John Hagel - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by John Hagel

A Manager's Guide to the New World of Work, 2020

Insights from organizations that are navigating the novel challenges of the digital workplace. Ho... more Insights from organizations that are navigating the novel challenges of the digital workplace. How can technology and analytics help companies manage people? Why do teams working remotely still need leaders? When should organizations use digital assessment tools for gauging talent and potential? This book from MIT Sloan Management Review answers questions managers are only beginning to ask, presenting insights and stories from organizations navigating the novel challenges of the digital workplace. Experts from business and academia describe what's worked, what's failed, and what they've learned in the new world of work. They look at strategies that organizations use to help managers and employees adapt to the fast-changing digital environment, from the benefits of wool-gathering to the use of anonymous chats; examine digital tools for collaboration, including interactive spreadsheets and analytics that increase transparency; and discuss such “big-picture” trends as expan...

Harvard Business School Press eBooks, May 10, 1999

Companies collect information about customers to target valuable prospects more effectively, tail... more Companies collect information about customers to target valuable prospects more effectively, tailor their offerings to individual needs, improve customer satisfaction, and identify opportunities for new products or services. But managers' efforts to capture such information may soon be thwarted. The authors believe that consumers are going to take ownership of information about themselves and start demanding value in exchange for it. As a result, negotiating with customers for information will become costly and complex. How will that happen? Consumers are realizing that they get very little in exchange for the information they divulge so freely through their commercial transactions and survey responses. Now new technologies such as smart cards, World Wide Web browsers, and personal financial management software are allowing consumers to view comprehensive profiles of their commercial activities-- and to choose whether or not to release that information to companies. Their decision will hinge, in large part, on what vendors offer them in return for the data. Consumers will be unlikely to bargain with vendors on their own, however. The authors anticipate that companies they call infomediaries will broker information to businesses on consumers' behalf. In essence, infomediaries will be the catalyst for people to start demanding value in exchange for information about themselves. And most other companies will need to rethink how they obtain information and what they do with it if they want to find new customers and serve them better.

PubMed, Jul 1, 1999

No matter how monolithic they may seem, most companies are really engaged in three kinds of busin... more No matter how monolithic they may seem, most companies are really engaged in three kinds of businesses. One business attracts customers. Another develops products. The third oversees operations. Although organizationally intertwined, these businesses have conflicting characteristics. It takes a big investment to find and develop a relationship with a customer, so profitability hinges on achieving economies of scope. But speed, not scope, drives the economics of product innovation. And the high fixed costs of capital-intensive infrastructure businesses require economies of scale. Scope, speed, and scale can't be optimized simultaneously, so trade-offs have to be made when the three businesses are bundled into one corporation. Historically, they have been bundled because the interaction costs--the friction--incurred by separating them were too high. But we are on the verge of a worldwide reduction in interaction costs, the authors contend, as electronic networks drive down the costs of communicating and of exchanging data. Activities that companies have always believed were central to their businesses will suddenly be offered by new, specialized competitors that won't have to make trade-offs. Ultimately, the authors predict, traditional businesses will unbundle and then rebundle into large infrastructure and customer-relationship businesses and small, nimble product innovation companies. And executives in many industries will be forced to ask the most basic question about their companies: What business are we really in? Their answer will determine their fate in an increasingly frictionless economy.

Elsevier eBooks, 2000

ODD The Real Value of Online Communities&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&am... more ODD The Real Value of Online Communities&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; Arthur Armstrong and John Hagel III In this chapter, authors Armstrong and Hagel indicate that the Internet presents a social and economic opportunity for businesses to capitalize on electronic communities. While online ...

... to examine marketing strategies for these hybrid consumers. They recognize that the Internet ... more ... to examine marketing strategies for these hybrid consumers. They recognize that the Internet transformation is just beginning, and it promises to have far-reaching effects on consumer behavior and the practice of marketing. ...

