LA Small Business Growth, UCLA Time Management Advice, and More

Take a look at some of the top stories coming out of the Los Angeles business schools this week.

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The Growing Role of the CIO – Wall Street Journal

Vijay Gurbaxani, professor of business and computer science at the the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, recently sat down with Ben Fried, CIO at Google Inc., and the Wall Street Journal for a conversation on the changing role of the CIO in today’s companies. The conversation was led by Nikki Waller, WSJ bureau chief.

Gurbaxani discussed changing technology and its impact on business, particularly the importance of cultivating talent in machine learning. For companies to stay current and competitive, he says, they must perfect the art of gathering data and putting it to good use.

“If you fall behind your competitors in developing this new know-how and leveraging, you’re going to fall further and further behind,” Gurbaxani said. “So my message to you would be get out there in a hurry.”

To read more excerpts from the interview, click here.

Study: L.A.’s Small Businesses Optimistic About Growth – Los Angeles Business Journal

A recent survey, conducted by 1st Century Bank in a partnership with Beacon Economics, has showed positive signs for LA small business growth, which is projected to continue through the end of the summer.

The study, which surveyed 150 small businesses in 30 core industries, reported a number of findings that offer hope and a positive outlook for small business owners in Los Angeles. About 78 percent of businesses reported that they expected to see an increase in market demand, while 54 percent witnessed an increase in profit margins over the past six months. Nearly 56 percent of the businesses reported a boost in sales during that same period, and over 70 percent expected to see further increase during the next six months.

According to Beacon Economics research director Adam Fowler, small businesses are a crucial part of the Los Angeles economy and throughout the nation.

“If we don’t understand small-business sentiment,” he comments, “we can’t know the direction this important sector will be heading in … nor can we improve conditions for their success.”

Click here to learn more about the LA small business growth research and look at the complete report here.

Time Management for Startups: Entrepreneurs Act as if Future Hours Aren’t Worth Much – UCLA Anderson Review

While larger companies have become increasingly aware about the importance of time management in a hyper efficient work environment, the same may not be true for entrepreneurs. Upstarts in the business world are as notorious for breaking certain conventions as they are for cutting their teeth, putting in triple-digit hour work weeks to build companies from scratch. And the reason being, says UCLA Anderson‘s Charles J. Corbett, is that there isn’t enough research quite yet.

“I realized there wasn’t much out there,” Corbett said in a UCLA Anderson Review interview. “A lot of the issues that entrepreneurs face don’t come up in our core management studies.”

Alongside fellow UCLA Anderson and INSEAD professor Guillaume Roels, and University College London’s Onesun Steve Yoo, Corbett found that entrepreneurs have to think of time management in the terms of their future, rather than today. And the trick is to understand “net present value (NPV).”

“But, according to Corbett, Roels and Yoo, people, including entrepreneurs, aren’t very good at thinking about their time in the same way. When people think about the value of their time, they tend to think about its current value, today, and not the future ramifications of having that time today. Correctly anticipating those dynamics, ‘NPV thinking’ is particularly important for entrepreneurs with the ambition to grow their business.”

You can read more from the trio’s time management research here.

regions: Los Angeles

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