Extreme cold still happens in a warming world - in fact climate instability may be disrupting the polar vortex

Over the past few days, extremely cold Arctic air and severe winter weather have swept southward into much of the U.S., breaking daily low temperature records from Montana to Texas. Tens of millions of people have been affected by dangerously cold temperatures, and heavy lake-effect snow and snow squalls have had severe effects across the Great Lakes and Northeast regions.These severe cold events occur when the polar jet stream – the familiar jet stream of winter that runs along the boundary between Arctic and more temperate air – dips deeply southward, bringing the cold Arctic air to regions that don’t often experience it.

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What Books Give Us: Hermann Hesse on Reading and the Heart of Wisdom

Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We rea…

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Marketing in the Age of Alexa

Over the next decade, as artificially intelligent assistants like Alexa and Siri become the main channel through which people get information, goods, and services, the way companies acquire, serve, and retain customers will radically change. Because the bots will have deep knowledge about individuals’ habits and preferences, they’ll be able to anticipate a consumer’s needs even better than the consumer herself can. They’ll ensure that routine purchases flow uninterrupted to homes and constantly scan and analyze complex offerings like insurance and data plans for the best deals. And the more AI assistants satisfy consumers, the more trust in them will replace trust in brands.

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Should You Share AI-Driven Customer Insights with Your Customers?

AI is already helping companies understand their customers better. And many theorize that AI will soon know us better than we know ourselves. In an age where data has become commoditized, but the insights and profits from data are the rather exclusive belonging of a few enormous tech players, what better way to harness consumer trust and loyalty than by giving people back valuable insights that can turn them not just into smarter and better customers, but also more self-aware humans? After all, if our choices as consumers are becoming more and more data-driven, but that data does not actually increase consumer sophistication or rationality, that’s a huge missed opportunity. We must democratize the knowledge that algorithms have on us, at least by making sure that companies have to share the personal insights they’ve gathered with us. Importantly, brands will enhance their ethical reputation and trustworthiness if they share their insights with consumers; persuading them that there is no conflict between knowing them well, and helping them know themselves well, when done in an ethical and transparent way.

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Why Everyone at Your Company Should Speak (a Little) English

Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School assistant professor, explains why every company needs a language strategy.

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Where There's No Margin for Toxic Leadership

Growing a midsized firm takes a top team with zero weak links. Even one ineffective executive weakens a firm’s ability to address big problems. But building a consistently strong top leadership team is difficult for at least three reasons: the tendency to be loyal to existing members, the lack of management depth to promote from, and many CEOs’ lack of experience in many functional areas.

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5 Pieces of Advice for First-Time Managers

Becoming the “boss” is a huge career transition and it comes with a lot of new responsibilities. You’re now a part of something bigger than yourself. Your success is no longer dependent on your work but on the work delivered by the people you coach. For first-time managers, making this shift and learning how to lead well takes time, patience, and practice.

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How Successful CEOs Manage the Middle of Their Tenure

Every leader knows the importance of the first hundred days or the first year in office—the period during which one must assess and diagnose, formulate a vision and a strategy, and achieve early wins. And guidance abounds for how CEOs in their final months on the job should approach their main responsibility: helping develop and select a successor and then smoothly handing over power. But little attention has been paid to the time between those stages. How can CEOs make the most of the middle years of their tenure?

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Reinventing the Leader Selection Process

The U.S. Army has long struggled with toxic and inept leaders, and no wonder: It has historically chosen battalion commanders, a linchpin position, on the basis of 90-second file reviews. Last year it undertook an ambitious revamping of that selection process, which now involves four full days of physical, cognitive, and psychological assessments and interviews. The author, a lieutenant colonel who served as an adviser to the task force that designed and implemented the new process, describes it in granular detail, including a variety of rigorous measures for reducing interviewer bias and ensuring diversity and inclusion. Although specifically aimed at improving the validity, reliability, and developmental impact of the army’s executive-leader selections, the redesigned process offers important lessons for any organization seeking to bolster its talent assessment and promotion practices.

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When We Learn From Failure (and When We Don't)

It mostly has to do with whether we can blame somebody else.

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5 Ways Leaders Accidentally Stress Out Their Employees

Decades of scientific research show that stress and anxiety are prevalent problems at work, contributing to deficits in employee morale, well-being, and productivity. While anxiety is caused by a range of factors, including issues unrelated to people’s jobs, one common and pervasive cause is something specific to the workplace: incompetent leadership.

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How to Develop Your Leadership Style

What they’re talking about is leadership style. In every interaction, we send signals to others that fall into two categories: power and attractiveness. Powerful markers are associated with confidence, competence, charisma, and influence but also arrogance, abrasiveness, and intimidation. Attractiveness markers are related to agreeableness, approachability, and likability but also diffidence, lack of confidence, and submissiveness. The more consistent our signals, the more distinctive our style.

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3 Priorities for Leaders Who Want to Go Beyond Command-and-Control

It’s cliché to say that “command and control” leadership is no longer relevant in most organizational contexts. But — especially in large, global, diverse organizations — what should it be replaced with? Leaders increasingly need to model traits that reflect the values and culture of the organization in which they operate. It’s nearly impossible to capture all those traits — every organization will have a different set of norms and customs. But there are at least a few essential leadership traits that we find common in many firms today.

