On Dec. 14th, Dr. Ben Shields, Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management, delivered a three-hour online lecture “Digital Transformation in Sports, Media, and Entertainment”for Fudan IMBA students.
Dr. Shields was impressed by the creativity of the Fudan students. “They were highly engaged during the lecture. When I gave them a couple of exercises that encourage them to think creatively about a set of business problems, they came back with fresh, interesting, engaging ideas. They were willing to offer comments and ideas in chat that move the discussion forward in positive ways. I enjoyed my time greatly with them during the lecture.”
After the lecture, Dr. Shields shared his personal experience towards online communication during the pandemic, as well as his keen observation on lessons to be taken from the practice of innovation and management in face of this crisis.
Efficient online communication
Dr. Shields first revealed that he has been utilizing three tools to prioritize connecting personally with the various members of his community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
1.Video conferencing It’s important for him to communicate not only with words, but also through nonverbal communication. He has also used video for asynchronous communication, just like the video he created for Fudan IMBA students in advance of the lecture.
2.Messaging or chat He has been using Slack to message with students quickly and with less friction.
3.To structure unstructured time a principle he learned from Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School. Before and after meetings or classes, he often sets aside some time to talk with others about what's going on in their lives or address any unanswered questions, so as to recreate water cooler conversations in a virtual environment.
Necessity of Self-disruption
Since the pandemic, we have seen many changes that are both money-saving and eco-friendly. We asked Dr. Shields, in his opinion, since the technology had been ready for some time before the pandemic, why didn’t we set out for such beneficial changes earlier, and why do we always hesitate to innovate or to apply technology in business?
“What we’ve seen in the pandemic is that when the market conditions are right, innovation can happen quickly.”Dr. Shields pointed out. “Unfortunately, for all of its negatives, the pandemic has in some respects given opportunities to innovate faster out of necessity for some organizations. To me, the key is that organizations need to constantly work on disrupting themselves, meaning that they should always think about new innovations. Then when the market conditions change, they can be in position to deploy the innovation, to accelerate it going forward.”
A good example of this concept was included in his lecture for Fudan students: Walt Disney company's decision to pursue the direct-to-consumer streaming strategy. The company has built over time a very healthy media networks business. They've also seen that consumer behavior is changing: consumers now prefer to stream their entertainment content online. So a year ago, Disney launched Disney+. When the pandemic hit though, it accelerated their streaming business to new heights.
Dr. Shields believes business schools and organizations can learn an important lesson from this: “Allocate a small team to think about ways that you could disrupt yourself, and experiment with those ways, so that you are always ready to apply some of the ideas to take advantage of changes in the market conditions.”
Post-pandemic innovation opportunities
When asked about the possibility of over-innovation during the pandemic, and what management can do about it, Dr. Shields explained that the current situation should be understood as experimentation by necessity. So when the pandemic does subside, it’s going to be necessary for leaders to take a look at those experiments and decide what worked and what to keep. “For example I think it's safe to assume that something like contactless delivery could become more prevalent within sports stadiums. That's an example of something that has become more popularized in the pandemic, but might stick around after the pandemic is over.”
Then he put forward his observation that there's going to be interesting innovation opportunities in all kinds of industries, where organizations can integrate offline and online experiences because of what people got used to during the pandemic. “They might want the same type of experience, but in real life. That will be an interesting trend to monitor when the pandemic is over.”
