Rotman, the Magazine of the Rotman School of Management.

The Rotman School of Management is the University of Toronto's business school. It has recently jumped significantly in international prominence under the leadership of its dean, Roger Martin.

The school is named in honour of Joseph Rotman who donated CAD $18 million to the school.

The Rotman School also chairs the academic advisory board for the annual Canada's Top 100 Employers competition. (Wikipedia.org)

The Rotman School has set out to redesign business education for the 21st century and become one of the world's top-tier business schools. Located in the heart of Toronto -- North America's third-largest financial centre and one of the world's most culturally-diverse cities -- the School is developing an innovative curriculum built around Integrative Thinking and Business Design

The School’s MBA program is now ranked in the top 15 in North America by the Financial Times. These are just some of the reasons why Bruce Nussbaum recently wrote in BusinessWeek Online, "Managers who want to 'get' the new innovation paradigm should check out [Rotman's] MBA and exec-ed programs.

Download Rotman Magazine, Spring 2008

PDF format, 5.4MB, 124Pages.

FEATURES:

4 Balancing Multiple Stakeholders: What’s a CEO to Do?
by Roger Martin
Gord Nixon, Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year, discusses some of his biggest challenges and opportunities as chief executive of Canada’s largest bank.

14 The New Consumerism: Inequality, Emulation and the Erosion of Well-Being
by Juliet Schor
Society’s wealthiest tier has become a widespread emulative target, and there are
implications for our collective well-being.

20 The Effects of Partitioning on Consumer Behaviour
by Dilip Soman and Amar Cheema
When a given quantity of a resource is physically divided into smaller quantities, it reduces both the total quantity consumed and the speed of consumption.

26 Consumption: The Happiness of Pursuit
by John Quelch and
Katherine Jocz
The consumer in each of us can learn from the citizen, and the citizen can learn from the consumer. Marketers must learn from both.

32 Social Innovation and Sustainable Development as Drivers of Growth
by Patrick Cescau
Finding the ‘sweet spot’ between the needs of consumers and our planet can be the path to competitive advantage.

38 Energizing Cities: Lighting the Way Forward
by Janet Sawin and Kristen Hughes
Cities can lead the way to a more sustainable future, improving the quality of life for urban and rural dwellers alike.

44 Hedonomics in Consumer Behaviour
by Claire Tsai and Christopher Hsee
To maximize happiness, consumers must accurately predict the emotional consequences of their options and make choices based on those predictions.

50 Tom Sawyer and the Construction of Value
by Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec
As evidenced by ‘Tom’s Law,’ consumer valuations are malleable and have a surprisingly large arbitrary component.

56 From Plague to Paradigm: Designing Sustainable Retail Environments
by Steve Bishop and Dana Cho
Considering a shopper’s context is the key to making green products and services relevant to them.

62 Blurring the Lines: Why It’s Time to Rethink Marketing
by Yoram Wind
It is time to develop new mental models that reflect the complex inter-linkages between modern consumers and business.

IDEA EXCHANGE
“We have way more ‘stuff’ than we need, but not enough time to enjoy it. This is the quandary of the post-consumption consumer.” – Seth Godin, p.70

70 Questions for: Seth Godin
74 Questions for: Barry Schwartz
77 Questions for: Alex Steffen
80 Point of View: Nicola Morrelli
83 Faculty Focus: Sridhar Moorthy
85 Questions for: Marion Nestle
88 Questions for: Stuart Boden
91 Faculty Focus: Pankaj Aggarwal
94 Questions for: David Lewis
97 Questions for: Mathis Wackernagle

Visit The Rotman School of Management Official Website

The All-consuming Issue
From the Dean: Roger Martin

THE LATESTBLACKBERRY; a country home; foreign travel. If you don’t already have these things in your life, chances are you want them. Many of us are caught up in a cycle of ‘work and spend,’ where consumption is our major form of reward for the long hours we work and the stress of daily life. Indeed, consumer expenditures are often the means by which we keep our frenetic lives going, whether it be stress-busters like vacations or restaurant meals, the contractingout of household services or the use of time-saving gadgets.

Consumption has gone well beyond satiating needs or even fulfilling dreams to become an end in its own right. Globally, the inequalities are stark: the 20 per cent of the population in the highest-income countries accounts for 86 per cent of private consumption expenditures (the poorest 20 per cent, a minuscule 1.3 per cent); the richest fifth consumes 58 per cent of total energy (the poorest less than four per cent) and owns 87 per cent of the world’s vehicle fleet (the poorest, less than one per cent).

Unfortunately, the results of our rampant consumption are becoming increasingly apparent, and they aren’t pretty: our cover image, from Seattle artist Chris Jordan’s ‘Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait’ exhibition, shows the two million plastic beverage bottles that are discarded every five minutes in the U.S. This issue of Rotman , which will be launched on Earth Day 2008, examines how and why we consume, and how our choices impact the planet.

Our consumption habits are not only ecologically unsustainable; for many they are also financially unsustainable. Consumption patterns are all-too-often supported by the assumption of increasingly- debilitating debt. Nobel Laureate William Sharpe discusses the investment effects of ‘longevity risk’ and a new approach to saving called a ‘lockbox strategy,’ on page 10.

Fifty years ago, we compared ourselves to our peers: the Smiths wanted the Joneses’ Chevy and nifty TV – not the Rockefellers’ mansions and art collections. But the reference groups we now use to calibrate our consumer aspirations have become more vertical and less horizontal, as Juliet Schor documents in The New Consumerism: Inequality, Emulation and the Erosion of Well-Being on page 14.

Over the past few years, people’s inability to control their consumption – of everything from goods and services to food – has spawned much discussion. Alarge part of the problem stems from all-too-easy access to resources. Rotman Professor Dilip Soman and his co-author have discovered a way to help control our varied appetites. They examine The Effects of Partitioning on Consumption on page 20.

Elsewhere in this issue, Unilever’s Chief Executive Patrick Cescau explains how social innovation and sustainable development can be drivers of business growth on page 32; Wharton’s Jerry Wind explains why it’s time to rethink marketing models on page 62; and our Idea Exchange features 10 thought leaders including Seth Godin, Barry Schwartz and Marion Nestle.

At one end of the spectrum lies the conventional economic wisdom that ‘consumption is good’ – that new-and-improved products really are improvements, and that consumption makes our lives better in some meaningful ways. At the other end are those who point to findings that once our basic needs are met, consuming does little to improve an individual’s well-being. We need to find some middle ground between these two extremes, to seek ways that consumption can be restrained and redirected in order to improve prospects for human well-being and sustainability.

The amount of energy we consume is a result of two kinds of choices: those we make as a society and those we make as individuals and families. We can’t all stop consuming, but we can start to consume more thoughtfully by examining how our values fit with the products and services we consume. I’m pleased to announce that with this issue, Rotman Magazine is going ‘greener:’ the first half of our magazine will be printed on paper with 50 per cent recycled content and 25 per cent post-consumer waste; and the second half on paper made from 100 per cent post-consumer waste. These changes mean that with each issue we will spare approximately 110 trees and 64,306 gallons of water.

As consumers on a much larger scale, business faces one of the most important questions of our time: will it be a barrier to sustainability, or its greatest hope? At Rotman we believe that the latter is a possibility, and we are giving our students the thinking tools required to shape our world for the better. Because we can, and because we must.

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