Ivan Salgo, MD, MS, is senior director of Global Cardiology at Philips in Boston and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2012.

Analytics can turn cryptic data into insightful, effective decision-making. In general, it involves two broad approaches: clustering existing data to “see useful patterns” and applying machine learning on past data to “predict the future”. While “Big Data” has been the cornerstone of many sophisticated business models at firms such as Google and FedEx, the “New World” is generating data faster than managers can process it and presenting new opportunities and new challenges for decision-makers.

Following are two cases of using analytics to drive business decision-making. One uses a simple histogram analysis...

Nitin Jain is an IT solution and strategy executive within the Federal Healthcare Practice for IBM Global Business Services in Washington, D.C. and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2014.
 

Cost pressure in the U.S. public sector, as well as in many other industries, is a disruptive force that is encoraging companies (sellers) to build differentiated capabilities. Additionally, the pressures of sequestration budget cuts and an ongoing effort to address the federal budget deficit are causing government agencies (buyers) to do more with less. As a result, at IBM (a seller) we’re focusing on ways to maintain our competitive edge in light of this challenging and uncertain landscape.

A big part of my job involves making pricing and bidding decisions. How do we decide...

Jeremy Macdonald leads marketing for the MIT Executive MBA program, is an angel investor, and a member of the MIT Sloan MBA class of 2005.

Raising venture funding can be a little like playing Where’s Waldo?: you try really hard to find something that has a lot of false positives. One of the problems is that investors are often too polite and not direct enough. Let’s flip this process on its head and think about some ingredients to start up success that you will be rewarded for focusing on no matter whether you raise money or not! It also happens that these are things that are at the top of many investors’ minds, so hopefully you will end up closer to your goal.

Team, Team, Team:
Just like the real estate adage; location, location, location. The most important...

Jonathan Lehrich is a lecturer and program director of the MIT Executive MBA program, and a member of the MIT Sloan MBA class of 2005.

Higher education abounds with acronyms.  We abbreviate the names of our schools (MIT, HBS, BU) and our programs (BS, PhD, MBA, EMBA, and others).  Often these acronyms become so commonplace that one forgets what they stand for.  Take the EMBA.  Most understand the MBA part – it’s the degree you receive – but what’s the “E”?  Some think it stands for Electronic or even Easy.  Both are wrong: the E stands for Executive, for the level of the experienced leaders who want to challenge themselves, challenge convention, and challenge the status quo by applying what they learn.  But in the...

Eyas Abu-Raddad and Sree Koka are members of the MIT EMBA class of 2013. Eyas is a research advisor and head of PK/PD at Chorus, a division of Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, IN. Sree is a professor and chairman of the Department of Dental Specialties at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.

The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who change the world.  As we move towards our June 2013 commencement day, the lectures and passion of Professors John Van Maanen, Richard Locke, Nelson Repenning, John Sterman and Charles Fine reverberate with the clear and compelling drumbeat of the Sloan mission.  These men have “made it” in their chosen fields; they have published numerous papers and textbooks, given honorary lectures,...

Guha Bala is president of Vicarious Visions, Inc. in Albany, NY and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.
 

When you have a set of resources committed to a product and you don’t meet your quality target, there is a tendency to redouble efforts to meet that target. But by doing this, you become stuck in a “work harder loop” to solve a problem that you might not have the capability to fix. Given that we only have 24 hours in a day, simply working harder robs the team of the bandwidth required to develop the capability to fix the problem. In other words, time spent on “working harder” robs from time needed to “work smarter.” As a result, the quality gap becomes greater and you become less able to solve the problem.

This is an...

Dan Bachiochi is a vice president of software engineering and technology in the Electronic Trading Platforms Group at State Street Corp. in Boston and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2014.

A friend of mine and I were recently discussing some problems he’s been having at work.  He is managing director of product and software development at a $130-million dollar business.  The business is growing steadily, but headcount is flat and almost everyone in the organization is spending a larger amount of time on production support.

What’s the problem?

As it turns out, his company’s situation is remarkably similar to one we recently studied in our Organizational Processes course.  Product development can be permanently derailed by natural organizational...

Rob Lentz is vice president of international delivery at Acxiom in Little Rock, Ark. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2013.

