trust

29 March: People count on businesses to act. So what should they do?

Posted on March 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

The 2020 Edelman trust barometer – surveying 34,000 people in 28 countries – showed that 74% of people expect their CEOs to take the lead on change to address global issues. In the context of COVID-19, a follow up survey with 10,000 people in 10 countries re-affirms that people trust their employers to respond effectively and responsibly to the pandemic, and 78% want businesses to act to protect employees and local communities.

So what should businesses do? I asked 4 experts working closely with businesses in the context of the crisis: Peter Bakker, Lise Kingo, David Nabarro, and Anthony Renshaw. First, they pointed to businesses’ duty of care going beyond the health and safety of employees, to also secure employment continuity. Second, they highlighted the key role of businesses in providing medically-verified information to employees – important as employer communications is the most credible source of information about COVID-19. Third, they suggested that businesses find ways to support health systems. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) lists such actions on its website, and the UN Global Compact calls on business leaders to support workers and communities.
Smaller local companies, providing employment to the majority of people around the globe, are the hardest impacted by the crisis. For WHO COVID-19 Special Envoy David Nabarro, all should support SMEs where governments might not provide direct stimulus package. UN Global Compact CEO Lise Kingo is working with global companies to keep the SMEs of their supply chains in business. For SOS International Medical Director Anthony Renshaw, local SMEs which are still open can contribute to the response by adjusting their practices such as defining specific shopping hours for the elderly, or their processes to manufacture supplies required by the health system. Looking forward, all interviewees noted the opportunity to rethink business models; reimagine the social contract of business with society; and move towards a model of integrated capitalism. And putting things further in perspective, WBCSD CEO Peter Bakker argued that this crisis was “a warning that the power of nature is stronger than any human constructs”.

For The Verge’s Casey Newton, who is usually quite critical, big techs’ response to COVID-19 has so far earned them brownie points. They have promoted high-quality information. They have offered money, supplies, and jobs. And this has put the big tech backlash on pause.

My quote this week is from NY Governor Cuomo’s 24 March briefing [35’26’’]: “And at the end of the day my friends, even if it is a long day, and this is a long day, love wins. Always. And it will win again through this virus.”

26 May 2017

Posted on May 26, 2017 Leave a Comment

Megan Roberts’ “The state of the world: report card on international cooperation” summarizes the main findings of the Council of Councils’ 2017 Report Card. It is depressing. The data come from asking the heads of 25 think tanks across the world to grade international cooperation efforts on global challenges. The 2016 overall grade is C minus, down from previous years in the aggregate as well as throughout specific issues from climate change to global health to global trade and conflict. The main driver behind this poor score is the global wave of nationalism coupled with the declining trust in institutions. The report card also ranks global risks and opportunities. Top 3 risks: conflict between states, transnational terrorism, and internal conflicts. Interestingly they are all security-related while the WEF Global Risks Report 2017 had three environmental risks topping its list this year. Top 3 opportunities: combating international terrorism, promoting global health, and advancing development. I cannot draw any comparison with the WEF report as it only looks at risks, contributing to the overall depressing feeling.

Andrew Mayeda’s “World Bank’s star economist is sidelined over war on words” recounts how the World Bank’s Development Economics Group staff mutinied against chief economist Romer and his rough demands to make research more straightforward. Romer requested that researchers connect their work to public debates, define clear purpose for each publication, and make emails shorter. He also had strong views on style, asking for less convoluted wording and more use of active voice while tracking frequency of “and” in reports (which he would not clear if above 2.6%). From this story it seems that requests were conveyed in a painful way. This aside, the rules seem pretty good to me. Especially as I recalled this World Bank research showing that while the Bank spent one quarter of its country service budget on reports, one third were never downloaded and only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times in their shelf-times.

A little extra this week as it is a long week-end for some of us and Bill Gates just shared his summer reading picks. I read two. Homo Deus which I recommended here as a good cerebral trip. It was no surprise to see it in the list as Gates had loved the prequel. What was surprising to me was to see Maylis de Kerangal’s The heart which is more of an emotional trip. de Kerangal is a great writer who can make a page turner out of the science of building a bridge. In The heart, which was entitled “mending the living” in French, you follow a heart being extracted from the body of a young man killed in a car accident to its transplantation in the body of a middle age woman dying of a heart malfunction. It is about grief and how every person around these two protagonists deal with it. It is powerful. I enjoyed it.

My map this week is from Fred Stolle’s “We discovered 1.8 million square miles of forest in the desert”. Stolle and colleagues counted trees on satellite images and found the equivalent of a whole Amazon worth of trees hiding in drylands and deserts. This is good news for the planet. But it also good news for the 2 billion people, most of whom very poor, who live in drylands and depend on these trees for their livelihoods.

My quote this week is from Dame Helen Mirren’s “Tulane commencement speech“: “We do need you to fix things, to make things right, to answer the big and troubling questions of this extraordinary modern world. How is it that we have figured out how to put everything from our resting pulse rate to every book or song we’d ever want to read or listen to on our iPhones – and yet for six years we haven’t found a way to stop little children in Syria from being murdered by poisonous gas?”

