THINKING+++ FORWARD
Ideas for your work from MIT Sloan School of Management | Office of Communications
+ THREE INSIGHTS FOR THE WEEK November 21 – November 27, 2021
1. Before she was a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Maria Ressa was an entrepreneur. And the lessons she learned founding and running Rappler, a digital news company, have served her well as she weathers intense government scrutiny in her native Philippines.
“I have learned so much,” Ressa said in a talk at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. “Prepare for the worst, embrace your fear, and look at crisis as an opportunity.”
Other advice from Ressa:
Take joy in creating something from nothing. Rappler was built from the outset with technology at its core. Staff were outfitted with laptops and iPhones and developed ways to improve technology for reporting, such as creating metal cases and tripods for iPhones.
“The most fun in those first few years was coming up with something really new by just putting bits and pieces together,” Ressa said.
Pivot in the face of opposition. Four months after the government tried to revoke Rappler’s license to operate, the company had lost 49% of its advertising revenue. So Rappler tapped its intelligence on disinformation networks to develop a new business, providing data to people or companies under attack, and providing fact-checking services to Facebook.
“That business model grew 2,000% in 2018,” Ressa said. “That is how we survived.”
2. In developing digital products and services, security should be baked in rather than bolted on.
Writing recently in MIT Sloan Management Review, Keri Pearlson, the executive director of the research consortium Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, and research affiliate Keman Huang recommend four steps leaders can take to build teams that design for cybersecurity:
- Tie performance appraisals to cybersecurity. Criteria such as creating designs that pass testing gates, including security design components and security controls, and collaborating with security experts should be part of individuals’ performance evaluations.
- Reward and recognize employees who take cybersecurity seriously. Recognition can be a big motivator for employees, yet leaders often fail to call out the accomplishments of those who find and fix cybersecurity issues.
- Use experts and safety nets, but train designers in security as well. Designers need basic training on how to design for cybersecurity and should be reminded that security is their responsibility, the authors write.
- Deliver strong and frequent messages to increase awareness of cybersecurity needs.Without reinforcement, designers may not realize it’s their job to develop elegant, cost-effective, secure offerings.
3. Central banks played a crucial role in stabilizing the markets during COVID-19, thanks to their willingness to revise their monetary policy playbooks. Doing so in the future will be crucial as crises increase in frequency, according to economist Stanley Fischer.
Bank purchases of corporate and municipal bonds, along with other new monetary policies, “were crucial to halting the downward spiral of markets and jump-starting the economic recovery,” Fischer said in an address on Nov. 4 at MIT Sloan.
Fischer, a former professor of economics at MIT, has served as vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, governor of the Bank of Israel, and chief economist at the World Bank.
He praised central banks’ willingness to react, saying, “The past two decades have shown how important speed, size, and adaptability are to monetary policy of the 21st century.”
Former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers agreed with Fischer’s assessment, but questioned the merits of protracted quantitative easing and suppressed interest rates. On the topic of forward guidance from central banks, Summers said, “My instinct has always been that the market doesn’t believe it, so it doesn’t [affect] rates very much.”
Fischer presented his paper while accepting the inaugural Miriam Pozen Prize for outstanding research or practice in financial policy.
