Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i Rotman Management

Tom Peters Author, In Search of Excellence; Thinkers50 Hall of Fame Subscribe today! Just $49.95 cad Available in print or digital www.rotmanmag.com/subscribe Get access to the latest thinking on leadership and innovation with a subscription to Rotman Management, the magazine of Canada’s leading business school. An affordable professional development tool that will help you and your team thrive in a complex environment. Interested in group subscriptions? Order 5 or more and save! Email rotmanmag@rotman.utoronto.ca for details.…

Rotman Visiting Experts is a podcast for curious, media-savvy professionals who want to stay sharp — without the noise. Each month, host Brett Hendrie has thoughtprovoking conversations with influential authors and business leaders, helping you connect the dots between big ideas and real-world leadership. Whether you’re short on time or deep into your next business read, this is insight you can trust — in a format that fits your day. New season launches Sept. 30, 2025 Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Or visit rotman.utoronto.ca/podcasts.…

IN 2008, THE GLOBAL ECONOMY nearly collapsed. All because one man — Joseph Cassano — silenced the voices of those around him. Cassano played an outsized role in the global financial crisis because his team was responsible for issuing ‘credit default swaps,’ which essentially served as insurance policies on mortgage-backed securities. As head of AIG’s Financial Products unit, Cassano invested heavily in credit default swaps. It was amazingly profitable, until it wasn’t. When these mortgage-backed securities became virtually worthless, AIG was responsible for covering the losses. The problem was that it had issued them with almost no collateral. As a result, it didn’t have the money to cover the tens of billions in losses. The world economy stood on the brink of complete collapse until the U.S. government bailed out…

IN OUR DAILY LIVES, we face no shortage of potentially exasperating interpersonal clashes. Some, admittedly, may be ripple effects of our own doing. Or, we may be innocent bystanders roped into a mess. No matter the origin, these conflicts can elicit confusion, ire — and a sense that we lack control over certain areas of our life. What if there were an efficient way to reliably turn the tables in our favour? From professional to personal, inconsequential to monumental, the conflicts you bump into can be vastly diverse, just like the individuals involved. No singular methodology will solve every problem. A strategy that succeeds in one case could backfire in another. Ah, but there is a pattern. And patterns can be reprogrammed. Human beings are capable of incredibly complex calculation…

AFTER A DECADE of climbing the ranks at Google, I reached the point of managing other managers. Despite the company’s apparent confidence in me, I struggled with performance anxiety. A decade in the trenches didn’t guarantee my potential for upper management. Could I deliver at the same level with significantly more people in my org? A flight to Boulder early in my tenure as a senior leader left me with a few hours of peace before leading an off-site the next day with a number of the managers who reported to me. We would spend a day planning a high-stakes transition, shutting down a major business unit in one part of the country and building it back up in another. With my impostor syndrome flaring, I used every trick in…

IN 2014, social scientist Dr. Chris Ertel and I published a book called Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations to Accelerate Change. Our goal was to help people prepare for and find solutions to complex, adaptive challenges in what has been termed a ‘VUCA’ world — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We thought 2014 exemplified VUCA. Looking back, it seems almost quaint. Today, we’re experiencing ‘VUCA on steroids,’ with no signs of slowing down. The pace and scale of disruption have intensified dramatically across every domain of business and society. From the promise and perils of accelerating technologies, to climate change and global pandemics, to polarization and proliferating misinformation, the future seems to be accelerating towards us. The paradox for leaders today is clear: When everything is moving…

Rotman Professor Jia Lin Xie is in the midst of studying perceptions of post-pandemic return-to-office demands. And she’s finding that employees aren’t exactly happy about it. COVID-19, interview subjects are saying, clearly proved that people could work from home — so, why should they have to come into the office? “When I ask them why they don’t want to come into the office, there are many different answers,” she says. “But the most common one is that they were given a degree of control by working at home. And now they feel that they are losing that control.” Professor Xie has been studying job design, stress and employee well-being for decades. The concept of control — having some degree of autonomy over aspects of one’s job — is a recurring…