20 January 2017

Posted on January 20, 2017 Leave a Comment

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report comes out every four years. This year’s “Paradox of Progress” does not bring much novelty when it comes to the list of global trends considered [summary p. 6]. The three scenarii (islands, orbits, communities) piqued my curiosity a little more, in particular the third one discussing the future of governing. In this scenario, successful countries are those who manage to share governing power with local authorities and non-state actors when responding to citizens’ needs. The idea is that national governments retain “hard power” (eg security) while “soft power” is decentralized both geographically and to other actors with technology providing some kind of partnership gel. And there is an emphasis on the growing power of human agency. International organizations get revived because they know how to bring multi-stakeholder partnerships [yes, this non-UN document uses such term] to life. I’d also recommend the first annex [p.85] offering a 3-page five-year outlooks for each region. The Artic/Antarctica and space sections are exciting, not least because they are presented as regions where international cooperation may have the brightest near future. They also got me thinking that most UN agencies do not have a regional office for these parts of the world (nor for the deep and high seas for that matter). And yet, they will increasingly matter for next generations and the natural resources, food, and habitat they will need. Should we consider piloting a desk for polar, space and sea?

It was Davos week. Global reports flooded the Swiss resort. Oxfam did it again: for the fourth year in a row they grabbed headline news with their inequality report showing that the 8 richest men have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world population. The Commission on Business and Sustainable Development report argued that $12 trillion of market opportunities could be unlocked by 2030 if companies embraced a sustainable growth model. And the Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer, surveying 30,000 people in 28 countries, unpacked the global trust crisis. Trust in institutions is declining across the board from governments and businesses to NGOs and the media. More than half of interviewees, including those with high-income and college degree, believe that the system is failing them. The credibility of government leaders and CEOs is at all-time low. The most credible person today is a peer (“person like yourself”). Information coming from a spontaneous speaker, relating to personal experience, and communicated via a company’s social media is more likely to be perceived as true than information with a more traditional format, style and channel. The report thus calls for a communication model that work “with the people” rather than “for the people”.

Two weeks ago, I flagged exciting trends for renewable energy generation. But green power can only boom with matching prospects on the storage and distribution fronts. This graph from the International Finance Corporation’s “Energy storage trends and opportunities in Emerging markets” offers just that. It forecasts that “energy storage deployments in emerging markets worldwide are expected to grow by over 40 percent annually in the coming decade”.

My quote this week is from Andrew Sullivan’s “I used to be a human being”: “If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.”

13 January 2017

Posted on January 13, 2017 Leave a Comment

Iris Bohnet’s What works: Gender equality by design is the book I was waiting for on the topic. Using a behavioral economics lens, Bohnet systematically compiles evidence from businesses, universities, and governments about what works and does not, and offers super practical steps to boost gender equality. The book first unpacks the unconscious biases we all suffer from. It then shows that changing mindsets is not the solution. $8 billion are spent yearly in diversity training in the US alone with no evidence of success. It also argues that going it alone is hard and risky. Bohnet’s central thesis is that de-biasing our environments by design is what yields the most impact. And she offers 36 research-grounded design suggestions to increase inclusivity in the workplace. They include: adopting a Gawande-inspired interview checklist, getting rid of self-evaluation in performance assessment, using people analytics to screen job applicants, having quota to appoint counter-typical leaders, using a point system to measure workload, using public rankings to motivate and compete on gender equality. A fundamental pre-requisite to these recommendations is the collection of staff data to understand where inequalities are and how they evolve. Despite its title, the book’s thesis and solutions apply to inequalities beyond gender. If you are committed to increasing diversity in the workplace, read this book and experiment with some proposals, or pass it on to someone in your office who is in a position to move the needle. I am doing just that.

Peter Fabricius’ “Peering into a murky crystal ball; where will Africa be in 2030?” shares the main findings of a recent Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar on Africa’s future. Under each of the three ISS-designed scenario (baseline, optimistic, pessimistic) Africa misses most SDGs by 2030. The main factors responsible for this outcome are poor governance and service delivery. Prospects drawn from the UK Ministry of Defense’s analysis of regional strategic trends to 2045 for Africa are more upbeat. Here extreme poverty is defeated by 2045 when Africa’s numbers catch up with the rest of the world. In this scenario, positive drivers of change are external to the region with a global economy increasingly reliant on African youth’s cheap labor. This illustrates how a foresight exercise can bring different perspectives. What matters is not to get it right but to unearth different possible futures so as to be ready no matter what.

Uber’s Movement is on my list of visual tool this week. It is new and shiny. It is launched in the midst of long-lasting (data sharing) disputes between Uber and regulators. And it could transform urban planning. But I also need to flag this graph from the WEF Global Risk Report plotting the 2017 global risk landscape because the top risks, once impact and likelihood are aggregated, are environmental. This report has been published for 12 years and this is a first.

My quote this week is from Facebook’s Fidji Simo in her “Introducing: the Facebook Journalism Project”: “We will work with third-party organizations on how to better understand and to promote news literacy both on and off our platform to help people in our community have the information they need to make decisions about which sources to trust.”