Sandrine Devillard

Talent pipeline failure and its impact on DE&I should be treated like the significant business problems they are. Organizations need to tackle them the same way they take on any significant business challenge, such as increasing revenue or global expansion. It needs to be looked at as a large change program, but [that’s often not] the way it’s being handled right now. Organizations need to … [ Read more ]

Ted Iverson

If we have measurables that are not connected to elements of purpose, then we need to ask ourselves, “Is there an opportunity to better align these?”

Maria McKay

Many organizations ask employee resource groups (ERGs), which are voluntary, employee-led groups where people who share a mutual characteristic can come together in a safe space, to be responsible for DE&I projects.

ERGs are critical parts of organizations. But successful organizations don’t make advancing equity the responsibility of ERGs. They are largely not funded and they don’t necessarily include decision-makers and sponsors from the highest levels … [ Read more ]

Erik Roth

Innovation, at its simplest, is identifying a valuable problem to solve, using a technology to solve that problem, and putting it inside a business model that allows it to scale as quickly as possible to create value. If you have that mental model in mind, how easy or difficult is it for those pieces to come together end to end in your organization? We often … [ Read more ]

Emily Field, Bryan Hancock, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi, Bill Schaninger

McKinsey research found that workplace relationships account for 39 percent of employees’ job satisfaction. Moreover, relationships with management, in particular, account for 86 percent of workers’ satisfaction with their interpersonal ties at work. Yet, despite the importance of these manager–employee relationships, surveyed managers report spending almost three-quarters of their time on tasks not directly related to talent management.

Go, teams: When teams get healthier, the whole organization benefits

Creating effective teams depends on multiple factors, including high levels of trust and communication, and understanding team context. A new approach helps elevate performance and create value.

Judith Persichilli

Take your jobs and your responsibilities very seriously, but don’t take yourselves too seriously.

Nouriel Roubini

Sometimes borrowing makes sense, to borrow to invest into something productive. But if you borrow just to consume, then eventually you get in trouble and your debt ratios become too high relative to your need to pay back your debts over time. It could be a problem for households, for the business sector, financial institutions, for governments, for a country as a whole.

Ginni Rometty

Whenever you position something so that there’s going to be a winner and a loser, very rarely have I seen that be to anybody’s benefit.

Ginni Rometty

Resilience is the most important characteristic, along with curiosity, for any leader. It’s not exactly about what you know; it’s about those two dimensions. I think there are two ways to develop resilience: one is through the relationships you have… The second way is through your attitude.

Ginni Rometty

Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, because you’re acknowledging what you or the organization know or don’t know… It takes a strong person to do that, to ask for help. When people won’t ask for help when they need it, I get very nervous. To me, that’s a great sign of weakness.

Ginni Rometty

We’ve got to move the whole country to a skills-view, not just degree-view, of jobs, and then hire for that and reward for that. This accomplishes many things. First, as an employer, I need more people with the right skills. Second, there are so many people left out of economic opportunity. This brings more people back into our workforce.

What I learned from Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman was the psychologist whose findings helped launch behavioral economics. The encouraging words he shared with me offer good news for organizations.

Sally Helgesen

One of the ways that I assess whether an organization has an inclusive culture is one of the simplest possible methods: Does the largest possible percentage of people speak of the organization in terms of “we” or “they”? If it’s we, it’s probably inclusive, and if it’s they, which it often is, then despite all the mission statements extolling diversity and inclusive culture—it’s not an … [ Read more ]

Myra Strober

If we’re going to live on average to age one hundred, we are certainly not going to be retiring at 65 or anything close to 65, because we’re not going to be able to earn enough money prior to 65 to finance retirement to one hundred.

We’re going to have to rethink retirement, we’re going to have to rethink careers, and we’re going to have to … [ Read more ]

Michael Ross

We believe very firmly that there’s something foundational about cohorts. When we say “cohort,” we mean a group of customers that were acquired in a period, whether that’s a monthly cohort, a quarterly cohort, or an annual cohort. The 2021 cohort is a group of customers who made their first purchase in 2021.

What’s powerful about a cohort is that the membership of that group never … [ Read more ]

Michael Ross

The opportunities to use customer analysis to change behavior go way, way beyond what is in the marketing domain—it goes to how we think about profitability, how we align channels, how we align the service propositions, how we align the operational experience, and how we understand which elements of products or categories are good for acquiring and retaining customers.

Michael Ross

Understanding the time between first and second purchase is incredibly helpful. It is a very good discipline to understand, “Why do customers only buy once? How can we get them to come back? How can we get them to come back faster?” That drives a lot of very good behaviors.

Michael Ross

When you look at a distribution of customer value, you will often see that a high-value customer—what we’d call a top-decile customer—can be worth 40 or 50 times a low-value customer. The notion of an average customer may be mathematically true, but it doesn’t really exist in practice or is extremely unrepresentative of a customer base.