Donna Hicks— If there were ever a time when leaders needed to understand the role dignity plays in the workplace, that time is now. The pandemic forced us to work from home, disrupting our traditional notion of what work looks like: where to work, how to work, and when to work.
Christopher Marquis— In 2012, the late Lynn Stout, a renowned legal scholar at Cornell Law School, published The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public, a no-holds-barred exposé of the lies the corporate world tells itself about shareholder primacy and an explanation of why
Lee Drutman— Over the past four decades, large corporations have learned to play the Washington game. Companies now devote massive resources to politics, and their large-scale involvement increasingly redirects and constricts the capacities of the political system. The consequence is a democracy that is increasingly unable to tackle large-scale problems,
Carlo Ratti— One of the lesser-known casualties of COVID-19 has been a new, large-scale urban development in Toronto, led by Google sibling company Sidewalk Labs. Several years in the making, the “Google City”—as it was sometimes dubbed in the media—ultimately came to a halt because of the ongoing recession, but
Sudipta Sen— On March 20, 2017, the highest court in the state of Uttarakhanda, India declared the river Ganges (known as the Ganga in India) and its main tributary Yamuna as rights-bearing “living entities,” effectively granting them the legal status of personhood. Uttarakhanda is a northern Indian state that borders
Pascal Boyer— It is in the nature of human beings that they create societies. Philosophers have known and said that much for millennia. These days, scientists can paint a detailed picture of how evolution by natural selection made us social animals, providing us with those capacities and preferences that makes
Kathleen Day— No one can predict what or when the next financial crisis will be, but one can spot troubling trends. Policies and practices that contributed to the last crisis—dubbed the Great Recession it was so severe—have started to reappear. Too much debt fuels every financial crisis. So where can
Anne-Marie Slaughter— In 2004, the British think tank Demos published an edited volume on networks that opens: “Networks are the language of our times. Think about alQaeda. The Internet, eBay, Kazaa. The mobile phone, SMS. Think about iron triangles and old school ties, No Logo and DeanforAmerica. Think VISA and
Scott A. Shane— We Americans aren’t creating new businesses with employees at the rate we once did. The formation of new employers has fallen below its replacement rate and many policymakers and pundits have become worried. Lesser entrepreneurship would mean a more rigid economy, less able to respond to shocks.
Niall Kishtainy— If you study economics at university, you mainly learn about those basic economic principles. They’re powerful and useful but you should use them with care. Some people think they’re not really ‘science’ at all. They say that underneath economists’ equations is a conservative political ideal that says that