The best management ideas of the year … millennials and globalisation, platforms and good leadership

December 23, 2016

As director of Thinkers50, the global ranking of the world’s best management thinkers, I spend a lot of time scanning, curating and making sense of the best ideas in business. Of course it doesn’t follow that the top academics will produce the best new ideas.

As Chip and Dan Heath say in their book Made to Stick, good ideas need to be something that is distinctive, practical and contagious. Or in their “SUCCESS” model – simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories.

Many of the ideas that stood out this year fall  into two categories:  1. streams of management research that gathered momentum or brought new data to an old debate and 2. management thinking applied outside the sphere of what we ordinarily think of as management to help make sense of global risks, political choices, and economic, social, and technological shifts.

The list below, coming from Harvard Business Review, shows that good, principled, innovative management can help us solve our way out of even the most difficult problems:

Inequality rising

• Income Inequality Makes Whole Countries Less Happy
• Corporate Inequality Is the Defining Fact of Business Today
• Western Middle Classes Have Been Left Out of Global Growth
• What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
• Computers Create Jobs and Inequality at the Same Time

Globalisation fears

• People Are Angry About Globalization. Here’s What to Do About It  
• What You Won’t Hear About Trade and Manufacturing on the Campaign Trail
• The Case for Trade and Why American Leaders Need to Make It
• A Brief History of Britain’s Relationship with Europe Starting in 6000 BCE
• In Defense of Cosmopolitanism

Good (and bad) leadership

• A 10-Year Study Reveals What Great Executives Know and Do
• A 2×2 Matrix Explains Good vs. Great Leadership
• How to Deal with a Boss Who Behaves Unpredictably
• Why We Keep Hiring Narcissistic CEOs
• Why We Pick Leaders with Deceptively Simple Answers
• When Charismatic Leadership Goes Too Far
• Good Leadership Is Contagious

Doing deals

• How to Negotiate with a Liar
• A Definitive Guide to the Brexit Negotiations
• What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Negotiation
• The Secret to Negotiating Is Reading People’s Faces
• Setting the Record Straight: Using an Outside Offer to Get a Raise

Diversity problems

• Why Diversity Programs Fail
• If There’s Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There’s Statistically No Chance She’ll Be Hired
• Diversity Policies Don’t Help Women or Minorities, and They Make White Men Feel Threatened
• Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women But Not Minorities (Or Vice Versa)
• Why Subtle Bias Is So Often Worse Than Blatant Discrimination
• Gender Equality Is Making Men Feel Discriminated Against

AI and machine learning

• The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence
• Algorithms Need Managers Too
• What Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Do Right Now
• Why You’re Not Getting Value from Your Data Science
• Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces
• Artificial Intelligence Could Give Managers Half of Their Time Back

MBA failure

• Generalists Get Better Job Offers Than Specialists
• MBAs Are More Self-Serving Than Other CEOs
• Which MBAs Make More, Consultants or Small Business Owners?
• How Having an MBA vs. a Law Degree Shapes Your Network
• Why I Tell My MBA Students to Stop Looking for a Job and Join the Gig Economy

Millennials are normal

• Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life
• What Do Millennials Really Want at Work? The Same Things the Rest of Us Do
• Labels like “Millennial” and “Boomer” Are Obsolete
• Millennials Are Actually Workaholics, According to Research

Scandal impact

• The Scandal Effect
• The Leadership Blind Spots at Wells Fargo
• What 100,000 Tweets About the Volkswagen Scandal Tell Us About Angry Customers
• The Organizational Reasons Police Departments Don’t Change
• Managing Police Departments Post-Ferguson

Finally, here are the most popular articles of the year in eight of the most important topics HBR covers. I highly recommend saving and reading any you haven’t already read!

• Managing people: Let Your Workers Rebel
• Sales & Marketing: The Elements of Value
• Innovation: Embracing Agile
• Strategy: Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy
• Analytics: Visualizations That Really Work
• Recruitment: How One Fast Food Chain Keeps Its Turnover Rates Absurdly Low
• Leadership: The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World
• Organizational culture: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

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