As a Black man with three decades of experience in the corporate world, the author has a deep understanding of how to conceive and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas from the top down. Following the 2020 murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, he was approached by numerous executives who wanted to act to combat systemic racism and sought his advice on how to proceed. So White and his daughter Krista wrote the book "Anti-Racist Leadership" to share what he has learned. In this article, adapted from the book, White provides guidance for getting started. Leaders should listen to and learn from colleagues across the organization, enlist senior executives in the cause, audit the culture, and document what their companies are already doing to foster diversity and inclusion. They should then establish benchmarks for measuring progress, build "action learning teams" to spearhead the effort, and develop and communicate an overall plan. As the world goes into economic recovery mode, leaders have a brief window in which to reimagine their approach to the workforce. This article can help them seize the opportunity and bring fully inclusive cultures to the organizations they run.
Despite substantial regulatory reform following the 2008 financial crisis, financial firms are still suffering from fraud and other forms of ethical misconduct. As a result, they have collectively paid out more than $400 billion in fines over the past 12 years. A 2019 Harvard Business School study found that among a sample of Fortune 500 companies, more than two instances of internally substantiated misconduct occur each week, on average. It's becoming increasingly clear that the traditional approach to financial regulation--imposing formal rules and investing in a strong compliance function to ensure that institutions, managers, and employees comply with those rules--cannot protect firms against excessive risk-taking and financial misconduct. The authors of this article draw on their experience advising some of Europe's largest financial institutions to present an alternative approach to compliance that is based on the principles and discoveries of behavioral psychology. It involves understanding the contextual drivers of human behaviors and introducing small changes, or "nudges," to eliminate misconduct at the source.
The triple fit canvas is a sales framework designed to facilitate collaborative value creation between sellers and buyers. Inspired by the Blue Ocean Strategy canvas developed by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and the business model canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, the triple fit canvas is both a diagnostic and an action framework. It extends a limited, product-centric view to a broader, customer-centric perspective. It shifts the focus from selling existing products and services to helping create new ones. In this article the author details the key components of the triple fit canvas and describes how companies such as BMW, Konica Minolta, and GAP have benefited from it.
Though they've been warned for decades about the dangers of overrelying on gut instinct and personal experience, managers keep failing to critically examine--much less challenge--the ideas their decisions are based on. To correct this problem they need to think and act like scientists. That requires doing five things: (1) being a knowledgeable skeptic and relentlessly questioning assumptions; (2) investigating anomalies--things that are unexpected or don't look right; (3) devising testable hypotheses that can be quantifiably confirmed or disproved; (4) running experiments that produce hard evidence; and (5) probing cause and effect. Drawing on the experiences of Harrah's Entertainment, Sony, Bank of America, and Lego, Thomke and Loveman show how scientific methods can help companies discard ineffective practices, increase marketing and operational efficiency, boost customer satisfaction and sales, find new sources of growth, and even turn around struggling businesses.
For years business leaders have turned to peer forums--groups of four to 10 people with similar interests who meet regularly for confidential conversations--to share their problems, find support and insights, and learn and grow. But because such forums are small and private, many people don't know much about them. In this article two authors who have studied forums extensively open a window into them. Drawing on their research, Groysberg and Halperin explain the different types of peer forums, how they can benefit individuals in a variety of jobs and organizations, and the principles and practices that make them successful, as well as the challenges they sometimes face.
Do you keep postponing work you need to do? The problem probably stems from one of three things: your habits and systems (or lack thereof), your desire to avoid negative emotions (like anxiety and boredom), or your own flawed thinking patterns (which can make a task seem harder than it is). Luckily, there are simple strategies for managing each. To develop good habits, for instance, do your important work in a consistent pattern daily: After I do this, I do my deep work. Devise a system for starting new tasks (drawing on one you've handled well); that will make it easier to get the ball rolling. When a task makes you anxious, do the easiest part first and progress from there; motivate yourself to do a boring task with a reward for completing it. And if you're cognitively blocked, consider what would make a task impossible--and then identify its opposite. Novel work often is filled with friction. You must recognize that tension doesn't mean you're not making progress. And if a project still feels overwhelming, tackle it in small chunks of time, not big ones.
The CEO of a Toronto-based toy company is trying to decide whom to hire for a critical position in its Asia division. He has two strong candidates: a Chinese-American woman with little on-the-ground experience in Asia, and a white Texas-born man who has spent his entire career in Hong Kong and is fluent in Mandarin. The company's board expects the CEO to prioritize diversity. This fictional case study by David S. Lee features expert commentary by Daisy Auger-Dominguez and Yuting Wang.
A look at some new books exploring the topic of immigration, including " 8 Billion and Counting," by Jennifer D. Sciubba; "The Immigrant Superpower," by Tim Kane; "One Quarter of the Nation," by Nancy Foner; "Streets of Gold," by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan; and "Crossing Borders," by Ali Noorani.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Interpreter of Maladies" talks about the surprising arc of that book, why she's now writing in Italian, the writers who have most influenced her, and more.
The CEO of a Toronto-based toy company is trying to decide whom to hire for a critical position in its Asia division. He has two strong candidates: a Chinese-American woman with little on-the-ground experience in Asia, and a white Texas-born man who has spent his entire career in Greater China and is fluent in Mandarin. The company's board expects the CEO to prioritize diversity. This fictional case study by David S. Lee features expert commentary by Daisy Auger-Dominguez and Yuting Wang.
