There are hundreds of Insights to explore that we hope raise people’s consciousness and elevate the conversation by exploring today’s world through the lens of The HOW philosophy.
Machines are starting to out-think us.
Everyone knows that a workplace in which people feel appreciated and valued, with more autonomy, is a more pleasant place to work than one in which they don’t. What has been less certain is that workplaces with high trust and a strong culture actually do better as businesses.
Everyone knows that a workplace in which people feel appreciated and valued, with more autonomy, is a more pleasant place to work than one in which they don’t. What has been less certain is that workplaces with high trust and a strong culture actually do better as businesses.
The vast majority of business leaders are looking for innovation in all the wrong places. In the 20th century, a CEO could command his employees to, ‘produce 10 times as many widgets as you did last month,’ in the same way that a general might have told a soldier to, ‘Take that hill.’ You could measure such progress easily.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, boundaries don’t restrict team members; they empower them.
Unless you’ve been cryogenically frozen for the last 16 years, you’ve probably noticed how radically our world has been reshaped by ever-expanding technology. Perhaps no part of our world, however, has embraced this shift as fully as business.
A few weeks ago Hillary Clinton said that we should “Make America Whole.” She may have said it as an aside, just as a contrast to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” but it actually encapsulates an ethos of leadership both deeply rooted in the American political tradition and central to the future of both our country and the corporate world.
“What behaviors do you want to see more of from your employees? What would help you win more customers and grow your business?”
What, exactly, is “greatness”? This is a question very much worth asking. After all, if we’re going to aspire to greatness together, we should have a common understanding of what we’re talking about.
The world is being dramatically reshaped and now operates differently. The implications for organizations and their leaders are profound, as new frameworks and metrics are now required to achieve resilience and growth. There is a growing need to move beyond measuring only how much business gets done — and bring equal rigor to analyzing how business gets done. The 2016 HOW…
One of the enduring ironies of the World Economic Forum in Davos is that the world’s élites congregate in this Alpine village each year to contemplate a backlash against the world’s élites.
Marking the UN Global Compact’s 15th anniversary, Global Compact +15 brought business and civil society to the United Nations to show how the private sector is taking action and partnering to advance societal priorities, with an emphasis on the United Nations global agenda for sustainable development (i.e. the Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs). The General Assembly Session was a unique gathering of all participants and special guests in the UN General Assembly Hall. Together participants aimed to demonstrate to Governments the private sector’s critical role in solving our world’s greatest challenges and show how the Global Compact’s work is at the heart of the United Nations agenda.
If you go to The Guardian’s website these days you can find a section that is just labeled “Protest.” So now, with your morning coffee, you can get your news, weather, sports — and protests. I found stories there headlined, “Five Fresh Ideas for the Street Art Agitator in 2016,” “Muslim Woman Ejected From Donald Trump Rally After Silent Protest” and, appropriately, “We Are Living in an Age of Protest.”
Several years ago, Dov Seidman published a business book called How. His primary argument was that process — the “how” — matters as much, if not more, than the substance — the “what.” Seidman focused his argument on how companies deliver products and services, but the Bowe Bergdahl case shows that political leaders who ignore the “how” in decision-making do so at their peril.
Today marks the fourth year of an inspiring new celebration, one that reacts to this trend by putting value over price and values over value and one that, I believe, deserves to become an enduring part of our global culture: #GivingTuesday.
“People often ask me to name the leaders who have inspired me the most in life. When I think about the unique qualities they possess, one trait that is consistent among them is how they get others to act, not just spectate, and join their cause. The leaders who have inspired me all have the…
If ever we needed any evidence that we are undergoing a huge shift in the very nature of capitalism, how our economy is organized and what business fundamentally is, we need only look to how and how much new business language is being invented. While business often gets accused of being jargony, of creating unintelligible phrases, I think much more is going on with this flowering of ethically-minded language.
As those of us in the Northern hemisphere settle into the autumn, I’m mindful of persistent advice from business gurus telling me that I should be practicing mindfulness, but I’m even more mindful that mindfulness has become one of the most overused, watered-down tropes of the year. The television series Silicon Valley nails this problem on the head, when it has Gavin Belson, the chief executive of Hooli, the show’s Google-like fictional technology company, consulting with his spiritual advisor for ways to use yoga and meditation to crush his opposition.
