Future of Work Briefs

Let’s face facts: Most boards invest heavily in executive assessments, exposing chief-executive candidates to C-suite responsibilities and checking their P&L performance — while simultaneously scanning outside prospects.

Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis is that we have a flawed sense of what is an advantage or a disadvantage. However, when reading his book, I noticed that he primarily focused on this idea when, instead, he should have told us why some people can turn their disadvantage into an advantage.

The title Chief Executive Officer is something of a misnomer. The task of a CEO is not wholly or even primarily about execution. In fact, when the CEO starts to “do” things, and starts becoming more “active,” that is usually when a company gets into trouble.

The debate that has raged in Congress and elsewhere about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has focused almost entirely on its participation provisions. What is rarely discussed are other, perhaps more important features of the Act.

In 1981, Peter Drucker delivered a lecture at New York University. He offered provocative prescriptions for coping in a world in which “the real challenge is to decide what you are doing” in the face of tremendous “technological change or market change.”

After years of hearing that it was impossible to restructure jobs to make them more doable, guess what? When Goldman Sachs discovered it couldn’t attract and retain the most promising recruits with pay and perks alone, it woke up to the idea that you can actually restructure the way work is done.

Much has been written about boards and diversity, especially diversity that is readily perceptible: gender or race, for example. We ourselves have explored gender diversity, in our global surveys of corporate directors in scores of interviews with board members across the globe.