If you look at the evolution of business footprints over the last 20 years, many companies began in one country like the U.S. and became optimized over time for that specific geography. However, they may have more recently bought into another market, suddenly acquiring different employees, technologies and engineering platforms. Now, they are in multinational territory.

I’m currently looking at how our company is evolving as a multinational entity. We formed a taskforce on global workforce strategy and are moving toward identifying what we need to complete this evolution. Here are some of the things that I’ve learned from MIT and am...

Jonathan Lehrich is the Program Director of the MIT Executive MBA Program, a lecturer at MIT Sloan, and a member of the MIT Sloan MBA class of 2005.

As our executive MBA program continues to grow, so does the program’s capstone project, Global Organizations Lab (GO-Lab). We recently kicked off the second year of the global management course with more companies in more locations, which means more diversity and more impact.

This year, student teams are working with 12 companies located throughout Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Near East to help solve major international business issues.  In this capstone of the EMBA experience, students apply everything they’ve learned and build on their own experiences, in a new and dynamic environment.

The six-month lab...

Shankaran (Shanks) Srinivasan is an international program manager at 4D Security Solutions, Inc., a firm that provides integrated security solutions worldwide for critical infrastructure.  Shanks is a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

Whether you are in a startup or a large company, you don’t want to have to say NO to a potential client. Every dollar helps to build your business so you figure out ways to staff projects as needed. You ask questions like:

- How much revenue will this produce?
- What strategic benefits will be realized?
- What resources will be needed?

However, not all projects are created equal and saying YES to everything has pitfalls. It leads to projects that consume resources and do not deliver the intended results. It leads to a culture...

Shehryar Ahmad is chief marketing officer of BMA Asset Management, former manager of the rock band Junoon (the “U2 of Pakistan” - The New York Times), and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

Having worked in finance and the music industry, I appreciate that business is both a science and an art. Some aspects are data-driven and analytical while others are more intuitive. There are occasions when there is enough time to make decisions based on the best data available, and then there are times when you have to use your best judgment based on instincts and experience. When it comes to entrepreneurship and innovation, the key is finding the balance between the two and staying flexible enough to apply them as needed.

Infatuation Is Not Contagious
A good example...

Andrea de Souza is director of informatics, data analysis and finance at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass. and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

I was recently inspired by an entrepreneurship class at MIT Sloan to further explore an idea that I’ve been kicking around for awhile.  While I am new to entrepreneurship I thought I would share some of the steps I have taken to turn an idea for a “LookBook” for IP into a start up. The idea is to provide an online marketplace to match inventors with those seeking innovation.

Here are some steps to help turn your idea into a startup:

1. Seek Early Feedback

During class, we tested our ideas with class members. The “LookBook” idea received far more positive...

Tom Cole is vice president of Atlantis Operations at DENTSPLY Implants in Waltham, MA. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2013.

When your business is growing fast, you don’t always have time for long-term strategic thinking. If your product is successful and customers are willing to pay a premium price, then strategy often falls by the wayside. But eventually, there comes a time when low-cost competitors or other business models will begin to challenge your success. You’ll be a lot better off if you’ve done some strategic thinking before then.

Flying under the radar

This was the case for the dental company I cofounded, which was acquired by a larger company in 2007. Even after that acquisition, our strategy was pretty much to fly under the radar since our...

Rubi Iniguez is vice president/head of U.S. Tax for Reed Elsevier in Newton, MA and a member of MIT Sloan’s EMBA class of 2012.

Tax departments are often regarded as a necessary evil. Instead of being innovators, they often are perceived to be backward looking. This makes sense given that we usually deal with things that have happened in the past. But it’s also important for tax groups to have a good understanding of the overall business to play more of a strategic role. So the big question is: What does it mean to be strategic when you live and die with the details?

What Is The Life Expectancy Of Your Business?
Every business model is mortal so it’s important to understand the life expectancy of your business. If you change nothing, how soon will it die?...

Jonathan Lehrich is the Program Director of the MIT Executive MBA Program in Cambridge, MA and a member of the MIT Sloan MBA class of 2005.

This year we have doubled the EMBA program to two cohorts. We have increased the size of the class of 2014 to 114 students, up from 70 in the class of 2013. And we have welcomed an exceptional class, comprised 25% of women, that averages 16 years of work experience – continuing our commitment to world-class management education for active, senior leaders.

