All Features
Alena Komaromi
Negotiators are often told they should eschew competitive negotiations, where parties fight for what’s on the table. They should instead increase the size of the pie and seek win-win scenarios. But in reality, competitive negotiations are often unavoidable. Sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be any…
Gleb Tsipursky
It’s too bad that so many rely on their intuition for their decision-making process. From former President Donald Trump, to Steve Jobs, and even allegedly Mark Twain, gut reactions are viewed as something almost magical, acquired either by hard-earned experience or possessed by a select few young…
Zach Winn
More and more people are doing their shopping from home these days, and whether they’re ordering groceries, home office equipment, or Covid-19 tests, they increasingly expect their deliveries to be fast and on time.
Companies have struggled to keep up with the rise in orders and expectations. One…
Knowledge at Wharton
Food Co., a pseudonym for a large food processing plant in the U.S. Northeast, had been operating successfully for several years when the plant manager realized he had a problem he couldn’t solve alone.
The employees did their jobs well, but they didn’t seem to care much about taking care of each…
Felipe Monteiro
Bringing innovation inside an established firm, even one that has created novel ideas in the past, is not as simple as just purchasing bundled external knowledge and expecting it to work wonders at headquarters right away.
Enel CEO Francesco Starace’s mandate was to create long-term sustainable…
Matt Fieldman
This article is the sixth in a monthly series by the the America Works initiative. As a part of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, this series focuses on innovative approaches, and…
Tad Haas
According to Forbes, employees whose voices are heard are nearly five times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
Every team leader must keep their employees engaged and motivated so that they can benefit from their expertise. They can achieve this by taking a holistic approach…
Bruce Hamilton
Just a little over a year ago we lost Hajime Oba, one of the great pioneers of Toyota Production System (TPS) learning in the United States. In 1992, he was the founding manager of the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), a nonprofit affiliate of Toyota Motors of North America (TMNA),…
Torsten Schimanski
The manufacturing skills gap has been a topic of discussion for several years. According to a 2021 Deloitte study, it is estimated that by 2030, there will be 2.1 million manufacturing jobs that will need to be filled. Finding employees who are trained, skilled workers is becoming more critical in…
Gleb Tsipursky
Recent surveys show, and many managers are learning, that their employees are often not interested in working from the office full time.
It’s easy to assume we know what they want due to a bias known as the false consensus effect, which causes us to perceive others whom we feel to be in our team…
Christoph Senn
In 2011, we started talking with top B2B executives about their engagement with their firm’s major customers in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The vast majority told us that they were very involved, to great effect. However, when we interviewed their sales account managers, we heard a…
Caroline Zimmerman, Theodoros Evgeniou
People often associate the term “data literacy” with mastering a litany of technical skills: SQL for data querying, Python for data analysis, and Tableau for data visualization, to name a few. However, one skill that is less discussed and has great power to scale data-guided decision making across…
Phanish Puranam
As businesses increasingly adopt AI-driven decision making, experts agree that the most interesting questions are not about whether humans can beat machines or vice versa, but how the two forms of intelligence can most fruitfully collaborate—and how organizations can best facilitate those…
MIT News
First published June 29, 2021, on MIT News.
MIT and Harvard University have announced a major transition for edX, the nonprofit organization they launched in 2012 to provide an open online platform for university courses: edX’s assets are to be acquired by the publicly traded education technology…
Matt Fieldman
This article is the fourth in a monthly series brought to you by the America Works initiative. As a part of the MEP National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, this series focuses on innovative approaches and uncovering the latest trends in…
Knowledge at Wharton
Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s graduate course on business responsibility is peppered with students he calls “ethics refugees.” They are young people who earned their bachelor’s degrees and landed a great job only to fall into an ethical or moral trap set by a boss, a co-worker, or the…
Iffet Turken
We need instant adaptability to the new skill sets in the unknown future of work. The Covid-19 pandemic is a prime example of how change is accelerating and requiring us to adapt quickly. We often hear about the skill sets we will need but not enough about how executives will adapt to them. A “…
Dawn Bailey
In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became to date the first and only three-time Baldrige Award recipient.
From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a workforce of more than 250 people. The largest privately owned company in its market, it is a…
Clare Naden
We all know that like attracts like, but when it comes to the workplace, differences can be a very good thing. Numerous studies have shown that workplace diversity and inclusion can drive innovation and lead to new markets and financial benefits.
There is also evidence that when employees feel…
Sara Harrison
If you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy, then you’ve gotten a peek into the complex hierarchies that rule a hospital. Over 17 seasons, the show’s eponymous heroine, Meredith Grey, ascends from a lowly intern to chief of general surgery, learning from the presiding residents and older surgeons along the…
Knowledge at Wharton
When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (Virgin Digital, 2021), he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new…
Arron Angle
Iwas talking to a friend recently, and the subject of organizational health came up. With my quality background my ears perked up, and I asked him to explain what he thought organizational health meant.
The friend went on for several minutes explaining that organizational health was all about six…
Caroline Zimmerman
With big data and artificial intelligence (AI) transforming business, it’s almost certain that every executive will need to leverage these technologies at some point to advance their organization—and their career. However, doing so carries a heavy intimidation factor for most leaders, and this is…
James Wells
I was talking recently with a friend who runs an academic program at a major U.S. university. She was telling me about solving a problem in her department and how the solution was obvious so she just did it. She then related how one of her colleagues protested that she should have used some Six…
Enterprise Minnesota
Based in Winona, Minnesota, Alliant Castings is a foundry manufacturing abrasion and impact-resistant castings for a variety of heavy-duty industries. Utilizing the latest technologies, they create custom, proprietary materials to meet their clients' needs for demanding and extreme performance. In…