The MIT Press eBooks, Jul 21, 2020

Gabler Verlag eBooks, 2000

Informationen uber Kunden Zusammenfassung gewinnen und sie fur wirtschaftliche Zwecke Zusammenfas... more Informationen uber Kunden Zusammenfassung gewinnen und sie fur wirtschaftliche Zwecke Zusammenfassung nutzen, ist nichts Neues. Ganze Branchen — beispielsweise das Direkt-Marketing- und das Kreditauskunftsgeschaft — bauen darauf auf. Aber der Infomediar sollte nicht mit anderen Unternehmen in einen Topf geworfen arden, die ebenfalls mit Kundeninformationen handeln.

The McKinsey Quarterly, 1994

... Competitive dynamics are likely to lead to substantial network overcapacity in the next ... T... more ... Competitive dynamics are likely to lead to substantial network overcapacity in the next ... This situation is made worse by the ability of wireless competitors to siphon off ... transport providers will soon increase, and a significant reassessment of network deployment strategies will take ...

The McKinsey Quarterly, Sep 22, 1994

How multimedia "gateways" develop will define, for years to come, many industries' ... more How multimedia "gateways" develop will define, for years to come, many industries' ability to create - and destroy - value Interactive multimedia is contagious. The trajectory and timing of its development will transform not only technology providers, but an increasingly broad range of other industries as well, including retailing, advertising, and financial services. The key agents of this transformation will be so-called "gateway businesses" - the suppliers, like CompuServe or Prodigy or America Online, of navigation assistance to end users seeking to locate resources available through the electronic network. Although standalone gateways today are largely limited to computers, they will soon be widely available on other platforms such as TVs, set-top boxes, portable access devices, and even screen-based telephones. At present, these gateways represent a fairly small revenue stream - less than US$800 million in 1994. Most of that revenue is concentrated in the United States, with a few notable exceptions such as the Minitel network in France. Nonetheless, the choices that the managers of these businesses make today will deeply enhance - or erode - the opportunities that managers of other businesses will have to create value in the future. Today a gateway is often tightly bundled with another business. The dial tone you hear when you pick up a phone and the number you enter on a telephone key pad represent elements of a simple but powerful gateway to the telephone network. Similarly, the on-screen program guides starting to appear on cable networks represent a gateway to the universe of cable. Over time, as the diversity of electronic networks and the resources they offer grow exponentially, so will the navigational value of a gateway service. The much-vaunted 500 channels on a full-service broadband network, for instance, would be useless without effective navigation assistance - and that is only one among the many networks that are likely to be available. Providers of all kinds recognize this opportunity and are maneuvering to become the gateway of choice for end users. Some - such as telephone and cable companies - assume that gateways will be tightly bundled with the networks themselves. Others - such as Microsoft and Delphi - are working to build standalone gateways that will operate across many networks. Both groups are eagerly pitching their gateways to multifarious content and service providers in an effort to expand the resources that their gateway can supply - and, if possible, to offer things not available elsewhere. A question of outcomes How will all this evolve? Many different outcomes are both possible and plausible. The potential revenue of the retail gateway service business in the United States in the year 2000, for example, could be anywhere from zero (if these services become tightly bundled with the communications network), to as much as $13 billion (if independent gateways succeed in capturing subscribers and delivering advertising to them). Moreover, the roles that such a service might play also vary widely. It could become no more than an interesting packaged software business or a "loss leader" to generate traffic on communications networks. But it could equally well become a critical distribution bottleneck through which content providers must pass to reach their audience - and through which advertisers must pass to deliver their messages. The challenge for senior managers, therefore, is to understand the range of possible outcomes and assess the implications of each one for their particular business. This challenge applies not only to companies that aspire to become gateways themselves, but also to those that are being courted by the gateways. Traditional media companies, such as magazine and newspaper publishers, are already being approached to adapt their content for specific gateways; so are retailers and banks. The choices these companies make in the next 12 to 18 months will have a profound effect on their own futures - as well as on how gateway businesses will themselves evolve. …