Fifteen year-old Trisha Prabhu understands the power of pausing. As a high school student and daughter of software engineers, Prabhu spent years studying computer programming from a young age. After learning about an 11-year-old girl who committed suicide in 2012 because of relentless bullying on the internet, she was prompted to put her knowledge to use in order to disrupt one of the greatest social problems facing her generation.
It’s fashionable to push for education reform these days, but the results of our various programs and initiatives are often harder to pinpoint exactly. American students’ achievement remains stagnant compared with their international peers, and just this year U.S. students received the lowest overall scores in a decade on the SAT. Despite the movements to create better math and science-based STEM programs, and to limit the number of vocabulary words students need to know for standardized tests, it seems our focus for what our children need to know is narrowing even further when it should be doing the opposite: expanding.
Dov Seidman, an ethics and compliance expert, urges banks and other companies to do the "next right thing," not the "next thing right," citing the example of Chipotle, which earlier this year stopped serving pork at one-third of its restaurants when it found a supplier fell short of its animal welfare standards.
I share the belief that ethics lie at the heart of all sustainable human endeavor. Your leadership is an inspiration to me and countless others.
With the 2016 Election season underway, the swirl of candidates and campaigns is drawing us into a discussion. Behind the talking points and slogans, what’s on display is not just leaders or leadership styles, but underlying worldviews.
Fifteen years ago, when 40 companies formed the Global Compact at the United Nations, they laid out the principles for a more inclusive and sustainable world. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for a “global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market.”
Anyone can change his or her behavior to improve creative impact in a company. According to the authors of the Innovators DNA, the five skills of disruptive innovators are questioning, observing, networking, experimenting and associational thinking (drawing connections among unrelated fields). These chiefs that follow make one or more of these habits a daily even
Dov Seidman keynotes the 2015 ASU GSV Summit.
Fortune’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list provides useful insights into how we collectively view corporate culture. Most of us flip through the pages or click through the screens hovering over pictures and blurbs highlighting gourmet chefs, nap rooms, yoga instructors and other signifiers of “great” workplaces.
Most of us seem to associate the word "leader" with stereotypical personality traits such as charisma, dynamism, self-motivation and forcefulness. There’s nothing wrong with any of these characteristics in and of themselves. Most successful leaders I have met exemplify some if not all of them. But just because these are the commonly thought of features, does that make them the best or definitive ones?
The world hasn’t just changed, it has been dramatically reshaped. When we can do business across continents in a matter of seconds and the Dow can lose and recover $136 billion in minutes because of a Twitter hoax, it’s clear that technology does more than just connect the world.
The monthly jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reads like a national marriage scorecard. There are tallies of courtships (“job openings”), marital unions (“hires”) and a variety of divorces (“total separations,” “quits,” “layoffs” and “discharges”). Our recent scorecards contain some positive how-much news: Employment marriages have outpaced employment divorces for more than a year, and the national unemployment rate is now south of 6 percent.
Join us for the first in a series of conversations on HOW individuals, nations and business must urgently change how they behave, lead and operate in a world that is more interconnected and interdependent. This first evening will examine the challenges in the global arena at this pivotal time and the fundamental shifts needed to solve our most pressing problems.
You could easily write a book, or, better yet, make a movie about the drama that engulfed Sony Pictures and "The Interview," Sony's own movie about the fictionalized assassination of North Korea's real-life dictator.
Two years ago, I wrote about #GivingTuesday when it first launched, calling it the “kind of wave that will launch and sustain us on a new journey.” Created as a response to “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday,” #GivingTuesday was spearheaded by the 92nd Street Y in partnership with the United Nations Foundation and other admirable organizations. Back then, the movement consisted of around 1,400 American charitable groups; this year, #GivingTuesday has spread to all 50 states and dozens of countries. From participating in coat and blood drives, to volunteering, to making donations, people of all ages, religions and opinions are uniting in the spirit of giving. It is capturing people’s imagination in ways no one has anticipated because it is tapping into a new source of power: our values.
