Play these 3 “mind games” to be a better leader

Posted on

by Wally Bock

Spoiler alert: these games aren’t about manipulation but they will help you sharpen your thinking and work better with others.

Merriam Webster defines “mind games” as, “A psychological tactic used to manipulate or intimidate—usually used in plural.”

That’s only one definition.

Some companies sell “mind games” to describe programs and instructional material that are supposed to train your brain. The purveyors of these mind games promise miraculous results. Depending on who’s selling the mind game, you might fend off mental decline. You might get much smarter.

There’s also a much more mundane definition. The term “mind games” is used for puzzles and other things that challenge your mind. Several table games are in this group.

I’ve got another. My definition is: “ways to think that will help you be a better boss.” Here are three of them.

WHAT IF?
This is the simplest form of a mind game. When you play “What If?” you think about unusual things that could happen. Then, you give some thought to what you should do about it. For instance, if you live in earthquake country, you might figure out what to do if there was an earthquake. Continue reading →

The office is not dead. Here’s why

Posted on

By Eric Mosley

Lately we’ve seen lots of obituaries for the office. The pandemic caused a massive shift to work from home (WFH) among knowledge and service workers. Teams are using communication apps like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to stay productive. Even though employees are working more hours, people like having more control over their work schedules. They benefit from less commuting, even as the boundaries are blurring between work and home.

I believe reports of the office’s demise are premature for several reasons, but they all reflect the critical human need for connection. Last spring, a large number of Silicon Valley executives made very public statements indicating their changed minds on the need for an in-person workplace: “We’re working so well from home that we might never go back to the office.”

Didn’t they realize that the reason they could transition to 100% virtual teams overnight was that they had spent years building a shared experience among employees? It was the power of proximity that enabled employees to make the switch. Those companies had invested in their cultures, which carried them through.

After almost a year of remote working, we’re seeing a slow decay of connection. According to Gallup, remote employees are 7% less likely to see their connection to the mission of a company. Staring at a laptop screen with six other faces is inherently transactional, less spontaneous, and less human than working in an actual room with actual people.

Continue reading →

Key Trends Shaping The Workforce Of The Future

Posted on

by Kevin Parikh

The workforce of the future has been debated for years but has never been such a hot topic as today, with the Covid-19 pandemic. It is no longer news that the face of the world and the way we do business has irrevocably changed. Instead of the slow and steady climb toward a borderless, digital society, global economies suddenly found themselves launched onto a new trajectory, forced to adapt to survive. We are watching the workplace and workforce of the future take shape, with changing roles, relationships and demands. There has been a rapid shift toward remote work, innovation and automation, enabled by the ubiquity of technology and the digital economy.

What will the future look like, and what does it mean for the workforce and youth of today?

The workforce of the future will be distributed and transboundary.

Advancements in digital and unified communications, allowing for real-time audio and visual connection, have made it easier than ever to work remotely and efficiently from anywhere in the world without compromising the quality of interactions. In fact, at the advent of the pandemic, many white-collar companies around the world were able to make the work-from-home shift almost instantaneously.

According to a survey of roughly 1,200 chief information officers across different industries around the world conducted by Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), 72% of the workforce is remote, and it is expected that the share of the workforce permanently working from home will double to 34.4% in 2021, from 16.4% before the pandemic.

Continue reading →

What’s Style Got to Do With Strategy?

Posted on

 

by Frédéric Godart

Careful calibration of aesthetics and style can elevate companies and individuals above the competition.

There are watches, and there are watches. Even in the rarefied world of luxury watchmaking, the offerings range from merely excellent to heirloom-worthy. Each timepiece is an intricate marriage of two domains, aesthetics and technology, and seeks the approval of two audiences, public and professional, who have different ideas of what makes a great watch. If you were a watchmaker, how would you navigate between these demands in order to maximise both sales and prestige?

This is a strategic challenge that Kim Claes, Stoyan Sgourev and I address in a paper published in Aesthetics and Style in Strategy, the 42nd volume of the Advances in Strategic Management series. The book, which I co-edited, is the first systematic survey of the interface between style and strategy. It offers insights into, among other things, how producers make style choices as well as how consumers and other audiences evaluate and react to those choices.

 

Continue reading →

The pandemic has derailed women’s careers and livelihoods. Is America giving up on them?

Posted on

By Maria Aspan and Emma Hinchliffe

In early 2020, just before the first U.S. patient was diagnosed with COVID-19, women crossed a major employment milestone. The labor market was booming. Health care, education, and other service sectors largely staffed by female workers were racing to hire more people. And for a few shining months in early 2020, government data showed that women outnumbered men in the U.S. paid workforce.

Then “the whole house burned down,” says Michael Madowitz, a labor economist at the Center for American Progress.

It’s been almost a year since COVID-19 closed the schools and day cares working mothers rely on for childcare, and battered many of the service-oriented businesses with majority female workforces. And in that time, the pandemic has set working women back by more than three decades—to levels of labor force participation last seen in 1988. The resulting employment conflagration has spread across race, age, and industry, from low-paid essential workers to “knowledge” employees in remote-friendly corporate roles—although it has, predictably and awfully, done the most damage to the Black and Latina women who were already the most economically vulnerable.

“We’ve lost so much ground. It’s astronomical,” says C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Continue reading →