IN RECENT YEARS, with the focus on digital transformation, ESG, and other emerging issues, ‘strategy’ — the traditional bedrock of management education — has had less attention. The dawning AI revolution has put it back on centre stage. The disruptive nature of AI means that organizations of all types now need to examine their strategies for vulnerabilities and opportunities. Setting the context, Professor Walid Hejazi, Academic Director of Executive Programs at the Rotman School of Management (pictured above), refers to a quote from Andrew McAfee, a principal MIT research scientist: “Once in a while, a technology comes along that is so powerful and so broadly applicable that it accelerates the normal march of economic progress.” McKinsey estimates that generative AI could add $3 to $5 trillion to global GDP, while the…

Your book challenges grandiose, billionaire visions of the future, but at its core is something deeply human: How we think about meaning, mortality and responsibility. Was exploring this tension partly why you wrote More Everything Forever? I was seeing these ideas that are somewhere between implausible and delusional — that I knew didn’t work — gaining more traction among the wealthy and powerful and the broader culture, and I had this sense of alarm about the future of technology and humanity. This led me to larger questions about meaning, mortality and ethics; the interplay between history and technology; and the role of human choice, science and limits. Explain what you describe as ‘the ideology of technological salvation’. It’s this idea of tech as the ultimate salvation and power in the…

Imagine that you are a mid-career executive in a successful, medium-size company. One of your key goals, personally and professionally, is to be a force for good in society. How do you begin to think about that agenda? Any organization — and any executive — has to understand that traditionally, companies have had only one target, which was profit. But in today’s world, there are three targets: profit, people and planet. Leading a company today entails what I call ‘alignment integration,’ which means figuring out a way to align these three targets. The goal is to integrate efficiency with equity, size with sustainability and wealth with well-being. The economy has generated a tremendous amount of wealth, but mainly for the owners of capital, not the producers of that wealth. So,…

An expert on sustainable capitalism shares insights from his book, The Age of Outrage. There have been moments of outrage throughout modern history, from the anti-Vietnam War protests to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Arab Spring. There has also been outrage directed at corporations: the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Enron scandal, Occupy Wall Street. But you believe the moment we are in right now is different from any of that. How so? Managing outrage from a one-off event is basically crisis management, and most leaders know how to do that. It’s never easy, but they’ve figured out that if it happens, they need to be highly communicative, transparent and accountable. Managing an entire age of outrage is quite distinct from that. There is something different about…

IN THE EARLY 2000S, Blockbuster was a dominant force in the home movie and video game rental industry, with thousands of stores worldwide. As the market shifted towards digital streaming, Blockbuster focused on short-term earnings and failed to adapt its business model to the changing technological landscape. Meanwhile, Netflix, which initially offered DVD rentals by mail, quickly pivoted to a streaming model of the future and invested heavily in technology and content. Blockbuster’s inability to respond to systemic changes eventually led to its bankruptcy in 2010, while Netflix grew to become a global leader in entertainment. In a more recent case, Northvolt, which made groundbreaking advancements in battery technology, faced a similar fate due to operational and financial issues with its business model. Even with significant financial backing, its inability to…

NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND A GLOBAL PANDEMIC have transformed contemporary work, enabling many individuals to work in remote locations alongside traditional, on-site settings. As professional work becomes increasingly untethered from physical workplaces, researchers are examining how work location influences everything from productivity and social networks to management styles and developmental opportunities. To date, limited research has examined how work location might influence gender discrimination. In a recent paper, we asked: How does working remotely versus on-site influence women’s likelihood of experiencing discrimination? Examples of everyday discrimination can include ignoring a woman’s contributions, making inappropriate comments or asking her to perform tasks unrelated to her job because of her gender. Any single instance of such discrimination may appear inconsequential, but the cumulative effects can be significant. When people regularly experience these offences,…

FEAR OF MISSING OUT (FOMO) can occur anywhere — even in paradise. Consider this passage from a recent article by Rebecca Sullivan on one of Australia’s most popular websites, news.com.au: As I lay by the pool in my lush hotel watching the beautiful Balinese sunset, I stupidly checked my Instagram feed … A pic of my work colleagues having a laugh in the office. Cue a HUGE wave of FOMO. I ached to be a part of it and it killed me to think I was missing out. I was literally in paradise … Why couldn’t I just live in the moment and appreciate what was happening around me? While it may seem harmless enough, there is strong evidence that FOMO is both dysfunctional and maladaptive. It has been tied…

