Companies are concerned about finding new sources of revenue and cutting costs to stay afloat during the COVID-19 crisis. But those aren't the only risks they need to manage. They must also consider the impact of their activities on their myriad stakeholders. Those that don't pay attention to corporate social responsibility may end up hurting their performance, their reputation, or both.

In a world of true meritocracy, every individual-regardless of gender-would be fairly rewarded for their contribution. The problem, according to the author, is that such meritocracy does not exist in most organizations. She argues that the procedures and 'frames of reference' in most firms devalue women's contributions and reinforce the privileges of dominant groups. If we want to make meritocracy a reality, she says, men and women alike must confront their biases towards women. She provides eight strategies for getting closer to a true meritocracy, including 'training anyone in an evaluative position to understand implicit bias' and 'examining systems and procedures for unintended bias'.

One of the great challenges for organizations in the current economy is making strategy under the uncertainties posed by turbulent environments, intensified competition, emerging technologies, shifting customer tastes and regulatory change. Executives often know they must break with the status quo, but there are few signposts indicating the best way forward. Executives have long been exhorted to conduct analyses of internal and external environments and construct scenarios of the future. However, seeing strategy in this way has some serious weaknesses. It assumes that accuracy can be achieved through rigorous analysis and conscientious efforts to overcome individual biases in perception. It also assumes that the process will be relatively frictionless and primarily analytical. But research has found that most forecasting efforts fail to attain the desired precision. To study how managers make strategy in conditions of considerable uncertainty, the authors took an in-depth look at five technology strategy projects inside the Advanced Technology Strategy Group at a communications technology company that was experiencing a period of high industry turbulence. The authors observed managers'struggles to forecast the future and discovered that managers could not imagine new futures for the company without rethinking the past and reconsidering present concerns. A new future could not shape strategic choices unless it was connected in a narrative that showed how it relates to the past and the present. When managers settled on a particular narrative, they could make choices. Strategy making amid volatility thus involves constructing and reconstructing strategic narratives that reimagine the past and present in ways that allow the organization to explore multiple possible futures. In comparing strategy projects, the authors found that the more work managers do to create novel strategic narratives, the more likely they are to explore alternatives that break with the status quo.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most companies invest a significant amount of time and effort in a formal, annual strategic planning process--but many executives see little benefit from the investment. In the course of the authors' research, one manager compared his company's process with a "primitive tribal ritual," and another likened it to the Soviet system: "We pretend to make strategy and they pretend to follow it." The authors found that, although few truly strategic decisions are made in the context of a formal process, formal planning can be a real source of competitive advantage when it is approached with the right goal in mind: as a learning tool to help companies create within their management teams "prepared minds" (to borrow from Louis Pasteur). The key is getting right a host of seemingly mundane but actually critical details concerning the annual meetings that are at the heart of all formal processes--including who should attend the meetings, where they should be held, and what kind of preparation is necessary to make them effective. Following an analysis of those details, the authors offer several examples showing prepared minds in action, in which formal planning helped managers make solidly grounded, real-time strategic decisions in a world of turbulence and uncertainty.