Harvard Business Review, 2003

Harvard Business Review, 2005

Las empresas se estan volviendo cada vez mas dependientes de sus socios comerciales, pero los cos... more Las empresas se estan volviendo cada vez mas dependientes de sus socios comerciales, pero los costos de coordinarse con terceros les estan pasando la cuenta. Negociar condiciones, monitorear el desempeno y, si las necesidades no son satisfechas, cambiar de socio, son esfuerzos que requieren tiempo y dinero. Tales costos de transaccion, explico Ronald Coase en su ensayo de 1937 ?La naturaleza de la empresa?, impulsaron a muchas organizaciones a realizar sus actividades internamente. Pero ?y si Coase hubiese puesto demasiado enfasis en esos costos? ?Si la friccion entre las empresas pudiese ser productiva? En efecto, las interacciones entre organizaciones pueden generar benefi cios mas alla de los bienes o servicios contratados, dicen los autores. Las empresas mejoran en lo que hacen al trabajar con terceros cuyas capacidades complementan las propias. Diferentes empresas aportan diferentes perspectivas y competencias. Cuando estas empresas se combinan para atacar un problema, aumentan el potencial de soluciones innovadoras. Por supuesto, muchas veces surgen desacuerdos cuando personas con diferente formacion y diferentes conjuntos de habilidades tratan de colaborar. Bandos opuestos podrian enfocarse en la distancia que los separa en lugar de los desafios comunes que enfrentan. ?Como pueden las empresas aprovechar la friccion de forma que acelere el aprendizaje y desarrolle capacidades? Comience articulando metas de desempeno claras aceptadas por todos. Luego asegurese de que la gente use prototipos tangibles sobre los cuales discutir. Finalmente, forme equipos con personas comprometidas que traigan diferentes perspectivas a la mesa. A medida que se abordan los problemas individuales, procure que los fundamentos de sentido compartido y confi anza tambien formen un tejido entre las empresas. Ninguno de los dos puede ser impuesto, pero defi nitivamente pueden ser cultivados para crecer mas rapido.

The McKinsey Quarterly, Mar 22, 1994

A brief introduction to the most common assumptions that lead astray efforts to boost performace.... more A brief introduction to the most common assumptions that lead astray efforts to boost performace. THE GAP SEEMS to grow ever wider between the strategies required to compete effectively and the capabilities needed to execute those strategies. Organizations designed in -- and for -- a stable environment can easily grow into unwieldy barriers to performance improvement when the environment becomes turbulent. One CEO described the result as being like "running a slalom race in cement." Most know the feeling. As the demand for performance ratchets upward, many top managers have tried to lead their companies toward some more responsive form of organization -- only to find the route as problematic as the goal was elusive. Their wish indeed, their need -- to organize for better performance was perfectly reasonable. But the path chosen was not. All too often, the critical process of determining which route to follow was silently, but effectively, thrown off course by one of several common fallacies about how best to get from here to there. How often have you heard, for example, that ... ... "We ought to be able to 'leapfrog' to the kind of organization we need" Once a company's strategy has been agreed, there is a strong temptation to move quickly to align the organizational elements necessary to implement it. After all, as everyone knows, structure follows strategy. Why wait? One very important reason: since the organizational implications of these strategies now often extend far beyond mere tweaks at the margin of a business to rather massive overhauls, there is a need to translate them into enough painstaking, nuts-and-bolts detail for them actually to be implemented. One new strategy, for example, called for a company to develop a much simpler and more responsive customer interface. On the surface the implied marching orders were relatively straightforward: simplify our processes for interacting with customers and make them more responsive to their shifting needs. But what does this really mean in practice? Does it mean consolidating all relevant activities into one organizational unit or, at the extreme, into the charter of one individual? Or does it mean preserving existing functional specialization, but linking the relevant players more tightly through better information and performance measurement systems? Either way, which activities need to be performed at the customer interface and which can be managed off-line? Moreover, how can the company responsibly leap to key decisions about organization design before these microlevel questions --- and many others like them -- get answered? How can it even hope to do so without sorting through its managers' differing agendas for -- and biases about -- the way the business "ought" to be run? It can't. In this particular case, the Vice President of Sales took the strong position that, since Sales represented the primary customer interface, all activities involving customer contact should be consolidated into his organization. Not surprisingly, the Vice Presidents of Marketing, Manufacturing, and Distribution all opposed this view and argued that sufficient coordination could be achieved through other means. Each marshaled compelling arguments and repeatedly referred back to the broad statement of strategy as justification for his position. The debate grew sufficiently emotional that each began to view any counter-arguments as personal attacks. Even when such emotion does not come to the surface, it usually roils the waters just below. If agreement comes easily, it is often because the discussion remains at such a high level of generality that multiple interpretations of what has been agreed are not only possible, but virtually certain. And that, in turn, virtually guarantees endless skirmishing at lower levels of the organization, out of sight of the CEO, as implementation proceeds. Not surprisingly, the organizational outcomes that emerge from such skirmishing rarely correspond to the true performance needs of the strategy. …

