If you want to be a successful company, you have to sell a great product or service. That’s business 101.
But there’s a growing piece of the business equation that not enough companies are talking about: how you give back to the world around you.
It doesn’t matter if you call it “social good” or “corporate social responsibility.” What does matter to a growing section of your customers? Knowing what you and your company stand for and how you are helping the larger world.
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The actuarial career is consistently rated among the top jobs in America, according to surveys and rankings such as one recently reported by CareerCast. Good pay, low stress and interesting work equal high job satisfaction. It’s not surprising, then, that actuarial science is gaining a lot of attention from prospective students. But what does it take to educate a successful actuary?
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One evening this spring, like so many other working parents, I was working late. As I graded papers and wrote emails — after finishing dinner, dishes, and kids’ homework — I turned on the TV show Revolution. Watching main character Rachel Matheson dodge bullets while running through the underbrush, I thought, “Now, wouldn’t that be nice?”
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During my time at Bentley, I took a variety of business courses. We all know that to be a successful business person in today’s world, you need a variety of skills and exposure to many different ways of thinking.
In one class, Professor Tim Anderson introduced the talking stick.
He explained to us that it was an ancient tradition. Whoever held the talking stick was the person talking. They could hold on to it as long as they wanted, say whatever they wanted and everyone else had to allow them to speak and not interrupt.
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In the past decade, the presence of women on the boards of public companies has been increasing virtually everywhere in the world — except in the United States.
Internationally, the 16.6 percent of female directors serving on U.S. Fortune 500 boards falls somewhere in the middle; Japan sits at slightly over 1 percent and Norway at 40 percent. But that U.S. number is only 3 percent higher than it was 10 years ago.
The numbers are surprising, considering:
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The MBA is in trouble. Organized and taught in the same way for generations, the traditional MBA program is increasingly anachronistic.
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It’s often said that students attend business school because they want good jobs when they graduate. Naturally enough, they tend to focus on class work that will help them reach that goal. However, classroom learning can take them only so far. As business school faculty, it’s up to us to make the necessary link between classroom theory and how it is applied in the workplace. When this link is made, students learn more and retain better. Seeing their studies “in action” makes it stick.
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“Marissa Mayer Is Wrong.” “Horrible Bosses: Marissa Mayer’s Ban on Telecommuting at Yahoo Won’t Work.” “Marissa Mayer’s Work-From-Home Ban Is the Exact Opposite of What CEOs Should Be Doing.” These headlines reflect popular responses in the blogosphere to the Yahoo CEO’s decision to end work-from-home arrangements companywide.
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There is an adage in the organizational behavior world that posits that employees don’t leave organizations; rather, they leave bad managers who create and perpetuate toxic work environments. Instead of “sick” buildings, where workers develop physical maladies because of emanations from poorly ventilated insulation or carpeting, these are emotionally toxic environments that at times can border on abusive.
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