A.G. Sulzberger

The most important thing you have to figure out in order to change a company or change the culture of a company is what is not going to change. The reason is that if everything is up for grabs, if you can change literally anything about a company, then the company has no reason for being. For an institution to change, it needs to separate … [ Read more ]

Christopher Mims

I don’t know that algorithms are, themselves, the root of the problems that we have in our labor markets these days. But I do think that management by algorithm facilitates an additional level of remove between management and frontline workers. And whenever you have that, whether it’s a geographic or a communications remove, or in this case abstracting people away through software and scheduling algorithms, … [ Read more ]

Kip Tindell

One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership.

The algorithmic trade-off between accuracy and ethics

In The Ethical Algorithm, two University of Pennsylvania professors explain how social values such as fairness and privacy can be designed into machines.

Daniel Hulme

For millennia, philosophers have been debating how society should be structured and what it means to live a “good life.” As our environments start to intelligently interact with us, we’re giving them the power to create and destroy. We have to embed ethical behaviors into these system, which makes it an extremely exciting time for humanity, because we now have to agree on what those … [ Read more ]

Daniel Hulme

The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior.

Building resilience in a polycrisis world

To stay operational, even in the worst of times, focus on what matters most. It will change your risk culture.

Andre Durand

If you look at the essence of trust, it’s a one-to-one ratio between say and do. If over some period of time, I observe a good ratio of someone doing what they say they will do, they will earn my trust.

Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

When a market is up for grabs, the risk isn’t inefficiency — the risk is playing it too safe. If you win, efficiency isn’t that important; if you lose, efficiency is completely irrelevant.

Ecosystems for the rest of us

Before companies can benefit from collaborations, they must be clear about their role.

James O’Toole

When the purpose of a corporation is seen as only maximizing shareholder profit, enlightened capitalism — even when it is linked to long-term financial success — tends to fall by the wayside.

James O’Toole

The history of socially responsible companies shows that when virtuous programs and policies exist primarily because an individual leader cares about them, his or her successors have no problem removing them. These practices are far more likely to last when they are institutionalized in rules of governance. Thus, a few enlightened capitalists have attempted, in one form or another, to institutionalize their practices in an … [ Read more ]

Liz Wiseman

People generally need two types of information to achieve top performance. The first is clear direction: What is the target, and why is it important? (In other words, the What’s Important Now) The second is performance feedback: Am I hitting the target? Am I doing it right?

Liz Wiseman

The best leaders cultivate a climate that is both comfortable and intense. They remove fear and provide the security that invites people to do their best thinking. At the same time, they establish an energizing, intense environment that demands people’s best efforts.

What occurs when you create only one of these conditions? What happens when you stretch people without first building a foundation of safety, trust, … [ Read more ]

Mission critical

Economist Mariana Mazzucato explains how solving society’s toughest problems starts with rethinking how value is created and innovation is incentivized.

DeAnne Aguirre, Varya Davidson, Carolin Oelschlegel

Too often, leaders […] create a laundry list of the traits and characteristics they aspire to see in their company, and then try to retrofit how people work to fit those goals. But that isn’t how people behave, nor is it how cultures evolve. Some elements in a culture will support a specific strategic play, and others will undermine it.

Sally Helgesen, Fred Kofman

One of the hard problems of leadership is that an organization is only as strong as its weakest leader.

Sally Helgesen, Fred Kofman

The exclusive focus on monetary rewards inevitably leaves organizations fighting a fierce but losing struggle to balance individual and team results. Rewarding high performers serves the imperatives of accountability and excellence but can undermine alignment and cooperation among team members. Yet basing pay on team results in order to incentivize collaboration often ends up inadvertently rewarding subpar individual performance and penalizing individual excellence. Neither approach … [ Read more ]

10 principles for modernizing your company’s technology

Today’s technology platforms are not just new versions of legacy systems. They allow you to design a completely new digital enterprise — as long as you follow these guidelines.

Lawrence M. Fisher, Geoffrey West

Cities enjoy very long lives and keep growing in part because they become ever more diverse with increased size, which helps foster endless cycles of innovation. Companies, by contrast, tend to have a shorter, more defined life span. Successful companies focus on what they do best, casting aside fringe people and fringe projects that don’t fit the mission. But that laser-like concentration on the core … [ Read more ]