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Understanding the real reasons why racial equity initiatives provoke opposition can help you lead employees through cultural transformation. These efforts often lead to predictable responses as individuals seek to deny, distort, or distance themselves from the realities of systemic racism. This article presents strategies for countering those reactions and steering individuals toward a fourth common response: engaging actively with anti-racism efforts.

Early analysis of racial and networking data in 10 organizations highlights three behavioral drivers of inclusion: establishing ties with colleagues and stakeholders early on, building networks with diverse "bridging" ties, and seeking out mentoring. These behaviors were associated with faster promotions and longer tenures for employees of color.

Only certain details about job candidates are relevant for hiring decisions; knowing other details can undermine the fairness and accuracy of employers' assessments. Organizations can establish policies that "blind" decision makers to potentially biasing information, but this is rare. This article looks at when managers and other evaluators might choose to blind their own judgment and suggests ways they can foster less-biased decision-making in their organizations.

People feel a need to belong and have an inherent desire for deep and meaningful connections. This is true both outside and inside of work. To facilitate connection, leaders can design what the authors call immensely human interactions moments in which social interactions are interwoven with empathy, curiosity, and humility. The authors offer six specific strategies for bringing these moments into organizations.

Where should leaders focus when managing multiple, simultaneous change initiatives? Recent research by the authors explores the experiences of a global technology company that attempted two concurrent large-scale change initiatives. In this scenario, consistency around content, procedure, and normative expectations as perceived by employees stood out as the pivotal success factor.

The core of every great strategy is a valid argument. The authors have developed a flexible system of three activities constructive debate, iterative visualization, and logical formalization to help leaders arrive at such arguments. They offer tips to help savvy leaders conduct strategic conversations, analyze potential options via strategy maps, and test the logic of strategic arguments in order to make sound decisions that will result in sustainable success.

In this interview, the first in MIT Sloan Management Review's Leading With Impact series, Tassilo Festetics discusses his role as vice president of global solutions at Anheuser-Busch InBev with coach and consultant Chris Clearfield. Festetics describes the benefits of building cutting-edge applications in-house to improve the brewer's products and service, and the value of fostering an environment that encourages open communication.

Behaviors that spark organizational learning and growth also require a great deal of courage often because they involve speaking truth to power or challenging one's sense of self. Since they feel so risky, they don't happen nearly as frequently as they should day to day. In this article, the authors offer a framework for encouraging the behaviors and making them safer for employees to exhibit.

The shortcomings of the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile were fully exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they must be remedied before the next large-scale public health emergency. This will require government and industry to work together to build backup capacity and standby capability, not just more inventory.

Protests against racial injustice in the summer of 2020 resulted in a raft of corporate statements against racism, along with new racial equity initiatives. To effect meaningful change, businesses must maintain their commitments over time to address the concerns of their employees, customers, and other stakeholders. The authors suggest ways employers can ensure that their anti-racist statements continue to be backed by concrete actions.

In the phygital realm, the customer experience can be enhanced using the best of the physical and digital worlds. Unfortunately, digital transformation projects are often limited to the incorporation of various digital devices at different stages of the purchase experience. As a result, many companies are failing to seize the opportunities presented by this new hybrid world. While the physical-realm experience stems from sensory interactions between individuals and a distinct form of the bricks-and-mortar environment, the digital customer experience tends to relate to the integration of technologies that help consumers control, customize, optimize, and monitor their actions. Although physical experiences generate emotions, and digital ones are mostly functional, the phygital realm engages consumers by being both emotional and functional. When the concept of phygital is recognized as a hybrid realm with both functional and emotional components, companies can break free of existing customer experience constraints. Phygital-world competition is about an enhanced customer experience, not showcasing digital bells and whistles. To ensure a successful digital transformation, companies need a consumer-centric strategy that utilizes technologies to combine valuable experiences from the physical and digital realms to create something new and superior that consumers appreciate and don’t reject because it doesn’t fit with customer needs or expectations.

Companies that experience big fluctuations in demand can incur significant costs: overtime and lost sales when demand is too high, and idle capacity and excess inventory when demand slumps. But it's possible to better manage this variability by looking at one's customer list as a portfolio and targeting new customers whose demand patterns are complementary to those of existing customers.

