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
An Agile Approach for Digital Projects
Organizations that achieve the most success with digital projects use systematic processes to prototype, test, and launch ideas. Processes that allow for continuous learning and that support critical business goals can help you scale agile benefits.
Big Tech’s Eccentric Uncle Is Now Its Loudest Critic
He saw 200 Grateful Dead shows when Jerry Garcia was still around and sometimes tours as a guitarist with the likes of Pete Sears and Jefferson Starship. He also made a fortune in Silicon Valley in the early days of the internet and mentored young founders with names like Zuckerberg well into the 2000s. His name is Roger McNamee, and now he’s one of Big Tech’s loudest critics. Brian Barth paints a fascinating picture of McNamee’s ethical awakening for The New Yorker.
Redefining Work Can Create New Value
Understanding the relationship between job redesign and redefining work is essential to any strategic effort to compete. Redesigning jobs should be viewed not as an end goal but as a process that enables work itself to be redefined so that the workforce creates new value.
Get Updates on Transformative Leadership
Evidence-based resources that can help you lead your team more effectively, delivered to your inbox monthly.
Please enter a valid email address
Thank you for signing up
Elon Musk Bets Big
Elon Musk and his automotive company Tesla debuted their vision for the trucking market — the aesthetically mind-boggling Cybertruck. And, well, shares fell 6.1% the following day. As The Wall Street Journal writes, “This isn’t the kind of calculated strategic move you’d expect from a $60 billion public company. It’s basically a gut hunch — a wild bet.” Musk is known for his eccentricity as an entrepreneur, but will this latest bet pay off?
Digital Advances in Product Design Can Boost Sustainability
Digitization can help squeeze more economic value out of scarce environmental resources. By making product development more design- and information-intensive, companies are creating offerings that are reducing material use, lowering energy demands, and increasing revenues.
More Ideas That Matter:
- A webinar exploring how people-centered design principles can serve as a framework in AI implementation.
- Defining “tech companies”; Jeff Bezos’s empire has changed capitalism (and democracy?); the sharing economy is everywhere — and still expanding.
- Amazon may now touch Americans’ daily existence in more ways than any corporation in history.
Quote of the Week:
“While eureka moments can’t be forced, many of us have spent an enormous amount of time and energy thinking about a problem, only to have the solution arrive out of the blue when our minds are elsewhere. Great ideas often come to us in bed, in the bath, or on the bus, the so-called three Bs of creativity.”
— Professor Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries of INSEAD, in “Want More Creative Breakthroughs? Slow Down”