Chair
Martha Kesler
Vice Chair
Jamie Kelly
Treasurer
Amy Cowart
Trustees
Marco Cassone
Joe Cimbak
Sherry Duda
Steven Goodwin
Jean Hartmann
Cindy Miller
Sanjay Naik
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We Can't Undo Globalization, but We Can Improve It
Gary Pinkus, James Manyika and Sree Ramaswamy, Harvard Business Review
You can’t go forward by going backward. Take the current debate about trade and globalization, for instance. While the impulse to erect trade barriers is understandable given the pain experienced by workers in a range of industries and communities in recent years, it is not the way to create lasting growth and shared prosperity.
That doesn’t mean we should keep doing the same old things. Ignoring the very real costs of trade and globalization is not only counterproductive but indefensible. Instead, the United States needs to move forward based on a new economic agenda, one that promotes inclusion and helps workers and communities caught in transition.
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Globalization Is a Mechanism, not a Destination
Amy Jadesimi, Forbes
Seen from Nigeria, the vote for Brexit in the U.K. and for President Donald Trump in the U.S. lays bare some of the frustration and anger present at the extremes of wealth and power across the world. These tensions have been apparent in low-income, high-growth countries for some time. Despite the important successes and the potential of prosperity that the globalized, free trade model offers, wealth does not always trickle down, fueling resentment. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world now has more than the rest put together. Or perhaps even more shocking, the richest 62 people own as much as the poorest half of the global population. Keep Reading
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How to Cure the Globalization Backlash
Harold Sirkin, Forbes
Many thought leaders in the United States and Europe are trying to come to grips with the globalization backlash taking place on both sides of the Atlantic.
While I don’t share the views of the de-globalization crowd, I think it’s important to understand their thinking — and not dismiss them out of hand as racists, religious bigots, and xenophobes, as some have done.
While xenophobia and other fears may be factors — speaking in the present tense, because the backlash has hardly ebbed — concerns over family safety and job security appear to be a much higher priority. Keep Reading
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Robert Safian, Fast Company
I didn’t know what to do. A protester had just stood up in the audience, shouting questions toward the stage, where I was moderating. As host of the event, it was my responsibility to defuse the situation. But how?
That’s when PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, one of my guests onstage, stepped in. Nooyi calmly and firmly addressed the question with no hint of defensiveness. The audience applauded. When another protester tried to interrupt the session again several minutes later, the people seated nearby shouted down the disrupter. Completely unruffled, Nooyi continued on with our interview. The crowd came away even more impressed by her. She turned adversity to her advantage. Keep Reading
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True Leaders Believe Dissent Is an Obligation
Bill Taylor, Harvard Business Review
These are head-spinning times for those of us who think about the best ways to lead and the most effective ways to compete. What defines acceptable personal behavior (let alone behavior worth emulating) among public officials? Why would executives at so many iconic organizations — Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, FIFA — tolerate behavior so egregious that it threatens the very future of their organizations? How should innovators with a fierce sense of ambition handle the criticisms and objections that inevitably come their way and make sure that confidence does not turn into bombast?
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Why Trust in Leadership Leads to Better Employee Performance
Victor Lipman, Forbes
Trust is one of those softer management qualities that people usually believe are good but whose value they have a hard time quantifying.
Which is why I was pleased to see a new study from the Ken Blanchard Companies examining the connection between trustworthy leadership behavior and productive employees.
According to the study, the research showed a "large degree of correlation" between trust and numerous positive employee behaviors and attributes.
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How to Get Real Diversity at the Top: Deloitte's Chairman Explains
Jeff Kauflin, Forbes When Deloitte Chairman Mike Fucci first arrived at the accounting and consulting firm as an analyst, in 1981, he felt out of place. “I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I felt like everybody had a homogeneous look, and I thought I was different,” he says. It took him a long time to feel comfortable speaking up in meetings. Then he became friends with a manager who told him, “You offer something that’s different from some of the conversations we had, and it’s because of your diversity of thought.” That manager went on to advocate for Fucci, becoming his mentor and sponsor.
