Strategy, Leadership & Analytics Briefs

This Q&A with Sharad Jain discusses the job of the corporate director from his perspective as a partner with PwC’s Governance Insights Center. He touches upon topics like the external auditor’s direct reporting line to the audit committee and the challenge of a board’s oversight of a company’s tone at the top.

The numbers are staggering: More than 65 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced. Only a small number of refugees—less than 1 percent of 17.5 million in 2016—will ever be resettled. In Syria alone, more than 5 million people have fled their war-torn country since 2011, 1 million of whom have settled in Lebanon. Nearly a quarter of those refugees are children not enrolled in school. Behind each of these numbers is a life that’s been put on pause.

In 2015, Pearson launched the “Every Child Learning” partnership with Save the Children to deliver high-quality education to Syrian refugees and vulnerable children in Jordan, and to innovate new solutions that improve the delivery of education in emergency and conflict-affected settings. We are doing this through a combination of program funding, collaborative R&D, and joint advocacy.

Coworking spaces are on the rise, from Google’s “Campus” in London to NextSpace in California. Much has been made of these shared workspaces as a brand-new idea, one that barely existed 10 years ago.

“Virtual work” is increasingly just “work” for most of us. But as Peter Hirst, director of the executive education program at the MIT Sloan School of management, told me, there’s still something special about face-to-face interaction.

The founder of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to providing free online education to students around the world, talks with HBR senior editor Alison Beard. For more, read the Life’s Work section in the January-February issue of HBR.