The sharing economy has impacted across the board but its greatest imprint can be found in the travel and tourism industry. Airbnb and Uber are the best examples who have disrupted the market. The former has around 650,000 rooms across 192 countries in the world and just to demonstrate the scale, it took Hilton 93 years to reach 610,000 rooms. This has severely impacted tourism jobs with calls for greater regulation being experienced in several markets. While these players have grown exponentially, there is a cause for caution due to impending regulations. Also in certain cultures, travel is often seen as a status symbol and that is where some of the traditional players have an advantage.

Business innovation is usually a buzzword for all positive changes, yet these same disruptions can destroy other firms. Failure to recognize market trends which can impact business is a common fault. Borders failed to see the rise of e-books and closed shop while Barnes & Noble continues to flourish. Some firms such as Blackberry fail to balance product portfolio. Blackberry ignored signals that consumers rather than business professionals will drive the smart-phone segment. Often a bigger firm can succeed by simply buying off a smaller one which offers breakthrough technology. Netflix survived the phase and now sits as chief market disruptor. While Nokia developed a smart phone decades ahead of time, it failed to recognize its own smart risk and instead lost market share once the same became mass market. Customers’ needs keep evolving and it is critical for the brand to recognize the same to tailor the products accordingly. The customer must be involved in advisory boards, ethnographic research, open platforms and social networks.

A trans-organizational mindset is one where the top management has built in a holistic understanding from across the sector and other industries as well. This eventually seeps down to the rest of the firm. This form has particularly worked in the health industry and has led to increase in cross-organization collaboration. Management training programmes these days are integrating this sort of learning in action by involving different stakeholders. Thought leaders such as Samuel Culbert, David Boje, Thomas Cummings and Kurt Motamedi have been at the forefront of this paradigm shift.  

Pinterest is slowing creeping in as one of the important platforms to conduct digital marketing. Unlike several other channels, Pinterest does not seek to recreate the real world, and thus magical connotations work well here. A strong avatar image is quintessential and then the user needs to build around ten attractive boards in order to evoke interest. Among corporate users, the perfect example would be that of the Four Seasons Hotel or that of Azamara Cruises.

Designing an organizational culture is a lot about what is feasible and quite a bit about how it is executed from the very top. A management consulting publication has provided us with certain stellar examples where organizations have fostered excellent company culture. Better-Works from California works with the motto of ‘hire for sparkle’ and thus their entire recruitment and appraisal policy is built around rewarding employees for the zest and vigour they bring to the job. FlexJobs based in Colorado has a virtual office space called Sococo and company message board called Yammer which helps the remote working process. Team-Snap also from Colorado goes by the maxim of trusting employees and treating them well in order to promote company culture. Atlanta based Mail-Chimp have a system by which employees’ corporate training is well taken care of and they can plan ahead to their respective careers. Hub-Spot from Massachusetts meanwhile has a culture whereby employee happiness is gauged and changes implemented accordingly.

Entrepreneurship is a much talked about and researched subject. Rightly so. Entrepreneurs have the ability to think of new ideas, better solutions as well as have the passion and drive to actually bring to market new ideas with meager resources which others think are losers. They are the people who are the engines of economic growth as innovation and entrepreneurship go hand-in-hand and are synonymous. Entrepreneurship is all about doing something new or doing it in a different manner.

One of the ways to find out the traits that are common to entrepreneurs is to study the traits of the most innovative of them. This is exactly what Thai has done in this article. Thai has picked up the 10 most common traits of entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, Timothy Sykes , Paul Budnitz, Alynah Patel, Elon Musk and Emma Schrage through their interesting quotes as to what made them successful as an entrepreneur. So if you want to become an entrepreneur, reading this article could be your MBAin entrepreneurship.

Today every company’s corporate strategy involves making sure that it is digitally compliant to survive the fast changing digital world. To achieve the above objective a company has to go through “digital transformation” which not an easy process to accomplish. It would depend on the level of digital experience you want to offer and where you are at present. The process gets more complex with not only fast changing technology but with numerous competing technologies and products.

However, Ronald has some thoughts as to how we can make the process less painful. One, he suggests that we put the onus on  the vendors to convince us that they are offering the best option. Two, to ensure relevant customer experience we need to understand the entire customer journey thoroughly and to do everything in customer’s interest. Third, remember behavioral science is as important as data science. Lastly, ensure commitment of the entire organization. If digital transformation is important to you, read the article as it gives sound advise