Eric Friedrichsen, the CEO of Emburse, a B2B software provider, has navigated risks and costs to meet the needs of their tech contractors based in Ukraine — like offering to relocate families, and funding housing costs for colleagues taking refuge in Poland. These choices haven’t come without obstacles. But the benefits are moral, communal, and quantifiable.
Your local community can be the power behind an epic scale story — because smart community investment always maximizes returns. In creating opportunities for new jobs, Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya created opportunities for massive scale.
“It’s not about fixing women. It’s about fixing the system,” says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms. As the author of Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work, Reshma pushes the discourse around the “future of work” to include flexibility, childcare, and an end to the hustle culture — for all of us.
No matter what phase of growth you’re in, you need useful, cost-effective data. Data is essential to scale. Take it from Sheila Lirio Marcelo, the founder and former CEO of Care.com, the two-sided marketplace connecting working families with care providers. Marcelo scaled her business past the competition by getting the right data at the right time. As she says: “Something I coach a lot of entrepreneurs: You can have a great vision and idea, but start with a lot of data and testing.”
“You have to preserve your energy; this year has been about pace,” says restaurateur Danny Meyer, as he catches us up on the past seven-plus months of operating in the midst of pandemic. In the beginning of summer 2021, when Covid rates were plummeting in New York City, he was full of optimism: His restaurants were back to indoor dining, and despite a limited workforce, “progress is progress.” Then came the Delta variant.
As we grapple with change in business and as a society, we’ve become more fractured, more divisive, more vulnerable. Adam Grant, best-selling author and professor at Wharton, says that recognizing what we don’t know is the key step on the road to insight, competitive advantage, and community peace. In his book “Think Again,” Grant shares why taking a fresh look at our assumptions, about others and about ourselves, is such a powerful tool.
Onboarding isn’t just for employees. The step-by-step process to join a product or company lays the foundation for everything that follows. No one knows this better than Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva. From the moment she started the Australia-based graphic design platform, she knew she had to engage newcomers with simplicity and speed. First, onboard early users to her product; then, onboard investors and employees to help her build her values and her vision.
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.
Toward the end of 2020, some saw signs that the Covid pandemic was soon to be over. But as Dr. Bon Ku says in this prescient conversation, without significant change, we will just sleepwalk into another cycle of pandemic.
Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, walks us through the choices, costs, and protocols to keep an entrepreneurial team, and all of us, safe.
Dr. David Skorton, head of the Association of American Medical Colleges, shares what health institutions are grappling with as pandemic sets in —how they need to rethink how they operate, and what all of us can learn from this moment.
Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential crisis counseling via text, 24/7. To help counselors meet the moment, they anonymize and analyze real-time data on how their users are feeling – and that data is telling them the story of the onset of pandemic.