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
The Revolutionary Promise of Recommendation Engines
As the technologies behind recommendation engines advance, the advice and choices they produce could transform the experience of both the customer and the employee. But if the technology is to reach its full potential, companies will need to address sensitive issues of trust and privacy.
Data Accessibility Is a Management Problem, Not an IT Problem
Data accessibility has emerged as a challenge in taking AI out of the lab and into the business. Although it is often treated as an IT problem, in reality it is a management problem — aggravated by misconceptions about the nature and the role of data accessibility in AI.
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Hunting for Talent in the Digital Age
The dominance of social media sites and online platforms like LinkedIn has changed the hiring game and led to a rise in active recruiting on the part of companies. Companies are becoming more sophisticated about identifying talent, but they should cast a wide net, especially considering the rise of remote work.
Behind the NBA’s Slam-Dunk Social Justice Efforts
During its 2019-20 season, the National Basketball Association showed that three ingredients are essential for corporate social justice initiatives to stick: a workforce that unites behind a vision, an executive who supports that vision, and an organizational infrastructure built to implement and sustain change.
When It’s All Too Much
Almost every mundane activity of our lives — eating, getting dressed, hopping on Zoom — relies on “an almost unfathomably complex, algorithmically calibrated, partly automated, and partly sweatshop-labor-dependent global supply chain” that no individual can reasonably comprehend.
What Else We’re Reading This Week
- Jonathan Tudor, director of data and analytics at GE Aviation, explains in an interview how self-service data can help empower organizations at the individual level
- Five ways to communicate that build trust in you as a leader
- Instead of finding a purpose for data, find data for a purpose
- Climate change may drive the next mortgage crisis
Quote of the Week:
“You don’t need to collaborate in person to embrace a proactive mindset about creativity — you can do that independently, from anywhere.”
— Leigh Thompson, management professor and director of the Kellogg Team and Group Research Center at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, in “Virtual Collaboration Won’t Be the Death of Creativity”