The CEO of a Toronto-based toy company is trying to decide whom to hire for a critical position in its Asia division. He has two strong candidates: a Chinese-American woman with little on-the-ground experience in Asia, and a white Texas-born man who has spent his entire career in Hong Kong and is fluent in Mandarin. The company's board expects the CEO to prioritize diversity. This fictional case study by David S. Lee features expert commentary by Daisy Auger-Dominguez and Yuting Wang.
A renowned corporate transformation expert describes the key elements of his Rapid Transformation Framework, which has been embraced by the likes of Amazon, Intel and President Barak Obama. In a wide-ranging interview, he argues that the biggest obstacle to change in any organization is mindset - both the leadership mindset and the mindset of employees. Transformation cannot succeed, he argues, without engaging company insiders and focusing on two things: inside-out alignment (i.e. having the mission resonate with insiders) and outside-in alignment (being completely obsessed with your customers.) Once embraced these principles make change incredibly empowering, not something to be feared, he says. That's because they promote growth - for both individuals and organizations.
Most people believe that business competition takes place between companies: Boeing vs. Airbus; GM vs. Toyota; and Amazon vs. Google. But the author argues that there is a better way to think about competition: It happens at the front line more so than at head office. Customers choose between products and services that hold the potential to meet their needs; and they have a limited amount of concern for who brings that product or service to their front line-let alone the layers between the product on the shelf and where and by whom it is made. He discusses four outcomes that must be addressed in every business strategy today, including 'the layers you should drop' and 'the products and services you should add.' In the end he provides a strong argument for proactively structuring corporate strategy from the front line back.
A great transformation of human life is underway that will soon determine everything from how we treat disease to how we nourish ourselves and fight climate change. That according to the authors, who describe possible scenarios for incorporating biological innovation into organizations. If they pan out, the resulting impacts will be world-changing indeed: beating cancer, embracing biofuels at scale and the end of traditional meat farming, to name a few. And the scenarios they describe, they say, are only the tip of the iceberg.
Leadership is increasingly challenging in the Digital Age. Technologies have accelerated the blurring of boundaries between work and home as well as the boundary between shareholders and stakeholders. And within these blurred boundaries, leadership is further complicated by 'context collapse': The near impossibility in a social media era of credibly managing separate identities with colleagues, family and friends. The authors provide a roadmap for navigating these challenges and share principles for governing online behaviour and addressing context collapse.
Due to technological change, leaders and the organizations they run have no choice but to embrace perpetual transformation. In this environment, evolving the business model is an ongoing process that demands close attention to the customer and their 'jobs to be done'. Traditionally, start-ups have focused on this via Lean Start-up Methodology; but today, every organization must adopt this focus. The author, a Silicon Valley veteran, describes a new framework-the Jobs-to-be-Done Market Definition Canvas, which makes needs discovery faster-and reliably leads to market success.
While few people think about it, underlying every application of computers in organizations today is math, calculated using binary digits or 'bits.' The original computers of the 1950s could perform about 465 multiplications per second, and today's computers are billions of times faster. However, there is an important class of arithmetic problems that remain out of reach for classical computers: Large-scale 'combinatorics' calculations. Combinatorics problems ask the question, 'How many ways can this set of objects be combined?' Such problems can also ask whether a certain combination is possible, or what combinations of objects are 'best' by some defined metric. The authors argue that a surprising number of practical organizational problems can be viewed as combinatorics problems and describe how fields from finance to chemical engineering and cybersecurity will be impacted by the emergence of quantum computers.
In light of the current challenges the world faces, every one of us must be prepared to take action amidst uncertainty. The author-Executive Director of the Stanford d.school-argues that tools from the realm of Design offer methods for dealing with an ever-changing world. She shows that thinking and learning like a designer can be tremendously Powerful, but that in today's world, success is never about a single approach or moment of insight. She shares three methods that will help leaders thrive in this challenging environment-and shape the world for the better: stakeholder mapping, engaging your inner ethicist, and the Futures Wheel. All are intended to create lively conversations, much like the diverse voices every organization needs.
In recent years, leaders have had to tackle global challenges that even the most forward-thinking among them could never have fathomed. As a result, organizations once resistant to change have had no choice but to transform. Based on Accenture research, the author argues that six signals stand out as being essential to the future success of organizations. All present opportunities - and incentives - to embrace change and find new ways to grow and evolve.
The sales of various drug products for AstraZeneca, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have been greatly impacted by the volume-based procurement resulting from the medical reform in China. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 epidemic has catapulted the internet pharmaceutical industry into rapid development. When crises are intermingled with opportunities, AstraZeneca attempted to establish Yiliyili.com, an internet medical service platform, by leveraging its offline resources. Chen Hua, the CEO of Yiliyili.com, has 14 years of experience in pharmaceutical e-commerce and has set up an innovative "doctors-to-pharmaceuticals" model in contrast to the mainstream that runs otherwise. This model was created through collaboration with doctors from contracted offline hospitals who were engaged online. The goal was to establish a stable and active group of doctor users while providing them with empowerment and supporting services. The objective was to replicate existing doctor-patient relationships in an online setting. Meanwhile, it has extended services in physical medical and pharmaceutical products to value-additive services such as case management and compliance-related services for patients. It has also extended the provision of prescription drugs other than essential drugs at non-public offline hospitals according to patients' needs to enhance its marketing abilities for such drugs. Furthermore, it has used its marketing capacity for prescription drugs to establish cooperation with other medical appliance manufacturers to form an integrated marketing platform through which it could average down its fixed costs for maintaining a huge marketing team while better-utilizing marketing capacities. Can Yiliyili.com gain a competitive edge over its traditional competitors by implementing a service-heavy strategy and utilizing its offline strengths to outperform its online advantages? Will it be able to establish itself as a top-notch provider of exceptional and cost-effective