Executive Insights Blog

Rosalind Sullivan is chief financial officer of Cenegenics® Health in Las Vegas, NV. and a member of the MIT Executive MBA class of 2013.

A lot of companies price their products and services incorrectly. As a result, they leave money on the table, or they overcharge and drive away customers.

In a recent Pricing class, I learned just how much price can impact the bottom li ...

Rob Nachtrieb is lead scientist at Lutron Electronics, chair of the controls section of the NEMA Lighting Systems Division, and a technical advisor to USNC of the IEC. He is a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012 and has co-taught System Dynamics with Prof. John Sterman.

System dynamics is a powerful tool with applications in every industry. It can be used for a range of purposes f ...

Amit Varma is the Sr. Product Marketing Manager at High Connection Density in Sunnyvale, CA. and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2014.

Management requires a lot of skills, but one skill is often underrated but critical to success: the skill of influence without authority. A unique challenge exists when you own a deliverable, yet you do not manage the people who are directly r ...

Brian Harrison is the director of insurance and financial planning marketing at Commonwealth Financial Network in Boston, MA and a member of the MIT Execuitve MBA class of 2014.

In his bestselling book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini dedicates a chapter to the notion of commitment and consistency, illuminating “our nearly obsessive desire to be (and app ...

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.

In the military, there is a saying that when you’re flying an airplane at 400 knots, you had better be thinking at least at 401 knots. The point is that you always need to be thinking one step ahead of the jet or something bad will happen. ...

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.

When new graduates tell us that the MIT EMBA program has transformed them, they don’t just mean the curriculum. They are talking about the entire experience, inside and outside the classroom, on and off campus. So when we design the program, we ...

Mike Keogh is former Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Strategy for CompuCom in Dallas, TX. and a member of the MIT Executive MBA class of 2013.

The IT industry is going through a major change with the rise of the cloud computing paradigm. I’m seeing this first-hand in my business, which is in the IT infrastructure outsourcing space. This change is going to disrupt some cu ...

Frank Golding is a director (Head of Sport, North America) for Google/YouTube in New York City and a member of the MIT Executive MBA class of 2013.

On YouTube, everyone is a sports fan. It’s just a matter of degree. Anyone may drop in for an instant and become avidly engaged with a sport topic. I call this moment, “instant avidity.” At some point, every one of the 8 ...

Dr. Carlos Rueda is chairman and medical director of the Department of Psychiatry at the Orange Regional Medical Center and Catskill Regional Medical Center in Orange County, NY. He also is a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

When I negotiate, there is a lot more at stake than money. My negotiations are with mentally ill patients — who are often inherently distrustful ...

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 ...

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. Additio ...

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 ...

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 th ...

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 ch ...

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 m ...