The Best of This Week
The week’s must-reads for managing in the digital age, curated by the MIT SMR editors.
Topics
Weekly Recap
Enabling Cultural Learning From a Distance
Most of us recognize the unspoken knowledge of how our company’s culture works as something we accumulate over time and often in person. So how will new hires understand what a place is about or where the power lies if they’re not in the office as much as they have been in the past? In this article, Lynda Gratton looks at ways companies can innovate with technology and curate interactions to help new employees learn and navigate company culture.
Responding to Turbulence With Dynamic Rules
To prosper in uncertain times, businesses need to change their approach to rulemaking and adherence. Creating dynamic rules — rules that are built to change through collaboration, experimentation, and learning — means leaders must help spread the correct mindset throughout their organizations. To facilitate that shift, leaders should take these three specific steps.
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The Care Sector as Human Infrastructure
During the pandemic, school and child care closures pushed parents (mostly women) to a breaking point, leaving many either out of work or completely overloaded. Now, the Biden administration is pushing the notion that home-based care — whether for children, the sick, or the elderly — is as crucial to a functioning economy as any other kind of infrastructure.
Centering ESG Issues in the Quarterly Earnings Call
Quarterly earnings calls present an opportunity for businesses to share how their long-term financial performance is tied to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. They can overcome obstacles to discussing ESG in these calls by laying the groundwork for interest in ESG, adapting the call schedule, explaining and reporting on the return on ESG investment, developing cross-functional collaborations, and staging the call as theater.
What Else We’re Reading This Week
- Companies struggling to build diverse, inclusive workplaces need to break the cycle of “sameness” that prevents some employees from getting an equal shot at success (Source: HBS Working Knowledge)
- Global strategy and operations for the world’s largest companies are being reshaped by three trends (Source: MIT SMR)
- A recent analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine suggests the world may have undercounted COVID-19 deaths by a staggering margin — and the actual count may be more than double the official total (Source: Vox)
Quote of the Week:
“The accelerating transformation in energy gives us unprecedented opportunities to create millions of jobs in solar and wind power, energy storage, energy efficiency, and updating our grid. It will take time to retrain workers and create all those jobs. But we also have a faster solution to bridge the gap: Pay the workers losing fossil fuel jobs.”
— Andrew Winston, coauthor of the forthcoming book Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, and Hunter Lovins, president and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions and professor of sustainable management at Bard College’s MBA in Sustainability Program, in “Fossil Fuel Jobs Will Disappear, So Now What?”