For much of the past century, U.S. companies feared that unions would hurt shareholder value and innovation, so they responded to organized labor with one strategy: Fight, at all costs. This was brutally effective. Companies perfected the skill of union busting-so much so that most business leaders now have little experience with organized labor. But owing to an array of forces, including the pandemic and inflation, the landscape is shifting. Workers today feel less secure in their jobs and more uncertain about the future, and not surprisingly, a growing number of them are organizing. In fact, worker interest in joining a union, and public support of organized labor, is at its highest in decades. If business leaders stick to their old playbook, they risk permanently disenchanting their workforce and harming their brands. Instead, they must begin to reinvent corporate America's relationship with organized labor, working with, rather than against, unions and other formal and informal structures. Indeed, in the next 20 years, the skill of leading an organized-or organizing-workforce may well become the critical leadership skill.
The role of the CSO is undergoing a rapid and dramatic transformation. Historically CSOs have acted like stealth PR executives-their primary task was to tell an appealing story about corporate sustainability initiatives to the company's many stakeholders. Now, however, some CSOs have moved away from a role centered on messaging and instead are spearheading the true integration of material ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues into corporate strategy. This pivotal change requires close collaboration with other members of the senior leadership team and active engagement with investors. This article argues for four major changes to the CSO role. The CSO should be involved in strategy and capital allocation; be more focused on and realistic about stakeholder interactions; be more fully engaged with investors; and be supported with sufficient resources and experÂtise throughout the entire organization, including on the board and senior leadership team. In an ideal world, the authors say, a stand-alone CSO role would become obsolete once companies fully integrate ESG considerations into their corporate strategy and operations. Until that day arrives, however, it is crucial to adapt and evolve the CSO role.
Over the past few years the European Union has fined companies more than 1,400 times for a total of nearly €3 billion for violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Almost every week stories appear about how AI-driven decisions result in discrimination against women or minority members in job recruitment, credit approvals, medical diagnoses, or criminal sentencing. These stories are stoking feelings of unease about how data is collected, used, and analyzed. According to the authors, managers who are examining projects that involve gathering human-provided data or leveraging existing databases need to focus on five critical issues: the provenance of the data, the purpose for which it will be used, how it is to be protected, how the privacy of the data providers can be ensured, and how the data is prepared for use. They begin with a brief overview of the organizational requirements for a robust ethical-review process.
The author has conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of CEOs and other executives for the New York Times feature "Corner Office" and his leadership series on LinkedIn, and he has coached hundreds of high-potentials. In this article he shares the lessons that emerged about the mental shifts needed to make a successful transition to a senior leadership position. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions. It requires setting the bar for your team's performance and learning to compartmentalize so that you can find the right pace for yourself. And it requires expanding your self-awareness and paying attention to the stories you tell yourself about your experiences-your successes and failures, your bad times and good ones-when you contemplate the arc of your career and life.
Many companies realize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But most focus on gender and ethnicity, paying less attention to people with disabilities. Employing people with disabilities is usually seen as a social cause-one best suited to nonprofits or the public sector. That is a mistake-and more important, a missed opportunity. In many industries innovative companies are demonstrating that including people with disabilities can lead to real competitive advantage, in four ways: (1) Disabilities often confer unique talents that make people better at particular jobs. (2) The presence of employees with disabilities elevates the culture of the entire organization, making it more collaborative and boosting productivity. (3) A reputation for inclusiveness enhances a firm's value proposition with customers, who become more willing to build long-term relationships with the company. And (4) being recognized as socially responsible gives a firm an edge in the competition for capital and talent. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do good in the world, but there is also nothing wrong with wanting to do well, and the latter is enough reason to employ people with disabilities.
