Tag Archives: leadership

Tips for female MBA graduates seeking mentors – Maura Herson

Maura Herson, Assistant Dean of the MBA Program at MIT Sloan

From Financial Times

The benefits of providing women with mentors are clear. A 2016 study by Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University found that when employers introduced such programmes, “managerial echelons [were] significantly more diverse”. And companies with diverse perspectives on their leadership teams have better results.

According to Iris Bohnet in her 2016 book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, mentorship for women leads to increases in salaries as well as promotions and higher career satisfaction. She also notes that such programmes are associated with an increase in diversity in management.

Through its clubs, its leadership centre and its alumni, MIT’s Sloan School of Management offers its female MBA students many opportunities to both have and be mentors. After graduation, they can use these relationships as models to seek out and structure additional mentor/mentee relationships.

What should women who are finishing MBAs and preparing to start work consider when seeking a mentor?

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What Great Leaders Can Learn from Great Photographers–Hal Gregersen

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, Hal Gregersen

From Harvard Business Review 

Almost everyone on this planet is a worker in some way, but only a minority deserve to be called craftspeople. This is especially true of leaders. We don’t often think of leaders as artisans, but like good craftspeople, good leaders go about their work thoughtfully and purposefully.

These good leaders want every piece they produce to be the best it can be, and to bear their stamp. Some even go a step further. They reflect on their craft and articulate what they do that is special or distinctive. Doing this delivers the great benefit of making it, to at least some extent, teachable. They like to develop the skill in others.

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Tesla needs to put a seat belt on Elon Musk – Chester Spatt

Golub Distinguished Visiting Professor of Finance, Chester Spatt

From MarketWatch

The past few months have been turbulent for Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

From publicly accusing a Thai rescue diver of being a pedophile (without evidence) and conducting a radio interview while smoking marijuana to insulting equity analysts on one earnings call and threatening to take Tesla private — then reversing those statements, triggering a SEC and a criminal investigation — Musk has engaged in some reckless behavior.

Then there are production problems with Tesla not being able to deliver cars on time. A big question is whether Musk should step down. While investor confidence in Musk has taken a big hit, he is a visionary leader and there would likely be great disappointment if he left the company.

What Musk does need is a lot more checks and balances by his management team. Investors would like Musk to have more self-control and act more like other legendary leaders, such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos.

For that to have a chance, Tesla’s management team must play a bigger role in guiding the company’s strategy both internally and externally. If Musk is required to step down as CEO for a period of time by the SEC, the management team must be ready to take the wheel.

Tesla also needs to step back and review the basics of corporate governance. U.S. securities laws and common business practices are meant to keep market participants honest, so that they effectively represent their own best interests and those of their shareholders.

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When was the last time you asked, “Why are we doing it this way?” — Hal Gregersen

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

From Harvard Business Review

During a time when many retailers are struggling, business is booming at Target. But it wasn’t too long ago that the discount retailer’s future didn’t glow so bright. When CEO Brian Cornell took the reins two years ago, he inherited a company that had been struggling for years, taking far too few risks, and sticking too close to the core.

Since then the world has fallen in love with a far edgier Target, which has expanded its offerings through collaborations with such power brands as Lilly Pulitzer, Toms, Neiman Marcus, and SoulCycle, and updated product lines that break the status quo, like its latest gender-neutral kids home brand Pillowfort. But Cornell didn’t start right out of the gate making any big changes like these. Instead, he took time to carefully contemplate his approach, listen to his team, and ask questions.

At the MIT Leadership Center, I recently spoke with another leader, Guy Wollaert, chief exploration officer at Loggia Strategy & Design, about similar experiences he encountered at another highly visible brand, Coca-Cola. During his 20-plus year tenure with the global beverage brand, most recently serving as its chief technical and innovation officer, Wollaert made it a point to seek — and surround himself with — new ideas and people who challenged him to reflect and question first, then act later.

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The Power of Leaders Who Focus on Solving Problems – Deborah Ancona and Hal Gregersen

From Harvard Business Review

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

MIT Sloan Prof. Deborah Ancona

In front of a packed room of MIT students and alumni, Vivienne Ming is holding forth in a style all her own. “Embrace cyborgs,” she calls out, as she clicks to a slide that raises eyebrows even in this tech-smitten crowd. “Really. Fifteen to 25 years from now, cognitive neuroprosthetics will fundamentally change the definition of what it means to be human.”

She’s referring to the work that interests her most these days, as cofounder of machine learning company Socos and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. (“So — can I literally jam things in your brain and make you smarter? If you’re curious, the answer is unambiguously yes.”) But the talk has covered a lot more than this, as Ming has touched on many initiatives and startups she’s been involved with, all solving problems at the intersection of advanced technology, learning, and labor economics.

She’s an entrepreneur, a CEO, and a teacher — all leadership roles — but when we ask her about her leadership style, she demurs. “What I’ve learned about myself as a leader, as an executive, is — I’ll be blunt — I’m a pretty mediocre manager. I try to do the right things, but I’m much more focused on problems than I am on people, and that’s not always that healthy.” While she’s utterly confident in herself, she just doesn’t identify as top management. She’s happier to think of herself as a data scientist, a computer geek. She loves talking about hacks she’s pulled off — like the alterations she made to her diabetic son’s medical devices, so she could merge all their data to produce a predictive model. Now, she gets an alert an hour in advance if a spike or drop is coming in his blood glucose level. This is an unprecedented, and highly valuable, thing. “Turns out, it broke several federal laws,” she laughs.

Ming is a tech optimist, believing that all kinds of previously intractable problems will be able to be solved as the tool kit for addressing them is developed. And she’s decided her best way of contributing to that progress is to keep honing her individual-contributor skills. “For a long time, I tried to be the whole package. I put a lot of energy into making certain that I was shepherding everyone along, doing all the right things for my teams. Then I realized: You know what? If I can get some people that are really good at the things that I’m not, then I can focus on my strengths. And my strengths are in creative problem solving — all the way down to writing the code myself.” Read More »