This is the fourth apology in our Apology Metrics series in which we present apologies for readers to assess. Our goal is not to evaluate apologies as theatrical performances but to evaluate the apologizer’s behavior over time to see whether there has been genuine change. The survey for this apology will be predictive rather than retrospective. We will follow up with a retrospective evaluation after at least a year.
Over the course of the 20th century, the mature economies of the world evolved from being industrial economies to knowledge economies. Now we are at another watershed moment, transitioning to human economies—and the shift has profound implications for management.
Over the course of the 20thcentury, the mature economies of the world evolved from being industrial economies to knowledgeeconomies. Now we are at another watershed moment, transitioning to human economies—and the shift has profound implications for management. What do I mean by the human economy? Economies get labeled according to the work people predominately do in them. The industrial economy…
What does it mean for a company to be human? For starters, it means we want our companies to embody the best – not the worst – human capacities and qualities. Peter Drucker’s distinction between “doing the next thing right, and doing the next right thing” nails a profound difference between humans and machines.
People, we have a grande problem. And it goes much farther than your local Starbucks. Here’s how to take a stand. (How, indeed!)
It’s always a good time to ask what kind of leadership we need because the world is constantly changing. But the world is not only changing. It’s being dramatically reshaped, making us ask the question not just with more urgency but through a different lens.
Is your organization like GM? Your reaction to that question is probably similar to my own reflexive response–and to the reactions of the vast majority of business leaders and managers: “Of course not! Nor was our company like Enron or BP, for that matter. Our products didn’t kill customers, sap retirement accounts or damage the environment.” Of course, you may wonder why you should care enough to even ask yourself the question. Fair enough, but I strongly believe we all should ask this question.
Imposed order, says Seidman, “depends on having power over people and formal authority to coerce allegiance..."
I want to congratulate LeBron James, Germany and the San Antonio Spurs on their recent wins -- before they fade from our minds -- and for demonstrating to the world, and each other, how inspirational leadership works and what it takes to build a winning organization – any organization. This lesson goes far beyond sports; it is, in fact, directly analogous to the journey on which all leaders need to take their organizations to truly compete in today’s hyperconnected world as it reshapes our collective operating environment.
This is the third apology in our Apology Metrics series in which we present apologies for readers to assess. Our goal is not to evaluate apologies as theatrical performances but to evaluate the apologizer’s behavior over time to see whether there has been genuine change. This time, we will look at the apology of Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, to Australia’s indigenous community in 2008. With the benefit of six years of hindsight, we are in a much better position to judge the apology’s authenticity.
There’s definitely something happening here with pauses, but it isn’t exactly clear that we’re putting our pauses to good use. We’d better learn how to do so in a hurry because pausing has become a crucial capability for leaders, employees, and organizations in the 21st century.
This is the second apology in our Apology Metrics series in which we present apologies for readers to assess. Our goal is not to evaluate apologies as theatrical performances but to evaluate the apologizer’s behavior over time to see whether there has been genuine change.
The conference’s central question revolves around the growing recognition that the free enterprise system does not operate in a vacuum, and that it thus must be animated by a conscious regard for all its present and future stakeholders.
Doctors don’t traditionally apologize for medical errors; in fact, they usually don’t even disclose them. That is why I have long been interested in how the University of Michigan Health Systems has bucked tradition with its Michigan Model, a collaborative and transparent approach to patient safety and medical mistakes.
When Andrew Ross Sorkin and I came together to start “Apology Watch,” our goal was to elevate the conversation about authentic apologies. In that vein, we are introducing an “Apology Metric” survey to give readers an opportunity to share their insight.
“I am Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, your senior drill instructor. From now on you will speak only when spoken to, and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be ‘Sir.’ Do you maggots understand that?” With that line from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket actor R. Lee Ermey introduced his new recruits – and a whole generation of Americans – to the fundamentals of basic training, where drill sergeants demand respect, order, and, most importantly, obedience. Ermey, who wrote much of his own dialogue, acted out the reality he experienced when he was a Parris Island drill sergeant.
The freedom train has left the station, my friends. If you’re a business leader, you better track that train down, leap aboard and learn how to conduct the right type of freedom throughout your business ecosystem. If you don’t, your company and your career may soon hurtle off the rails.