Business

Want More Diverse Senior Leadership? Sponsor Junior Talent.

akinbostanci/Getty Images With renewed corporate attention to racial equity — and a growing body of evidence showing that diversity programs don’t work, especially for Black employees — many companies are turning to a different approach for diversifying their pipelines to the top: sponsorship. As I described it in a recent article on increasing gender diversity…

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The Next Generation of Office Communication Tech

HBR Staff/Yaroslav Danylchenko/Cactus Creative Studio/Stocksy Most knowledge workers in 2020 are familiar with mixed reality tools like Zoom, Teams, and Slack that enable them to meet in virtual locations. By merging real and virtual worlds to produce new environments, employees who relied on in-person office interactions as recently as nine months ago now meet on…

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How Nvidia’s purchase of Arm could open new markets

It could also be blocked by ChinaWHEN SOFTBANK, a Japanese technology group, paid $32bn for Arm in 2016, it was the biggest deal in chipmaking history. That record held until September 13th, when Nvidia, a big American chipmaker, announced its intention to buy the Britain-based chip-designer for $40bn.Although they share an industry, Arm and its…

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How do you stop corporate fraud?

CORPORATE SCANDALS occur with depressing regularity, from the accounting misstatements at Enron in 2001 to fake bank accounts at Wells Fargo, uncovered in 2016. In June Wirecard, a German payments processor, revealed that €1.9bn ($2.3bn) was missing from its accounts. What was remarkable about the affair was that the company’s book-keeping had been the subject…

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Who are the TikTok saga’s biggest winners?

As the race to control TikTok enters the final stretch, a White House-friendly tech giant seems to have carried the dayPRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S demand in August that ByteDance sell TikTok to an American firm set off a race for the Chinese firm’s trophy asset. Jockeying for the popular short-video app’s American business, with 100m users,…

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How Snowflake raised $3bn in a record software IPO

But competition in the database business is heating upCATCHING SNOWFLAKES is fun. It has become lucrative, too. Investors scrambled for shares in Snowflake, a maker of database programs, as it went public on the New York Stock Exchange on September 16th. The eight-year-old firm more than doubled its valuation the first day of trading, from…

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An Innovative Way to Prevent Adversarial Supplier Relationships

Nick Dolding/Getty Images The economic impact of the pandemic and the uncertainty about what lies ahead are having a major impact on relations between companies and their suppliers. For procurement professionals at large multinational companies, the temptation is to use their company’s clout to pressure suppliers to reduce prices. And when the supplier has the…

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Is Your Executive Compensation Plan Undermining Your Mission?

Cactus Creative Studio/Stocksy New technologies have been disrupting business for decades, especially since the internet became widespread in the late 1990s. But a new wave of innovation, centered on artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and the internet of things, is now intensifying the pace and magnitude of disruption. AI-powered advances by themselves, according to a…

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What B2B Companies Get Wrong About Volume Discounts

Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images I have a favorite client who always eggs me on to tell the “7-Eleven Big Gulp story” in meetings. “C’mon, tell it,” he nudges. Often, I do. My friend’s fascination with the story is well-founded. 7-Eleven does a fantastic job of employing volume discounts. Fountain drink sizes at the convenience store’s Cambridge,…

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