THINKING+++ FORWARD
Ideas for your work from MIT Sloan School of Management | Office of Communications
+ THREE INSIGHTS FOR THE WEEK November 28 – December 4, 2021
1. Companies are under pressure from multiple stakeholders to adopt sustainable business practices. Here are four foundational tenets to guide your strategy:
- Listen, internally and externally. MIT Sloan senior lecturer Jason Jay, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, said companies can adopt an “outside-in” approach, listening to the concerns and demands of stakeholders, or an “inside-out” approach, consulting internally with board members, the C-suite, and key employees to refine the social mission of the organization.
- Deploy overlapping timelines. Richard Wilner, EMBA ’19, head of business excellence and sustainability at Takeda’s BioLife Plasma Services, recommends developing sustainability solutions along several time scales — generally months, years, and decades.
- Develop a mix of metrics. It’s fine to articulate overarching intentions (“Net-zero by 2050”), provided companies establish processes to move toward those goals and then measure outcomes. Most important: Metrics should be granular enough to drive change.
- Connect sustainability to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. “We won’t have a healthy environment if people are poor and hungry and lack decent shelter, meaningful work, and opportunities to develop,” said management professor John Sterman, co-founder of the Sustainability Initiative.
2. As we look back on all that changed in business and management in 2021, here are some quotes from MIT Sloan news articles that captured the zeitgeist:
“The next 50 unicorns are going to be technologies that create something related to sustainability.” — Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO
“American organizations need to diversify the prototype of what a leader should look like.” — Jackson Lu, MIT Sloan assistant professor of work and organization studies
“We need much stronger labor protection laws in order to allow AI researchers to organize against things that they see going really wrong.” — Timnit Gebru, AI researcher
“We have coronavirus in the real world. Here, in the information ecosystem, you have the virus of lies.” — Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy
“If you constantly chase cost reduction, you will ultimately wear the system down into total failure.” — MIT Sloan senior lecturer John Carrier
“Companies are leaving a lot of value on the cutting room floor by not investing in the experience of their employees.” — Kristine Dery, research scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research
3. Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, MIT Sloan professor of management and innovation Kate Kellogg detailed four mistakes leaders often make when introducing new technology:
- Using junior employees as trainers. Younger employees may be more tech-savvy and flexible, but this strategy can make longtime employees feel slighted — and make it tougher to train them.
- Adding a new layer of workers to handle technology. This can signal that managers value data scientists, computer scientists, or other people in new roles more than traditional employees.
- Focusing on prominent users. Emerging technologies promise to automate a lot of practices and processes, but at the outset, they often create a lot of extra work that lower-level employees must cover.
- Assuming developers can create tools in a vacuum. Managers often assume that the process of adding new tech goes in one direction: Developers create a tool, and users adapt to it. But to make things go smoothly, users must have a back-and-forth dialogue with developers about how the system should work.
