Managing a Personal Crisis, and More – Boston News
What’s going on in Boston this week?
How to Manage an Employee Who’s Having a Personal Crisis – Harvard Business Review
The Harvard Business Review recently explored how managers can best support employees to “take care of themselves emotionally while also making sure they are doing their work.”
Annie McKee, author of How to Be Happy at Work and a senior fellow at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, offers three helpful suggestions:
- Set a tone of compassion in the office. It will not only give your employees confidence to approach you with struggles, but also give you the ability to spot warnings signs.
- Be creative with solutions. A flexible schedule may allow a person to maintain their output without much disruption.
- Check in from time to time, both to reassure the employee and to make sure that further adjustments or accommodations aren’t needed.
You can read the full article over at HBR.
Agile at Scale, Explained – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Center for Information Systems Research’s Kristine Dery is currently studying how agile management—the increasingly popular management methodology adopted by the likes of Microsoft, Ericsson, and Spotify—relates to the employee experience.
MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer and industry liaison Carine Simon writes, “The traditional method of managing, the waterfall method, which is very inflexible, planned-in-advance, linear, and not iterative at all, wasn’t lending itself at all to the flexibility and the adjustments that were necessary to make great software.”
Simon adds, “[Agile is] iterating with customer feedback, prototypes, and tests, versus taking some requirements and issuing the product maybe a year later, when the customer’s requirements have changed or technology has evolved.”
Many companies have taken note of agile’s prevalence and begun to “ask whether the method’s practices and philosophies could be scaled up to apply with equal success to other projects or even entire business functions,” according to Simon and Dery.
Simon continues, “In customer-centric processes where customer input is key, and in that sense it’s quite uncertain or fast-changing, then those would be the types of areas in a firm that lend themselves to agile.”
Check out the full article here.
Questrom Professor Named 2018-19 Batten Fellow – Questrom Blog
BU Questrom School of Business‘ Siobhan O’Mahony was recently awarded a 2018-19 Batten Fellowship by the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at University of Virginia Darden School of Business.
The Batten Fellows program, according to Darden, “provides support for prominent thought leaders and high-potential scholars who seek to generate new knowledge about entrepreneurship and innovation.”
O’Mahony, an Associate Professor of Strategy & Innovation and Academic Director of Research and Curriculum for Innovate@BU, explores how “technical and creative projects organize for innovation.”
O’Mahony plans to use her fellowship to “research entrepreneurial ecosystems and how those systems influence entrepreneurs and their efforts around venture creation.”
Read all about O’Mahony’s fellowship as part of the full article here.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Arrives at MIT, and More – Boston News
What’s happening at the best Boston business schools this week?
Asia Is Ripe For Investments. Here’s How U.S. Companies Can Capitalize – D’Amore-McKim Blog
The Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business recently published an overview of the recent Emerging Markets’ Symposium, in which Ravi Ramamurti, University Distinguished Professor of international business and strategy brought together seven CEOs and corporate executives to unpack the discussion topic, “On the Rise of Asia: How Should U.S. Companies Respond.”
Jimmy Weng, DMSB’07, and Credit Suisse’s current head of offshore investment strategies, told the audience via conference call that he believed “Asia’s economy is entering a “supercycle” of market boom.”
Symposium organizer Ramamurti said, “China is leading the way to a new era in globalization. The headroom for growth in Asia is very significant.”
You can read more about the symposium here.
Sheryl Sandberg On Facebook’s Missteps and What Comes Next – MIT Sloan Newsroom
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg delivered MIT’s 2018 commencement address last week and used her speech as an opportunity to come clean and share the lessons learned from her company’s recent Cambridge Analytica data mining imbroglio.
She told the audience, “It’s painful when you miss something — when you make the mistake of believing so much in the good you are seeing that you don’t see the bad. It’s hard when you know that you let people down.”
Sandberg speaking at the 2018 MIT commencement / Photo via Dominick Reuter
“The larger challenge is one all of us here today must face. The role of technology in our lives is growing — and that means our relationship with technology is changing. We have to change, too. We have to recognize the full weight of our responsibilities.”
You can read more Sandberg’s commencement speech and check out footage of the event here.
A Big Problem with Big Problems – Questrom Blog
Boston University Questrom School of Business associate professors Stine Grodal and Siobhan O’Mahony recently published a new study that explores how “competing and misaligned goals—combined with a lack of oversight—can derail an ambitious vision.”
In their paper “How does a Grand Challenge Become Displaced? Explaining the Duality of Field Mobilization,” Grodal explains how common “interest misalignment” can be when it comes to tackling big problems.
“The academic community might agree to focus on a grand challenge, but [individual] professors are also interested in publishing in top journals and funding graduate students, which can create misalignment between a grand challenge and a community’s existing goals.”
It’s also much easier to “develop advances in existing areas” rather than explore uncharted terrain. “People graft on to the grand challenge but are rewarded by the status quo, and end up pursuing goals that are closer to their existing work.”
Oversight is key to keeping researchers on track. Grodal notes, “With little overarching supervision, it shouldn’t be a surprise that communities found plenty of reasons to support their own missions more robustly than the mission of the grand challenge.”
Read the complete article and study here.
