Table of contents for 10. June 2023 in I by IMD

Learning to be an inclusive leader is a lifelong project. Growing up in India - with degrees in engineering and management, much like the two Desi CEOs interviewed in this issue of I by IMD - I was aware of how inequity can be piled up as with the caste system and the imperative for diversity. I "woke up" to the limitations of my worldview with a failing grade in my first graduate essay at Vanderbilt. The professor excoriated me for the use of words such as "mankind". I was puzzled. My fellow student Mary Watson compassionately explained to me the biases that are embedded in language and took me along to a Gloria Steinem book signing. Fast forward a few decades, and I've been subject - in a very…

As language impacts our views, behaviors, a nd interactions, it is crucial that we take a critical view on the words we use and the words we don't. Typically, language in this context is focused on the right words to use so as not to alienate the rest of the workforce. For example, many a boardroom will have discussed what words they can use instead of "racism", "white supremacy" and even "Black people", because it causes others to feel nervous and others feel that to call racism what it is, is to stoke the fires of division. Power is wielded through the use of words to label people, to whitewash racism into phrases and sentences that are seen as more palatable, softer, more professional or objective. Therefore, the way we…

From prominent LGBTQ+ fashion designers to events and advertising campaigns that champion diversity and inclusion in beauty and cosmetics, the rich array of companies - such as LVMH - that make up the luxury sector are recognized for their positive portrayal of diversity. "We are diverse by essence with over 200,000 employees, representing 190 nationalities and four generations, working in over 80 countries and across a variety of sectors," said Vanessa Moungar, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at LVMH. "However, diversity alone is not enough to create an inclusive corporate culture. Inclusion is a choice we all make and that must be felt through our behaviors and actions every day. As a group, we are committed to providing an inclusive experience to all our stakeholders - our employees as well…

Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity. Life is not a monotone but a many-stringed harmony, and to this harmony is contributed a distinctive note by each individual. Annie Besant, British socialist and women's rights activist (The Birth of India: A Collection of Writings and Speeches on Indian Affairs, 1917) No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Nelson Mandela, first President of South Africa (A Long Walk to Freedom, 1994) From…

Global Gender Gap Index 2022 Global Top 10 Things are looking up for women in leadership in countries such as the UK. Statistics released by the British government in 2020 showed that just under 40% of board positions in FTSE 100 companies were held by women - an increase of almost 30% in just 10 years. And it's not just the UK. There are signs that women's global share of leadership is trending upwards, with the World Economic Forum reporting a three percent rise between 2020 and 2022. The share of women hired for senior jobs around the world last year came in at 36.9%, according to its findings. But while stats like these are cause for some cheer, the overall picture remains gloomy. Women continue to earn less than…

Theapproach by companies to diversity, equity, and inclusion has evolved. There is increasing awareness that simply trying to manage "the numbers" (the diversity of the workforce) and ensure equal employment opportunity (prevent biases in selection and promotion) is not sufficient to build a flourishing diverse workforce that adds value to the company and that makes the experience of work enjoyable. To do so effectively requires that employees, regardless of their background, experience a sense of inclusion - a sense that they can bring their whole self to work and belong. A focus on such psychological safety and belonging is important. But when this is the core focus, it risks leaving the value of diversity only partly realized if companies do not also approach inclusion and inclusive leadership from the perspective…

Earlier this year, a Belgian man committed suicide after chatting with an Al chatbot created by Chai Research. The man's widow says the chatbot - classified as low risk by the European Union's draft Al regulation - encouraged the user to end his life. The incident raises questions about whether our regulatory guardrails can keep pace with the rapid development and proliferation of new generative Al tools. Some research scientists have long been vocal about the ethical impact of Al on society. Meredith Whittaker was part of the movement that called for Google to rethink its Al ethics council. Timnit Gebru was famously fired by Google in 2020 after co-authoring a paper highlighting the risks of large language models. And Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, uncovered large…