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The Leaders Who Make M&A Work

Despite the popularity of growth strategies based on mergers and acquisitions, the challenges of execution are substantial—40% to 80% of mergers fail to meet objectives. To understand the high failure rate, prior researchers have examined financial characteristics, capability matches, and human factors such as culture. What was missing was substantive quantitative research on collective leadership […]

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What Shake Shack Knows About Growth that McDonald's Has Forgotten

As you scale, maintain a focused brand.

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The Industries Apple Could Disrupt Next

After an unprecedented decade of growth, analysts wrote off 2013 as a year to forget for Apple. Most pundits agreed on what was wrong — a lack of breakthrough innovation since the passing of founder Steve Jobs. But in our view, Apple faces a deeper problem: the industries most susceptible to its unique disruptive formula are just too small to meet its growth needs.

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How Machine Learning Can Improve the Customer Experience

Machine learning is a promising technology for improving the customer experience. Why? It’s simple: because it can predict customer behaviors. Prediction as a capability is the Holy Grail for foreseeing each customer need and personalizing products and services accordingly. From the consumer’s perspective, when ML’s ethical pitfalls are avoided, prediction can be the ultimate antidote to the information overload that we all face every day. By deploying ML to predict which content is most relevant for each individual, customers can receive better recommendations, less junk mail, very little inbox spam, and higher quality search results, among many other things. These improvements to customer experience aren’t only a nice-to-have, pleasant side-effect of profit-driven ML deployments. They pursue the raison d’etre of any company — to serve customers — and will ultimately translate into further benefits for the business. After all, a happier customer is a more loyal customer, and a higher customer retention rate means a higher customer growth rate.

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Using Fiction to Find Your Strategy

By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when strategizing. This is counterproductive, the authors argue. Instead, they offer an alternative: Design fiction. A design technique that immerses executives and employees deeply in various possible futures, it uses artifacts such as short movies, fictitious newspaper articles and imaginary commercials to generate transformation roadmaps. Rooted in the future but helping to act in the present, design fiction results in concrete actions taken to adjust companies’ visions, strategies, and activities to create a better future.

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In Uncertain Times, the Best Strategy Is Adaptability

Companies everywhere labor under the illusion that the key to a great strategy is a good handle on the future. But meteorologist Edward Lorenz demonstrated that small differences can have massive consequences or none at all, which means that unless you have a perfect, complete picture of existing conditions, forecasting the future with any precision is impossible. Instead, advises Bain’s Michael Mankins, companies should focus on making themselves better able to cope with unexpected changes. For strategy, that involves instilling an adaptive mindset among managers, building in flexibility into operations, creating dynamic plans.

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Want to Excel in ESG? Craft a "Green Ocean" Strategy.

For many managers ESG competition leaves them feeling overwhelmed and under-equipped. It’s not surprising. This is a new type of competition, one that often means competing across industries. This means that it requires a new strategy — one that the authors call Green Ocean Strategy. For those companies with stakeholders that care about ESG, Green Ocean strategy is the ideal way to compete in the new and increasingly important arena of ESG performance. The manager who can find an ESG space where their competitor is absent and yet they can excel, execute upon it, and then effectively communicate that performance to their stakeholders, will help ensure the ESG success of their company.

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What Makes an Idea Take Off?

The title of this blog series used to be “The Next Big Thing,” which meant that it addressed why some business and management ideas take off, and some don’t. The trouble is, I didn’t know the answer. Maybe that’s why the blog no longer has a name other than my own! But I’m still obsessed with the diffusion of managerial innovations.

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How P&G Presents Data to Decision-Makers

Those of us who believe that managers make better decisions when key data are presented visually tend to get very excited about all the innovation going on in the graphical display of information. (For a sampling of some new and cool tools, see the popular Hans Rosling TED talk.) However, if you work in a large organization and want it to make better use of data visualization, I’d argue that commonality is more important than creativity. If you can establish a common visual language for data, you can radically upgrade the use of the data to drive decision-making and action.

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How to Win with Automation (Hint: It's Not Chasing Efficiency)

In 1900, 30 million people in the United States were farmers. By 1990 that number had fallen to under 3 million even as the population more than tripled. So, in a matter of speaking, 90% of American agriculture workers lost their jobs, mostly due to automation. Yet somehow, the 20th century was still seen as an era of unprecedented prosperity.

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When You Have to Carry Out a Decision You Disagree With

If senior leaders in your organization have made a decision you disagree with, how can you carry it out? To start, resist the temptation to communicate to your peers and supervisees that you’re not convinced this is the right way to go. Your job is to help your organization succeed. You won’t be fulfilling that role if you — intentionally or unintentionally — undermine the decision. Then ask yourself whether you trust senior management. Assuming you do (and if you don’t, it might be time to look for another job), then put yourself in the shoes of someone who believes deeply in the decision that was made. Ask yourself why someone would make this choice. Look for factors you may not have considered before that would make this option a good one. While you’re at it, also be explicit about all of your objections – this will help you anticipate any obstacles you might face in carrying out the decision. Once you’ve wrapped your head around why this decision was reasonable, convey that belief to your team. After all, how much effort your team puts into making a plan succeed depends in large part on how much they believe in it.

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