GitHub, a software company from San Francisco has been known for years for its unorthodox approach to managing. The company eschewed formal hierarchy and instead allowed its employees to work on projects that they deemed interesting and important. Many of the employees, including the founders, have for a long timed praised the boss-less structure as a source of company’s success in numerous blogs, presentations, and articles. One day, however, in early 2014 the company decided to make a sharp turnaround andintroduced traditional hierarchy. GitHub 2.0, as we may call it, is a vastly different place from the point of view of how the company approaches project selection and allocation of resources. In the recent article in the Journal of Organization Design we invited some of the most prominent management scholars to discuss the GitHub’s case. Our aim was to understand the benefits and limits of a boss-less organizational form, as well as the implications of the radical reorganization for the company itself and lessons we may draw from it about general principles of organizing.

Note: the article has also been featured on the journal's website and blog.

Recently a paper I wrote with Vikas A. Aggarwal (INSEAD) and Hart Posen (University of Wisconsin) on adaptive capacity to technological change has been published at Strategic Management Journal (SMJ). In that paper we claim that dynamic capabilities may not be the only rescue for incumbent organizations when technological change renders their products and services obsolete. The very processes of learning and experimentation that give raise to firm's routines and processes determine how easy it is for the organization to adapt to change, i.e., the degree of firm's adaptive capacity. The SMJ article was subsequently "translated" to a more practitioner-friendly version here and here. It is always interesting to see how some basic insights from a stylized and formal modeling exercise can shed light on some essential managerial problems.

Prodded by Phanish Puranam, together with my fellow INSEAD PhD colleagues (Julien Clement, Sunkee Lee, and Daniel Mack) we have developed and launched a new website for the behavioral strategy community – the Behavioral Strategy Wiki. The website’s main purpose is to provide a quick overview and introduction to the subject of behavioral strategy, which we define as “approach to studying traditional strategic management problems, that aims to draw on evidence rather than assumptions about human behavior, in its theorizing. “

The key feature of the website is an interactive literature matrix, which gives a visitor a representative sample of papers from the intersection of concepts (e.g. Alliances, Divestitures, Incentives) and phenomena (e.g. Aspiration Adjustments, Emotions, Learning). The list of papers should give a visitor a quick introduction to the subject, and the matrix itself highlights “hot” and “cold” zones in the research landscape.

Visitors are invited to contribute to the website and to make suggestions in terms of additional articles to include in the matrix. We hope the website will become a useful tool for the academic community. Send me an email if you want to know more about the initiative.

Making sense of a vast set of literature is always a challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience. It helps to put often disjoint work into perspective and find hidden connections and tensions that normally escape our attention. It is an especially illuminating exercise when the subject of an analysis is someone life's work and few scholars can be so engaging in their work as James G. March. In preparation for an interview with Professor March, together with my friend Jiyang Dong, we read and summarized as many books and papers by James March as we could find. Then we went one step further and made two maps of the literature to guide us through the vast literature.

I learned the technique of mapping literature in the first year of my PhD during the course taught by Gabriel Szulanski. He explained the technique to us and I have been using it ever since. Maps are to some extent personal, as they reflect the creator's interpretation of the subject, which may not always be what the author of the mapped work intended. Yet, I think someone's maps may still be helpful as a road map to understanding a given subject.

The links in this paragraph will take you to two maps. The assigns books and papers by James March to a "Circle of Choice" framework (by James March and Johan Olsen). The is an interpretation of the grand theory that we have stitched together from all the ideas published over the years. Finally, the list gives you the titles of the publications corresponding to the numbers on the Theory Map.

My INSEAD colleagues Amy Ding Zhao and Leena Kinger Hans recently interviewed Dan Levinthal (Wharton) at the Strategic Management Society’s Annual Conference in Denver. The conversation is another installment in the Foundations Session series, where PhD students interview accomplished scholars who shaped the field of knowledge and innovation research. They have done a wonderful job summarizing Dan’s work and making it a very interesting interview. You can watch the entire interview here.