The Best of This Week
The week’s must-reads for managing in the digital age, curated by the MIT SMR editors.
Topics
Weekly Recap
Data Liquidity Enables New Value Creation
Unlike traditional company assets that will deteriorate or be depleted over time, data can be reused and recombined freely without degradation. Increasing the liquidity of strategic data — the ease of data asset reuse and recombination — is the first step to data monetization.
Building Brand Loyalty in Brick-and-Mortar Stores
E-commerce and the pandemic have disrupted brick-and-mortar retail, but new research shows an opportunity for culturally rich brands to leverage in-person shopping to build loyalty. How might stores transform to meet customer needs?
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How Tech Won the Pandemic — and May Never Lose
As the pandemic set the world reeling, Silicon Valley supplied the tools that made life and work possible. No single industry has ever had such power over daily life, dominating how we communicate, shop, learn, and seek distraction and joy. But it’s uncertain how aware the tech industry is of the potential for abuse, especially when it generates profits.
Enduring Culture Change Is Rooted in Actions and Habits
Typical approaches to culture change — relying on leaders to define the culture and cascade it throughout the organization, or outsourcing the responsibility to an HR group — rarely produce real results. Instead, when individuals’ behaviors and actions become habits, it can truly change a culture. Three proven strategies can address the most widespread dangers to culture change.
What Else We’re Reading This Week
- The 10 most popular MIT SMR articles of 2021 (so far) explore strategy redesign and leadership skills for the hybrid future (Source: MIT SMR)
- This pandemic moment offers a rare opportunity to address burnout on a systemic level (Source: Wired)
- A new report from the Social Media Summit @ MIT examines the range of problems posed by existing social media models and offers 25 potential solutions to address them (Source: Ideas Made to Matter)
Quote of the Week:
“The single biggest thing you can do is make the work feel meaningful. … People forget that the thing that would help their teams the most is to give them what they themselves want.”
— Laszlo Bock, chief executive of Humu, in “The Pandemic Reset the Balance Between Workers and Employers. How Bosses Respond Will Shape the Future of Work”