Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2020 i Rotman Management

As we speak [in April 2020], businesses around the world are shuttered due to the global pandemic. What are some of the key leadership lessons from this unprecedented moment? First of all, my heart goes out to everyone who has been affected by this unprecedented pandemic. At the very beginning of my latest book I discuss some of the big unsolved problems we currently face, and I mention the fact that pandemics can travel from place to place at the speed of an airplane. Sadly, that is exactly what happened. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that we need to recognize and learn to deal with the interdependencies between countries, levels of government and levels of the business ecosystem. We need to see greater cooperation on all fronts. There is a…

Nobody knows when the COVID-19 crisis will end. Optimists anticipate a rapid V-shaped recovery, while pessimists worry this will take a long time and be a painful and protracted process. In a broad sense, there are two extremes: • The Good Outcome: In this scenario, we achieve wide-scale distribution of a vaccine or treatment or develop herd immunity before the end of 2020.• The Bad Outcome: In the second scenario, we achieve none of these before the end of 2023. Like everyone, we desperately hope for the Good Outcome. Yet we must plan for the worst. CDL Recovery — a new program recently launched at the Creative Destruction Lab — is designed for managing through the Bad Outcome. As indicated in the main article, there are two types of solutions…

THE TERM ‘GROUPTHINK’ was first coined in 1971 by the psychologist Irving Janis. Writing in the pages of Psychology Today, Janis set out to identify a psychological mechanism that could explain the disastrous decision by John F. Kennedy and his advisers to authorize the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 — the bungled American assault on Cuba that ultimately came to be seen as one of the most embarrassing foreign policy decisions of all time. The attack plan Kennedy signed off on — along with Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and about 40 other advisers from a team Janis described as “one of the greatest arrays of intellectual talent in the history of the American Government” — went something like this: Around 1,400 Cuban exiles, trained by the…

THOUGH MOST EXECUTIVES RECOGNIZE the importance of breaking down silos to help people collaborate across boundaries, they struggle to make it happen. That’s understandable: It is devilishly difficult. Think about your own relationships at work — the people you report to and those who report to you, for starters. Now consider the people in other functions, units or geographies whose work touches yours in some way. Which relationships get prioritized in your day-to-day job? We’ve posed that question to managers, engineers, salespeople, and consultants in companies around the world. The response we get is almost always the same: vertical relationships. But when we ask, “Which relationships are most important for creating value for customers?” the answers flip. Today, the vast majority of innovation and business-development opportunities lie in the interfaces…

PEOPLE OFTEN asked Innosight co-founder and Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen to give his opinion about various industry developments. No matter what industry, no matter what context, he would always start by saying, “I don’t have an opinion. Theories have opinions.” The word theory, used in this general sense, can be considered a catch-all term that covers frameworks, models and tools. Christensen’s point was that just like putting on the right lenses can help you to see clearly, the right mental model can simplify and bring clarity to often confusing situations. When confronted with the vast, chaotic maelstrom of change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have found ourselves returning to first principles, looking to the core frameworks, models and tools on which we base our fieldwork helping forward-thinking…

Given the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the need for resilience in the healthcare system—and everywhere else—has never been greater. Resilience can be defined as ‘the ability to absorb strain and preserve (or improve) functioning despite the presence of adversity.’ However, in the midst of chaos, fear, uncertainty and often completely insufficient resources, the call to ‘be resilient’ may feel like an impossible demand, especially if you view resilience as something one either has or does not have — a character trait like ‘grit’ or ‘fortitude’. Our own work, however, suggests something different. As we have looked at resilience in emergency rooms, firefighting teams, military units and sports teams, we have come to see it not as something you have, but instead as something you do. Nor is it limited to recovery…

AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS SIGNED IT. So did Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, and Charlie Scharf, the CEO of Wells Fargo. Last summer these corporate chieftains and 178 others made a big fuss over affirming the Business Roundtable’s updated statement of purpose, declaring the end of shareholder primacy in favour of “stakeholder capitalism” that aims to create value for employees, suppliers, communities, and others. What a difference a crisis makes. As America scrambled to deal with the health and economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers in Amazon warehouses across the U.S. staged walkouts to protest unsafe working conditions, and the company’s Whole Foods division had to walk back an initial statement asking employees to donate sick days. Walmart’s ASDA division has canceled orders from apparel manufacturers in places such…

