All Features
Knowledge at Wharton
It’s a commonly held belief, one that gets played out daily in organizations around the world: Employees who receive performance feedback are much more likely to improve their performance than those who don’t get feedback. But research tells us that it’s simply not true.
Typically, performance…
Ayman Jawhar
Product management as we’ve known it up until now—as a limited function or role—is effectively dead. However, viewed as a culture, product management is thriving. I predict “product culture” will be central to the future of work in digital economies. Yet knowledge workers, executives, and business…
Mark Schmit
During the Sept. 18, 2020, session of the “National Conversation with Manufacturers,” our three West Coast manufacturing leaders on the panel kept coming back to their critical need for skilled workers.
The conversation was one in a series of 11 virtual listening sessions hosted by the National…
Nicholas Wyman
It’s a new year, with a new president and new opportunities to boost modern apprenticeship programs in the United States that can help get people back to work and stimulate the economy.
Getting people into apprenticeships has never been more vital, as job losses caused by the pandemic continue to…
Gleb Tsipursky
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership, whether you’re a team leader or a member of a cross-functional team trying to lead team members to focus on quality. Stakeholders can be anyone from your colleagues to suppliers to business partners, and your relationship…
Jose Luis Alvarez
Alexander Hamilton, one of the United States’ founding fathers, famously called energy the most important characteristic of the executive branch of government. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he said in the Federalist Papers. “A feeble execution is but another…
Aarti Gumaledar, Sameer Hasija, V. Paddy Padmanabhan
Globalization of trade and decades-long innovation in supply chain networks have resulted in significant benefits for all stakeholders—greater efficiencies, lower costs, and greater access to markets, to name just a few. Yet Covid-19 has exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains. Dispersed…
Henrik Bresman
Right now it seems far away, but a post-Covid world is coming. Is it closer to us than the start of the pandemic? We can’t say with any certainty, but we must think about how we will work in the future. The sudden changes of early 2020 showed us how we are capable of extraordinary transformations…
Knowledge at Wharton
A new study finds that productivity has remained stable or even increased for many companies that shifted to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic. However, innovation has taken a hit as both leaders and employees feel more distant from each other.
Businesses tend to spend less money and…
Renita Kalhorn
Steffen Heilmann is a firm believer in empowering his people and giving them opportunities to grow. During his early weeks as CTO at Aroundhome, he and his staff were heading into an important negotiation with their data center provider to take over responsibility of a mission-critical database.…
Bruce Hamilton
As we begin to take our approximately 4 1/2 billionth trip around the sun, I’m reflecting on the previous 525,600 minutes and looking ahead to the new decade. The decade (the ‘20s), by the way, began last month, not a year ago, a factoid noted in a short address by Hiroyuki Hirano in 1999 as the…
Steven Ouellette
What is the most important thing for your business to be working on right now? Would everyone else working there agree? Is everyone working toward the business’s goals? How do you know?
Most businesses in my experience cannot answer these questions. There may be metrics, but they are not…
Philippe Aghion
Imagine a ship at sea, at risk of sinking in a tempest. Is it better to empower the crew to do whatever it takes to save the ship, or should every decision be made by the captain and top officers? Similarly, what should the optimal form of firm organization be during a severe downturn? The need to…
Michelle LaBrosse
Do you find the idea of having to do project management almost as much fun as getting a root canal? If so, you’re not alone. But it doesn’t have to be as bad as a painful dental procedure to adopt more effective ways of managing your projects.
Nor does it have to be extremely boring or some type…
Drew Calvert
For the past decade, policymakers and nongovernmental organizations have pushed for greater transparency in supply chains, with the goal of encouraging more responsible sourcing practices. The Dodd-Frank Act, for example, required firms to disclose their suppliers’ involvement with any “conflict…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
These days businesses have enough to worry about without thinking about their insurance. Unfortunately, tasks like managing insurance claims and completing annual renewals require a lot of thinking.
The startup Newfront Insurance is seeking to…
NordVPN Teams
According to Gartner, 99 percent of the vulnerabilities exploited in 2020 have been ones known about by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident. However, taking care of them is tiresome, as it takes 38 days to implement a patch and in the past year alone 12,174 new common…
Alena Komaromi
When your own inbox is overflowing with unread messages, it may not seem like the best tactic, but with the right approach, email can be a powerful negotiation tool, not least in the B2B realm. According to 2019 research by IACCM, a global contract management association, about 75 percent of…
Corey Brown
The ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies of all types to rapidly update policies and procedures governing how they share information in response to a world that is constantly changing around them. For the manufacturing sector in particular, their workforce is more spread out than…
Sky Cassidy
Whether you subscribe to the scientific definition of data (information on which operations are performed by a computer and transmitted in the form of electrical signals) or the philosophical definition (that which is known and used as the basis of reasoning or calculation), I think most people use…
Merilee Kern
The benefits of simulation-based training are indisputable and innumerable. Given its power and efficacy, this methodology is used in sectors beyond aerospace and military, where it gained its initial foothold. These include everything from manufacturing and retail to healthcare, fitness, fashion,…
Thomas Malnight, Ivy Buche
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways…
Tim Waldo
If you are like many small and medium-sized manufacturers, finding good help has been a pain point for many years, and it has become even more difficult during the Covid-19 pandemic. The market forces driving that dynamic are not likely to change soon.
Your shop has had to become more adaptive and…
Phanish Puranam, Julien Clément
Covid-19 has dealt most businesses a heavy blow, but the pandemic has at least one under-acknowledged upside. By moving organizations from the office into the virtual space, the pandemic has cracked open a treasure trove of data that can be used to streamline and optimize how organizations operate…
Mark Schmit
As a kid I used to be confused by the so-called curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Wouldn’t interesting times be... good? Why would I not want to be interested? Then I got a little older, experienced a little more life, and I started to understand why “interesting times” could be a…
