MIT Sloan Management Review Fall 2018

DURING THE THIRD SEASON of HBO’s brilliant series The Sopranos, Carmela Soprano, played by Edie Falco, visits a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist pushes Carmela to recognize her accountability as the wife of murderous mob boss Tony Soprano. Here is an edited version of the exchange: Dr. Krakower: You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself, you’ll never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame that you talk about as long as you’re his accomplice. Carmela: You’re wrong about the accomplice part, though. Krakower: Are you sure? Carmela: All I do is make sure he’s got clean clothes in his closet, and dinner on his table. Krakower: So, enabler would be a more accurate job description for you than accomplice. My apologies. Carmela: So, you think I need to define my boundaries more clearly, keep…

Uber Hits a Pothole When Uber, Lyft, and other ride-hail companies made their debut in U.S. cities, many of us marveled at the ease and speed with which you could order a car with a few taps on a mobile device. In short order, the companies had millions of regular users, many of whom turned away from traditional taxis and public transit. Recently, Uber, still a private company, had a market value of about $70 billion. But a New York City Council’s decision in August 2018 to put a yearlong freeze on the number of ride-hail vehicles (pending analysis of their overall impact) reflects a shift in sentiment. Although Uber and its competitors have promoted their services as a way to reduce the number of trips people take in private cars, some…

THIS YEAR’S AWARD goes to the spring 2017 MIT SMR article “The Corporate Implications of Longer Lives,” by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. This article explores the impact of longer life spans both on employees and on the policies and practices of organizations. The authors found that the traditional work-life stages, progressing from full-time education to full-time work to“hard stop”retirement, no longer apply to much of today’s workforce. With longer life expectancies, men and women may want or need to be productive for longer, which will necessitate more (and different) life stages and continuous learning. Yet, as the authors point out, most corporations are out of sync with those needs. Gratton, a professor of management at London Business School, and Scott, an LBS professor of economics, offer a framework and recommendations to…

One of the founders and architects of the field of organizational development, Professor Richard Beckhard was a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty for more than 20 years. A longtime friend of MIT Sloan Management Review, Beckhard was known for his efforts to help organizations function in a more humane and high-performing manner and to empower people to be agents of change. His books include Organizational Development: Strategies and Models; Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change; Changing the Essence: The Art of Creating and Leading Fundamental Change in Organizations; and his autobiography, Agent of Change: My Life, My Practice. The prize was established in 1984 by the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management upon Professor Beckhard’s retirement. It was renamed the Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize after his death…

When pundits talk about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on the labor market, the outlook is usually bleak, with the loss of many jobs to machines as the dominant theme. But that’s just part of the story — a probable outcome for companies that use AI only to increase efficiency. As it turns out, companies using AI to also drive innovation are more likely to increase head count than reduce it. That’s what my colleagues and I recently learned through the McKinsey Global Institute’s broad-based research initiative aimed at understanding the spread of AI in economies, sectors, and companies. We polled 20,000 AI-aware C-level executives in 10 countries to compile a sample of more than 3,000 companies (mostly large), identified distinct clusters within that pool, and ran a variety…

THEISPOT.COM There is no question that automation is changing the nature of work. But are the robots really coming for your job? One of the most popular narratives is that low-paying jobs are doomed, while college-educated professions will remain largely untouched. Analysts often focus on wages and education as the primary predictors of job evolution, along with organizations’ potential to increase efficiency and reduce costs by changing or cutting jobs. But our research points to a more nuanced explanation. A review of the academic literature and public discourse on automation revealed limited consideration of risks by profession. So we did our own comparison, coding 50 professions (including many from our literature survey) according to the type of value jobholders delivered and the skills they used to deliver it, to create a framework…