But why increase the class at all? To increase the richness of the academic experience. A larger class creates an environment that allows for even broader cross-learning and collaboration. It also deepens networking opportunities, as students form tight-knit bonds in the program that...

Tom Dengenis is CEO of Synchro Ltd. in Birmingham England and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2013.

Knowing how to live in the woods doesn’t make you an environmentalist any more than running a business helps you to truly understand the underlying forces of the market. But the business environment we operate in demands an understanding of what levers to pull in order to move markets in our favor.

Here are some levers that will help you create and capture value in a competitive marketplace:

Lever 1: Strategic Pricing

Pricing is often simply a tactical decision, i.e. the objective is to maximize economic profits. However, pricing can also be an important part of a company’s strategy and help differentiate the company from competitors.  Being able to look at...

Fernando Dangond, M.D. is head of medical affairs for neurodegenerative diseases for the U.S. at EMD Serono in Rockland, MA. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

Corporate reorganizations are common in this economy. Yet they frequently cause a lot of frustration among employees who want more communication about what is going on. That’s not surprising, especially when layoffs are likely. In addition to causing stress, reorganizations also can lead to inefficiencies in terms of how companies use their manpower and establish new processes.

Here are some tips for improving communication and facilitating a smooth reorganization.

Be Clear on the Reasons:
Gather data and clearly frame the strategic reasons that are motivating the reorganization. This will help a build a...

The following is a repost from OnStartups by Kate Endress. Kate is the CEO and cofounder of DITTO.com, a new cutting edge ecommerce site selling a curated collection of designer eyewear including prescription sunglasses. Kate is a graduate of Stanford Business School and was previously a private equity investor before becoming an entrepreneur. This is such a good post on my friend and MIT MBA 2005, Dharmesh Shah's blog OnStartups that I have posted it verbatim.

Despite the scary statistic that women lead just 8% of venture-backed companies, I believe that there has never been a better time to be a young, female entrepreneur. There are an increasing number of great female role models who serve as inspirations.

Yahoo's decision to hire Marissa Mayer to run the struggling web...

Sree Koka is a professor and chairman of the Department of Dental Specialties at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. as well as a practicing dentist. He is a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

In the world of healthcare, the concept of value is very poorly understood. Revenue generation is primarily from reimbursement for procedures performed and, consequently, often not proportional to the value created. Optimal patient care is why most of us entered healthcare in the first place, yet the current reimbursement system places this key value pretty far down the value chain.

Organizations present a myriad of competing initiatives, which if not aligned or clearly prioritized, lead to confusion.  As a department head, I spend a lot of time thinking about how my group...

Gary Smith is the founder of Beacon Management Consulting and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

There are many reasons why innovation is difficult for large companies. At the top of the list is the fact that their employees tend to be risk adverse and stay for a long time. While there are benefits to high employee retention rates, it also means they are reinforcing the same ideas over and over again.

The new ideas that are seen often only lead to incremental improvements, squeezing out a few basis points here or a few days off of a project schedule there. It’s common for a big company to make marginal improvements to a 20-year-old process rather than scrap it to adopt a newer system. They’d rather tweak a dinosaur that still functions than take a risk..

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Zafer Sahinoglu is a senior principal member of technical staff at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Mass. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2013.

Two years ago, I conducted research to develop fast charging stations for electric vehicles. Even though our business units in Japan were manufacturing and selling the entire components essential to build a charging station, our parent company was not interested in manufacturing pedestal charging stations. This puzzled me: Why was the company only producing the components? Why didn’t we build the entire charging station?

I found the answer in a Competitive Strategy course when I did a “Five Forces” analysis of the industry to identify the advantages and disadvantages of entering the charging...

Collaboration is the essence of globalization and managers play a critical role in sharing their knowledge across all of a company’s affiliates. Globalization is not about standardization and centralization, but rather about synergy and interdependence. As a result, going global (setting up country affiliates) and being global (sharing knowledge and best practices) are two very distinct states of being for businesses.

That said, there are many globalization frameworks companies can use as they move toward a regional or worldwide footprint. The question is: Which one is right for them? Should they develop customized tools for different locations, allowing for offices to respond to different markets’ needs (high national responsiveness)? Should they focus more on...

Charles Rizzo is CFO at John Hancock Mutual Funds in Boston, Mass. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2013.