The McKinsey Quarterly, Jun 22, 1996

How online marketing could shift the balance of power loan scenarios A key issue information liqu... more How online marketing could shift the balance of power loan scenarios A key issue information liquidity Future competitors will include these who might capture information you want The history of consumer marketing during the past two decades reflects a growing realization that information about customers is a key competitive asset. Airlines have spearheaded the development of loyalty programs, which offer valuable incentives to airline passengers in return for the ability to capture much more detailed profiles of frequent flyers. Banks have invested heavily to integrate information systems that facilitate access to broad activity profiles of customer across the major product categories offered by a bank. Credit information bureaus have compiled detailed credit histories of individual consumers. And retailers have developed point-of-sale information to track product movements and improve merchandising and promotion programs. Yet much of the information marketers want most about consumers has nearly always been out of reach. When is a consumer going to make a purchase? What is the precise impact of advertising on that decision? What (and how much) are consumers buying from competitors and across categories? Online markets (e.g., the World Wide Web or proprietary online services such as America Online or CompuServe) hold the potential to allow consumer marketers to answer these questions for the first time. They can provide better visibility of what consumers are buying, when they're buying it, and from whom they're buying it. They can give transparency to consumers' intent to purchase, and to their "demonstrated preference" for certain categories and brands over others. Best of all, they can bring information to marketers in real time, while it is still of use. Companies best able to capture this information and use it strategically will see market power shift their way as improved information flows allow them to select the most desirable customers and to better target them when they've signaled an intent to purchase. Already a new breed of network-based intermediaries is positioning to accomplish this information capture by aggregating people and resources on networks. Once these aggregations reach critical mass, the new intermediaries will be well positioned to create and capture value by leveraging rich profiles of consumer and vendor activities. Customers may also play an important role - to the extent they begin to reclaim ownership of their own information - thereby transforming what is today a "free" asset into an increasingly expensive asset to acquire. The implication for companies of all stripes is that they must begin to pursue explicit information-capture strategies addressing issues of targeting, capturing, leveraging, and competing for information about consumers. These strategies must in turn reflect a thorough understanding of the range of potential scenarios by which a still immature online marketplace is developing. Information constraints in physical marketplaces The competitive value of information has long been limited by the types and amount of information actually available in physical marketplaces. Vendors in physical markets, for example, often find that their "window" on transaction histories tends to be limited to their own customers. For example, United Airlines can identify a business traveler who flies extensively on United and selectively upgrade service to that traveler to increase loyalty to United. It has much less ability to identify an American Airlines frequent flyer who happened to book a flight on United. From United's perspective, this passenger appears as a relatively uninteresting passenger because she doesn't appear to travel much; therefore she would not receive special attention or service. If United had access to integrated travel profiles of all its passengers (even people who have never flown United before), it could be much more effective in targeting and serving highly profitable business travelers. …

