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
Arguing Your Way to Better Strategy
At the core of every great strategy is a valid argument, and the flexible system of three activities — constructive debate, iterative visualization, and logical formalization — can help leaders arrive at such arguments. This article offers tips to help savvy leaders conduct strategic conversations, analyze potential options via strategy maps, and test the logic of strategic arguments in order to make sound decisions that will result in sustainable success.
Reducing the Risks of Concurrent Change Initiatives
Where should leaders focus when managing multiple, simultaneous change initiatives? Recent research explores the experiences of a global technology company that attempted two concurrent, large-scale change initiatives. In this scenario, consistency around content, procedure, and normative expectations as perceived by employees stood out as pivotal success factors.
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Some Workers Are Quitting Rather Than Giving Up Remote Work
For some workers who have embraced remote work, their employers’ push to get people back into offices is driving an exodus. While some things — like opportunities for collaboration or learning for junior employees — may be lost with remote work, pressure to show up at the office in person is leading some workers to seek out jobs at companies they feel take flexibility and the coronavirus more seriously.
The Courage to Be Candid at Work
Behaviors that spark organizational learning and growth also require a great deal of courage — often because they involve speaking truth to power or challenging one’s sense of self. Since they feel so risky, they don’t happen nearly as frequently as they should day to day. In this article, the authors offer a framework for encouraging courageous behaviors and making them safer for employees to exhibit.
What Else We’re Reading This Week
- Reduced future earnings and retirement benefits mean that the pandemic may keep costing women “for the rest of their working lives” (Source: Newsweek)
- As the use of increasingly powerful AI-driven tools grows in higher education, so do questions about bias and accuracy (Source: Undark)
- Long work hours may be the biggest occupational health hazard of all (Source: The New York Times)
Quote of the Week:
“Mistakes are actually good. The more mistakes you make, the more you learn.”
— Tassilo Festetics, general partner at the Growth Equity Fund, a department within the growth and innovation group at AB InBev, in the first interview in MIT Sloan Management Review’s Leading With Impact series, “How a Startup Mindset Brews Innovation at a Global Scale”