The promise of digital therapeutics

Investments in digital-therapeutics companies in the United States have grown, on average, by 40 percent a year over the past seven years. What lies ahead for this fast-moving sector?
The promise of digital therapeutics

How payments can adjust to the coronavirus pandemic—and help the world adapt

The challenges are immediate, with long-term implications for global, regional, and local economies—and for the payments industry itself. Here’s what to expect.
How payments can adjust to the coronavirus pandemic—and help the world adapt

Cautiously optimistic: Chinese consumer behavior post-COVID-19

Brands are preparing for a “new normal.”
Cautiously optimistic: Chinese consumer behavior post-COVID-19

Demonstrating corporate purpose in the time of coronavirus

Companies will define what they do in the crucible of COVID-19 response—or be defined by it. Here’s how to frame the challenge.
Demonstrating corporate purpose in the time of coronavirus

KPIs Best Practices In Business

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Managing Stress and Emotions When Working Remotely

As COVID-19 continues to spread around the globe, more and more of us are starting to make changes to the way we work. Google, Microsoft, Trader Joe’s, Gap, and United Airlines are among a growing number of U.S. companies that have already acted to address their workers’ most immediate employment concerns stemming from the pandemic, including recommending or requiring employees to work from home, offering more paid sick leave, or maintaining wages in spite of reduced hours.

We’ve spent the past four years studying the science of emotions and their intersection with our lives at work. In our research, we’ve spoken to thousands of remote workers around the world, and from these conversations — and our own personal remote work experiences — we can attest that feeling isolated is common when working from home. Living with uncertainty in the face of a pandemic makes the current situation even more stressful. Here, we’ve pulled together our top tips for both tackling the challenges of remote work and managing stress and difficult emotions.

1. Emotionally proofread your messages. As we move away from face-to-face interactions with coworkers, it’s important to reread your messages for clarity and emotional tone before hitting send. Sending a direct message or email that says “Let’s talk” when you actually mean “These are good suggestions; let’s discuss how to work them into the draft” might bring up unnecessary anxiety for the recipient. If you’re worried about how your tone will come across, pick up the phone or offer to jump on a video chat. Your colleague (who is probably also working from home) might be glad for the chance to talk.

2. Be mindful of time zones. To help people in all time zones feel included, strive to delay decision-making until you’ve heard from everyone who should be involved. This is an especially good time to hone your documentation skills so everyone stays in the loop, and to see if your team could cover some meeting content over email, Slack, or another messaging platform instead. After switching to remote work, Humu, where Liz works, set up a 15-minute companywide meeting every day at 11:45 a.m. PT (which allows for team members on the East Coast and in Europe to join as well), during which the team can fill one another in on important announcements. Everything discussed during the meeting is also sent out afterward in a companywide email.

3. Schedule time for serendipitous collaboration. When we work remotely, we miss out on all the impromptu moments with our colleagues that lead to good ideas: chatting before and after meetings, catching up in the kitchen or hallway, and stopping by each other’s desks. When meeting via phone or videoconference, schedule time for informal conversation at the beginning and end of meetings.

4. Make room for minibreaks. Stepping away from your desk for even five minutes helps you relax — and stay focused. Danish students who were given a short break before taking a test got significantly higher scores than their peers who didn’t get any time to relax. Mollie has been using the app Time Out (for Macs), which reminds her to take periodic breaks to stretch, walk around, or change position at her desk.

5. Set up an after-work ritual. It’s easy to overwork when you don’t leave a physical office at a specific time each day, so it’s extra important to keep healthy boundaries. Your brain will benefit from a signal that tells it, “Work is over!” Some ideas: Meditate, listen to music, read a magazine, or lift weights. (Some studies show that weight training boosts your mood more than cardio.) Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, ends each day by transcribing any loose notes into a master task list, shutting down his computer, and then saying the phrase, “Schedule shutdown, complete.” “Here’s my rule,” he writes. “After I’ve uttered the magic phrase, if a work-related worry pops to mind, I always answer it with the following thought process: I said the termination phrase.”

6. Put time on your calendar to exercise. Commit to getting some physical activity by blocking off time to work out on your calendar. Need some working-out-from-home ideas? Try a seven-minute workout, or a variety of desk stretches that might (almost) replace going to the gym, or just put on your favorite song and dance it out. Even better, make it a virtual group activity: Jump on a video call with a friend, pick a YouTube fitness video, and get your sweat on together.

7. Check in on each other. This can be done by setting up virtual lunches, teatimes, or what social media management platform company Buffer terms pair calls. For pair calls, Buffer employees opt in to be randomly paired with someone else at the company once a week. Calls have no set agenda; coworkers get to know each other in pairs by talking about their families, hobbies, and favorite shows. If your organization uses Slack, one easy way to set this up is through Donut, a Slack bot that pairs people automatically.

8. Be thoughtful when you do head out. Not all of us have the ability to do our jobs from home. For the sake of those who still have to be physically present on the job (think doctors, cashiers, and pharmacists), be sure to wash your hands regularly and carefully when you go out, practice social distancing, and thank those who can’t stay home.

In these uncertain times, many companies are striving for business continuity and supporting employees as best they can in a variety of ways. Flexible, virtual work arrangements help employees continue to do their jobs, but these unprecedented circumstances require adjustments that for many come with significant challenges. It’s important now more than ever to support one another as we navigate the days ahead.

Managing Stress and Emotions When Working Remotely

The CFO’s role in helping companies navigate the coronavirus crisis

Strong, steady leadership from the finance organization is critical for addressing immediate concerns about safety and survival, stabilizing the business in the near term, and positioning it for recovery.
The CFO’s role in helping companies navigate the coronavirus crisis

COVID-19: How American states can manage the surge in unemployment services

State government leaders can proactively streamline service delivery to the public amid a quickly evolving situation—and maintain the improvements.
COVID-19: How American states can manage the surge in unemployment services

When investors call: How your business should talk about coronavirus

As the next earnings season approaches, CFOs and other senior leaders will need to focus on addressing immediate concerns associated with the pandemic while resetting expectations.
When investors call: How your business should talk about coronavirus

Critical care capacity: The number to watch during the battle of COVID-19

Since the explosion of COVID-19, most countries have put in place public health measures to “flatten the curve” and accepted the concomitant economic pull back. But there is another number everyone should watch now: the capacity in hospitals to deliver critical care in intensive care units (ICU) with ventilators. It is the metric that indicates whether hospital systems will be overwhelmed.
Critical care capacity: The number to watch during the battle of COVID-19

Coronavirus and the campus: How can US higher education organize to respond?