The global pandemic has changed the world in countless ways. You advise that business leaders approach ‘the new normal’ in three phases. Please explain. The first phase, which most organizations have already addressed, is to restart. This involves thinking about re-opening your business and looking at issues like safety, security, and how you will operate in a socially distanced way. Once these things are in place, leaders need to think about reforming their business model by examining and questioning everything they do. Things have changed so much that many will need to completely reconsider and revise their strategy, how they deal with customers — and maybe even the key aspects of their culture. The third phase is to revise your purpose. Every leadership team needs to revisit the very core…

IN A MOMENT OF CRISIS, it can be difficult to think beyond the next hour, the next day, or the next week. The global COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for each of us, as we grapple with our duty of care to our employees, to our communities, to each other, and to ourselves. The unprecedented disruption created by this crisis should be seen first and foremost in humanitarian terms, connecting to the very real personal toll of this disease — serious illness and lives lost, isolation and fear, worsening unemployment and economic precarity. The primary question in this moment should be: how might we each play our part in bringing this pandemic to an end? But it is a moment too, for reflection, on the future. Who do we want…

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? That is the question being asked by just about everyone, everywhere. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, business priorities immediately shifted from ‘how will we grow?’ to ‘how will we survive?’ As our medical and government leaders have indicated, we will get through this extremely difficult period and come out the other side. But there is little doubt that society will be different. It already is, and as a result, it is incumbent upon leaders to chart a new path. Whether you work for a large corporation or a small business, an NGO or a not-for-profit, new thinking and approaches are required. In this article I will present a framework that can serve as a roadmap to prepare your business for the other…

AS BUSINESSES CONTEMPLATE the reopening of the economy, the only thing that seems certain is that a lot will be different. Many executives have expressed a desire to ‘do the right thing’. But what is the right thing? How do you plan without knowing even broad parameters on what will occur, such as when a vaccine will be available, and what the timetable looks like for the lifting of all restrictions? In this article, we take on these questions and try to offer the best answers that we can, given what we know now. A critical facet of our approach is to use the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals as a north star for where value can be created during and post COVID. A Shared Priority As the economy reopens,…

DEALING WITH THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS and its aftermath could be the imperative of our times. Indeed, we have argued that it augurs the imminent restructuring of the global economic order. As Ian Davis, one of our previous managing partners, wrote in 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis: For some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, ‘What will normal look like?’ While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years. It is impossible to know what will happen. But it is…

The COVID-19 crisis is not only urgent and novel, it is also global. To that end, the Creative Destruction Lab disbanded its traditional location-based programming and designed the CDL Recovery program to run globally. See page 26 for a description of the program. Mentors for CDL Recovery include: Dawn Bell, Chief Scientific Officer, Novartis (Boston) Elizabeth Cannon, President Emerita and Professor at the University of Calgary (Calgary) James Cham, Partner at Bloomberg Beta (Palo Alto) Sir Chris Deverell, former Commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command (Bath) Mark Evans, Partner, LP at Kindred Capital (London) Chen Fong, Professor Emeritus of Faculty of Medicine at University of Calgary and Co-founder of Pureweb Inc. (Calgary) Brenda Fitzgerald, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control (Atlanta) Nancy Gallini, Professor Emeritus at UBC’s…

As the NeuroLeadership Institute’s research on organizational behaviour demonstrates, during disruption and crisis, we enter a state of threat. Humans have survived for millennia because our brains are wired to detect threat. In fact, we are so finely tuned for survival, our brains are far more likely to detect threat than reward or pleasure. And when we are in a threat state, we tend to make decisions strongly geared towards survival. That means, at least some of the time, the parts of our brains responsible for logical and deliberate thinking take a back seat to the parts responsible for keeping us alive. In these moments we tend to make unconsciously biased decisions more often. We rely on specific biases related to safety, experience, and expedience. We err on the side…

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN that saw so many of us working from home, my thoughts turned to how we can innovate our way out of this and future crises. The movie Mission Impossible 2 soon came to mind. Released in 2000, the antagonist is an Australian-based biotech company (Biocyte Pharmaceuticals, if you must know) with a rather unique commercialization plan. It has developed a virus, Chimera, that could start a very bad pandemic. It lies dormant for 20 hours before destroying the carrier’s red blood cells. One plan might have been threatening to release the virus and be paid not to do so. But the folks at Biocyte go one step further. They plan to release the virus itself because they have also developed the…

The first personal computer was introduced by MITS in 1975. Bell Labs brought out the first colour TV in 1929. 3M had the first copy machine in 1950. Good luck finding any of those products today. Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis’s seminal study of 500 brands in 50 product categories reveals that almost half of market pioneers fail. In fact, the greatest long-term success belongs to companies that enter a market and become leaders about 13 years after these first movers. In follow-up work, Tellis found little evidence to support the idea of first mover advantage: MySpace and Friendster were ahead of Facebook; Books.com was online before Amazon; AltaVista (among others) beat Google in search; and Sony, BlackBerry and others hit the shelves before Apple in mobile music, smartphones, and…

