Human Capital Briefs

The 2015 new study “How Americans Manage Their Finances”1 provides insights into financial management and at all ages. The study provides insights into use of financial products, debt, financial stresses, and planning for the future by age group. This article offers a few highlights from the study and my views about the implications for employers and employee benefits.

The most recent Society of Actuaries’ post-retirement risk research, released in January 2016, offers insights into financial shocks experienced by older Americans and into how older Americans perceive and manage financial risks. The focus groups were designed to understand how retirees were doing and how much they had been affected by shocks.

Simply put, we should license leaders. Think about it. No other professional group impacts as many lives on a daily basis as those who call themselves leaders. They impact the lives of employees, clients, customers, constituents, and patients.

In the face of increasingly complex problems and progressively compelling opportunities, your Diversity and Inclusion goals and objectives are not going away. We have a responsibility to design innovative ways of working that can deliver better results.

I hope that the new rules on prosecuting individuals represent a step toward the recognition that corporate misdeeds are almost invariably the product of corporate culture, and corporate culture is a product of the aims and values of senior management.

The number of chief executive officers who were dismissed from their jobs at large global companies fell to a record low last year. At first glance that might suggest complacency on the part of boards of directors, but it’s actually good news about corporate governance in general and CEO succession planning in particular.

Human beings are experts at motivated reasoning. When Chase Utley of the Dodgers broke Mets player Ruben Tejada’s leg with a hard slide into second base, Dodgers fans saw a player who was aggressively helping his team to win a playoff game, while Mets fans saw a dirty play that deserved punishment. Fans of each team had access to the same data, but differed in their analysis.

I’m convinced that the ingredient for the effective use of data and analytics that is in shortest supply is managers’ understanding of what is possible. Data, hardware, and software are available in droves, but human comprehension of the possibilities they enable is much less common.

Since companies can’t seem to solve the divisive problem of exorbitant CEO pay on their own, legislation may well turn out to be the best fix. Here’s how it’s starting to help in various parts of the world, though there’s still a lot of work to do.

Whether you like attending them or not, conferences offer great opportunities for networking. At conferences, you can extend your network by meeting new people, including potential employers or employees, and you can catch up with and get updates from those you already know.