IT IS WIDELY ACCEPTED that good design is good for business. Yet when a national provider of phone and data services wanted to redesign the experience of renegotiating mobile phone plans, design and business didn’t seem quite so aligned. Mobile was a core part of this telco’s business — yet customers consistently ranked the service experience poorly. To address this, the company hired a design consultancy. Early research showed that customers wanted greater transparency and were frustrated — especially if they had been loyal for years — when they heard that other people were getting a better deal. The consultancy’s designers went to work redesigning the experience to increase transparency. However, they ran into immediate resistance, not from users but from within the organization. To the telco, transparency wasn’t always…

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design and working briefly as an industrial designer, you cofounded Airbnb in 2008. Describe the early days. I still think back to that first weekend when Airbnb was started. My co-founders [Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk] and I were unemployed, so we decided to rent out our San Francisco apartment to conference attendees. There was a big design conference coming to town, so we inflated three air mattresses and called it ‘Air Bed and Breakfast.’ To our surprise, three designers stayed with us. Even back then, it wasn’t just about finding a place to stay, it was about connection — the idea that these strangers could stay in our house and walk in our shoes. At a fundamental level, the reason people…

Sam Ransbotham: For those who aren’t familiar with Lenovo, can you give us a brief overview? Linda Yao: Lenovo is a Fortune 500 technology company operating in 180 markets. We started many decades ago as a PC manufacturer, and then, in 2005, we acquired the IBM PC division and decided to diversify our technology business. We acquired the x86 data centre infrastructure business from IBM as well as the Motorola phones business from Google. And with that, we created what we call our ‘end-to-end, pocket-to-cloud portfolio.’ Our journey for the past five years has been about service-led transformation. Three and a half years ago, we launched our Solutions and Services Group, which addresses the demand from our customers to help them, not just with their hardware technology needs, but also with…

You believe that no matter what business they are in, entrepreneurs share a similar mindset. Please describe it. In the book, I lay out the ‘six R’s’ of an entrepreneurial mindset. I titled the book Unstoppable Entrepreneurs because the first R, resilience, is one of the most important components of the mindset. The second element is reason — what is motivating the entrepreneur to move forward with their vision? Third is recombination, which entails each entrepreneur using their unique mix of experiences to identify opportunities. Number four is relationships, which give entrepreneurs access to key resources to move ahead. Fifth is the resources themselves, which include everything from advice to funding and talent. And the last R is results, because of course, you need to focus on your end goals…

MANY GLOBAL BUSINESS LEADERS are rightly preoccupied with tariffs, trade and geopolitics. Uncertainties about market access, input costs and supply chain viability pose big questions about near-term company performance. But they also present an additional danger: the potential to take over the top management agenda, overshadowing forces that will have an enormous longterm impact and that need attention now. The starting point for balancing leader attention is understanding what’s really going on, which is actually pretty straightforward. Three massive discontinuities are taking place simultaneously: One of them — the fracturing of the post–Cold War geopolitical order — is making headlines every day, while the other two are deep economic shifts that are already reshaping the global growth environment: artificial intelligence (AI) and physical climate risk. As AI and climate change…

IN THE PAST YEAR, humanity crossed multiple points of no return. This didn’t happen gradually, but in sudden, irreversible leaps that have fundamentally altered the trajectory of civilization. Just as the first telescopes revealed the vastness of space, today’s advances are revealing how much we don’t understand about our own potential. Let me be clear: The decisions we make in the next five years will determine the long-term fate of human civilization. This isn’t hyperbole — it’s the sobering conclusion drawn from our best available data. The convergence of technology isn’t just changing how we work or live; it’s changing what it means to be human. As we show in the Future Today Strategy Group’s 2025 Tech Trends Report, we are now building systems that can reprogram biology, reshape matter…

IN LATE APRIL, the Rotman School of Management hosted a conversation on one of the most pressing and complex questions facing organizations today: What will the future of work really look like? Rotman Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources (OBHR) John Trougakos focused on the structural side of the equation — how organizations are rethinking time, productivity and work models in the wake of the pandemic. Then, fellow Rotman OBHR Professor John Oesch brought attention to the human side, exploring how leaders build trust, what motivates people and why influence is never simple. Together, their insights offer practical guidance for anyone facing the challenges of today’s workplace — whether that means rethinking schedules, managing change or shaping a culture that balances flexibility with clear expectations. What follows are two…

