HBS:Most Popular Articles of 2011

Here are the Top 10 most-read articles that appeared in HBS Working Knowledge in 2011. As you reflect on the trends of yesteryear, we ask that you also turn your thoughts to 2012. What do you think will be the top areas of concern for managers in the coming months? Please share your thoughts in the comments section, and have a happy new year!

2011 Top 10 stories: (# unique visitors)

What CEOs Do, and How They Can Do it Better (29,119)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6665.html
Published: April 25, 2011
A CEO's schedule is especially important to a firm's financial success, which raises a few questions: What do they do all day? Can they be more efficient time managers? HBS professor Raffaella Sadun and colleagues set out to find some answers.
Being the Boss (26,224)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6573.html
Published: January 17, 2011
Striking the right balance between good management and good leadership is a daunting but necessary challenge for anyone endeavoring to be a good boss. In Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, Harvard Business School professor Linda A. Hill and former executive Kent Lineback discuss the steps to take and the roadblocks to avoid in order to meet that challenge.
Is Groupon Good for Retailers? (25,712)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6600.html
Published: January 10, 2011
For retailers offering deals through the wildly popular online start-up Groupon, does the one-day publicity compensate for the deep hit to profit margins? A new working paper, "To Groupon or Not to Groupon," sets out to help small businesses decide. Harvard Business School professor Benjamin G. Edelman discusses the paper's findings
Teaching a 'Lean Startup' Strategy (24,997)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6659.html
Published: April 11, 2011
Most startups fail because they waste too much time and money building the wrong product before realizing too late what the right product should have been, says HBS entrepreneurial management professor Thomas R. Eisenmann. In his new MBA course, Launching Technology Ventures, Eisenmann introduces students to the idea of the lean startup—a methodology that has proven successful for many young high-tech companies.
Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (24,877)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html
Published: February 14, 2011
About 95 percent of new products fail. The problem often is that their creators are using an ineffective market segmentation mechanism, according to HBS professor Clayton Christensen. It's time for companies to look at products the way customers do: as a way to get a job done.
Are You a Level-Six Leader? (23,834)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6752.html
Published: July 6, 2011
Asking the question, whom do you serve? is a powerful vector on which to build a useful typology of leadership. Visiting professor Modesto Maidique offers a six-level Purpose-Driven Model of Leadership ranging from Sociopath to Transcendent.
HBS Cases: Lady Gaga (22,795)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6812.html
Published: September 26, 2011
What goes into creating the world's largest pop star? Before her fame hit, Lady Gaga's manager faced decisions that could have derailed the performer's career. A new case by Associate Professor Anita Elberse examines the strategic marketing choices that instead created a global brand.
Why Leaders Lose Their Way (21,651)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6741.html
Published: June 6, 2011
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is just the latest in a string of high-profile leaders making the perp walk. What went wrong, and how can we learn from it? Professor Bill George discusses how powerful people lose their moral bearings. To stay grounded executives must prepare themselves to confront enormous complexities and pressures.
It's Not Nagging: Why Persistent, Redundant Communication Works (18,159)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6629.html
Published: April 18, 2011
Managers who inundate their teams with the same messages, over and over, via multiple media, need not feel bad about their persistence. In fact, this redundant communication works to get projects completed quickly, according to new research by Harvard Business School professor Tsedal B. Neeley and Northwestern University's Paul M. Leonardi and Elizabeth M. Gerber.
The Most Powerful Workplace Motivator (17,348)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6792.html
Published: October 31, 2011
When evaluating compensation issues, economists often assume that both an employer and an employee make rational, albeit self-interested choices while working toward a goal. The problem, says Assistant Professor Ian Larkin, is that the most powerful workplace motivator is our natural tendency to measure our own performance against the performance of others.
Source:Internet

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Smartphone Battery Breakthrough Coming … In 3 to 5 Years