Although most students have gone home, colleges and universities still have decisions to make. An integrated nerve center can help.
Coronavirus and the campus: How can US higher education organize to respond?

Bias busters: Seeing strategy alternatives in the momentum case

A momentum case can reveal what could happen if a company takes no, or only limited, strategic action.
Bias busters: Seeing strategy alternatives in the momentum case

Market Analysis Templates And Tools

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Combating the Toll of Digital Pollution

If you went back to London in the 1600s, you would find a coal-fired metropolis, where heavy smoke from the city’s burning hearths and furnaces damaged buildings. Only during the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, when respiratory diseases became the leading cause of death in the city, did people finally recognize how air pollution was affecting their quality of life. It took even longer to galvanize people into action, with laws finally enacted in the 20th century to improve air quality in London.

We know how fossil fuels and other byproducts of the industrial age have affected people’s health and contributed to the climate crisis. In the digital era, a new kind of pollution, fueled by technology growth and dependence, has had an unintended yet profound impact on society. As business leaders, we urgently need to understand these effects so we can build our businesses and develop our products more responsibly.

We’ve started to see the consequences of unregulated digital growth in the tech sector but until now haven’t recognized these consequences as pollution. As with any new form of pollution, recognizing it takes time. Digital-era pollution can be categorized into the following three types.

Eroding Trust In Information Ecosystems

During a cab ride recently, the conversation with my driver turned to politics. He shared the news that he had read about various politicians, but each time he added a disclaimer: “This is what I read, but who knows if it’s true.” His most sobering comment spoke to the erosion of our information ecosystem and the alarming spread of disinformation: “Years ago, I would open a newspaper and feel like I got the facts. Today, I have access to all the information I want, but I just don’t know what is real.”

The early days of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s offered promise and hope for democratizing knowledge across the globe — anyone looking for information could have it at their fingertips. But in recent decades, as social media and platforms have transformed how we share and distribute information, we’re seeing how truth itself can be disrupted through a digital lens. Apart from the spread of false news across social networks, the web also enables users to curate their online presence and personas in a way that adds to a sense of distorted reality and distrust.

Education and information access are pillars of society — but some of the most prominent, widely used products in the digital era have eroded our access to knowledge and facts.

Polarization Effect

While there are several underlying reasons for political polarization, including the rise of partisan cable news, changing party composition, and racial divisions, our digital products also contribute to the polarization effect. In a new study, researchers were able to demonstrate for the first time that Facebook’s algorithms for ad targeting contribute to political polarization.

Social media also increases polarization by giving airtime to more extreme views. Wide reporting has revealed how prior versions of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm favored extreme content and contributed to the radicalization of users’ preferences. Studies show that the addiction to validation (through things like “follows,” “likes,” and “faves”) leads people to post increasingly polarizing content and to express moral outrage.

The digital economy has also contributed to polarization by increasing the divide between the rich and poor. Wealth inequality has risen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The risks of an economic downturn or a decrease in demand, previously assumed by companies, are often now borne by workers amid the widespread deunionization and outsourcing that are part of the gig economy, leaving many workers trapped in a cycle of insecurity (made even more precarious during a pandemic).

Increasing wealth inequality and polarized views create a more divisive society that makes people more disillusioned with majority rule. By creating an increasingly divisive society, we are, in fact, eroding democracy.

Social Media Pollution

While air or water pollution affects physical well-being, social media can pollute the mental health of individuals and damage our well-being as a society. Recent research has shown a correlation between social media use and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Another study found that people who stopped using Facebook for a week were happier than those who continued using it.

Even more dramatically, in 2014 Facebook demonstrated through an experiment on over 1 million users that it was able to make individuals feel positive or negative emotions by curating the content in their newsfeeds. The experiment showed how social media platforms make it easier to manipulate people. The power of using Facebook for manipulation was known at least as early as 2010 but more fully entered public awareness after the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in 2018.

Together, these forms of pollution fray the fabric of a democratic society. People are more divided and easily manipulated and have a harder time accessing facts. There have been calls for more digital regulation as people recognize the need for change, but history shows that regulations will always play catch-up. While we wait for meaningful regulatory action, digital pollution threatens our society, and many of the unintended effects of our digital products are hard to reverse.

Toward a Cleaner Digital Footprint

Tackling digital pollution is a shared responsibility. While recognizing that the oil and gas industry is a heavy environmental polluter, we also know that as individuals, we each have a part to play in reducing our carbon footprint regardless of our industry. As business leaders, we need to recognize our responsibility in creating a clean digital footprint and building products that reduce digital pollution. Whether you’re a technology leader directly involved in engineering new products or a business leader who affects product decisions, there are many ways to get involved.

Leaders can do these three things to engineer positive change while avoiding digital-era pollution:

1. Determine your vision. To recognize when a product or business is polluting the world, we must start with a clear picture of the change we intend to create. Define your vision by answering questions about whose experience you’re setting out to change, why it needs changing, and how it will look once you’ve accomplished your goal. This detailed vision serves as a signpost for what the world will look like when you’ve achieved your vision. Your product is only a mechanism to create the change you envision — it’s not the end goal in itself. Clear signposts are needed to judge a product’s success — that is, whether it’s creating the change you set out to achieve in the first place.
2. Recognize when you’re compromising on your vision. Building a product often requires a balance between making progress toward your vision and the realities of running a business, such as meeting revenue goals and investor expectations. These trade-offs permeate everyday business decisions. For example, the iconic “like” button increases user engagement (and therefore ad revenues), but it’s been shown to decrease user well-being. Vision debt accumulates by trading off progress toward the vision against pleasing stakeholders and investors. A visual approach to prioritization can help you identify when you’re compromising on your vision (and societal well-being) to achieve business objectives or profitability. By making more deliberate and thoughtful compromises as we build our products and scale our businesses, we can work toward a cleaner digital footprint.
3. Take responsibility on the path to creating change. Until the digital era, most businesses had a local reach. In contrast, even relatively niche products today can affect millions of users. It’s important that we recognize our responsibility for the impact our products have on society. As recent employee protests at Amazon and Google show, you can hold your organization accountable for the change it’s creating. You can choose to take the Hippocratic oath of product leadership and recognize that you’re responsible for the product decisions you make and the resulting change your product creates in the world.

