GM is working on two daunting goals: an all-electric vehicle future, and building its rep as the world’s most inclusive company. Gerald Johnson, EVP of manufacturing and sustainability at General Motors, helped lead GM’s COVID-19 response; he’s now tackling these next, twin challenges.
Ken Frazier, the longtime CEO of Merck, was one of the few Black CEOs at the top of corporate America. Now as an adviser at General Catalyst and co-founder of the social impact organization OneTen, he’s re-shaping how business addresses racial and health equity. There’s an important role business can play, he says, by stressing our commonality.
Faced with long odds, how do you keep your team motivated and moving forward? Alexis McGill Johnson is focused on building hope. As president of Planned Parenthood, Johnson is preparing for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade — and modeling a sense of relentlessness for her team, so they too can be fearless.
Crate & Barrel CEO Janet Hayes started her role in August 2020, when stores were closed and the future of retail was uncertain. Her move? Lean into digital and sustainability for her brands, and flexibility and trust for her employees.
Collaboration drives performance in the modern economy. Yet the uncertainty and dislocation of our pandemic experience has unsettled workplace expectations and cultures. Managing a team today requires a new mindfulness about physical and mental health, what motivates performance, and how to build creativity in remote, hybrid, and fluid conditions. In this special episode, we share five moves that are essential to building a successful team spirit right now.
As dangerous as obstacles and setbacks may appear, they can also present opportunities. Robert Reffkin, founder and CEO of the real estate platform, Compass, knows this well. The trick, he says, isn’t to avoid obstacles at all cost, but rather, to identify them quickly as resources you can harness. “You can’t do great things in the world if you don’t have that entrepreneurial, ‘I can do it’ energy,” Reffkin says. “And how do you get that energy? You dream a big dream.”
The ability to ask the right questions at the right times of the right people is an essential skill for every entrepreneur. For Michael Seibel, managing director at Y Combinator, action sometimes needs to take a back seat to asking: “Is this working?” Michael learned early on that by stopping to ask the counterintuitive question, he gained the wisdom – and avoided time lost to big mistakes – that ultimately propelled him forward.
How do you win the war for talent? Send your frontline workers to online school. That’s the pitch Rachel Carlson has made to businesses from Chipotle to Disney, Walmart to Waste Management. As co-founder and CEO of Guild Education, Carlson helps workers get online degrees and certifications as a free employee benefit. To meet the ongoing need for upskilling, Carlson says, company-sponsored classes should be as ubiquitous as company-sponsored health plans — because the ROI is astonishingly high.
“We may not be able to survive this,” thought Robert Reffkin, founder and CEO of real estate platform Compass, in early 2020 when pandemic lockdown rules essentially outlawed U.S. home selling. Yet now, the housing market is booming, and Compass has successfully IPO’ed. Reffkin shares how he kept his team together, why he stayed optimistic, and what businesses lucky enough to have benefited from Covid times owe their communities.
Frustration is an important signal: it indicates an opportunity, a problem to be solved, a path to scale. Adi Tatarko founded the online home-design site Houzz with her husband after their own home reno turned into a nightmare. By building a tool that flipped their frustration on its head, they’ve grown Houzz into a bustling platform and marketplace for homeowners, designers, architects, craftspeople. Learn how to identify frustration – and flip it.
Even before the pandemic forced us to stay home, loneliness was snaking its way through our lives, says economist Noreena Hertz, affecting everything from how we vote to how we work. The author of The Lonely Century, Noreena has advice for businesses about how loneliness impacts productivity, the bottom-line advantages of in-person connection — and why kindness is key to retaining talent.
Drew Houston knows if Dropbox is going to design for the future of work, then its own workforce needs to live in that future, right now. He discusses Dropbox’s move toward the virtual-first workplace — and how its benefits extend far beyond pandemic times.