Although iPhone 4S battery drain was a real problem, it also brought up the need for a smartphone battery breakthrough--something so significant that you'll never have to worry about getting through the day on a single charge, even if the battery's not behaving properly.
The good news is that a true breakthrough is on the way, and promises week-long battery life and 15-minute recharge times. The bad news is that this technology is still three to five years away from the market.
Researchers at Northwestern University worked with the same lithium-ion batteries found in today's smartphones. But by layering clusters of silicon in between the graphene sheets that make up one side of the battery--known as the anode--the researchers were able to pack in a lot more lithium.
Scientists have already tried using silicon as a replacement for carbon-based graphene sheets but, in previous approaches, it expanded and contracted too dramatically, causing fragmentation that reduced capacity. Apparently the sandwiching of silicon between graphene solves that problem.
The researchers also poked tiny holes in the graphene, providing a shortcut for the lithium to travel through and be stored by a reaction with the silicon. Essentially, the unique use of silicon is solving two problems at once.
This breakthrough sounds particularly interesting to me because it's still based on lithium ion batteries. When I last ranted about smartphone battery life when the iPhone 4S faced problems, I pointed to new approaches like kinetic charging, photovoltaic cells or lithium-sulfur batteries. But Northwestern researchers aren't working on entirely new methods. They're just drastically improving the type of batteries that smartphones use already. Let's hope it gets to the real world in time for the iPhone 6S.

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IP address can now pin down your location to within a half mile

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog—but they might now have an easy time finding your kennel.
In a research paper and technical report presented at the USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NDSI) conference at the beginning of April, researchers from Northwestern University presented new methods for estimating the exact physical location of an IP address tens or hundreds of times more accurately than previously thought possible. The technique builds on existing approaches but adds a new element: it uses local businesses, government agencies, and educational institutions as landmarks, helping it achieve a median accuracy of just 690m—less than half a mile.
The researchers, led by Yong Wang, used a variety of statistical techniques to combine data from 163 public ping servers and 136 traceroute servers into a precise estimate of the range of possible physical locations for a particular IP address. They state that, despite the large number of data sources they need to combine, their technique is capable of real-time use, giving results in just one or two seconds in real-world applications. The novel technique uses several iterations to successively hone in on a target's location.

How it works

Step one: a signal travels through optical cables at about two-thirds the speed of light, which drops down to about four-ninths the speed of light once you account for queuing at uncongested routers. The researchers' first iteration takes advantage of this fact by pinging the targeted address from multiple servers, then recording the amount of time that it takes a signal to return. Since the servers have known locations, this method of absolute timing results in a selection of circles around the ping servers; and the target must lie within the area where all of these circles overlap.
At this point, the researchers have a pretty good idea of the general area of the target address, (to within several miles) so they can start homing in by looking for local landmarks.
Step two: a selection of points within the possible area are selected, and these geographic points are converted into their corresponding postal ZIP codes. For each ZIP code found, a commercial mapping service is used to guess at a variety of possible businesses, schools, and other institutions in the area. The researchers are looking for locations that publish their street address on their website and also host their website from that same physical address. The websites of the candidate business are scraped, looking for a street address.
Meanwhile, a couple of clever techniques are used to weed out websites that are hosted by a CDN, on a shared hosting service, or otherwise located away from the physical address. The resulting places are very important landmarks, because they combine a known location on the network with a precise geographic point.
Step three: now that the researchers have reliable pairs of IP and physical addresses, they can start searching for Internet backbone routers in the vicinity. They send traceroute requests from as many servers as possible to both the nearby landmarks and to the target IP address. Comparing some of these traces and the geographic locations of the known landmarks, they can deduce which nearby routers are connected to both the target and the landmark.
Then, using timing data from the pings, they eliminate congested routers which add too much delay to be reliable sources of distance data. The time it takes these nearby routers to ping the target allows for another, more fine-grained set of circles which constrain the target's location again, this time down to the area of just a few city blocks.
It turns out that physical distances vary in close proportion with relative ping times of nearby landmarks. The researchers can look at a particular router and see how long it takes pings through that router to reach landmarks and the target. The relative ping times can then be translated into quite accurate local distances. Now, the research team can guess how close the target is to the small number of landmarks which remain in the possible area, and associate its physical location with that of the nearest, most reliable landmark.
This final analysis gives a very good guess at the target's location: the median estimate is about 690m away from the target's actual position. That's almost close enough to send in the black helicopters—or the lawyers.

Here come the ads

The most important part of the research is that the method described is completely client independent: it doesn't require any particular software on (or even permission from) the computer being targeted. This makes it particularly valuable to advertisers, who can now choose to target ads for the burger joint down the street or the record shop a block over.
But the technique also has some serious privacy implications. Before this, turning an IP address into a truly accurate location required a lot of work and some human interaction. With this method, the barriers to accessing real location data are considerably lower.

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