By taking a deliberate approach to building products, we can achieve business objectives with a cleaner digital footprint to change the world for the better.

Combating the Toll of Digital Pollution

Best Excel Quality Tools For Process Improvement

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How To Become An Amazing Retail Manager

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How China’s consumer companies managed through the COVID-19 crisis: A virtual roundtable

During a virtual roundtable, China-based executives discuss their experience managing operations at leading consumer companies during the coronavirus crisis.
How China’s consumer companies managed through the COVID-19 crisis: A virtual roundtable

A former European defense chief offers leadership lessons for tackling coronavirus

The former chief of defense of the Netherlands armed forces, Tom Middendorp, describes his approach to crisis management amid a complex situation like the coronavirus outbreak.
A former European defense chief offers leadership lessons for tackling coronavirus

Cybersecurity tactics for the coronavirus pandemic

The pandemic has made it harder for companies to maintain security and business continuity. But new tactics can help cybersecurity leaders to safeguard their organizations.
Cybersecurity tactics for the coronavirus pandemic

Coronavirus: Five strategies for industrial and automotive companies

To rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, industrials must undertake a journey that begins with resolve and ends with fundamental reform.
Coronavirus: Five strategies for industrial and automotive companies

Meeting Japan’s Paris Agreement targets—more opportunity than cost

Japan can meet its Paris Agreement targets in 2030 and 2050—but doing so will require carefully calibrating efforts across four sectors: power, industry, transport, and buildings.
Meeting Japan’s Paris Agreement targets—more opportunity than cost

Maintaining a high-speed connection: A new playbook for cable growth

US cablecos have enjoyed solid growth in recent years. Continuing it will require doubling down on several key areas, even as tougher, longer-term strategic challenges loom.
Maintaining a high-speed connection: A new playbook for cable growth

At the heart of a crisis: How consumer-health companies can lead in the time of coronavirus

As consumer behavior continues to shift with ever-changing conditions, consumer-health companies must respond to the coronavirus pandemic with key stakeholders in mind.
At the heart of a crisis: How consumer-health companies can lead in the time of coronavirus

Survey: UK consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

British consumers are adjusting to the realities of the economy, spending less but consuming more digital media.
Survey: UK consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Survey: Italian consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Italian consumers are adjusting to the realities of the economy, spending less but consuming more digital media.
Survey: Italian consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Survey: Spanish consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Spanish consumers are adjusting to the realities of the economy, spending less but consuming more digital media.
Survey: Spanish consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Survey: Chinese consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Chinese consumers are beginning to show signs of optimism as the new cases of COVID-19 stall.
Survey: Chinese consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

The Best of This Week

During the COVID-19 crisis, we at MIT SMR want to support our readers by offering free resources on how to lead during the pandemic.

We also want to hear from you and find out what challenges you’re facing in a quick two-question survey in this week’s web edition of our weekly recap.

What challenges are you facing?

Fill out my online form.

Managing the Flow of Ideas in a Pandemic

While their workforces practice social distancing to limit the spread of illness, leaders need innovative tools and tactics to optimize the flow of ideas, maximize effective communication, and sustain productive decision-making. When in-person contact is pared down, an array of tools and approaches can help to bolster trust, solidarity, and the mental health of employees.

You Are Not Alone in Your Coronavirus Grief

During this harrowing time, many of us are feeling grief — for ordinary days, for missed in-person connections, for a sense of normalcy. David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief, spoke with Harvard Business Review’s Scott Berinato about why it’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling during the pandemic, how to manage it, and how he believes we will find meaning in it.

Crisis-Proof Your Org Chart

The COVID-19 outbreak has exposed many interlinked fragilities — of the global supply chain, certainly, but also of individual companies’ organizational structures, many of which offer little room to maneuver or adapt in an emergency. A full-scale organizational transformation simply isn’t possible overnight, but managers can learn from the approach of a Chinese manufacturing giant that quickly rebounded from the coronavirus, due in part to its emphasis on autonomy and microenterprises within the business.

How to Fight Burnout

For The New York Times, Wharton’s Adam Grant looks at how the risk of burnout in our jobs increases in stressful times. For Grant, an organizational psychologist, the best model for fighting burnout is demand-control-support, which gives people three options: reduce the demands of a job, provide support to deal with them, or increase control over them.

What Else We’re Reading This Week:

• A dozen of MIT SMR’s most popular articles on managing teams
• Is anonymized health data really anonymous?
• Working from home with kids, many struggling parents are newly appreciating teachers and creating funny memes

Quote of the Week:

“The truth is that both boomers and millennials want business to do better than it has. Both age groups want business to be a positive force in society. Both want business to work to build stronger communities, cleaner environments, and more meaningful and better jobs.”

— Edward Freeman and Ben Freeman in “Is There a Generation Gap in Business?”