The McKinsey Quarterly, Dec 22, 2002

Companies in every sector have streamlined their internal processes by integrating systems and el... more Companies in every sector have streamlined their internal processes by integrating systems and eliminating the manual activities once needed to coordinate the flow of information across the enterprise. Streamlining processes that involve interactions between companies has been more difficult, however: the automated connections that they currently forge with one another can funnel only certain types of information and require negotiations over the value of these expensive connections. Web services--new technologies that spring from the Internet and are used mostly to automate linkages among applications--might at last make such connections not only possible but also easy and cheap. Today, connecting systems inside a company (a procurement system and a finance system, say) can require the IT staff to write customized code that "glues" them together. Making connections between companies and their applications exponentially increases the job's complexity and cost. But thanks to the emergence of Web services, programmers can now write a layer of software that sits on top of an application and connects it to any other Web services-friendly application quickly, cheaply, and flexibly. In the new book Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow through Web Services, McKinsey alumnus John Ha gel argues that companies will use these technologies first at the "edge" of the enterprise--where business activities involve communications and transactions with other organizations, such as trading partners and customers. Companies that had better and cheaper connections with one another could gain cost savings in the short term and look forward in the longer term to collaborating more innovatively to give customers more value. The editors In the decade ahead, companies will pursue strategic opportunities and performance improvements abetted by a new generation of technologies called Web services. Such companies will adopt this novel approach at the edge of their enterprises, where they bump up against customers, dealers, and suppliers, as well as in activities requiring frequent interaction with any number of people and organizations--activities like customer support, marketing, procurement, and sales. As a result, these companies will forge connections among existing systems and applications less expensively and more rapidly and flexibly than they can using today's conventional technologies. Automating the flow of information between a company and its business partners has always been difficult and expensive. Many interactions thus require human intervention--for instance, employees who key into corporate systems the data retrieved from business partners through faxes, telephone calls, or even lists printed out from the systems of other companies--a practice that leads to human error. Furthermore, many companies maintain larger stocks of inventory than they really need, because the flow of information among partners in the value chains of most sectors just isn't efficient enough. Since activities near the edge of businesses abound in inefficiency, the opportunities for creating near-term value from Web services are substantial there, which makes it likely that companies will apply them in this way before using them to knit together core internal systems. Until now, though, integrating the systems of one company with those of its partners has been less feasible than integrating internal systems. Web services promise to change that. Better connections among trading partners are going to mean that companies will be able not only to streamline their edge activities but also to collaborate on improving internal processes, such as product development. But the real long-term prize of business collaboration lies in mobilizing the assets of partners to deliver more value to their customers. When cooperation among different businesses resembles the activity of a network, they can increasingly focus on innovation in their core activities, and the network becomes more efficient and flexible in what it can offer. …

PubMed, Jul 28, 2009

Traditional metrics don't capture many of the challenges and opportunities in store for U.S. comp... more Traditional metrics don't capture many of the challenges and opportunities in store for U.S. companies and the national economy. The authors, from Deloitte, present a framework for understanding the forces that have transformed business over the past 40 years--and an index for gauging their impact on performance.

The McKinsey Quarterly, Mar 22, 1997

... Banks that fear these entrants are seeking to enter the retail banking business miss the poin... more ... Banks that fear these entrants are seeking to enter the retail banking business miss the point. ... Like the other type of new entrant, these players have no interest in entering the banking business - at least, not as traditionally defined. ...

Harvard Business Review, 2002

THE TRADITIONAL ROUTES to business growth-organic expansion and acquisition-share a common requir... more THE TRADITIONAL ROUTES to business growth-organic expansion and acquisition-share a common requirement; investment in proprietary assets. To grow organically, you build new assets. To grow through acquisition, you buy them. Either way, you own them. But the need to own assets-whether they're physical ones like factiories and machinery or intangible ones like information and skills-is precisely what makes traditional growth strategies so risky. You have to make your investment up front, but the payoff doesn't come until later, sometimes much later. The pursuit of growth, therefore, almos always entails a narrowing of margins-for a eime or, in the worst case, forever. But there is another kind of growth strategy, one that involves substantially less risk and offers the potential of an immediate and sustainable boost not only in sales but in profitability. This strategy, which I call leveraged growth, begins with the realization that it is not always necessary.

Journal of service science, Jul 1, 2008