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Companies that sell shippable goods have grappled with spikes in demand since COVID-19 hit. Robots seem like an obvious fix, but putting them into production is a complex undertaking. Still, we can learn from the rare successes: Plug-and-play systems offer far greater returns than large-scale, custom installations. They can be rapidly set up to meet surging demand and rapidly reconfigured when needs change.

The increased visibility of gender issues in society has inspired a trend among marketing companies: female empowerment. Marketers are working with clients and developing advertising that advocates equality for female consumers. Yet, despite this trend for femvertising, little progress has been made toward gender equality for the women working inside the creative advertising industry. This article looks at the inequality problem and considers whether it stems from women's thwarted attempts to establish a leadership identity within the strongly-gendered cultures in which they are subject to established practices. We interviewed 30 female creatives from the U.S., U.K., and mainland Europe, and, based on our findings, we present three overarching themes: vision, voice, and visibility. Together, they represent the challenges women experience in developing a leadership identity but also inspire opportunities for agencies to increase the influence of female creatives. If the advertising industry's claims to represent society are to be taken seriously, it must move beyond empowering female consumers to also empowering its female creatives.

Published in 26 languages across 68 countries, Forbes is one of the most-read business periodicals globally, and in 2019, its annual Top 50 World's Most Influential CMOs list highlighted 31 female CMOs and 19 male CMOs who demonstrate industry-shaping leadership. In this article, we analyze the language used to describe the male and female CMOs on the list to determine whether certain words are commonly seen as gendered characteristics, as leadership traits, or as compliments. Using this data, we find that Forbes presents female CMOs in a gendered way and argue for the importance of strategically choosing leadership words for female marketing leaders.

Technology is an engine for growth with great potential to transform women's self-efficacy and social capital. This article focuses on women in sales and sheds light on the intersection of technology, self-efficacy, and social capital in developing countries. The use of technology allows women to transform their social and economic lives by changing and reshaping processes that enable opportunities for growth and development-ultimately offering a bridge to close the many gaps in human socioeconomic development in developing countries. To this end, we offer several recommendations for saleswomen and organizations to expand their application of technological capabilities for product orders, market messaging, and training.

Networking is imperative for career success in business, particularly in industries like sales and marketing. Success in the sales industry is directly tied to networking and building relationships. In this article, we shed light on the relationship between women, business, and golf as a potential networking tool. Many believe golf is the pièce de résistance of business networking, yet there is no research to support this assumption. To boot, women report golf as one of the primary informal networks they feel excluded from, which creates a disadvantage for women working in sales in marketing. We conducted a content analysis of over 500 pages of articles about women and golf from which three primary categories emerged: the benefits of golf for women in business, the effects of not golfing, and the reasons why women don't golf. We include recommendations for managers who may want to encourage their teams to get in the game.

This study identifies sales managers' perceptions of sales forecasting. We surveyed close to 400 business-to-business sales managers, split about equally by gender, and concluded forecasting-related preferences, beliefs, and desires. Herein, we evaluate gender differences and identify some critical perceptions of women that differ from the perceptions of their male counterparts. We also compare attitudes, behaviors, and demographics of women and men. We conclude with organizational recommendations and implications for firms concerning hiring practices, forecasting tool selection, training and development, and the use of an employee resource group.

Female consumers often experience marketplace discrimination in service encounters. Researchers have examined women's differential treatment in many settings, but they have yet to study how women are treated during service-recovery encounters. We found evidence that male providers discriminated against female consumers during the service-recovery process in three experiments. Specifically, male providers offered less compensation to female consumers who complained after a failure than to male consumers who experienced the same failure. Further, we found that perceptions of consumer social power may explain this effect. We offer suggestions for how firms can identify internal marketplace gender discrimination, as well as how they can prevent and treat this significant problem. We also suggest that managers create anticipatory protocols and scripts and engage employees in both bias and interpersonal accuracy training.

Feminism's reemergence in the mainstream has forced businesses and media organizations to be aware of and even to promote gender issues relevant to the marketing of their products, services, and brands, especially those that target young female consumers. Business scholarship has offered marketing guidelines for gendered representations, but most studies have occurred in adult consumption spheres, with less attention paid to feminist messaging in youth media. Through a thematic analysis of 17 Disney and Pixar animated films produced between 1989 and 2018 and featuring a female lead or colead, this study offers a blueprint that could help businesses develop feminist messaging in marketing communications and media directed at young female consumers. While businesses might understand that promoting positive gendered messages is necessary in the current era of heightened feminist awareness, few firms actually do it. And for the companies that do it, integrating feminist messages in a way that does not alienate mainstream consumers might prove challenging. This study's framework, which emerges from an empirical study of Disney and Pixar media, helps reduce some of these creative barriers.