The Best of This Week

Perspectives for North America’s fashion industry in a time of crisis

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Integrating marketing and brand in M&A: The way to superior growth

Focusing on six core aspects of marketing integration can help companies get the most out of their integration efforts and the new organization.
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Playing to win in oncology: Key capabilities for success

Five key trends are driving growth in oncology. To be successful in oncology, a focus on capabilities is critical—both the ones in place today and the ones needed to stay competitive.
Playing to win in oncology: Key capabilities for success

Lessons from Asian banks on their coronavirus response

Financial institutions in countries initially affected by the pandemic moved quickly to safeguard their employees, transform their operations, and serve customers in new ways.
Lessons from Asian banks on their coronavirus response

Crisis nerve centers: Supporting governments’ responses to coronavirus

A centralized response system can help set up government leaders for success in managing a crisis.
Crisis nerve centers: Supporting governments’ responses to coronavirus

The Best Help To Using Excel For Business

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Enterprise-wide security is both a technology and business issue

CISOs have important skills that can position them for the CIO role.
Enterprise-wide security is both a technology and business issue

COVID-19: Implications for business

The coronavirus outbreak is first and foremost a human tragedy, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. It is also having a growing impact on the global economy. This article is intended to provide business leaders with a perspective on the evolving situation and implications for their companies. The outbreak is moving quickly, and some of the perspectives in this article may fall rapidly out of date. This article reflects our perspective as of March 25, 2020. We will update it regularly as the outbreak evolves.
COVID-19: Implications for business

Patterns for value creation in apparel, fashion, and luxury

Performance in the fashion and luxury industries has turned lower, but leading companies haven’t been deterred. Here’s how they excel.
Patterns for value creation in apparel, fashion, and luxury

Applying past leadership lessons to the coronavirus pandemic

Three seasoned leaders describe what they learned from managing through past crises.
Applying past leadership lessons to the coronavirus pandemic

Protecting the business: Views from the CIO’s and CISO’s offices

At JPMorgan Chase, CISOs and CIOs work together to align cybersecurity with business goals.
Protecting the business: Views from the CIO’s and CISO’s offices

Robust cybersecurity requires much more than great technology

Security is increasingly an interdisciplinary capability.
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The modern CISO: Managing scale, building trust, and enabling the business

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The benefits of a CISO background to a business-unit CIO

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The benefits of a CISO background to a business-unit CIO

Cybersecurity’s dual mission during the coronavirus crisis

Chief information-security officers must balance two priorities to respond to the pandemic: protecting against new cyberthreats and maintaining business continuity. Four strategic principles can help.
Cybersecurity’s dual mission during the coronavirus crisis

How new CEOs can manage for the future

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Is There a Generation Gap in Business?

We have heard many CEOs and human resource executives bemoan the fact that talent is challenging to manage. Older leaders can’t seem to get a grip on what younger people, usually millennials, really want. Countless articles have examined the gaps that exist among the current generations.

As members of two different generations (so-called boomers and millennials), we want to explore this problem more closely. We believe that generational differences have been exaggerated and that both boomers and millennials want business to improve its performance along a number of dimensions.

Expectations of Older Generations

Most research divides the generations in the U.S. as follows: the silent generation (born 1920 to 1945); baby boomers (1946 to 1964); Generation X (1965 to 1980); millennials (1981 to 1996); and Generation Z (1997 and later). Boomers are said to be characterized by their loyalty, willingness to work hard, and strong sense of responsibility. Many boomers began their careers with the idea of working for one company for life. If they did a good job, they expected the company to take care of them asand reward them with a good pension, benefits, and a golden retirement.

Sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, those expectations were clearly not met by many global companies. Citing competitive pressure, globalization, and a need for more efficiency, U.S. companies reengineered themselves, moved jobs offshore, or simply closed unprofitable parts of the business. The waves of people being laid off and needing to find new jobs in their 50s was a new phenomenon, and many simply were not successful.

Boomers were also the generation that gave the world a set of political protests around the Vietnam War and other issues. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s led to expectations of social change and resulted in the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. However, again in the 1980s and 1990s, progress stalled, and we saw a rapid increase in inequality among economic classes. Boomer expectations went largely unfulfilled.

Expectations of Younger Generations

Due to technological advancements, especially the invention and popularization of the internet, younger generations have grown up connected to the world in wholly new ways. The global community isn’t just a grand concept, it’s a reality. It used to be that letters and telephone calls were the only ways to communicate (and long-distance calling was expensive). Now people can talk, text, or email with one another all over the world from the phones in their pockets and even from their watches.

For many of these connected digital natives, the concept of America First doesn’t have the same sway as it did when the U.S. was the only reality people were exposed to. Today’s younger generations have been taught to help those in need and the less fortunate — and they expect the businesses to which they give their money to be socially conscious.

Even if companies can’t completely save the world, millennials are drawn to organizations that try to make a direct impact on one small part of it. These include the eyewear company Warby Parker and sock company Bombas, which both have “buy a pair, give a pair” programs to donate products to people who don’t have the means to purchase necessities like glasses and socks, and Toms Shoes, which boasts that “for every $3 we make, we give $1 away.” Millennials celebrate helping underserviced communities regardless of where those communities are based around the globe.

It is often said that millennials are not as loyal to companies as boomers are. However, imagine seeing your parents or grandparents laid off — or rightsized or outsourced — as you were growing up. Imagine growing up with a constant drumbeat of news about thousands of people being fired or plants closing. You might also believe that corporate loyalty is a sucker’s bet.

Boomers and Millennials Can Be on the Same Page

There are differences between generations, often accentuated through surveys and the analyses of pundits who are trying to make a point. However, we believe there are far more differences within generations than there are between generations. And there are far more similarities among people when you compare what they care about at the same stages in life. For instance, when we are younger, we might be more idealistic about the nature and meaning of work and what we expect from our jobs. Later in life, we often come to accept that our idealistic visions of work have not been realized.

One recent finding that has not received a lot of notice is that opinions about the fairness of the economic system don’t vary much across the generations. The Pew Research Center reports that 60% of boomers and 66% of millennials say that our economic system unfairly privileges powerful interests. Even larger numbers — 84% of both boomers and millennials — say that economic inequality is a big problem. And confidence in politicians to fix it? Over two-thirds of both boomers and millennials say they trust the federal government “to do what is right” only some of the time.

The truth is that both boomers and millennials want business to do better than it has. Both age groups want business to be a positive force in society. Both want business to work to build stronger communities, cleaner environments, and more meaningful and better jobs. We maintain that the biggest difference between generations is just what types of clothes are fashionable and what music they listen to. These differences may make it seem like it’s hard for them to relate to each other, but it doesn’t mean the generations don’t have similar values and ideas.

