Category: Business

To neutralise populism, give people more control

Robin Varghese and Sarah Pray in The Economist:

People who have lost their jobs lose not only an income but also a sense of place, of purpose and of solidarity. Community dislocation, absence of social belonging, loss of identity, lack of political control and self-determination—these things are extremely hard to measure in dollars and cents or pounds and pence.

Responding to this is urgent. Unless people get a more substantial voice and sense of agency over their lives, it is hard to see how the backlash against global trade can be quelled, and that threatens the global economy and democratic institutions.

So how might confidence and agency be restored to those facing the sharp end of globalisation? Our work at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) sheds light on how giving people a “path to participation” can help tamp the anxiety that drives people to embrace protectionism and populism. We have looked specifically at three contentious areas: refugee settlement, worker participation and trade policy.

More here.

http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/an-animated-look-at-the-charade-of-the-global-elites.html

From Peter Kropotkin to Leo Tolstoy to Noam Chomsky, some of the most revered anarchist thinkers have exhausted page after page explaining why power over others is unjustified, no matter how it justifies itself. To those who say the wealthy and powerful benefit society with charitable works and occasionally humane policy, Tolstoy might reply with the following illustration, which opens Time editor Anand Giridharadas’ talk above, “Winner Take All,” as animated by the RSA:

Continue reading “An Animated Look at the Charade of the Global Elites: Claiming They Want to “Change the World,” They End Up Preserving the Unjust Status Quo”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90424514/decency-quotient-how-this-ceo-frames-inclusive-capitalism-for-his-company

Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga says “DQ” is as important as IQ or EQ.

A few years ago, Ajay Banga, president and CEO of Mastercard, was searching for a concise way to describe his approach to community outreach and other social impact initiatives. Employees, he says, were constantly asking him what criteria he applied when, say, deciding to send supplies and volunteers in the wake of the hurricanes in Houston and Puerto Rico. At one town hall he blurted out the term “DQ,” short for “decency quotient.” The term stuck.

Continue reading ““Decency quotient”: How this CEO frames inclusive capitalism for his company”

https://hbr.org/2019/11/cracking-the-code-of-sustained-collaboration

Ask any leader whether his or her organization values collaboration, and you’ll get a resounding yes. Ask whether the firm’s strategies to increase collaboration have been successful, and you’ll probably receive a different answer.

“No change seems to stick or to produce what we expected,” an executive at a large pharmaceutical company recently told me. Most of the dozens of leaders I’ve interviewed on the subject report similar feelings of frustration: So much hope and effort, so little to show for it.

One problem is that leaders think about collaboration too narrowly: as a value to cultivate but not a skill to teach. Businesses have tried increasing it through various methods, from open offices to naming it an official corporate goal. While many of these approaches yield progress—mainly by creating opportunities for collaboration or demonstrating institutional support for it—they all try to influence employees through superficial or heavy-handed means, and research has shown that none of them reliably delivers truly robust collaboration.

Continue reading “Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration”

MV《海纳百商》你会单曲循环吗？

一曲《海纳百商》太有范儿了！你的耳机，准备好了吗？#上海进博会

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/09/why-we-will-end-up-piercing-the-corporate-veil.html

The internet is one big reason why we will find it increasingly difficult to separate out the assets of a company from the assets of its founders or CEOs, as I discuss in my latest Bloomberg column:

More important, social media personalizes agency — in effect, making it easier to accuse particular individuals of wrongdoing. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the Koch brothers all have images or iconic photos that can be put into a social media post, amplifying any attack on their respective companies. It is harder to vilify Exxon, in part because hardly anyone can name its CEO (Darren Woods, since 2017), who in any case did not create the current version of the company. Putting the Exxon logo on your vituperative social media post just doesn’t have the same impact. With Bill Gates having stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000, it is harder to vilify that company as well.

This personalization of corporate evil has become a bigger issue in part because many prominent tech companies are currently led by their founders, and also because the number of publicly traded companies has been falling, which means there are fewer truly anonymous corporations. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the most important decision a new company makes is how personalized it wants to be. A well-known founder can spark interest in the company and its products, and help to attract talent. At the same time, a personalized company is potentially a much greater target.

The more human identities and feelings are part of the equation, however, the harder it will be to keep the classic distinction between a corporation and its owners. As the era of personalization evolves, it will inevitably engulf that most impersonal of entities — the corporation.

Do read the whole thing. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-16/purdue-pharma-bankruptcy-how-much-will-the-sackler-family-pay

https://qz.com/work/1675944/the-man-who-invented-brainstorming-did-his-creative-thinking-alone/

Some companies have a serious addiction to brainstorming. Whenever a problem arises, the team is called to gather and shout out possible solutions, with at least one notetaker scrambling to get everything down. It’s as if this were the only known way out of a pickle, or into a new project—and it can feel like a supreme waste of time, especially when the same few dominating personalities ruin the mood.

Yet the value of brainstorming is rarely questioned. (A notable exception is a 2012 New Yorker story arguing that research cannot scientifically validate the effectiveness of the process, but even that did little to get in the way of the ubiquity of brainstorming.) Perhaps that’s because the idea of brainstorming seemingly has always existed; it’s as much a part of workplace culture as pizza parties or sales reports.

Continue reading “The man who gave us brainstorming meetings did his best thinking alone”

by Sarah Todd via Quartz

Whenever I have to stay home sick from work, I’m always uncertain about how much detail to give. Do I let my boss know that I have the stomach flu, specifically? Or would she prefer the simple elegance of “feeling under the weather?”

I mentioned this conundrum at a recent dinner with three friends, all of whom are managers. For the most part, they agreed they would not want to know the particulars of an employee’s reasons for missing work. They trust the people they manage and are troubled by the idea that workers would feel pressured to disclose the minutiae of their bodily ailments. The exception, they said, is when an employee has a chronic illness or condition, in which case it’s helpful to have a bit of context for regular absences.

Continue reading “Why you should never tell the boss you have food poisoning”