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, new technologies have demanded step shifts in the skills that companies need. Like the First Industrial Revolution’s steam-powered factories, the Second Industrial Revolution’s mass-production tools and techniques and the Third Industrial Revolution’s internet-based technologies, the Fourth Industrial Revolution — currently being driven by the convergence of digital, biological and physical technologies — is changing the nature of work as we know it. Now the challenge is to hire and develop the next generation of workers who will use artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, genetic engineering, 3D printing, virtual reality and the like in their jobs. The problem, strangely enough, appears to be two-sided. People at all levels complain bitterly about being either underqualified or overqualified for the jobs that companies advertise. In addition, local and regional imbalances among…

When some people hear the word empathy being used in a business context, they think ‘What does that have to do with business?’ How do you respond to that mindset? I would argue that empathy has everything to do with business. If you accept that innovation is about meeting the unmet (and often unarticulated) needs of your customers, you have to ask, “How can we get in touch with those unarticulated needs?” Only through our ability to listen to people, observe them, read between the lines and extrapolate. That requires a deep sense of empathy — making it a necessary ingredient for succeeding with any innovation agenda. At Microsoft, we are rising to this challenge by putting the necessary conditions in place for our people to develop empathy. One word…

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS, our lives have been upended by the global pandemic. The adjustments to life we anticipated as temporary are morphing to new, still largely unfamiliar ways of working and living. Our teams have endured these changes as well, and we have also tried to help them manage it all. All this while leading transformation to our companies’ processes, systems, products, and operations. We are not going back to life as it was, but turning a page. The sheer length of time we have managed this level of stress has a compounding impact on our physical, mental, and emotional health. While hope is on the horizon for an end to the current pandemic, it does not change this fact. In addition, people around us face challenges —…

While well-intentioned, research shows that anti-bias programs rarely deliver. What are organizations getting wrong when it comes to this kind of training? So much! The kind of bias training that has been the industry standard for the past decade is not effective because it’s about the cognitive causes of bias. What people need to know is what bias looks like on the ground in everyday workplace interactions. That’s what my research has focused on for the past decade. We can’t look at today’s organizations as meritocracies, because, typically, they really aren’t. The fact is, in most organizations, the group that dominates doesn’t have to prove itself as much, and this happens because of the subtle forms of bias that are constantly being transmitted by formal and informal systems. If we…

How do you define ‘upstream thinking’, and why is it so powerful? There’s a public-health parable that captures the distinction: You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. Suddenly you hear a shout from the direction of the water — a child is drowning. Without thinking, you both dive in, grab the child, and swim to shore. Before you can recover, you hear another child cry for help. You and your friend jump back in the river to rescue her as well. Then another struggling child drifts into sight … and another … and another. The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly, you see your friend wading out of the water, seeming to leave you alone. “Where are you going?” you demand.…

• 65% of respondents trust their employer to respond effectively and responsibly to the coronavirus outbreak • 42% of respondents believe that business should be working in partnership with government to combat the virus • 78% of respondents believe businesses have a responsibility to ensure their employees are protected from the virus in the workplace and that their employees do not spread the virus into the community • 43% of employees want their employer to update information about the virus at least once a day…

GOAL 1: No Poverty GOAL 2: Zero Hunger GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-Being GOAL 4: Quality Education GOAL 5: Gender Equality GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production GOAL 13: Climate Action GOAL 14: Life Below Water GOAL 15: Life on Land GOAL 16: Peace and Justice, Strong Institutions GOAL 17: Partnerships to Achieve the Goals…

Martin Lindstrom Author of seven New York Times best-selling books, advisor to Fortune 500 brands; ranked #20 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50 WHAT WE ARE EXPERIENCING WITH COVID-19 can be seen as the first global 9/11. That event from 2001 has been studied extensively in terms of its impact on people’s brains. We now know that it was a very powerful ‘somatic marker’ — USC Neuroscientist Antonio Domasio’s term for positive or negative ‘bookmarks’ in our brains that affect our behaviour and decisions for years to come. When we have such a negative emotional bookmark, it has a profound impact on how we behave, how we interact with other people — and even how we shop, and we are seeing all of this with the pandemic. This is one…