AI has the power to gather, analyze, and utilize enormous volumes of individual customer data to achieve precision and scale in personalization. The experiences of Mercury Financial, CVS Health, and Starbucks debunk the prevailing notion that extracting value from AI solutions is a technology-building exercise. That thinking holds companies back from capturing the power of AI. They needn't build it; they just have to properly integrate it into a particular business context. But AI is probably only about 10% of the secret sauce. The other 90% lies in the combination of data, experimentation, and talent that constantly activates and informs the intelligence behind personalization. Personalization is the goal; it's what constitutes a company's strategic brawn. The technology is merely the tool for reaching it. The authors describe what it means to integrate AI tools and what it takes to continually experiment, constantly generate learning, and import fresh data to improve and refine customer journeys.
Markets for carbon trading function poorly, and many traded offsets do not actually perform as promised. Without robust protocols for monitoring offsets and in the absence of proper accounting mechanisms, market-based approaches to reducing atmospheric GHG will be vulnerable to misrepresentation and fraud. This article presents an accounting framework based on five core principles. The first two define what can and cannot be counted as an offset and what may or may not be traded. The remaining principles set out basic accounting guidelines for offsets. Together they provide the foundation for a well-functioning market that accelerates innovation and deployment of improved offsetting technologies, leading to atmospheric decarbonization.
Although human beings are naturally social creatures, ready to both give and accept help, many of us struggle to actually ask for it, which over time can make us miserable and bitter. And because remote work is on the rise, leaving many of us isolated from colleagues, the challenges of asking for help have only intensified. To feel fulfilled and be successful both personally and professionally, it's important to acknowledge and accept when you are working beyond your own capacity and be open to asking others for help. In this article the author, a management scholar and a leadership guru, looks at what drives people's reluctance to seek help and offers strategies for overcoming the barriers.
Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of the enterprise software firm Puck.io, is facing a hard decision. Just three months earlier the company laid off 20% of its employees to reduce its burn rate amid growing economic uncertainty and a suddenly unattractive funding environment. The company's lead investor and its board think more cost cuts are necessary, and they're pushing Tyler to execute a second, 10% reduction in force. Worried about employee morale if they do back-to-back layoffs, Tyler and two other members of the C-suite are looking for alternatives.
Four new books investigate how language connects, differentiates, and enlightens us. Viorica Marian's The Power of Language explores the benefits of multilingualism. People who are multilingual perform better on executive-functioning tasks, for instance, and draw more novel connections. In A Myriad of Tongues, author Caleb Everett notes that more than 7,000 languages exist today. And while academics traditionally looked for commonalities among languages, recent research has focused on how languages diverge, and what those differences can teach us. A third book, Magic Words, by Wharton professor Jonah Berger, examines how specific words can carry an oversize impact, making them more likely to change hearts and minds or drive change. By contrast, Dan Lyons's STFU reminds readers that sometimes saying nothing is the best approach. "All of us," he writes, "stand to gain by speaking less, listening more, and communicating with intention." His book offers advice on how to do that, whether online, at work, or at home.
Nominated for 10 Tony Awards, the Broadway star began her career as a chorus girl. She went on to play the original Anita in West Side Story and the original Velma in Chicago. Despite her success, she describes herself as "obedient" and says, "You get so much by being humble."
Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of the enterprise software firm Puck.io, is facing a hard decision. Just three months earlier the company laid off 20% of its employees to reduce its burn rate amid growing economic uncertainty and a suddenly unattractive funding environment. The company's lead investor and its board think more cost cuts are necessary, and they're pushing Tyler to execute a second, 10% reduction in force. Worried about employee morale if they do back-to-back layoffs, Tyler and two other members of the C-suite are looking for alternatives.
Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of the enterprise software firm Puck.io, is facing a hard decision. Just three months earlier the company laid off 20% of its employees to reduce its burn rate amid growing economic uncertainty and a suddenly unattractive funding environment. The company's lead investor and its board think more cost cuts are necessary, and they're pushing Tyler to execute a second, 10% reduction in force. Worried about employee morale if they do back-to-back layoffs, Tyler and two other members of the C-suite are looking for alternatives.
