Tag Archives: Amazon

An ‘unrecognizable’ Seattle: One MIT geek’s take on the ‘rainy’ city — Philip Simko, MBA ’14

Philip Simko, MBA ’14

From GeekWire

Having grown up in Portland, I didn’t really think anything would come as much of a surprise during my career trek to Seattle with MIT Sloan’s Tech Club. After all, I had visited Seattle many times with my family over the years.

While some of my classmates were shocked at things like the weather (yes, the sun does shine here), the silent traffic (no horns!), and the abundance of coffee shops, I knew to expect these things.

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Philip Simko is a first-year student in MIT Sloan’s MBA program and vice president of treks for MIT Sloan’s High Tech Club. He is currently working as an intern at Wellframe in Boston, and is interested in working in the high-tech field

Leading Your Company’s Digital Transformation — George Westerman

From Sloan Management Review


George Westerman (MIT Center for Digital Business), interviewed by Michael Fitzgerald
October 29, 2012

Big traditional companies get overlooked when it comes to digital transformation. But companies across all industry sectors are remaking their operations, their customer interactions, and even their business models. George Westerman tells us how they’re doing it, whether they are technology champions or beginners.

Read more from MIT Sloan Management Review about Digital Transformation

George Westerman is a research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business

Erik Brynjolfsson on Big Data: A revolution in decision-making improves productivity

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

There is a fundamental change underway in the way that companies make decisions. Instead of relying on a leader’s gut instincts, an increasing number of companies are embracing a new method that involves data-based analytics. This ‘Big Data’ revolution is occurring mainly because technology enables firms to gather extremely detailed information from and propagate knowledge to their consumers, suppliers, alliance partners, and competitors.

Companies that use this type of ‘data driven decision making’ actually show higher performance. Working with Lorin Hitt and Heekyung Kim, I analyzed 179 large publicly-traded firms and found that the ones that adopted this method are about 5% more productive and profitable than their competitors.  Furthermore, the study found a relationship between this method and other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for companies that are able to use Big Data to their advantage. Read More »

From Data to Decisions: Lessons from Davos, 2012

We are at the beginning of the Big Data era, and there is widespread anticipation that this will be a huge benefit to companies. I’ve been attending the World Economic Forum in Davos and in my `Data to Decisions’ panel we heard CEOs tell how Big Data can reinvent everything from CRM to internal processes to product design.

We also heard that there are significant challenges in data sourcing, permission agreements, data quality and of course privacy concerns, as most Big Data is personal data about customers. Fortunately these challenges can be addressed by conventional business practices.

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MIT Sloan MBA Areta Shum on the Seattle "Tech Trek"

After a fun and rigorous core semester, it’s finally winter break, but I’m not hitting the slopes or soaking up the sun on a beach somewhere warm. Instead, I signed up to go to Seattle with 17 other MIT Sloan students on a technology career trek. While this may sound like an unusual way to spend our vacation time, it’s actually a great opportunity for MBA students to learn more about the technology industry and what it would be like to work for a tech company.

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