In 2018, Rebecca Wardell, a heptathlete who competed in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, set herself the challenge of cycling from Lausanne to her home country of New Zealand. The epic journey - including elevations the equivalent of climbing Everest 11 times -took her through 19 countries in almost a year. She experienced countless highs and lows, both physically and mentally - battling severe headwinds, snow, ice, and torrential rain as well as suffering the discomfort of sleeping in highway drains and on restaurant floors. In Iran, she crashed and split open her knee. She also saw stunning natural beauty in remote parts of the world and was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. In this interview, Wardell explains why she decided to undertake the journey, what it taught her…

Many economists have at various points in Japan's downhill tumble over the last quarter century hollered a view on how to send the economy back to the summit. It was there, after all, in its glory days of rapid and sustained economic growth from 1945 to 1991 - the era of the famed Japanese economic miracle that followed the loss of its mainland conquests. Japan is in need of a similar miracle today, with Marcel Thieliant, senior Japan economist at Capital Economics, stating in December: "We think the Japanese economy will enter a recession sometime next year." It's holding off for now thanks to a post-COVID spurt in household spending and tourism. But Japanese exports dropped by four per cent in the first quarter of 2023, according to Refinitiv, marking…

It is hard to know where you are going if you don't have a decent map - either a physical map, or a mental map based on experience. First-time visitors to London can be forgiven for wondering why there are so many "High Streets" in the same city, or how they wound up in Westminster or St John's Wood when they thought they were in London. The London Tube map - stylized, simplified, and necessarily inaccurate - turns out to be an indispensable guide for getting around a charmingly idiosyncratic city. What happens when the tools and categories you use for your map no longer work? For much of the 20th century, you could reasonably describe the US economy using a simple set of nested categories; industries consisted of firms…

What were your first priorities as CDO at Philip Morris International (PMI)? When I became CDO (in 2020), it was clear to me that this would be my final career step-which meant that I was not going to do "tick the box" exercises. I wanted to focus on things that have an impact on the experience of our employees. We started analyzing the status quo based on existing data, but I soon realized that there could be much more. I looked around for ways to measure diversity and inclusion. The Bloomberg Gender Equality Index, for example. What do we need to be part of this? And then looking at the benchmarks in light of our biggest challenges. What were those challenges? We already had an aspirational target: 40% women at…

Inclusive leadership Heralded as a "feminist freedom-fighter" and "one of the most influential human rights leaders of our time", Ayo Tometi has helped to change the conversation about the fight for racial equality. But most organizations and business leaders have a long way to go to untangle the scourge of racism, she says. "Racism can't be fixed with a band-aid," she said on the sidelines of the 52nd St Gal len Symposium in Switzerland, a student-led initiative aimed at fostering cross-generational dialogue. "Racism is deep… it's ideology … it's enshrined into our society and the fabrics of our world. For us to undo that, we have to work diligently day in and day out to uproot it." Black Lives Matter, formed 10 years ago by Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse…

In 2023, inclusion shouldn't just be a buzzword or a fleeting trend. It must be a necessity. Here's the reality: the rules of the workplace were written by men, for men, over 100 years ago. Rather than continue to conform to an outdated status quo, we must urgently rewrite the rules. Companies need to evolve to make sure that we attract and retain our best talent. Consider these stats. When employees believe that inclusion is a priority, the number of all employees who are happy increases by 31% and the number of both women and men who feel motivated increases by nearly 25%. When we infuse inclusion into our workplaces, everyone wins. Employees don't just want to hear about inclusion. They want to experience it. Here are five steps that…

MYTH 1: WOMEN ARE BEING FAST-TRACKED FOR TOP JOBS, LEAVING MEN IN THE DUST WHY IT'S WRONG: The speeding up of women's advancement stops when there are enough women for the firm to look good - but nothing has changed structurally, so numbers will start slipping ratherthan growing. If you dig into the career progression of women in the highest executive roles of your average Fortune 100 company, you will indeed see that they have been catapulted into those roles earlier in their careers (relative to similarly qualified men). But, far from creating a pattern of reverse discrimination, the speeding up of women's promotion to senior roles stops once companies have more than one high-ranking female executive. This is what researchers from IE Business School (Madrid) and the Wharton School…

