Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
Associate Professor of Business Administration, Richard Hodgson Fellow
Mikołaj Jan Piskorski, who often goes by Misiek, is an Associate Professor of Business Administration and Richard Hodgson Fellow in the Strategy Unit at the Harvard Business School. Follow @mpiskorski on Twitter.
Misiek received his B.A and M.A. (Cantab) from University of Cambridge where he read Economics and Politics at Christ's College. Subsequently, he received his A.M. in Sociology and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University. After completing his Ph.D. he became a faculty member in the Organizational Behavior area at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. In 2004, he returned to Harvard to teach the Required Curriculum Strategy course in the MBA Program. He is now teaching his own Elective Curriculum class: Competing With Social Networks. In addition, Misiek teaches in Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage, Driving Digital and Social Strategy, Media Strategies and Strategic IQ Executive Education programs as well as in a number of custom programs.
Misiek is an expert on why and how people use various on-line social platforms, both in the U.S. and abroad. He also studies how firms can leverage these platforms to build social strategies. He also applied many of these insights to large organizations as they seek to become more agile and use social networks to execute their strategies. He has documented this research in a book called Social Strategy: How Social Media Platforms Work and How to Leverage Them for Competitive Advantage, forthcoming in 2013.
His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly and Social Forces and cited in the New York Times, Business 2.0, and Investors Business Daily. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals including American Journal of Sociology, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science and Organization Science.
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Research Summary
On-line social networks
by
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
Professor Piskorski's current research examines why and how people use on-line social networks, both in the US and abroad. Using extensive fieldwork and large scale empirical analyses, he constructed theories of social failures and networks as covers which allow us to understand numerous facets of people's on-line behaviors. Professor Piskorski is also an expert on how firms can harness the power of social networks to build sustainable businesses. He has applied many of these insights to large organizations as they seek to become more agile and use social networks to execute their strategies.
Keywords: social networks;
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Research Summary
Social media and user-generated content
by
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
In this project, Professor Piskorski, jointly with Andreea Gorbatai, examines inherent trade-offs in provision of user-generated content, using Wikipedia as a research setting. In Wikipedia, every user has the right to add material to an article, but with no explicit attribution of authorship or copyright. Subsequent users can easily delete previously written material and add their own, which allows for fast improvement in the quality of articles. However, the process also has a demoralizing effect of seeing one's own well-thought out contribution deleted, leading many of Wikipedia editors to abandon the project. The objective of this project is to identify the types of social structures that keep the editors involved even though their contributions are routinely deleted.
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Research Summary
Previous research
by
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
Professor Piskorski's previous research examined the role of power and status in social networks in the venture capital industry. Prior to that, Professor Piskorski studied the role of power in profitability and vertical integration decisions in the US economy.