Chair
Sherry Duda
Vice Chair
Martha Kesler
Secretary
Beverley Patwell
Lori Blander
Jaya Bohlmann
Marco Cassone
Zoe MacLeod
Sanjay Naik
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| Globalization Is Becoming More About Data and Less About Stuff Susan Lund, James Manyika, and Jacques Bughin, Harvard Business Review Globalization is not what it was even a decade ago. What links the world together has changed fundamentally — and for many companies, succeeding in this new operating environment will require rethinking many past decisions and assumptions. The 20th-century version of globalization was defined by rapidly growing trade in goods, as major multinationals created supply chains that spanned the world. Today growth in global trade has flattened, and it looks unlikely to regain its previous peak relative to world GDP anytime soon. The same is true for cross-border financial flows. But globalization hasn’t gone into reverse. It’s gone digital. Cross-border data flows have grown by a factor of 45 over the past decade, and they’re projected to post another ninefold increase by 2020.
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| Ranjay Gulati and Alicia DeSantola, Harvard Business Review
Why do so many startups that seem to have it all—customers, cash, a promising outlook—run off the rails? Ask a venture capitalist, and you’ll probably hear that they have trouble “scaling.”
What does that mean, though? VCs typically describe it as a need to “professionalize the organization” and “bring in grown-ups.” But those are simplistic fixes—poor substitutes for the substantive changes that need to occur. Startups these days grow so rapidly that it’s difficult for them to correct course once they recognize missteps. They can improve their prospects by understanding the mechanics of effective scaling before they reach that moment of truth.
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| The Office Hierarchy Is Officially Dead Rebecca Greenfield, Bloomberg Business
After predictions of its demise, the traditional office structure is crumbling. Only 38 percent of companies in a recent survey say they are "functionally organized." For large companies with more than 50,000 employees, that number shrinks to 24 percent.
These organizations are moving away from the top-down hierarchies, inherited from the industrial age, suggests a Deloitte survey, released Wednesday, of more than 7,000 companies. Traditionally, jobs were organized by function—sales people worked with sales people; marketing people with marketing—and success meant moving up the chain. But in a modern workplace, people have less-defined jobs and move laterally from project to project, said Deloitte's Josh Bersin, who worked on the study. "We're now operating businesses as networks of teams," he said. Companies that haven't already made this shift are thinking about it—92 percent of those surveyed cited organizational redesign as the top priority.
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| Why So Many Thirty-something Women Are Leaving Your Company Christie Hunter Arscott, Harvard Business Review
What is the main reason women in their early thirties are leaving your company? Organizational leaders report that women are leaving primarily because of flexibility needs and family demands. Women in their thirties disagree.
A recent global ICEDR study revealed that leaders believe that the majority of women around the age of 30 leave because they are struggling to balance work and life or planning to have children, whereas men leave because of compensation.
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| How to Help Fix Your Employee’s Time Management Problem Laura Vanderkam, Fast Company
You might think that by the time people enter the workforce, they would know how to manage their time. And yet in any office, there is someone who creates chaos and bad feelings because of his or her relationship with the clock. As a manager, "You really shouldn’t be the one who has to teach this," says Bruce Tulgan, author of Bridging the Soft Skills Gap, and yet if it’s a business issue, then you do. So how can you teach an employee time management?
First, identify why you feel the person is "bad" at this soft skill. The simplest problem is if he is not meeting your expectation for timeliness in everyday activities. You want your meetings to start on time, which means you want everyone in their seats at 9:28 a.m. so when you walk in at 9:30 a.m., it’s game time. To you, this seems like simple respect and courtesy for one’s manager, but not everyone can read your mind.
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| Can Your Employees Really Speak Freely? James R. Detert and Ethan R. Burris, Harvard Business Review
Chances are, your employees are withholding valuable intelligence from you. Maybe it’s about a project that’s gone off track or a manager who’s behaving badly. Or maybe they’re not sharing their thoughts on ways the business could grow its sales or improve operations. No matter how open you are as a manager, our research shows, many of your people are more likely to keep mum than to question initiatives or suggest new ideas at work.