IBY IMD: The world's attention has been on Ukraine since President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian invasion over a year ago. But you and the CCL have been active in human rights work for much longer. OLEKSANDRA MATVIICHUK: Yes, we started in 2007. It was the period after the Orange Revolution [in 2004, when Ukrainians protested against a rigged election won by the pro-Moscow candidate Viktor Yanukovych], It was decided that it would be good to have an organization to promote human rights and dignity, not only on a national level butto be able to work on an international level as well. And Kyiv was seen as a good place for it. Yanukovych used power for his own benefit, and that's why he served Russian interests. It was then that…

Viewers who tuned in to Match of the Day, BBC Television's long-running Saturday night football show, on March 11 were in for a shock. Clips from that day's Premier League matches were broadcast without commentary and there were no pundits in the studio. Everyone usually involved in presenting the program had walked out. Behind the disruption was the BBC's decision to suspend the show's star presenter Gary Lineker, a former England and Barcelona footballer, over his Twitter criticism of the British government's refugee policy. Lineker compared the government's rhetoric about refugees to that used in 1930s Germany. BBC bosses regarded this as an infringement of the organization's impartiality and told Lineker he could not present that week's program. What they didn't count on was that all the other presenters and…

The business software group SAP launched its Future of Work strategy in 2021 based on a belief that there was not only a strategic imperative to ensure that the company remained an attractive employer, but a conviction that it would help to drive transformation and create business opportunities. "At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was suddenly a huge focus of attention on how we would like to work, not only during the pandemic but afterwards too," said the company's Chief Future of Work Officer Christian Schmeichel in a discussion with Anand Narasimhan. "And as part of that discussion, the executive board decided that there was not just a strategic imperative that SAP needed to get this right for business purposes, but also a strategic opportunity to take things…

We can't get through a day without feeling the impact of the latest innovation in Al coming to life in real time. But it's the tangible ramifications in the near future of this exponential impact that bewilder us all. ChatGPT is not the only thing. Copilot by Microsoft is another. Then the stock market saw Nvidia hit a trillion-dollar valuation, surpassing Tesla and Meta. Nvidia is a company that a year ago few outside of the tech sector would know or care about. It's a company quietly making chipsets for video gamers; and it just so happens that these same chipsets can be trained for Al. A trillion-dollar capitalization is a thousand billion: a thousand unicorns. The magnitude of change in our world, all of a sudden, becomes unfathomable. Should…

Systemic racism represents a distinct form of discrimination that goes beyond individual prejudices and isolated incidents of bias. It is deeply embedded in the structures, systems, and institutions that govern our society, leading to consistently favorable outcomes for some and consistently unfavorable outcomes for others. Most executive leaders recognize that their culture, the way they do things, seems to work for a particular ethnic group - and that ethnic group is very rarely Black employees. But, at the same time, it can feel like a personal attack to start from a place that assumes there is a problem - racism - and then to take the necessary steps to address it. This is not because leaders hire bad people or because they've deliberately set out to oppress certain groups, but…

What does diversity mean to you? You may think about gender, race, ethnicity, perhaps sexual orientation. Would you consider age? Most organizations don't - to their detriment. Only eight per cent of Fortune 1000 companies have added age as a metric to consider when thinking about whether they're a diverse workplace, according to Chip Conley, the American hospitality entrepreneur and author of Wisdom @ Work. Yet age diversity is just like any other type of diversi- ” ty - employees from different generations bring different skills, experiences, and viewpoints to the table, helping to increase innovation and creative problem-solving. Research from Germany on age-diverse workplaces has found that if you have only young people on a team, they make decisions quickly and make more mistakes, while older people take a…

