Harvard Looks At Facebooks Attempt to Take on Fake News
The amorphous impact social media has had on the collective social conscious, especially since the 2016 U.S. general election, has become a striking waypoint of how we all may interact in the near future. To potentially combat the negative outcomes of it, Facebook has crafted plans to transform its platform into a forum for “more meaningful social interactions,” even if it comes at a great cost to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Experts from Harvard Business School recently discussed the potential changes.
Harvard Explores How Independent Bookstores Have Stuck Around in the Amazon Era
Amazon may slowly be turning the small consumer business world into a Mad Max-ian wasteland, but brick-and-mortar bookstores are still somehow enduring, writes Harvard Business School.
Ryan Raffaelli, an Organizational Behavior professor at HBS and field researcher whose work is inspired by stories of “technology reemergence,” including the recent reinvention of the Swiss watch industry, has prepared a new abstract due for publication in 2018, “Reframing Collective Identity in Response to Multiple Technological Discontinuities: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores.”
Raffaeli examined how, after a nearly two-decade-long plummet, independent bookstores staged an unprecedented comeback between 2009 and 2015 after “Amazon forced Borders out of business in 2011.” This was also due in no small part to the efforts of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), which facilitated “partnerships between bookstores and other local businesses and strengthened the collective identity of indie bookstores by helping its members share best practices, such as how to use social media to promote special events.”
Raffaeli explains, “This has been an especially fascinating industry to study because indie booksellers provide us with a story of hope.”
Over 200 bookstore owners, publishers, and authors across 13 states were surveyed and the results were consolidated into the “3 C’s of independent bookselling’s resurgence community, curation, and convening.”
Community: “Bookstore owners across the nation promoted the idea of consumers supporting their local communities by shopping at neighborhood businesses [and] stressing a strong connection to local community values.”
Curation: “Independent booksellers began to focus on curating inventory that allowed them to provide a more personal and specialized customer experience.”
Convening: “Independent bookstores have become intellectual centers for convening customers with likeminded interests—offering lectures, book signings, game nights, children’s story times, young adult reading groups, even birthday parties.”
“The theoretical and managerial lessons we can learn from independent bookstores have implications for a wide array of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses facing technological change.”
Seattle Pacific University Donates Thousands of Pounds of Food
Instead of throwing out nearly 100,000 pounds of uneaten food each year, Seattle Pacific University’s food recovery program gives back to those in need. The SPU program is certified by a national organization called the Food Recovery Network that provides protocols for how to store and deliver the food. Since January, SPU has saved nearly 2,000 pounds of food. Continue reading…
Demonstrating Community Contribution in Your MBA Application Essay
“What will you contribute to our business school’s MBA community?”
If you are applying to the Henley Business School or any of several other MBA programs, you are very likely to find a variation of this question as part of your application. So what’s the best way to tackle it? Ensuring your specific examples fit in with your Continue reading…
San Diego State Focuses on Philanthropy
San Diego State University is known for its generosity and has worked to develop a culture of student philanthropy. In fact, it’s at the heart of SDSU’s philosophy, and Aztec Proud—a donation program—is a major initiative of the Office of Alumni Engagement. This past Giving Tuesday, Alumni staff and student volunteers spent the day at the SDSU Bookstore offering refreshments to previous student donors and gifts to new donors to encourage donations to the SDSU scholarship fund. Continue reading…
