Why Companies Practice Corporate Social Responsibility

For two decades now, the question of why companies practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gripped practitioners, policy makers, and academics alike. Strong interest in this question has been driven by the increasing engagement of companies worldwide in all manner of CSR activities, from reducing carbon emissions to increasing the gender...

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Leading in an Age of Employee Activism

Brian Stauffer/theispot.com The Research The authors’ research on employee activism builds on a seven-year project examining the experience of speaking truth to power. They conducted 62 semistructured interviews with employee activists and company leaders from multiple sectors around the world. Their work also draws from six cooperative...

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The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days

Even before the pandemic, 71% of managers thought meetings were costly and unproductive. Since many companies have shifted to remote and hybrid workplace models, meetings have steadily increased in frequency and length to compensate for the loss of in-person interactions. Today’s knowledge workers typically spend more than 85% of their time in meetings,...

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Prepare for the Bullwhip’s Sting

Nearly two years into the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, signs are pointing to the growing risk of a global economic recession. High consumer demand, product shortages, and transportation disruptions in the second half of 2021 triggered inflation and changes to manufacturers’ order patterns, setting up the bullwhip effect — a supply chain...

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Human Diversity Will Save Your Job From the Robot Takeover

Robots have long been celebrated as ideally situated to take over society’s most dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs, from robot vacuum cleaners (dirty) to manufacturing robots (dull) to military robots (dangerous). All those roles, of course, were at one point held by people, and people in those functions will continue to be replaced by robots. But they...

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Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation

More than 40% of all employees were thinking about leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021, and as the year went on, workers quit in unprecedented numbers.1 Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, an all-time record.2 As the Great Resignation rolls on, business leaders are struggling to make sense...

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Designing a Tailored Online Delivery Strategy

How we shop has been forever changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Retailers across the world are trying to figure out how to best serve the online consumer. For most, that means faster delivery; the speed with which retailers are able to deliver the goods has been synonymous with quality service. Related Reading Pedro Amorim and Nicole DeHoratius,...

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The Three Internal Barriers to Deep-Tech Corporate Venturing

The flow of capital to deep-tech startups is rapidly becoming a torrent. From 2016 to 2020, annual investments in startups focused on commercializing emerging technologies such as biotechnology, robotics, and quantum computing grew in value from $15 billion to $60 billion worldwide, with the average private investment more than tripling in size. Deep-tech...

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Humanizing the Digital Experience in a Post-Pandemic Era

After months of repetition, rituals become deeply ingrained — which is why the sweeping changes in consumer behavior that have taken root during the pandemic are likely to last well into the future. In my work advising Fortune 500 companies, I call this COVID-stasis — a state of suspended animation that is keeping consumers stuck in place. It’s no...

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How Hyperflexibility Can Benefit — or Burn Out — Your Team

We are witnessing a new HR trend: unlimited or forced paid time off (PTO), also known as unlimited vacation in the U.S. or, on the other side of the pond, unlimited holidays. The London stockbroker FinnCap recently announced that it will force its employees to take at least four weeks of vacation, following a difficult year that required employees to...

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