The case traces the genesis and growth of Ganga Hospital, a trauma care center in Coimbatore, which is an industrial hub in South India. The case presents a study in contrasts. In a landscape that is dotted with multi-specialty hospitals, Ganga has chosen to provide niche trauma care. The decision to differentiate in the prevailing circumstances of the day amounts to a disruption, and highlights important management and strategy issues. The case highlights the central role that family members of the Ganga founders have played in establishing, running, and growing the hospital in an ethical way. It describes the contingencies that drove decisions about expansion made by the Ganga founder and directors. The narrative illustrates issues confronting hospitals that choose to expand primarily in response to patient demand. This is in stark contrast with investor-funded ventures that have come to dominate the landscape of Indian healthcare.
Researchers from the University of Missouri studied the auto insurance industry to learn more about what drives sales success. The analysis showed that experienced reps found fewer prospective customers than novices did. But that didn't necessarily hurt their overall performance, because they excelled at conversion. Advertising boosted both prospecting and conversion efficacy but was most beneficial among experienced reps. And the success of managerial levers to enhance both kinds of efficacy depended in part on reps' level of experience. In this article, the researchers offer several recommendations for sales managers looking to bolster their reps' productivity.
Having studied TV signals in East Germany from the 1960s to 1989 and rates of entrepreneurship there after German reunification, the researchers found that people in households with access to West German broadcasts were more likely than other East Germans to launch companies later in life.
The newly appointed Senior Vice President of Trendy needs to put its supply chain on a more sustainable footing for the future. Trendy is an imaginary fast fashion company with a market base in Europe and a global supply chain. Core themes and actions that improve both sustainability targets and/or operational performance are discussed in the case. For sustainability, these include waste reduction, sustainability accounting, and partnerships with suppliers and eco-labels. For operational improvements, these include changing the manufacturing footprint, digitalizing the supply chain, and reducing the product portfolio. The case examines improving sustainability on Scopes 1, 2, and 3. While the case setting is in the fast fashion industry, lessons provided by this case are applicable to many industries seeking to improve their operational sustainability. The case challenges students to bring together different elements of the supply chain course to meet the objective of having more sustainable practices and achieving better operational performance.
Vanessa Keitges stepped into the role of CEO at Columbia Green Technologies (CGT) in 2010, growing it to become the dominant green infrastructure and green roofing materials supplier on the West Coast. The Portland, Oregon-based company offered customizable green roofing systems that harnessed nature-based technologies to mitigate the damage caused by stormwater runoff. With 2500 roof garden installations under her belt Keitges wanted to scale her sales and marketing operation to capture the emerging opportunity across the North American market. The green roofing industry was projected to experience a CAGR of 16.2%, building to a $5.37 billion global opportunity by 2030. Working with her executive team, Keitges was preparing for a Q1 2023 Series C funding round to finance the major rollout of her business. The immediate question was where to locate CGT's expanded sales force and how to prioritize the targeted geographic markets. Compelling business rationale, as well as opportunity framing to mitigate the known gender bias in VC funding, would need to be reflected in the eventual funding pitch.
When Mel Mathers, the chief sustainability officer of a food cooperative, the Independent Food Retailers Consortium (IFRC), was flooded in October 2019 with emails from animal rights activists demanding the cooperative sell only cage-free eggs and make a pledge now to do so by 2025, he had to prepare a brief and recommendation so IFRC's board of directors could make a decision on whether to pledge selling only cage-free eggs in its grocery stores. Should the cooperative make a public commitment, as requested by the activists, to transition selling only cage-free eggs in its supply chain or continue to offer its customers a choice among the different egg production systems? Mathers examined the organization's mission statement, its corporate responsibility statement, and its policies on animal welfare. He studied IFRC's financial materiality chart and was unsettled by the current materiality chart as to pointing a clear direction for his direction. Mathers began researching egg production systems. Mathers' research is described in the case and students see the tradeoffs about which that Mathers is learning. Mathers wonders how he can navigate the seemingly contradictory tradeoffs with IFRC's policies, animal husbandry science, environmental impacts, and responsiveness to the many stakeholders in IFRC's operating environment.