Three Big Points

Author Larry Downes, an expert on government regulation of the tech industry, argues that the Biden administration should heed the lessons of history and let innovation flourish under a less-is-more approach to intervention.

In this episode of the Three Big Points podcast, MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral, author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt, talks about the hype loop — the echo chamber resulting from the explosive growth of social media. Aral argues that the ongoing dialogue between machine intelligence and human decision-making is changing our society at every level. MIT Sloan’s Sinan Aral discusses social media as a marketing tool that can have a positive impact — if used ethically.

Even though we know that professional sports is big business, we might overlook how the strategies used by that industry can be applied to the broader business world. On this week’s episode of the Three Big Points podcast, MIT Sloan lecturer Ben Shields explains how the NBA’s use of data analytics can offer important lessons for organizations that want to derive real value from their data to gain a competitive edge.

Emotions are a big part of daily life, and there’s no avoiding them at work — even when employees are working remotely, and especially at a time when emotions are heightened by world events. In this episode of the Three Big Points podcast, authors Molly West Duffy and Liz Fosslien argue that we can improve this stressful situation for everyone by setting a positive example, shifting expectations, and leading with empathy.

Social science tells us how to address the key issues of leading through difficult times at the individual, relational, collective, and contextual levels. The challenge, says Morela Hernandez, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, is to lead with humanity. In this week’s episode of the Three Big Points podcast, Hernandez offers specific and actionable advice leaders can follow amid COVID-19 to inspire their teams and lead with compassion.

As companies adjust to the sudden, recent shift to remote work amid COVID-19 and consider its long-term implications for employees, they’re faced with a new challenge: how to make remote work a permanent and productive part of their long-term workforce strategies. In this week’s episode of the Three Big Points podcast, MIT researcher Kristine Dery suggests ways leaders can help their employees address the pain of remote work and transform the experience into an opportunity to excel.

The coronavirus pandemic may serve as a wake-up call to help us focus on the crises and trends already impacting us and our environment. In this week’s episode of the Three Big Points podcast, sustainability consultant and author Andrew Winston explains how we can learn from the current health crisis and use it to develop strategies to shape a more sustainable future.

During a crisis, leaders may find it difficult to determine the best approach to managing the day-to-day business challenges while simultaneously developing a strategy for the future.  On this week’s episode of the Three Big Points podcast, Eric McNulty, associate director of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard, shares some of the lessons he has learned from studying past crises and how they can help today’s leaders address the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even as the corporate benefits of diversity and inclusion have become widely understood, actual progress has stalled. So says the guest on this episode of MIT Sloan Management Review’s Three Big Points podcast, Tim Ryan, the U.S. chairman of PwC. He offers a frank assessment of the scope of the challenge and points us toward some specific and replicable practices that are actually working.

In the past decade, disrupters have changed dramatically, says Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath, this week’s guest on the Three Big Points podcast. Disrupters now enter the market with products and services that are just as good as those offered by legacy companies — making it harder than ever for legacy businesses to compete. But, McGrath says, it’s within any company’s power to take on the upstarts — if they’re open-minded in responding to change.

With potential disruption coming from all sides, the future might seem pretty complicated for your company. Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, has identified 11 ways disruption can sneak up on organizations. In this episode of Three Big Points, Webb explains how business leaders can use these factors as a framework to help them see where the next potential disruption might come from.

Clayton Christensen introduced his Theory of Disruptive Innovation over 25 years ago. So why do leaders still fall prey to disruption’s dangers? Our guest on this episode of Three Big Points, Innosight’s Scott Anthony, asserts that disruption remains a dangerous force because leaders fall prey to same faulty thinking time and again — but they can overcome it.

Each major wave of technological advancement has proved to be a boon to society — at least eventually. But in the meantime, many people’s lives and jobs have faced unwelcome disruption. This week’s Three Big Points guest, Oxford economist Carl Frey, says it’s time to learn to move from resisting change to mitigating its most painful short-term impacts.

Pipeline Equity CEO Katica Roy says there’s been a false narrative that women don’t know how to operate in the workplace, when in fact the workplace was not designed to value them. She warns that we will perpetuate that narrative unless we change how we make decisions about talent. Her solution: Use AI and natural language processing to remove bias from performance evaluations.

Company leaders need to take a 360-degree approach to digital transformation — by reinventing both outward-facing strategy and inward-facing operations, says IBM’s Mark Foster. In this episode of the Three Big Points podcast, he explains how the combined impact of quality data, technology, and a sense of humanity enable a digital reinvention to succeed.

For all the giant leaps promised by artificial intelligence, when it comes to business, what we’ve seen so far amounts to just tiny steps. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; many smart people advise companies to start small with AI. But as Boston College professor Sam Ransbotham notes in this week’s Three Big Points podcast, when you think small, you get small results.

We do plenty of strategic thinking about our careers but surprisingly little when it comes to our relationships. Strategy might sound like a cold word to use to describe managing our personal lives, but as you’ll hear in this week’s Three Big Points podcast, the ideas driving Jennifer Petriglieri’s research into why some dual-career relationships work better than others are quintessentially human.

Digital transformation often starts with leaders identifying a fundamental change in the competitive environment and moving quickly to counter a potential disruption. But as Jeanne Ross explains, even the most forward-looking strategies are bound to fall flat unless leaders themselves evolve — and in some pretty dramatic ways.

You stand in front of a roomful of decision makers and present an iron-clad case for a compelling, data-backed proposal. The group’s reaction? Tepid, at best. So, what happened? Nancy Duarte would likely tell you that you were missing the story behind the data. In this episode of Three Big Points, Duarte shows us how to bring data to life in a way that will win people over to your idea.

Just as Jacob Marley was bound to drag the weight of his sins for an eternity, so too are organizations burdened by the weight of their debts. And we’re not just talking about the monetary kind. There are other forms of debt that companies take on, and they carry a weight that can be as heavy as the greatest financial liabilities. Two of the most nefarious forms are technical and cultural debt, which accrue as a by-product of the decisions and investments companies make along their growth journeys. In this week’s episode, Stanford’s Bob Sutton takes us inside ride-sharing giant Uber, which offers an ideal case study.

In a data-rich world, company stakeholders know more than ever about the organization and possess unprecedented power to spread the word when something goes wrong. Leaders must realize that the damage to the business and its reputation will be revealed more quickly and spread faster and wider than ever before — so it’s vital that they look carefully at potentially risky decisions and practices.

The days of the well-planned career path are over. It is rare for a professional to stay in the same industry, let alone the same company, for the majority of their working life today. And the threat of career disruption grows only greater as the pace of digital change increases. Author and expert Whitney Johnson offers her prescription of specific steps you can take to help ensure you stay in control of your own career amid all this unpredictability. 

While digital disruption may seem like a technology problem, it’s really a people problem. Host Paul Michelman cuts to the chase with Jerry Kane, coauthor of the book The Technology Fallacy.

MIT SMR's Three Big Points is the podcast you need to stay at the top of your game as a business leader. In each episode you’ll get one new idea from the world’s leading academics, researchers, and executives delivered with three takeaways to help you put it to use in your organization. New episodes are available biweekly starting September 17.