What can an investing company learn from a huge retail store like Wal-Mart? As I saw from our leadership coursework, the answer is: a lot. From Wal-Mart’s concepts of sustainability to its constant focus on generating cost savings, improving operations, using data, and eliminating waste, the company’s business practices inspired me to think about how they could be applied to our businesses at John Hancock. 

I had been looking for a way to get my professional staff more engaged and connected to our business aside from their normal day-to-day responsibilities. I wanted to create a structure that would be fun and at the same time unlock their creative side...

I'm delighted to announce the graduation of our inaugural MIT Executive MBA class. This is a remarkable group of executives. They juggled demanding jobs and a rigorous academic program in order to gain the advanced management techniques needed to drive their careers and make significant impacts on their organizations and the world.

When these 62 students began this program two years ago, they arrived with an average of 17 years work experience, which is far more than in a typical EMBA program. More than half of the class already held an advanced degree, nearly three-quarters were in director-level positions or above, and 51% were based outside of New England with several commuting from other countries.

Results have been swift. Over half of the class has been promoted or taken...

Irshad Ahmed, is president and CEO of Pure Energy Corp. in Paramus, N.J. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

There are major changes happening in the biofuel industry. Public policy is aggressively attempting to shift our dependence away from nonrenewable energy sources. Our country’s goal is to produce and consume 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022 in order to decrease our usage of gasoline and diesel fuels. In other words, about 25% of our transportation liquid fuels need to come from renewable energy resources in the next 10 years.

While this is a huge and daunting challenge, it’s a great one to have and I’ve been applying my knowledge from MIT Sloan’s EMBA program to help my company lead the way in this area.

A New Business Model

I’m...

Tony Bacos is General Manager at Hubbub Health in Portland, Oregon and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2012.

Being a member of the inaugural MIT EMBA class of 2012 has nearly all been fantastic. For some of us (including me) the unpredictability and frontier nature was actually a big draw. One of the realities of going first at anything is that you have no point of reference - you can’t ask anyone who has walked the path before you, “So…what should I expect?”

While I won’t guarantee that I can provide a remotely helpful answer to that question for you, I can at least share a few of the things that I discovered along the way that helped me survive and thoroughly enjoy my EMBA journey. If you happen to be a ~40 year old technology exec who flies...

Willie Wu is managing director of PQD International in Plano, Texas and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2012.

As companies grow from local to global, there are a lot of critical decisions to make. They need to decide whether to retain their hub and spoke system – where the headquarters is the hub and regional offices are the spokes – or to embrace a distributed model, such as a “meta-national” with high global integration and national responsiveness as well as a strong emphasis on global knowledge sharing. They need to decide how people in each country will share knowledge and figure out a fair reward system.

Discussions on this topic both in classes and during our Global Organizations Lab (GO-Lab) resonated with me as my company is headquartered...

Shahriyar Rahmati is a vice president of the Gores Group in Los Angeles, CA and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

My day job is pretty amazing – I work with a group of highly intelligent, highly driven people at a private equity firm in Los Angeles.  I don’t lack opportunities to make impactful or important decisions. The key question for me is: Am I bringing the best thought leadership possible to bear on my decisions, and how do I make sure that I’m not just fishing from a pool of similar ideas and backgrounds and letting “group-think” assure the wisdom of my actions?

I came to MIT Sloan’s EMBA program to make me better as a thinker and as a business professional.  That sounds pretty philosophical, but you don’t want to be &...

Shawn Atlow is director of facilities, legislation, and grants and funding for the Los Angeles Unified School District in Los Angeles, Calif.  and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

Working for a government agency, I wasn’t sure how the MBA curriculum would apply to my job. It turns out to apply more than I ever imagined. Even the entrepreneurship classes have been right on target for the ways my organization needs to think and innovate, especially in light of the current economic environment. Here are a few examples:

Find a framework

A key step for entrepreneurs is finding a framework for evaluating opportunities. You need a way to filter the opportunities you’re considering to ensure that you offer value to your stakeholders/customers without wasting...

Nathaniel F. Wienecke is vice president of Global Government Relations at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Washington, DC and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

Compartmentalization is a human tendency. After all, when we’re at work, we think about work. When we’re at home, we focus on home. And when we’re at school we put our energy into studying. While we can apply a lot of what we learn in MIT Sloan’s EMBA program to our jobs, I wasn’t really expecting my system dynamics class to fit into my ‘compartment’ of government relations.