Gender stereotypes, which are particularly harmful to women, have historically been prevalent in advertising, prompting some governments and brands to regulate conventional gender portrayals. This study examines current gender portrayals in television advertising in the Middle East, and specifically in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), because of the increasing importance accorded to women's empowerment in some of these countries. Building on similar studies elsewhere, we analyze the content of 111 distinct television advertisements aired over a week by a major TV channel in the region. Our analysis reveals that while depictions of certain aspects, such as role (familial/nonfamilial) and location (home/occupational setting), gently nudged traditional stereotypes by portraying women in nonfamilial roles and in occupational settings, depictions of background (female/male/children) and product type further reinforced traditional stereotypes. Based on these findings, we offer specific recommendations to marketers and advertisers in the region.

In his new book, The Hype Machine, MIT Sloan School of Management professor Sinan Aral takes on the greatest communications force of our lifetime: social media. Aral provides an insightful, level-headed, analysis of the power, peril, and potential of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms for both organizations and society.

Resilient companies go beyond traditional forecasting and risk-assessment exercises when formulating strategy. They actively sense threats and opportunities early on, organize in response, capture value by revising business models and restructuring relationships, and renew the organizational capabilities needed to create and capture value.

Many leadership models are missing a key ingredient: sensemaking, a capability that is an essential tool for navigating change and planning through uncertainty. As our world grows more complex, and in the face of difficult, uncertain circumstances, executives need to recognize sensemaking as a crucial leadership tool and embed sensemaking processes and practices into their organizations.

Most companies treat cybersecurity as an operational issue and are often unprepared for debilitating attacks. Elevating it to a matter for strategic planning can not only improve organizational resilience but also reveal strengths, weaknesses, and new opportunities.

Developing a truly innovative strategy requires you to anticipate your own company's disruption. The Phoenix Encounter Method uses a series of exercises and workshops to imagine your organization's competitive annihilation and then develop a new strategy for disrupting yourself before a competitor can.

The sharing economy promised independent workers flexibility and decent pay, but it often falls short on both fronts as platform companies put growth and profit targets first. Worker-owned cooperatives provide a model for more equitable digital business.

Customers ultimately want to pay for meaningful outcomes, not the products and services that presumably deliver them. Today, companies can be increasingly accountable for those outcomes with three kinds of technologically enhanced revenue models. Adopt one to better align your company's success with your customers satisfaction.

The U.S.-China trade war and the supply and demand shocks brought on by the Covid-19 crisis are forcing manufacturers everywhere to reassess their supply chains. For the foreseeable future, they will face pressure to increase domestic production, grow employment in their home countries, reduce their dependence on risky sources, and rethink strategies of lean inventories and just-in-time replenishment, which can be crippling when material shortages arise. This article provides advice to make your supply chain more resilient without sacrificing competitiveness. Start by mapping the full extent of your supply network to identify both direct and indirect sources. Determine how quickly those that are most vital for you could either recover from a disruption or be replaced by an alternative. Address the vulnerabilities by diversifying your suppliers or stockpiling essential materials. Explore production-process improvements or new technologies-such as automation, continuous-flow manufacturing, and 3D printing-that could lower your costs or increase your flexibility when faced with a shock. And revisit your product strategies: Offering consumers more choices isn't always better.

Rather than try to follow a set of simple rules ("Don't lie." "Don't cheat."), leaders and managers seeking to be more ethical should focus on creating the most value for society. This utilitarian view, Bazerman argues, blends philosophical thought with business school pragmatism and can inform a wide variety of managerial decisions in areas including hiring, negotiations, and even time management. Creating value requires that managers confront and overcome the cognitive barriers that prevent them from being as ethical as they would like to be. Just as we rely on System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (deliberative) thinking, he says, we have parallel systems for ethical decision-making. He proposes strategies for engaging the deliberative one in order to make more-ethical choices. Managers who care about the value they create can influence others throughout the organization by means of the norms and decision-making environment they create.

To succeed, a new company must rally investors, staff, customers, and the media around a good story. But often that narrative turns out to be wrong, and entrepreneurs realize they need to change direction. How that shift is communicated can have a huge impact on a venture's future. Through extensive research with founders, innovation chiefs, analysts, and journalists, the authors have identified stratagems for maintaining stakeholder support during pivots. Early on, entrepreneurs should avoid a focus on overly specific solutions and instead present the big picture. When changing course, they can then signal continuity by explaining how the new plan fits with the original vision. Once the reboot has happened, it's critical to be conciliatory and empathetic to stakeholders who may feel abandoned. Employees and customers are far more willing to remain loyal if given guidance about how they'll be affected and if leaders seem to genuinely care about their situation.

Companies struggle with innovation because they put all their chips on one innovation paradigm-what Holt calls better mousetraps. This is innovation as conceived by engineers and economists-a race to create the killer value proposition. It wins on functionality, convenience, reliability, price, or user experience. Fortunately, building better mousetraps is not the only way to innovate. In consumer markets, innovation often proceeds according to a logic Holt calls cultural innovation. Better-mousetraps innovation is organized by quantitative ambitions: Outdo your competitors on existing notions of value. Cultural innovation operates according to qualitative ambitions: Change the understanding of what is considered valuable. Holt's research and consulting reveal the strategic principles that allow companies to pursue cultural innovation. In this article he explores those principles using the stories of how the Ford Explorer reinvented the family car and how Blue Buffalo reinvented the ideology of dog food.