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内容：Morgan Hu 编辑：Yong Shu WeChat ID: NativeStudy / Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471 ----------------------------------下划线-------------------------------------------- Part I: Speaker Commercial Real Estate's Great Reckoning Stacey Vanek Smith & Cardiff Garcia, October 2020 Source:NPR https://www.npr.org/2020/10/05/920521236/commercial-real-estates-great-reckoning [Rephrase 1,9:32] Part II：Speed Three ways to plan for an uncertain future James Berry, SEPTEMBER 30, 2020
[Time 2] Since the start of the pandemic I’ve had the strange feeling that time has speeded up. This is surprising because at the beginning of lockdown, I imagined time slowing to a standstill, the weeks stretching out endlessly.
Apparently this is a consequence of spending more time at home. Because we’re exposing our minds to fewer experiences, we create fewer memories. This creates the illusion that our lives have slipped into the fast-lane.
In the business world, times of uncertainty can produce a similar sense of unreality. Problems seem to pile up much faster than usual. The time left to deal with them seems to shrink. In these circumstances, even a highly successful business can find itself in difficulty. So how do businesses plan for an uncertain future? Three techniques that are commonly used are visioning, forecasting, and scenario planning.
Visioning: Setting a target Every business has a plan for where they want to get to in the future. That future vision may stretch to next quarter, next year or even into the next decade. This is a leadership choice that guides a company’s decisions toward a set of goals. Typically, a CEO, director, or the board of a company might decide what these goals and visions look like, with a vast array of input. They must then successfully communicate them to the wider company.
Generally, these aspirations are laid out through stable, more prosperous periods. This is understandable because stability gives a company more time to plan ahead. With their bottom line secure, companies also have more time to focus on innovation and improving business processes. This might mean hiring new staff or launching new products. Actively seeking out a better future.
A company vision is like knowing a desired destination. You know where you are today and where you want to get to in the future of your vision. A well-articulated vision is a statement of what you want the company to be in the future. You can then begin to put plans and actions in place to move towards this vision. [349 words]
[Time 3] Forecasting: Path forward If visioning is setting a destination, forecasting in developing a route to go from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. Forecasting considered where the organisation has been before and how it has developed to where it is now and then extrapolates where it might and should go in the future.
Managers and leaders regularly develop annual budgets, sales targets, and staffing plans around past and current performance to include anticipated variance (for good or bad) going forward. These forecasts are predictions of how the current momentum of an organisation will play out over the next time period.
Predictions for tomorrow are going to be pretty accurate as the conditions in the next twenty-four hours are unlikely to be very different from the conditions today. However, as forecasts extend further from the present, accuracy declines and predictions are best made with upper and lower bounds. ‘If everything goes well, we should see a 20% rise in sales over the next year. If things don’t go our way, we might at worst see a 15% drop.’ This is what we call a confidence interval. We are fairly sure the future answer to sales growth will be somewhere between 15% down and 20% up. A manager who gives me a single number for a forecast a year out, is usually in for a long session.
Companies often forecast regularly but managers and leaders often simplify the end results with single numbers that obscure the potential uncertainty that is uncovered in proper planning. Do not added additional uncertainty in trying to understand your future by ignoring the information confidence intervals can give you about how uncertain the future is for your organisation’s leadership. [295 words]
[Time 4] Scenario Planning: Developing agility for crisis management In an interview in 2002 the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” when asked about the lack of evidence linking Iraq with weapons of mass destruction. At the time Rumsfeld’s answer was ridiculed, but it has since been reappraised as a good, if initially confusing, explanation of the problem of uncertainty.
The issue of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” could just as easily be applied to the problem of scenario planning within companies. How, for instance, can a company hope to plan for a scenario they’re not even aware is on the horizon? Scenario planning has it roots in the military but became a formal technique as global companies sought to deal with the economic instability of the Oil Embargo of 1973 and looked for a solution to avoid being caught unprepared for the next crisis.