What Needs to Be Done

We need to build a better narrative about business that takes societal issues into account within its basic business model. Seeing society as an “add-on,” to be considered only if there are leftover profits, will not satisfy either boomers or millennials.

Businesses must either drive forward on their purpose or rediscover their purpose if somehow only making money for shareholders has moved to center stage. Closely related is understanding how key stakeholders, including communities and society, are affected by the business model and working to bring about desired effects rather than just mitigating bad effects.

Business leaders need to understand that they are embedded in society, not just in competitive markets. This means that they must deal with societal issues, especially those that are important to their business models.

The real key to building a better version of capitalism is to realize that business is fundamentally a human enterprise. We must see its people in their full humanity, not just as economic agents seeking to maximize their individual self-interests. Seeing business as fully human involves putting business and ethics together into business models that create value for all stakeholders. This is, admittedly, easier to say than to do. However, if we can use our creative imaginations, we can build businesses that are economically viable and that create a better world.

Is There a Generation Gap in Business?

Healthcare Management Basics

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Leading a consumer bank through the coronavirus pandemic

The implications of the COVID-19 crisis are profound for consumer and small-business banks, and the steps they take now will shape operations long into the future. Here is where to start.
Leading a consumer bank through the coronavirus pandemic

Viking Cruises founder Torstein Hagen: How tailoring experiences for Chinese tourists drives growth

Torstein Hagen’s belief that Chinese and American cruisegoers fundamentally desire the same things—the comforts and language of home—has led to exponential growth in Chinese passenger numbers on Viking’s European river cruises.
Viking Cruises founder Torstein Hagen: How tailoring experiences for Chinese tourists drives growth

Decision making in uncertain times

The timeline for companies to react to the coronavirus has shrunk dramatically. Here are five principles that leaders can follow to make smart decisions quickly during the pandemic.
Decision making in uncertain times

Creating A Better Customer Service Experience

Methods to develop client experience strategy Like the majority of things in the current market place, client experience has evolved – its a lot more than person-in order to-person support and due to technologies, businesses can interact with their clients … Continued

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Creating A Better Customer Service Experience

Managing the Flow of Ideas in a Pandemic

Most organizations are hierarchical or centralized, so their senior leaders are at the center. All roads lead to them. The leaders are typically older and have more health conditions. During a pandemic, like the one we now face with COVID-19, standard organizational structures are a management disaster in the making — because the senior people are likely to be the hardest hit.

We’ve all learned about the value of social distancing in reducing the spread of infection. In the workplace, physical separation often means going virtual, and we have plenty of tools for that. But given that ideas and decision-making flow primarily to and from the central (senior) people, the essential work of preventing the spread of illness can pose risks to the also essential work of running an organization. That’s true in part because informal conversations (such as ad hoc chats in hallways or while getting coffee) account for about half of decision quality. So if we try to rely on the usual flows of ideas and decisions in a primarily virtual arena, quality can degrade. It’s a wicked problem with no simple solution.

So how do you minimize the spread of illness while maintaining the flow of ideas necessary in a high-performance organization — and simultaneously preserve mental health, trust, and solidarity? This article highlights a few often complementary tactics and tools that we have at our disposal. Some that I mention by name are spinoffs from my MIT lab, but they are merely examples in a category where many options exist.

Maximize Idea Flow

When in-person contact is greatly reduced, we have far fewer of the usual physical cues (body posture, facial expressions, and so on) to help guide our decisions and behavior. But we still need to feel connected — that we can reach out in genuine ways to other people and that they can reach out to us. This authentic two-way interaction is crucial not only for mental health but also for the free flow of ideas.

One way for leaders to assess whether authentic, productive, rewarding interactions are continuing to happen is to measure them continuously. That means tracking patterns of digital communication — along with physical contact and exposure — and trying to balance them in order to maximize idea flow and minimize virus spread.

For instance, the company Humanyze measures your organization’s teleconference, phone, and email pathways but for privacy reasons does not look at the content. Then it produces a graph that roughly describes the idea flow in your organization — showing when employees are not engaged, which groups are very cohesive, and where bottlenecks exist. The information offers opportunities to tweak communication pathways, collaborative structures, and other systems that sustain the flow of ideas. Such tweaks will become increasingly important as people’s schedules and modes of work change during the coming weeks and months.

Lower the Social Cost

Unlike asking “Does everybody agree?” at an in-person (or even a video) meeting, decision-making tools such as secret voting reduce the social cost of expressing an opposing viewpoint. Loud voices that squelch those of others are less likely to rule the day, thereby building a broader base of trust by signaling that all participants’ opinions matter.

Riff Analytics, which analyzes videoconferences in real time, subtly reminds people not to interrupt or talk over others. Its AI-driven “nudges” (in the form of feedback graphics and private chat messages) encourage extroverts not to dominate conversations as often and introverts to feel less alienated. When everyone feels heard, the sense of belonging to the group increases and decision-making improves.

Tools from Cogito listen to the tone of voice (but not the words) during call-center interactions and also remind staff when they are supposed to say something, are talking too much, or raise their voice. The reminders improve customer engagement but have an even greater positive effect on employee stress levels and turnover rates. Cogito’s tools also can be deployed to analyze verbal communication within companies.

Reward the Flow

To foster solidarity, try an idea market, where people can post ideas and win rewards when other folks endorse those ideas. Research suggests that idea markets are not an optimal way to actually make decisions but are a pretty good means of uncovering what’s happening in your organization, hearing concerns, and (if done well) finding out whether people feel that their ideas are being heard and used.

You can also deploy the concept of peer rewards more broadly. Once a week, have people in a work group vote (by secret ballot) for the team member they think has been most helpful or emotionally supportive. Then give the winner a paycheck bonus (but ensure that no one can win twice in a month, to avoid popularity contests). Peer rewards signal to the winner, “The people I work with value what I’m doing.” Social rewards have been shown to improve trust and solidarity in work groups — something we especially need when physically apart from one another.