1. Encourage Dissenting Opinions. The problem with group decisions is that even when team members have doubts, they often soft-pedal their objections or even silence themselves entirely for fear of being seen as an annoying buzzkill or a non-team player. The solution is to change the group’s social norms, creating a social context in which opposing viewpoints are welcomed and rewarded. To do that, leaders need to demonstrate that they truly want to hear opinions different from their own and emphasize that the goal of discussion is not group harmony, but sound decisions. 2. Gather Opinions Anonomously. The Delphi Method, originally developed for military and diplomatic analysis of cold war scenarios, is a decision-making process in which team members submit their thoughts anonymously. This confers two critical benefits. First, since…

IN RECENT YEARS, the debate around corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved from whether firms should be responsible for more than just profits to how firms can be profitable while respecting people and communities and preserving the environment. While CSR has been widely embraced, corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) continues to be widespread. Examples range from oil spills to misrepresenting the environmental benefits of products to unsafe working conditions, sexual harassment, unethical sales practices and accounting scandals. Some of the organizations involved in these activities have even had reputations for CSR achievements. Indeed, research shows that some may be motivated to engage in CSR as a proactive way to camouflage, offset or compensate for prior or future CSiR. In this article I will take a look at the roots of CSiR…

FORTUNATELY, DURING OUR CAREERS, most health system leaders have not faced a crisis like the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, this also means that healthcare leaders around the world are now learning — in real time — about significant gaps in their planning processes and their ability to react. While the initial reaction to COVID-19 in many organizations has been an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ response, in this article we will argue that it is critical that we divide management tasks across four distinct teams to allow us to focus not just on immediate needs, but also on issues lurking around the corner. Each of the four teams we recommend must report directly to senior leadership. Where appropriate, it will be useful to have overlapping membership across teams, to help coordinate their activities. In…

WHEN MY WIFE MARIE-LOUISE introduced me to Joe’s Stone Crabs of Miami Beach, a favourite of hers from when she had lived in South Florida, I was promised a great meal; but I had no idea what an intriguing business experience it would be. Joe’s is a rarity: an American restaurant that has prospered for over a century. It is currently the top-grossing independent restaurant in America — despite being the only one in the top 100 that closes for three months per year when its principal fare, stone crab, is out of season. I was entranced from the moment I entered the restaurant. The waitstaff all stopped to greet us warmly. Because I am a business nerd and know that the average annual turnover in the U.S. restaurant industry…

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has had a wide-ranging impact on the global workforce, from job losses to layoffs and salary cuts. But perhaps the most ubiquitous impact has been increased stress, which can wreak havoc on us both mentally and physically. Even before COVID-19, 58 per cent of Canadians reported experiencing excessive levels of stress at work every day. And in times of heightened uncertainty and rapid negative change, stress levels rise even further. In March of this year, my Rotman colleague John Trougakos and I launched a large scale study of well-being with workers from across Canada. We tracked over 700 employees for more than three months and in this article we will share some of our preliminary findings. The first thing we found is that employee stress levels should…

You have said that every organization should embrace the practice of continuous experimentation. Why is this so critical, particularly right now? The main reason is that experimentation is the engine of innovation. As a result, anyone who cares about innovation must also care about experimentation. Innovation is about novelty and value creation, but it is equally about uncertainty. There can be R&D uncertainty, production uncertainty, market uncertainty, customer experience uncertainty, to name a few. We typically deal with the uncertainty element by relying on our experience. But that can be quite limiting. The fact is, when you’re trying to create something new, in most cases you don’t have any prior experience with it. Some might say, ‘In that case, look to the data’. But again, the same problem arises: If…

You developed the GettingItDone® management system and have been teaching it to Rotman MBA students for 19 years. What are its key principles? The system applies the thinking of three well known management gurus. The first is the late-great Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. He had plenty of great ideas, but the one we embrace in our framework is management by objectives. I ran into him in the early 1970s and was lucky enough to get to know him pretty well in the late 1990s. I have been a devout apostle of his methods throughout my career. The second guru is the late British-born management behaviouralist Bill Reddin, who believed that that there was only one realistic and unambiguous definition of managerial effectiveness: The extent to which…

How would you describe the trust landscape in Canada right now? Every fall, we survey people around the world to measure their trust in four institutions: government, business, NGOs and media. Last fall we found that Canadians were quite distrusting of all these institutions — and government was at the bottom of the list. At that time, only 50 per cent of respondents trusted government, 53 per cent trusted both business and media and 55 per cent trusted NGOs. Fast forward a few months and we re-surveyed Canadians in the midst of the global pandemic, and found record highs in reported trust across all four institutions. This included a 20-point jump in trust in government, which actually moved from fourth position into first. This significant increase can be explained by…