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Evidence That Minorities Perform Worse Under Biased Managers
Amanda Pallais, Harvard Business Review There is a growing body of research showing that minorities face bias in the job application process. When identical resumes — one with the name Emily and one with the name Lakisha, for example — are sent to job openings, Emily’s resume gets substantially more callbacks. And even with the same credentials as other candidates, minorities are less likely to be hired. But we know considerably less about how bias plays out when minorities are hired, especially when it comes to on-the-job performance and productivity. Recent research I conducted along with Dylan Glover and William Pariente, forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, attempts to address this gap. We find that when managers hold negative beliefs, even unconscious ones, about minority workers, minority employees perform much worse than they do with unbiased bosses. In other words, managers’ biases can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
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3 Ways Data Dashboards Can Mislead You
Joel Shapiro, Harvard Business Review
Executives love dashboards, and why wouldn’t they? Single-screen “snapshots” of operational processes, marketing metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) can be visually elegant and intuitive. They show just-in-time views of what’s working and what isn’t — no need to wait for weekly or monthly reports from a centralized data center. A quick scan of a dashboard gives frontline managers transparency and, ideally, the opportunity to make rapid adjustments.
But dashboards aren’t the magic view some managers treat them as. Although they can convey snapshots of important measures, dashboards are poor at providing the nuance and context that effective data-driven decision making demands.
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How Blockchain Will Change Organizations
Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, MIT Sloan Review
What if there were an internet of value — a secure platform, ledger, or database where buyers and sellers could store and exchange value without the need for traditional intermediaries? This is what blockchain technology will offer businesses.
For the last century, academics and business leaders have been shaping the practice of modern management. The main theories, tenets, and behaviors have enabled managers to build corporations, which have largely been hierarchical, insular, and vertically integrated. However, we believe that the technology underlying digital currencies such as bitcoin — technology commonly known as blockchain — will have profound effects on the nature of companies: how they are funded and managed, how they create value, and how they perform basic functions such as marketing, accounting, and incentivizing people. In some cases, software will eliminate the need for many management functions.
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We’re Thinking About Organizational Culture All Wrong John Traphagan, Harvard Business Review A common thread in the study of organizational culture is the idea of culture as a unifying force that brings people together to work productively toward the attainment of organizational goals. In this approach, organizational culture is understood as a variable to be used in projects of social engineering aimed at creating unity and cohesion. But that’s not really what culture is about, nor is it a useful way to think about organizations. Why? Because culture isn’t just about unity; it’s also about division. Rather than a deterministic “thing” that shapes behavior and unifies people, culture is something people use, often strategically, to achieve goals. It can also provide a basis upon which people contest and counter certain ideas and values while accepting other values associated with a particular cultural context.
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Embracing the Reality and Possibility of Transition
Kelly Lewis, OD Practitioner
Transitions are beautifully hard. They can be initiated by a situation not of our choosing or inspired by a possibility of our liking. Some are long and drawn out while others are short and swift. Often, they feel chaotic and messy and we try our hardest to make them neat and tidy. For most of us, they are easier to think about than to experience. For all of us, transitions are an invitation to wholeheartedly embrace reality and unequivocally step into possibility.
Early this spring, I was invited into a long, messy, beautifully hard transition by a situation not of my choosing. I am grateful that I said “yes” to this invitation even though it is easier to grasp intellectually than to experience emotionally. Through this article, I would like to invite you into my transition and my learnings to date; I hope it supports and perhaps challenges you (and your clients) to navigate the transitions you are experiencing.
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Collaborating Better Across Silos
Sarah Green Carmichael, Harvard Business Review
Harvard Law School lecturer Heidi K. Gardner discusses how firms gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. But it’s often difficult, expensive, and messy. The former McKinsey consultant is the author of the new book, Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.
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Execution Is a People Problem, Not a Strategy Problem
Peter Bregman, Harvard Business Review
Paul, the CEO of Maxreed, a global publishing company, was having trouble sleeping. Publishing is an industry that’s changing even faster than most other fast-changing industries, but Paul wasn’t awake worrying about his strategy. He had a solid plan that took advantage of new technologies, and the board and his leadership team were aligned around it. Paul and his team had already reorganized the structure — new divisions, revised roles, redesigned processes — to support their strategy.
So what was Paul worrying about? People.
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