Bolster Connection, Minimize Direct Contact

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the concept of “flu buddies” took root. The idea: Just like kids have buddies at camp or school, you pair up with someone remotely for regular communication (often by video) when you’re sick (or under quarantine) at home. You and your buddy can discuss business if you wish, but mostly you share things like how you’re keeping the kids entertained while you work from home and they’re not in school, how you’re staying safe, and anything else that strengthens social bonds.

Encourage people to choose their own buddies, give them time to touch base with each other, and reward them for that behavior in whatever nonmonetary ways suit your work culture. For instance, instead of snacks in a common area (which you might use in a normal office environment), have video “buddy chat time” count as working hours or accrue points toward treats delivered to employees’ homes.

Strong evidence shows that such sharing between people bolsters mental health and that having a specific person to turn to in a time of need or crisis is especially helpful. Promoting regular human connection when physical contact must be minimized can go a long way toward maintaining the social support any organization requires.

To promote mental health specifically, Ginger offers full-stack support services. It guarantees that within just 60 seconds of texting the service, you’re getting real-time coaching from a human and having a conversation about what’s bothering you. The aim is to mitigate depressive feelings and other negative emotions, and major companies are using Ginger for their entire workforce. Services like these are especially valuable in times of crisis, when in-person support from colleagues and even health care professionals is less readily available.

Medically recommended social distancing to slow the spread of illness, along with hygiene practices, are crucial for our physical health. But we also need to recognize the effects of distancing on mental health, trust, and solidarity within the organizations whose activities help to sustain our livelihoods and our sense of purpose. We still must maintain the flow of ideas and maximize effective decision-making at a time when our organizations and the people within them are more widely dispersed than ever.

As leaders and managers help people execute on an organization’s long-term vision and strategy, we must deploy tools that help us tweak our habits to adapt to the new realities. I hope that by sharing my ideas here and highlighting a few pertinent tools and tactics, I’m doing my part to contribute to this rapidly evolving effort.

Managing the Flow of Ideas in a Pandemic

12 Essential Insights for Managing Teams

Teamwork doesn’t just happen — good teams require good leaders who have vision and practiced skills. Leading effective teams today requires laying the groundwork for how team members and the wider organization will be successful. We’ve collected a dozen of our most popular articles on leading teams from our archives.

This collection, all of which are free on our site Tuesday, March 24, through Thursday, March 26, offers a range of actionable advice for managers on how to foster trust and accountability, resolve conflicts, and bridge geographic distances on distributed teams. Readers will benefit from decades of research from academics and practitioners on the skills and effective approaches leaders need to manage diverse teams to enhance collaboration and achieve better performance.

1. The Smart Way to Respond to Negative Emotions at Work

Christine M. Pearson

Whether provoked by bad decisions, misfortune, poor timing, or employees’ personal problems, no organization is immune from bad feelings. Many executives try to ignore negative emotions in the workplace, but that tactic can be costly. When employees’ negative feelings are responded to wisely, they often provide important feedback.

2. It’s Time to Tackle Your Team’s Undiscussables

Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux

The more undiscussables there are on your team, the more difficult it is for the team to function effectively. Ignoring unresolved conflicts results in strained relationships and bad decisions. This article outlines how leaders can bring the four types of undiscussables to light, improving team learning, problem-solving, and performance.

3. Five Rules for Managing Large, Complex Projects

Andrew Davies, Mark Dodgson, David M. Gann, and Samuel C. MacAulay

Large-scale, long-term projects are notoriously difficult to manage. But research on megaprojects — defined as projects costing more than $1 billion — reveals five lessons that can help executives manage any big, complex project more effectively.

4. Five Ways to Improve Communication in Virtual Teams

N. Sharon Hill and Kathryn M. Bartol

When it comes to managing your virtual team’s success, it’s not the technology that matters — it’s how people use it. This article looks at five strategies for conquering distance and improving communication and performance in dispersed teams.

5. How to Create Belonging for Remote Workers

Liz Fosslien and Mollie West-Duffy

A common question among leaders about managing remote teams is how to ensure that employees feel connected to their work and to their colleagues. There are practical steps managers and colleagues can take to make their remote employees feel valuable and ingrained in company culture.

6. How to Manage Virtual Teams

Frank Siebdrat, Martin Hoegl, and Holger Ernst

Dispersed teams can actually outperform groups that are colocated. Based on an investigation of the performance of 80 software development projects with varying levels of dispersion — members in different cities, countries, or continents — this article asserts that virtual teams offer tremendous opportunities despite their greater managerial challenges. To succeed, however, virtual collaboration must be managed in specific ways.

7. Why Teams Still Need Leaders

Lindred (Lindy) Greer, interviewed by Frieda Klotz

While flat organizational structures have gained favor in recent years, hierarchies continue to provide many important benefits, says the University of Michigan’s Lindy Greer. Depending on the circumstances, the answer isn’t to eliminate hierarchy but to train leaders and teams to use it flexibly.

8. The Trouble With Homogeneous Teams

Evan Apfelbaum, interviewed by Martha E. Mangelsdorf

Diversity in the workplace can increase conflict. But research also suggests that if teams lack diversity, they will be more susceptible to making flawed decisions.

9. Improving the Rhythm of Your Collaboration

Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer

With so many digital tools in the workplace, team collaboration has gone omnichannel. Given how hyperconnected people are, the authors set out to explore the implications for organizations and teams. Their research demonstrates how alternating between always-on connectivity and heads-down focus is essential for problem-solving.

10. The Unique Challenges of Cross-Boundary Collaboration

Amy Edmondson, interviewed by Frieda Klotz

Many of today’s team projects have built-in hurdles because of differing communication styles, cultures, and professional norms. Leading this kind of “extreme teaming” requires management skills that don’t always come naturally — such as humility.

11. In Praise of the Incurably Curious Leader

Douglas A. Ready

There is a growing recognition that curiosity is an essential leadership trait. Leaders who consider themselves perpetual students are thriving by asking questions, demanding them of their teams, and exploring the root cause of problems rather than focusing on temporary fixes.

