Usted es me todos: Best of the Issue: What Your Company Can Learn from Your Email

December 17, 2019

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What Your Company Can Learn from Your Email

From Amy Bernstein
Editor, Harvard Business Review

Email and Slack are treasure troves of information — and not just about you personally. In “The New Analytics of Culture,” Matthew Corritore, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer Srivastava show how studying the language employees use in online communications reveals important insights about the workplace. It can surface the real value of “cultural fit” — turns out it matters less than someone’s ability to adapt to change — and offer insights into how cognitive diversity can help and hinder teams. It may not make you happy to know that your posts are being scrutinized. (I admit that I shuddered when I first heard about this story. Privacy!) But this approach does appear to surface useful insight about your company culture you can’t get from traditional surveys and questionnaires.

I love when an article helps me detect order amidst seeming chaos. That’s the case with “Choke Points,” by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. The duo demonstrate how geopolitics is now colliding with the financial and supply-chain connections that keep global business humming. The result is bad behavior: Powerful, wealthy states are increasingly turning economic networks and infrastructure into tools of domination. Japan, they note, recently restricted the export to South Korea of three chemicals crucial to the manufacture of semiconductors — all because of a political disagreement with Seoul. The risks this sort of behavior poses to business are incalculable. What to do about it? You have to start by understanding your organization’s vulnerabilities and devise strategies to sidestep possible trouble.

Good judgment is your ability to interpret ambiguous information to form a cogent perspective and make a smart decision. It’s essential to great leadership. So how do you improve it? Sir Andrew Likierman studied distinguished leaders across a range of fields; in “The Elements of Good Judgment,” he explains that knowing how to optimize six key elements — learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery — can make better leaders of us all.

Thanks for reading,
Amy Bernstein

In the Issue:

The New Analytics of Culture

by Matthew Corritore, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer Srivastava

Culture is easy to sense but hard to measure. The workhorses of culture research — employee surveys and questionnaires — are often unreliable. Studying the language that employees use in electronic communication has opened a new window into organizational culture. New research analyzing email, Slack messages, and Glassdoor postings are challenging prevailing wisdom about culture.

Choke Points

by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

To conduct international commerce, businesses have built an intricate system of networks that move money, information, and components around the world. These networks may look decentralized, but all too frequently, they have major choke points. Increasingly, these choke points are being turned into political weapons by governments — and companies are getting caught in the cross fire. The stakes are high: Firms can go out of business if they’re cut off from critical networks. They need to analyze their exposure and develop a strategy to protect themselves.

The Elements of Good Judgment

by Sir Andrew Likierman

Judgment — the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make choices — is key to good leadership. It enables good decision making in the absence of clear-cut data or an obvious path forward. A more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible for people to learn and improve on it. This article takes a close look at the judgment of CEOs and other professional leaders. Six key elements emerge: learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery.