Happy International Women’s Day! Just a quick reminder: we’re not doing enough globally to close the gap between men and women.
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Last week I attended a one-day conference called “Leading For Good” at Loyola’s Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility, aimed at bringing together social and civic minded corporate executives from around the Chicago area. The connections and conversations were good, but in all honesty, I left frustrated that the conversation still mostly centered around whether or not a business should be doing good, rather than how it should go about doing it.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. We have no common definition of business “purpose”, and no shared ethical framework for how to evaluate whether or not the decisions made by a business can be considered “good.”
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If you haven’t yet read Derek Thompson’s excellent essay in The Atlantic about “The Religion of Workism,” I highly recommend it. Thompson’s thesis—that in American society we’ve replaced religion with “workism” as a way to find meaning—strikes at the very heart of many occupational ambitions. (Including, if I’m honest, my own.)
“For today’s workists,” Thompson says, “anything short of finding one’s vocational soul mate means a wasted life.”
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Earlier this week I spoke at a class at Loyola University on Ethics & Communication—a topic highly relevant to our time. I was specifically asked to give my opinion on “Ethics in a Digital World.”
Here’s what I listed as the five biggest issues that concern me right now.
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In case you haven’t heard, Amazon is canceling its much-aligned plans to build a second headquarters in Queens, New York.
Would having a large Amazon footprint in NYC have created jobs? Probably. Would it have helped the local tech economy over subsequent years? Maybe. Would it have exacerbated the already bad affordable housing market? Almost certainly.
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Not enough people invest in strategy—not just planning, not just ideation, but actual strategy. Because developing a strategy is hard, self-reflective work.
It’s the craft of finding out what doesn’t matter, and the art of saying “no.”
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There’s a mythology that persists around data, and its ability to act as a salve to heal all organizational woes. “If only we could do more with our data!” “If only we could apply it to XYZ problem!” “If only, if only …” It’s a misguided treasure hunt, the real gold always just around the corner.
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