Infertility is a common issue, and around one in six couples seek fertility treatment. Pregnancy and childbirth are highly visible in the workplace, whereas fertility challenges tend to be invisible and silent. Fertility treatments can be lengthy and have serious emotional, physical, and financial impacts on a woman and her partner. Many women choose not…
As the crises of 2020 wear on, the unique skills of our country’s Special Operations Forces (SOF) are becoming more and more valuable in the private sector. Their adaptability, excellent judgment, and wide range of training and experience makes SOF veterans well suited to lead in tumultuous times. Companies that want to succeed amid ongoing…
Joe Biden won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Democrats saw an increased share of votes from white working-class voters in 2020. What did he do to win this crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that “we can…
“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Everyone knows Thomas Edison’s classic observation about an inventor’s toil. And as a leader of a trail-blazing startup, you probably see the world the way Edison did. If your startup is like most, you’re fueled more by a singular creative vision than deep pockets. Tackling your own challenges,…
November 10, 2020 Ellen Ernst Kossek, management professor at Purdue University, is researching how the pandemic is putting an enormous strain on working parents and the new challenge that poses for their managers. She shares how supervisors can offer much-needed consistency and predictability for working parents on their teams. She also outlines specific ways to…
November 10, 2020 Entrepreneur Christy Jones is trying to create a new venture to help women preserve their eggs and postpone motherhood. But what would an egg-freezing service sell – and to whom? Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar discusses the challenges of commercializing fertility in her case, “Extend Fertility: Conceiving the Market for Egg…
The Covid-19 pandemic presents a unique problem to economic forecasters — one that’s uniquely urgent to solve. As consumers’ needs, attitudes, and behaviors continue to rapidly change, how can forecasts accurately adapt to reflect them? The key is to build consumer sentiment into economic forecasting models. To do this, economists must marry credit- and debit-transaction…
One of the challenges in developing AI applications is obtaining the vast amount of data that’s required. Making matters worse, regulations and privacy issues pose obstacles to firms’ sharing their data. A possible solution is for firms to form a “data trust.” that serves as a fiduciary for the data providers and governs their data’s proper use. Willis…
You can always count on outside circumstances to affect your pitch to a senior leader, so prepare to get your point across under pressure by understanding the interpersonal dynamics at play in advance. What are your boss’s “tells”? How do they engage with material? And whom do they look to for endorsement? Knowing these things…
Leaders often feel uncomfortable dealing with employees who are reeling from a disappointment. They often want to contain their feelings, worried they will adversely affect the rest of the team. Instead, they should seek to coach the people to uncover the emotions generated by the experience, help them release their inner self-coach and repress their…