12. How to Lead a Self-Managing Team

Vanessa Urch Druskat and Jane V. Wheeler

Teams that are basically left to run themselves can be highly efficient and productive. To be successful, though, such autonomous groups require a specific type of external leadership.

12 Essential Insights for Managing Teams

Data Analysis Healthcare Management

Healthcare information management data analysis In the very first portion of it series, nicely analyze how information cleansing and knowledge change are a couple of significant bottle-necks in data analytics. Each could be sleek by utilizing more effective techniques for … Continued

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Help Yourself to Research and Ideas You Can Use

Times are tough. The economy looks precarious. Leaders are scrambling.

We’d like to give you a hand in whatever small way we can. These past few weeks, we’ve been offering our best research and ideas on leading in a crisis, dealing with disruption, and working in virtual teams. This week, we’re making all of that content, plus the rest of our articles, reports, videos, and interactive tools, freely available through Thursday, March 26.

Like you, we are attempting to quickly adjust to new realities and new constraints on how we work, travel, and collaborate. While that may leave less time for reading and reflection, we believe that many of our expert authors’ contributions may be particularly helpful, both now and as you plan for the future.

To get you started on your browsing, we’re offering some recommendations that are relevant to the current crisis and other leadership challenges of the moment. I hope the selections below are helpful to you. We’d love your feedback.

Crisis Management

• Leading Through COVID-19
• How Companies Can Respond to the Coronavirus
• 12 Articles for Managing with Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty
• From Risk to Resilience: Learning to Deal With Disruption

Leading Virtual Teams

• Five Ways to Improve Communication in Virtual Teams
• Leading Remotely
• How to Create Belonging for Remote Workers
• A Surprising Truth About Geographically Dispersed Teams
• Set Up Remote Workers to Thrive

Disruptive Innovation (From Our Spring 2020 Spotlight)

• Disruption 2020: An Interview With Clayton M. Christensen
• The New Disrupters
• The Experience Disrupters
• The 11 Sources of Disruption Every Company Must Monitor
  
• Read the full series

Risk and Resilience

• Creating More Resilient Supply Chains
• Reducing the Risk of Supply Chain Disruptions
• Preparing for Disruptions Through Early Detection
• How Vigilant Companies Gain an Edge in Turbulent Times
• The Power of Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty

Help Yourself to Research and Ideas You Can Use

A blueprint for remote working: Lessons from China

As home to some of the world’s largest firms, China offers lessons for those that are just now starting to embrace the shift to remote working.
A blueprint for remote working: Lessons from China

Safeguarding our lives and our livelihoods: The imperative of our time

We must solve for the virus and the economy. It starts with battling the virus.
Safeguarding our lives and our livelihoods: The imperative of our time

Beyond coronavirus: The path to the next normal

The coronavirus is not only a health crisis of immense proportion—it’s also an imminent restructuring of the global economic order. Here’s how leaders can begin navigating to what’s next.
Beyond coronavirus: The path to the next normal

Addressing the needs of customers in delinquency impacted by the coronavirus

As banks respond to disruptions in their operations, they can plan their credit risk management strategies around three customer-centric best practices.
Addressing the needs of customers in delinquency impacted by the coronavirus

Five Fifty: Learn fast and prosper

Fast times require faster learning. Is your organization keeping pace? 
Five Fifty: Learn fast and prosper

COVID-19 Crisis: McKinsey consumer survey insights

Solving the humanitarian challenge of COVID-19 is the top priority. We launched a rapid research effort to gather consumer insight on COVID-19 and how consumers are responding to it. This survey aims to provide early insights into consumers’ perspectives.
COVID-19 Crisis: McKinsey consumer survey insights

How high performing companies develop and scale AI

We find that those companies finding more success in scaling efforts are more likely than others to apply a core set of practices, write Michael Chui and Bryce Hall in Harvard Business Review.
How high performing companies develop and scale AI

How To Improve Project Management Skills

In present day professional atmosphere, project management professionals and project managers have to put on a number of caps, transferring involving the daily roles and responsibilities of operating a group in order to comprehending the large image technique. These are … Continued

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How Autonomy Creates Resilience in the Face of Crisis

The outbreak of COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of the global supply chain and, in turn, many companies’ organizational structures. In their pursuit to become ever more efficient, bear fewer costs, and eliminate redundancies, many organizations have come to rely on tightly coupled, interdependent systems. In this type of system, there is little slack and few buffers among its parts and, as we are seeing now, little room to maneuver when something goes seriously awry. Dependencies span vast geographic distances, and they can be especially vulnerable to delays in another part of the chain.

In the auto industry, for instance, manufacturers — from Toyota in Japan to General Motors in the U.S. — all rely on parts from China, and the industrywide emphasis on just-in-time delivery means they don’t carry much safety stock. In normal circumstances, this system is fiercely efficient and productive, but no one can build a car with only 99% of its parts. Indeed, when Hyundai first shuttered its assembly plants in South Korea in February, it was not because of the rampant spread of COVID-19 in the country, but because the company couldn’t keep its plants open without Chinese parts. In an inflexible system populated with companies run from the top down that are too slow to adapt, those channels that prove so efficient in periods of calm are now a source of severe disruption.

Organizational rigidness has exacerbated supply chain issues across a number of sectors in recent weeks and in a wide range of companies, including Apple, Toyota, and Hasbro. But this impact has not been universal.

While most manufacturers in China were only just beginning to restart production at the end of February, Haier Group — one of the world’s biggest home appliance manufacturers — already had its factories operating at full capacity again, thanks in large part to the company’s distinctive organizational design. For years, Qingdao-based Haier has organized itself not as a top-down pyramid but as a swarm of self-managing business units that can make their own rapid adjustments to stay afloat in times of crisis.

The organizational reconfiguration that prepared Haier for the shock of coronavirus was several years in the making. Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin has always been obsessed with breaking the bureaucracy, and he is famous for saying “successful companies move with the times.” Around 2012, he issued midlevel managers an ultimatum: Choose to either be fired or become independent entrepreneurs. It was “the hardest decision” the CEO had ever made, but it was meant to transform the company from a few monolithic businesses into some 4,000 microenterprises, or MEs, most comprising just 10 to 15 employees. Early estimates indicate that Haier reduced its workforce by around 45% compared with its peak size, but it created new positions for more than 1.6 million.