Sp You Want to Talk About Race Ijeoma Oluo The book has a complete lack of jargon and is a refreshingly frank conversation. There is no walking around any taboos - it just dives right in to help you develop the kind of empathy that is essential in the business world and beyond. It is tempting to just see inclusion and diversity in a very structural way - with KPIs and governance - and while that is important, you also need to develop a deep human empathy: "I see your pain and i am willing to change." Howard Yu, LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation The Inclusive Language Handbook: A Guide to Better Communication and Transformational Leadership Jackie Ferguson and Roxanne Bellamy Word choice matters, particularly nowadays when language is…

An example of addressing design exclusion from industry is kitchen, houseware and office supplies manufacturer OXO; the first company to understand that most kitchen tools exacerbated aches and pains for arthritic users. Older adults with arthritis felt they were unable to cook without suffering the immediate consequences of pain. Consumers with arthritis aiso experienced the residual effects of non-incl usi ve design: the negative emotional consequences of using tools that impacted their ability to cook, such as not being able to prepare meals or provide for their families as they had done in past. In response, and inspired by founder Sam Farber's desire to help his wife handle ordinary kitchen tools, OXO used thermoplastic rubber, an innovative material at the time, to create products with better grip that were easierforarthriticconsumersto…

When former Mastercard chief executive Ajay Banga was selected as the next head of the World Bank in May, his appointment made news for more than one reason. For one thing, picking the 63-year-old Indian-born executive broke with a long-standing tradition that each World Bank chief comes from the US. Some doubted the suitability of someone who'd had a mostly corporate and Wall Street career for a job running the world's most powerful development finance institution. Banga launched fast-food franchises in India for Pizza Hut and KFC before going on to have a 13-year career at Citigroup. Yet Banga has long been clear that his Indian origins and the experience he has gained from his background influences make him uniquely qualified for his various leadership roles. In a 2020 interview…

Al offers numerous benefits to democracy including: enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of public services and policy-making through data analysis and machine learning; streamlining administrative tasks by automating processes to improve public service delivery; promoting transparency, accountability and engagement by, for example, sifting through online data to identify patterns, misinformation and public sentiment; strengthening electoral processes by ensuring the integrity of voting systems and reducing the risk of fraud or manipulation. Here are some examples of how Al Is being used by governments: • To improve knowledge management capacity: in Slovakia, Al helps users navigate through government websites more efficiently to find relevant data. • To map and predict risks: in Zurich, Switzerland, Al is used to try to predict burglaries from past data. • To automate data collection and…

When Mostafa Terrab became head of Morocco's OCR group in 2006, he had a frank discussion with a miner who told him the organization's biggest asset was not - as his management team was trying to tell him - its sole access to 70% of the world's phosphate reserves, but rather its people. "He said, Mr CEO, you have a choice here, a basic choice'," recalled Terrab. "Either you believe them and we're going to go to bankruptcy, or you understand that our real wealth is human capital." Formerly responsible for the reform of Morocco's telecoms industry, Terrab credits this conversation with guiding him over the past 17 years as he has transformed OCP from a loss-making governmental agency producing and selling phosphate rock into a leading producer of customized…

Workforce planning Sets the path for a future-ready workforce and translates SAP's business priorities into future workforce needs by providing insight on workforce composition, markettrends, and desired future state across dimensions such as skills, roles, career-level-mix, age-mix, location, and employment models. Pledge to flex Transforms SAP into a true hybrid company through flexible working. New work practices Guides and enables organizations, teams, and leadersto apply innovative work practices to thrive in the future of work. Health, safety, and well-being Fosters a caring culture, healthy habits, and resiliencethrough tailored physical health and mental well-being offerings, dedicated support for leaders, and crisis support. Strategy and innovation Scouting and infusing newtrends into the organization while showcasing SAP's Future of Work agenda. Digital lab Boosts digital experiences and productivity with new hybrid work technology,…