1. Someone makes negative assumptions about your personality because of your gender. Remote example: In a virtual meeting, a colleague comments that a female co-worker is “too emotional” to lead an important sales call. On-site example: In an in-person meeting, a colleague comments that a female co-worker is “too emotional” to lead an important sales call. 2. Someone makes negative assumptions about your commitment to your job because of your gender. Remote example: In a virtual meeting, a supervisor tells a female employee that she’ll be given a less valued task so that she can spend more time with family. On-site example: In an in-person meeting, a supervisor tells a female employee that she’ll be given a less valued task so that she can spend more time with family. 3.…

IN EARLY 2024, Rotman Management published a special issue focused on behaviourally-informed organizations. Containing articles by thought leaders in the field, the issue spoke to the power of Behavioural Science (‘BeSci’) to drive progress in areas from health and wellness to financial decision-making and digital/online safety. This publication articulated both the core premise and the potential of Behavioural Science: Leaders who ground themselves in understanding how people actually make decisions in practice will be able to develop better products, services, policies and procedures. This will provide their organizations a competitive advantage, both in the marketplace with customers — and in managing their employees and internal teams. It also made it clear that the field of applied BeSci had made significant strides since the 2009 publication of Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and…

BRITISH PHILOSOPHER Bertrand Russell was fond of telling a story about a chicken. Every day when the sun rose, as it did, the chicken would wake, go outside and be fed. Because the same pattern repeated daily, there was no reason for the chicken ever to expect anything different. And yet one day, the sun rose, the chicken went outside to be fed and the farmer wrang its neck. We, Russell implied, are like the chicken, always assuming that what has been, will be. But, he asked, have we any real reason for believing in what he called ‘the uniformity of nature’? The best we can ever hope for, he argued, are probabilities, not certainty. It’s a tough lesson. Yet if we thought about it, we’d recognize just how much of…

In a working world full of noise, Rotman Executive Summary delivers clarity. Each episode unpacks the latest management research from the Rotman School of Management — and translates it into practical insight you can actually use. From rethinking HR systems to advancing workplace equity, you’ll get clear, researchbacked ideas to sharpen your thinking and shape your work — no jargon, just substance. Season 4 launches September 9. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Or visit rotman.utoronto.ca/podcasts…

DESPITE DECADES OF EFFORT, women in Canada and the United States remain underrepresented in various areas of employment including STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] and senior-level executive positions. Researchers have proposed a cultural explanation for the maintenance of gender disparities in majority-male fields and occupations: ‘masculine defaults.’ These defaults reflect a cultural bias that values traits and behaviours associated with masculinity over those associated with femininity. In a recent paper, we studied how masculine defaults are used in job advertisements — a critical recruitment and selection tool designed to attract preferred candidates. Job ads for male-majority workplace contexts often communicate defaults via stereotypically masculine terms such as ‘competitive,’ ‘ambitious’ and ‘independent.’ Accordingly, some have proposed removing such language as an intervention to increase gender diversity in these domains. Some scholars…

How does Design Anthropology relate to BusinessDesign? Business Design is about applying a deepunderstanding of human experience to how we approach problem solving and innovation. It asks us to reframe business challenges not just as technical problems to be solved, but as human challenges to be understood, within broader systems of meaning, power and behaviour. Design Anthropology provides the foundational methodology for this work. It equips us with the tools to explore how people think, feel and act — not just in isolation, but in cultural, social and systemic contexts. Throughethnographic methods, scenario-building and participatory research, Design Anthropology helps us uncover the beliefs andassumptions that drive behaviour, and the mental models that shape how people imagine the future. Put simply, we use Design Anthropology to getbeyond the obvious. It’s one…

You believe that conflict is getting the best of us. Please describe the current environment. Conflict itself is not new, but over the past several decades — especially in the United States, but also globally — we’ve seen an increasing level of polarization and vitriol. There is a sense that we are no longer able to handle our differences in an effective way, and this is playing out as studied avoidance — intentionally and actively avoiding situations, people or thoughts that cause us distress or anxiety. Of course, that is easy to do in today’s world due to social media, where we can take shelter in ‘cocoons’ of like-minded people. The algorithms even help us do that. As a result, we are used to being very comfortable with our own…