Articles

TASA ID: 22108

"Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech… the company has taken the decision to terminate the partnership with Ye immediately," according to its October 25 news release. That statement conveys a principled and admirable stance against the antisemitism shown by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West after his anti-Semitic tweet on October 10 that he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

Yet Adidas waited much, much longer than other companies that cut ties with Ye. Even Ye’s own talent agency dropped him before Adidas. In fact, Adidas delayed so long that Ye taunted them on his October 16 appearance on the Drink Champs podcast, saying, "I can say anti-Semitic things, and Adidas can't drop me. Now what? Now what?"

TASA ID: 22108

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.”

Fink did not provide any data in the form of statistics, surveys, or studies to support his claims. He simply insisted, without evidence, that in-office work would reduce inflation. So what does the data say?

TASA ID: 22108

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently claimed that returning to the office will help improve diversity. And if he’s right, that’s an important argument for office-centric work. After all, extensive research shows that improving diversity boosts both decision-making and financial performance.

Yet does office-centric work really improve diversity? Meta Platforms - the owner of Facebook and Instagram - decided to offer permanent fully-remote work options to its current employees and new job applicants as part of adapting to the post-pandemic environment. If Dimon is right, this shift should have undermined Meta’s diversity.

TASA ID: 22108

Organizations need to incorporate constructive feedback from stakeholders to survive pandemic-related disruptions amid today’s turbulent economy. To meet the expectations of their stakeholders, leaders must ensure that they obtain regular feedback from them, since these people make decisions that determine the success of the organization.

Securing constructive feedback is critical in helping you find out which decisions are working and which ones are not. Yet, many organizations fail in engaging effectively their stakeholders due to reluctance to incorporate and act on feedback. This results in communication gaps between executives and their stakeholders.

To address these problems, leaders need to adopt best practices of getting constructive feedback from stakeholders. These practices are a product of insight obtained from both external research, and my interactions with senior organizational leaders.

TASA ID: 22108

Elon Musk recently demanded that all Tesla staff return to the office full-time, according to an email sent to executive staff and leaked on social media. Musk said those who do not want to come to office should “pretend to work somewhere else.” This authoritarian, top-down approach rooted in mistrust and false assumptions goes against best practices. It speaks to an illusion of control that will undermine employee productivity, engagement, innovation, retention, and recruitment at Tesla.

One of Musk’s false assumptions involves the idea that employees “pretend” to work from home. In fact, research using both surveys and behavior tracking from the early days of the pandemic has shown that remote work resulted in higher productivity. More recently, academics demonstrated a further increase in productivity in remote work, from 5 percent in the summer of 2020 to 9 percent in May 2022. That is because companies and employees grew better at working from home.