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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Teaching Interest
Competing with Social Networks
by
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
MBA EC 1217 (Winter 2010)
Career Focus
Competing with Social Networks is a Strategy class targeted at students considering careers in high technology, entertainment, social media or consumer packaged goods. It will be useful for students considering consulting careers, careers inside companies as well as for students who are planning to start their own Web 2.0 companies. Frequent protagonist visits will help students establish relationships required to be effective in this space.
Educational Objectives
The course introduces the network failure framework to help companies that use social networks to build and sustain their competitive advantage. Such companies face two unique strategic problems. First, they compete against a very powerful substitute-real world social network-which potentially undermines their value proposition. The network failure framework addresses this problem by identifying where real-world social networks fail and how to step in to help people establish new relationships, or change their existing relationships. Second, introduction of commerce to social relationships often undermines the latter, implying that firms competing in social industries often run into monetization problems. The network failure framework identifies the kinds of monetization that are viable.
Course Content
The course is composed of three modules. The first module establishes the network failure framework using the example of on-line social networks and examining while some succeeded while others failed. Here we examine: LinkedIn, Friendster, Twitter and mixi. We then focus on successful on-line social networks and examine monetization challenges and opportunities by comparing MySpace and its music venture to Facebook Connect and Google's Friend Connect. The second module uses the network failure framework to establish conditions under which adding social networks helps or hinders competitive advantage of existing business models. Among others, we consider a matchmaking company, eHarmony, a peer-to-peer lending company, Zopa, an on-line reviews company, Yelp, and finally, Wikipedia Contributors. In the third module, we apply the network failure model to community management. Here, among others, we examine the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, Young Presidents' Organization and P&G.
Syllabi
Keywords: social networks;