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However, the Organizations Lab (O-Lab) that we take midway through the program showed me not only that it does apply, but that it can significantly improve a process at my company.
O-Lab...

Shajahan Merchant is cofounder and managing partner of Intellectual Capital Services, Inc. in New York City and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2012.

When you go to Starbucks and order a mocha, it costs quite a bit more than a regular cup of coffee sold in that same store. Why is there such a price difference? Do the extra ingredients cost significantly more? Is a mocha much more labor intensive to make?

Discussing this question in our Economics class, the answer turned out to be none of the above. There is just a segment of the market that really likes mocha and is willing to pay more for it. So a good question to ask yourself is: How do I identify the “mocha” in our business? What product or service can we offer that consumers would be willing to pay more for?.

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Dave Markert is the founder and president of Tactical Systems Engineering in Newport, R.I. and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

As a Navy officer for more than 20 years, I didn’t have a lot of reasons to learn about venture capital, marketing strategy, or pricing. This all changed when I founded a defense engineering firm. I am now part of the MIT Executive MBA program and have some reflections on growing a business.

Start VC networking before you NEED it

When I retired from the Navy and founded an engineering firm, I thought our funding options were to bootstrap the startup or find a strategic partner – we’ve done both.
However, the lunchtime guest lectures at MIT Sloan, with entrepreneurs and VCs, have been incredibly eye opening. My company is...

Amjad Hussain is CEO of Silk Route, a global e-Commerce and supply chain solutions provider in Detroit, Mich., and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

When I started MIT Sloan’s EMBA program, I expected that my classes would include some business analytics, which is also my line of business. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that my core classes and electives exposed me to advanced topics in business analytics and systems dynamics. I found myself gaining new knowledge and refining my business.

Here are a few things every company can do when planning business analytics:

Get it all together

Many companies have massive amounts of data for the different aspects of their business, but it sits in silos separated by different systems. Getting it all together...

Liz Larsen is a management consultant in Boston, Mass. and member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.
 

It’s natural to think that if you just work harder, you can do more with less. In a world with increasing economic pressures, everyone wants to find ways to cut costs, and many managers are staffing projects with leaner teams than ever. Maybe they’d ideally like to have a team of 10 people assigned to a project, but think they can get away with only eight in order to save the company money. The outcome is fairly predictable: Projects inevitably fall behind and managers end up spending significantly more money and time in an attempt to help get them back on track – often two to three times the original budget

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What’s even more...

Jeff Thomas is vice president of instrument development at IDEXX Laboratories in Westbrook, Maine and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

It’s not unusual to see the price of new products go down over time. Look at the price of the first e-readers compared to the options available today. New products are refined over time to improve performance and enable production at higher volumes, which eventually leads to a lower price. When the topic of “learning curves” (the effects of learning) came up in our Microeconomics class, it was in the context of manufacturing environments.  Prof. Stokes discussed how cost savings arise from repetition of ongoing production. As companies learn through practice in manufacturing, they are able to lower their costs.

Here are...

Mo Hussain is the founder of Accel Mobile in Boston, Mass, and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2013.

I’m the founder of a mobile technology company and a few years ago, I found myself negotiating a potential multi-million dollar contract with the head of a telecom conglomerate overseas. The conglomerate was hesitant to sign the deal due to my company’s small size, but I finally found some leverage. I had reviewed their quarterly reports and the one line that I could understand involved the number of users, which was increasing but at a rate that was lower and lower each quarter. Pointing this out, I made the case for how my technology would provide an innovative solution, avoiding the trend towards a growth plateau, and they signed the deal. At that moment, I realized...

Megan Cramer, Ph.D., is the science and technology director for the US Navy's Program Executive Office (PEO) Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) in Washington, D.C. and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

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A significant part of my job for the U.S. Navy involves looking at both near- and far-term technologies and determining how to transition these technologies to our acquisition programs that will reach the Fleet. This technology analysis can be incredibly challenging given that in a particular week I might be looking at varying technologies such as that involving steel, software, sonars, radios, networks, autonomy, or unmanned vehicles. It is important to have a coherent framework to consider these very different technologies and to create a technology roadmap..

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