Let’s Get to Work

Our ambition at MIT Sloan Management Review is to arm business leaders with information to make a positive impact: on your organizations and careers, for sure, and also on your employees, customers, trading partners, and the broader world within which you operate. Right now we are exploring ways to increase our own impact.

Our exploration starts with better understanding you — our audience — and the challenges you face.

Business leaders and managers have always been our primary focus. However, based on recent reader research and other audience trends, we know that more than a third of our most engaged readers are people who educate or advise business leaders and managers. The rest are management practitioners in a wide variety of industries. What links our “superfans” is that as change makers, educators, and trusted advisers, you use the ideas we publish to advance practice in the management space.

In the months ahead, we will be reaching out to many of you to understand not only how useful our current content is but what more we can do to help you put our authors’ ideas into practice.

We can also increase our impact by concentrating on a smaller number of critical topics. We live in incredibly challenging times. We can’t help readers solve every problem, so we’re sharpening our focus in three key areas that we believe matter most right now.

It will come as no surprise that artificial intelligence tops the list. New information — much of it not very reliable — about where AI is headed and the opportunities and risks for businesses floods all of our feeds. At MIT SMR, we work hard to make sure the information we provide is not just novel but is (a) relevant to managers’ work, (b) based on solid evidence from credible experts, and (c) specific and narrow enough to lead to actionable recommendations.

Our second area of focus centers around culture and the workforce. Technology — AI and otherwise — has had a profound impact on workers of all kinds. Knowledge workers and those on the front lines of customer service, operations, and fulfillment face a continually morphing set of new expectations. Hybrid work, fueled by the pandemic in 2020, has made it more challenging to build and sustain a healthy organizational culture. In this dynamic, disrupted environment, we’ll bring you the best evidence-based advice to create a humane and high-performing workplace.

Third is sustainable business, encompassing some of the biggest challenges of our time. How can organizations thrive when faced with climate threats, social and political instability, supply chain disruptions, cyberattacks, and more? These challenges can seem overwhelming. We are committed to bringing you the best current research and advice for sustaining a healthy business in the face of great change.

In the coming months, look for us to provide new types of content to help you transform insights into action, especially around these three key topics. And please let us know what kinds of collections, extensions, media, tools, and aids would be most immediately useful for you. Send your ideas to smrfeedback@mit.edu.

In this issue, we’re introducing Radar, a new section intended to create an engaging entry point into the magazine. It features quick takes on new research findings, books we’re reading, insights from our conversations with business leaders, and more. Think of it as an intellectual appetizer before you get to the main course! We hope you enjoy reading Radar and find it both interesting and useful.