The Best of This Week
The week’s must-reads for managing in the digital age, curated by the MIT SMR editors.
Topics
Weekly Recap
How Crises Can Drive Innovation
The conditions that exist during a crisis — including a sense of urgency, a focus on fewer priorities, and more latitude for experimentation — make it easier for organizations to innovate. Leaders can build and sustain a more innovative culture by fostering similar conditions, even in the absence of a crisis.
Is Self-Sufficient Production the Future?
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains but also drove experiments in local self-sufficiency, a production method that can fill the gap between do-it-yourself initiatives and mass manufacturing. Advances in digital fabrication technologies demonstrate a new way forward.
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Five Essential Communication Best Practices for Remote Teams
Communicating in a remote work environment doesn’t have to feel as all-consuming and frazzled as it does today. Consider these five best practices for deliberate and sustainable processes and communication in remote teams.
Building Equity Through Data
Business leaders who intend to address racial equity in their organizations need strategies that are systemic, race explicit, and outcome oriented. Using a data-driven racial equity framework can help identify racial disparities in workforce outcomes.
Rethinking How Businesses Calculate Success
Profit and loss aren’t enough, says Harvard Business School professor George Serafeim. Instead, put a dollar value on the impact of products and operations on people and the planet, then add or subtract it from companies’ bottom lines.
What Else We’re Reading This Week
- Insights from top chief data officers on ensuring data success
- Lessons from the late Tony Hsieh on happiness as a top business priority
- Seven ways leaders can accelerate their companies’ data efforts
- It’s a great time of year to digitally declutter
Quote of the Week:
“It is no small irony that a designer whose explicit intention was to support the individual’s right to be different came to be associated with the conformity and soullessness of the cubicle.”
— Martha Bird, business anthropologist at ADP, in “Enter the Cube Farm”