This is true even if, like most leaders, you believe you have an open-door policy. (In our years of studying employee “voice” and advising organizations, we’ve never heard anyone say, “I have a closed-door policy.”) Think about it: How often do employees come to you, on your turf, to tell you the unvarnished truth simply because you’ve encouraged them to do so? The reality is, they worry—rightly or not—that you’ll take their comments personally, or that they’ll come across as disrespectful know-it-alls.
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| 6 Ways Successful Leaders Evaluate Business Relationships Glenn Llopis, Forbes
The external partners that you decide to align your business with can either positively or negatively impact your short and long term success. They can either lift your business up to reach greater levels of significance or pull your business down — making you vulnerable and guiding you down a path of ineffective decision-making. Relationships with external partners (vendors, consultants, advisors, non-profit organizations, etc.) can either make you stronger and wiser about your future, or they can weaken you and blind you to the opportunities perhaps right in front of you.
As a leader, do you grow complacent and allow business relationships to continue without assessing the real value they provide, or are they keeping you on your toes? And are you keeping them on their toes, anticipating when the relationship is at risk of being taken for granted and demanding that they step up their game?
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| How Powerful, Low-Status Jobs Lead to Conflict Eric M. Anicich, Nathanael J. Fast, Nir Halevy, and Adam D. Galinsky, Harvard Business Review The insufferable coworker. The abusive boss. When it comes to conflict in the workplace, we tend to think that people are the problem. There is some truth to this idea. From differing values and backgrounds to personal insecurities, individual characteristics are often an important source of conflict. However, by focusing on individuals and their personality traits, we ignore a crucial ingredient in the conflict cocktail: one’s structural position in the organization. Our recent research has begun to shed light on this often-overlooked source of interpersonal conflict. In a set of studies, including surveys, a field study in a large federal agency, and controlled experiments, we found that employees who occupied positions that lack respect and admiration in the eyes of others (i.e., that lack status) but who simultaneously control important resources (i.e., have considerable power) were the most likely to initiate conflict with others. Being in a role that has power but lacks status leads people to demean others.
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| The Future of HR and Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It Cale Guthrie Weissman, Fast Company
In 2012, a curious person on the web—likely an enthusiastic entrepreneur—asked a simple question on Quora: Does a startup need an HR person? This was in the infancy of the current boom—or bust—we’re now in; Now-defunct shopping website Fab had just raised $117 million; Pinterest landed $100 million, Box raised $125 million, and Square got $200 million.
Startups at the time were figuring out how to ride this wave, so it’s unsurprising that the first and most popular answer provided was this: "No, you don’t need an HR person."
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| Don’t Let Outdated Management Structures Kill Your Company Vineet Nayar, Harvard Business Review
During a consulting engagement at a $50 billion conglomerate, I spoke with a young man who was worried about a potential project overrun. I asked if he had hit a stumbling block. “It really isn’t a big deal — I know we have the in-house expertise to solve this,” he said. “I just need to rope in some colleagues from another team.” “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “I’m waiting for my boss to give me the go-ahead,” he replied.
This company operates on a hub-and-spoke management structure, where significant decisions are referred to one’s formal boss rather than to whoever is best suited to make the call, regardless of hierarchical positioning. The management structure gave the company the ability to make decisions quickly in the early days.
Now, though, it is slowing the organization down, due to its inherent inability to enable quick, cross-functional, collaborative decisions. (In this company, like so many others, most significant value creation now occurs through the work of cross-functional project teams.) The management of this company has noticed this lag and asked for help answering a question: Does it need to review its management structure to enable better collaboration between individual teams?
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| Is Diversity Good for Business? Glenn Llopis, Forbes
As the cultural demographic shift continues to transform the face of America, business leaders are taking a closer look at their diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts and asking, “What really should our D&I efforts be solving for?”
The reality is that D&I is no longer just a numbers game, nor just another politically correct workplace initiative; it’s about bridging the opportunity gaps that will continue to widen if we continue to ignore the message the marketplace is clearly telling us: that it’s becoming less about the business defining the individual and much more about the individual defining the business. As such, American enterprise must adopt D&I as a strategy for growth if they are to compete in the 21st century. For those corporations that do, I believe there are at least six things that D&I can solve for in our efforts to bridge the growing opportunity gaps that span all industries.
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