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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imposed order, says Seidman, “depends on having power over people and formal authority to coerce allegiance..."
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.
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.
We are in troubling times for the business community, and your work is greatly appreciated by it. Trust of American business is at an exceedingly low level, perhaps the lowest since the Great Depression. The actions of a few, spectacular malfeasants have sullied the reputation of business as a whole and exposed the need for greater vigilance, and greater penalties for failures of compliance and ethics.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, for capitalists, free enterprise is sacred and an inherent good. But what if we looked at free enterprise another way, and asked What is the role of freedom in the corporate setting? And how do levels of freedom affect the bottom line?
The global outpouring of respect for Nelson Mandela suggests that we’re not just saying goodbye to the man at his death but that we’re losing a certain kind of leader, unique on the world stage today, and we are mourning that just as much. Mandela had an extraordinary amount of “moral authority."