What followed, for those who stayed, was an increase in autonomy. Zhang gave the leaders of each ME the suite of decision-making powers — the power to hire staff or to control distribution — that would ordinarily be granted to the CEO of a company, not to a division leader. Instead of being centrally orchestrated, these MEs independently transacted with one another and were given full autonomy to deliver the final product to consumers. Certain MEs manufacture specific component parts, while others provide services like HR or design. Haier also introduced several internal platforms to facilitate transactions among MEs, likening the idea to an app store. It enabled coordination but did not direct it.

During the coronavirus outbreak, Haier’s microenterprises have buoyed the business. With the freedom to adjust their own supply chains according to specialized knowledge and up-to-date information, MEs have shifted their dependencies ever so slightly. Because each ME was able to act rapidly to reduce disruption, the company as a whole was able to recover more quickly than its competitors. With supplier resources spanning the Americas, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Europe, Haier fulfilled 99.8% of orders throughout February, with 60% of products manufactured in factories outside of China.

Though a full-scale organizational transformation like Haier’s simply isn’t possible overnight, there are a few steps companies can take to crisis-proof their org charts — and bottom lines — in the short term.

1. Democratize the decision-making process at the cross-functional level. In the face of this crisis, although it may not be possible for companies to increase the autonomy of specific product departments or locations, it is possible to temporarily allow cross-functional teams to have more decision-making power. Think of these as “flying SWAT teams,” with limited requirements to report back up the hierarchy. Increasing autonomy, even on a provisional basis, is often scary, but a guiding principle should be that your employees on the ground are an asset for making tough calls — in other words, trust your teams’ capabilities and skills.
2. Embrace single-threaded leadership. Single-threaded leadership is well known for its success in tech giants such as Amazon and refers to giving a leader a single problem to solve with a specific budget and timeline. Taking a cue from the venture capital world, this form of leadership entails companies identifying a startup idea with potential and handing it to one leader to bring it to life within the organization. Within this clearly defined role, leaders are able to maximize focus and minimize distractions where possible — at least for the time being.
3. Communicate clearly and transparently. Leaders will need to make use of digital workflows and start recording who decides what and why. When possible, record business meetings on video and make them available to everyone in the organization via a simple internal communications platform. This model provides transparency into the key information employees need, thus increasing trust, and it provides clarity around decision-making (and responsibilities and accountability) at the top while lowering communication costs.
4. Prioritize a small set of digital collaboration tools. Often, internal communication is hindered by legacy systems and situations such as waiting for a decision in “next week’s meeting.” In order to aid crisis management, companies should select one set of digital collaboration tools and go all-in. There are plenty of tools around that can be easily installed and used for virtual meetings, instant communication, and project work collaboration. Whether it is Zoom or Skype or Slack, the Indian platform Flock, or the Chinese app DingTalk, it needs to meet only one criterion: ease of use. It should take no more than 48 hours to implement.

Speaking of crises and how they can expose weak companies, Warren Buffett once said that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fallacy of our singular pursuit of efficiency. But it also provides organizations the opportunity and impetus to end corporate bureaucracy.

How Autonomy Creates Resilience in the Face of Crisis

Survey: US consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

American consumers are still optimistic about the economy, but they’re already reporting changes in their income, spending, and behavior.
Survey: US consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis

Metrics For Improving Your Teamwork

Team Performance Metrics This business measurement lets you know exactly how a lot income you might have in the end costs have already been subtracted coming from your profits. Basically, it unveils precisely exactly how a lot real revenue you … Continued

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Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges

For many executives, the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis unlike any other in recent times. Five leadership practices can help you respond effectively.
Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges

Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges

For many executives, the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis unlike any other in recent times. Five leadership practices can help you respond effectively.
Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges

Business Strategies & Competitors Analysis

Knowing your competition is a vital element of the business strategy. In purchase to contend, you need to realize exactly what the levels of competition are performing, like prices and repair amounts, It may also help you determine if generally … Continued

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The Best of This Week

Are We Facing a Black Swan or the New Normal?

While the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, the scale of what’s happening and the pace of change is hard to grasp. COVID-19 may be the so-called black swan event that society and business have feared, but it’s also the kind of challenge that we may now face all the time — a new normal.

Combating the Coronavirus ‘Infodemic’

With millions on lockdown across the globe, social media is a major source for news about the pandemic. But social networks are also where misinformation thrives. Here’s how platforms can step up to fight the growing infodemic.

Rethinking Supply Chain Resilience During a Global Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates why disaster preparedness is vital for supply chain resilience. Given the central role many Chinese companies play in the supply chains of other businesses, global supply chain disruption is likely to linger for many months. How did we end up with such complex interdependencies in our supply chains — and how should managers improve their resilience against future shocks?

3D Printing to the Respirator Rescue

When a medical device manufacturer was unable to supply new respirator valves quickly enough to hospitals in northern Italy overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, a 3D-printing company rushed to develop a prototype and print valves on a volunteer basis. Each 3D-printed version takes about an hour to produce at a cost of less than 1 euro.

Designing AI Systems to Optimize Human-Machine Teams

Many organizations don’t understand the opportunities for mutual learning between people and machines. Before designing AI systems, managers need to assess the openness of the decision-making process and the level of risk in order to meet their goals and optimize the chances of success. These assessments will help managers determine the right teaming options for implementing AI systems.

What Else We’re Reading This Week:

• Seth Godin opines on the future of online interaction
• McKinsey recommends a “minimum viable nerve center” to coordinate a crisis response
• Amid the pandemic, everyone’s reading a lot of news

Quote of the Week:

“There is broad agreement that those billions of workers whose jobs have been affected by technology deserve a chance at reskilling. And there is a growing consensus about how this can be achieved. Yet without acknowledging and strengthening the mechanisms of potential incentives, there is a danger that the commitment conversation simply goes around in circles.”

— Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School, in “Davos 2020: The Upskilling Agenda”

The Best of This Week