Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author, discusses his new book and explains why it's essential to follow your commitments 100% of the time. For more, read his article, How Will You Measure Your Life? Posting Guidelines We hope the conversations that take place on HBR.org will be energetic, constructive, and thought-provoking. To ensure the quality of the discussion, our moderating team will review all comments and may edit them for clarity, length, and relevance. Comments that are overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic may be deleted per the moderators' judgment. All postings become the property of Harvard Business School Publishing Continue reading →
The fun of the Russian steam bath, or ‘banya’, supposedly comes from the invigorating contrast between the heat of the sauna followed by a bracing roll in the snow. There was an echo of such dubious pleasure at this year’s Skoll World Forum held in Oxford last week, as the mood swung between optimism and pessimism. Contrast, for example, the brilliant Hans Rosling’s opening plenary presentation, which showed that the world has already solved what many think is an ongoing population crisis, and Friday’s panel on global threats where Ian Goldin, the man who heads a crystal-ball gazing institute in Oxford frankly scared the pants off everyone with his warning that “countries have never been more divided and more unable to solve global problems”. Invigorating, ... Continue reading →
The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years. Why? because CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore. The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile. “As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organizations, they ... Continue reading →
Want to see how severely we humans are scouring the oceans for fish? Check out this striking map from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2012 “Living Planet Report.” The red areas are the most intensively fished (and, in many cases, overfished) parts of the ocean — and they’ve expanded dramatically since 1950: To measure how intensively these areas are fished, Swartz et al., (2010) used the fish landed in each country to calculate the primary production rate (PPR) of each region of the ocean. PPR is a value that describes the total amount of food a fish needs to grow within a certain region. (WWF) Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to ... Continue reading →
EVEN more private jets than usual landed at Santa Barbara airport on May 9th, as some 35 billionaires and a score or so of spouses flew in for a behind-closed-doors meeting in the luxurious Bacara resort. They included Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, America’s two richest men; Melinda Gates, Ted Turner and Steve and Jean Case, as well as youngsters such as Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay both in their 40s. Their mission: to help each other become better philanthropists. This was the second meeting, after last year’s in Tucson, Arizona, to be held under the auspices of the Giving Pledge, launched by Mr Buffett and the Gateses in June 2010 to encourage America’s billionaires to make a ... Continue reading →
EVEN more private jets than usual landed at Santa Barbara airport on May 9th, as some 35 billionaires and a score or so of spouses flew in for a behind-closed-doors meeting in the luxurious Bacara resort. They included Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, America’s two richest men; Melinda Gates, Ted Turner and Steve and Jean Case, as well as youngsters such as Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay both in their 40s. Their mission: to help each other become better philanthropists. This was the second meeting, after last year’s in Tucson, Arizona, to be held under the auspices of the Giving Pledge, launched by Mr Buffett and the Gateses in June 2010 to encourage America’s billionaires to make a ... Continue reading →