As consumer shopping preferences shift from traditional retail channels toward e-commerce, the negative effects of e-commerce are easy to see and are often noted in the popular press. Yet, the benefits of this shift are often unseen. In this article, we first consider empirical evidence that suggests technological innovation is generally a net positive for society. We look at the unseen benefits along with each of the seen costs of e-commerce growth to fully understand the impacts on society. To do this, we consider packaging and waste, traffic and emissions, and energy and resource consumption all considered costs of ecommerce. Based on this evidence, we propose that policymakers should exercise caution before developing policies that may alter this shift and limit innovation.

The healthcare industry continues to face substantial pressure to simultaneously improve costs and patient centricity. Much of the focus to date has concerned policy interventions capable of improving these performance measures for traditional healthcare providers, such as hospitals. But recently, nontraditional healthcare providers like Walmart Health and Amazon have made forays into the industry by establishing retail medical clinics (RMCs). These efforts constitute a redistribution of how services are organized across the macro healthcare delivery supply chain. While RMCs stand to bring innovative models of service delivery to patients, the policy environment can both enable and inhibit their involvement in the industry. We develop a framework that explains how structural and conduct regulations have historically influenced demand for and supply of healthcare services. We then describe how these regulatory factors can support nontraditional healthcare providers as they launch innovative service delivery models aimed at efficiency and customer centricity.

Renewable energy (RE) is "green gold" for corporate energy buyers, and big companies have been using their influence and scale to advocate for state policies that will make it easier to buy RE. For most companies, however, getting to 100% RE is still a long slog through the current policy landscape. With that in mind, this article highlights policy implications at the state level that can advance or impede corporate RE energy buying. The article also provides case studies based on four states whose varying policies create different opportunities for companies to buy RE. The goal is to demonstrate the potency of state energy policy and to recommend shifts in the policy landscape so companies can meet their RE targets.

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 (FSMA) was the first significant reform in 70 years of the food production regulations governing the safety of human and animal foods produced for consumption in the United States. FSMA intended to provide policies that proactively prevent foodborne illnesses, establish science-based food safety standards, and include supply chain partners to ensure systematic prevention of foodborne illnesses. Yet these intentions may also drive small farms out of business, create food supply shortages, stifle food innovation, and harm the environment and consumer health. We propose that policy makers and managers consider reducing unnecessary documentation requirements, incentivizing innovative food technologies that improve food safety, improving the capacity and efficiency of testing labs, and increasing consumer awareness of food safety.

Supply chain strategies are used to increase efficiency, save money, or reduce uncertainty and disruption. Disruptions can be unexpected and potentially devastating for supply chains. However, sometimes supply disruptions are built into supply chains using a postponement strategy. When postponement is implemented as a supply chain strategy, it can smooth the flow of goods, provide cost savings, and improve customer experience. When postponement is forced on supply chains via government intervention it can break down the seamless flow of goods and information, causing them to work inefficiently. In this article, we show how intervention through postponement creates unintended consequences that negatively impact beer supply chains and make recommendations to help managers mitigate these consequences. We also address policymakers, who can decrease the likelihood of unintended consequences resulting from regulations they enact, including how to prevent legislating these regulations in the first place.

Using data on more than 4,000 product recalls, we recently found that firms whose boards of directors include more women are significantly faster to recall dangerously defective medical products. More specifically, adding just one female director to a board with no women did not speed recalls, but increasing from one female director to two, from two to three, and so on led to increasingly faster recalls. This provides initial evidence that consumer safety can be improved through including more women on companies' boards. Assuming data from other settings support our findings, it is tempting to conclude that governments should mandate a certain level of female board representation, especially for firms in consumer product sectors such as medical devices, food, toys, and automobiles. We suggest, however, that policy makers need to carefully think through the possible intended and unintended consequences of dictating board composition in terms of gender. Meanwhile, wise companies will recognize the benefits of greater female board representation and will pursue it without government intervention.

Business leaders must make sound, data-based decisions about their company's geographic footprint to ensure that they can meet future global challenges. The author's analysis of the Fortune Global 500 finds that COVID-19 will have a lasting effect on the geography of competition, regardless of vaccine availability. He identifies two misconceptions leaders should avoid and points to three trends that that could reshape companies' geographic footprints in the wake of the pandemic.

To prosper in dynamic times, businesses need to change their approach to rule-making and adherence. To transition to creating dynamic rules "rules that are built to change through collaboration, experimentation, and learning" leaders must help spread the correct mindset throughout their organizations. There are three specific steps that leaders should take to facilitate that shift: Increase employee involvement in rule-making, embrace rapid experimentation, and enact rule audits.