an unemployment rate of 12% in 2009, according to this Washington Post article. I find it striking that in 2008 Money magazine put Charlotte's population at just below 600,000, and only 2 years later the population had increased by over 20%. Such an increase would be difficult to absorb seamlessly in the best of situations, and the financial crisis certainly did not help.
The Washington Post article "Hard times in Charlotte, a city depending on the banking industry", published in October 2009, paints a rather sad picture of Charlotte at the time, and its high hopes of becoming a national powerhouse dashed by the economy. For instance: "In Charlotte, the number of people served by the soup kitchen at Urban Ministry, a local charity, has increased 22 percent since August 2007, while the number of private airplanes arriving and departing from Charlotte-Douglas International Airport has dropped by 38 percent."
Even in 2009, many people remained optimistic about the future of Charlotte. "This is a great city with a deep talent pool", said the CEO of GMAC Financial. Also, the journalist wrote: "Some local leaders have suggested that Charlotte diversify its economy. But it is much more common to find people who say the city's destiny as a financial center has simply been postponed."
Two years later, we can better judge the future of Charlotte, and it is looking up. In fact, in September the Washington Post published another article about Charlotte, this one entitled: "Charlotte looks beyond financial sector in effort to become energy capital." It starts as follows: "
By the end of this year, a tower built as a home for Wachovia will be the new headquarters of Duke Energy... While the tidy North Carolina city of 730,000 people still counts itself as the nation’s No. 2 financial center and is looking to expand in a number of arenas — including health, motor sports and defense — the area’s energy sector is showing particular promise." Charlotte has ambitious plans, in areas that should be of interest to many operations researchers: "In addition to luring energy firms, the city is expanding recycling, “smart” grid projects and public transit, with plans to add 10 miles of light rail and a commuter line in years to come." Leaders in the Charlotte community also aim at making the city “the most energy-efficient in the world.” The article also provides a long list of energy-related companies adding jobs to the area, from Siemens to ABB Group to Celgard and SPX. The renewed ascent of Charlotte as a national economic powerhouse should be fascinating to watch!