The answer is to begin by asking a series of ‘what if’ questions with scenario planning. What ifs or scenarios that might dramatically shift a market or change society, are often described as crises when they rapidly develop. Considering a range of potential shifts and then developing outlines of plans to deal with them is what we mean by scenario planning. These crises may arise both internally or externally.
Organisations first need to identify single points of failure – areas of particularly high risk that could lead to a domino effect. Companies should be looking for things like key personnel dependencies or supply chain risks around essential component parts to at least have a strategy for how they would proceed if disruption is experienced. [289 words]
[The Rest] A second selection of ‘what if’s should focus on factors outside the organisation. These could be a radical fluctuation in exchange rates, a No Deal Brexit, or a global pandemic. These scenarios, or others like them, could have a dramatic impact on a company and need to be properly considered. In some instances, the outcome could be a positive – disruption is not always necessarily a negative but can uncover opportunities for growth.
These ‘what ifs’ shouldn’t just come from a CEO or senior people within the company. Good leaders should draw on the ideas and imagination of staff members throughout the business. They ought to ask: ‘what foreseeable problems keep you awake at night’. This is an opportunity to be open and honest about how the business runs and what plans are for the future; one that has the additional benefit of helping employees feel like they have more of a stake in the overall success of the company. My own research shows that engaging employees in future planning, encourages them to take ownership of their work decisions and more proactively engage in efforts to innovate for the organisation.
This is a crucial point. Scenario planning helps leaders develop plans to respond to possible market disruptions enabling leaders make better decisions under crisis situations – we thought of this or something similar before. By engaging employees in this process, leaders get to know there employees more and employees build a more resilient relationship with the organisation. Both being more adaptable if a crisis hits.
Three key questions to leave you with: 1. Most businesses have a vision. Is it up to date and clear to the entire organisation?
2. Most businesses use forecasts. Do those forecasts include estimates of the uncertainty they might predict?
3. Most business have not utilised scenario planning. How might scenario planning have helped your organisation weather the global pandemic? What scenarios should be planning for next? [331 words]
Source: Management-Issues https://www.management-issues.com/opinion/7420/three-ways-to-plan-for-an-uncertain-future
Old habits die hard, new habits die easy Max Mckeown , SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
[Time 5] "Imagine a warm summer day at the beach, a pile of sand, and a bucket of sea water. Pour some water on the top of the pile, and watch how it finds its way down. The first wave seems undecided, constructing a winding path to ground level. Later waves, however, follow this path, and flow downwards in a seemingly effortless fashion: a habit has been born."
How much of what you do each day is the result of habit? Learned sequences of acts that become automatic. Some habits don't appear to achieve anything at all. They are just the way we behave. Some habits are even passed on genetically with our minds acting in fright, flight, spite or delight because of some unknown series of events before you were even born.
The useful thing about habits is they are efficient. We don't have the brain power to think about everything we do, so we need shortcuts. Riding a bicycle, opening a door, saying hello - all done without bothering our minds with the details.
Without habits you're constantly struggling to find an appropriate response to every situation no matter how many times you've experienced it. Without traditions life becomes shaky - unbearably uncertain.
Driving becomes automatic. You may have had the experience of setting off to go to a new place and finding yourself driving to somewhere you are used to going to. Repeated behaviour conditions your brain to turn left and right without really thinking.
The problem is that bad driving also becomes automatic. Instead of mirror, indicator and accelerate, you might simply accelerate, nearly hit another car, curse at the other driver and continue along believing you were right all the time.
Some patterns of behaviours are labeled good and bad. The bad habit might get in the way of what you want. Or someone sticks a bad habit label on behaviour that gets in the way of what they want. Or that offends their sense of morality which is also habitual - an automatic pattern of judgments about other people's behaviour.
Groups have habits. Learned sequences of behaviour between members of the same group. Learned patterns between two groups. Anything from how they dress, to phrases and clichés, to whether they do just enough or whatever it takes to do a great job for a customer, for each other, or for your own satisfaction. [397 words]
[Time 6] The habits of others influence our habits in a chain of subtle influences. Your friend's friend's friend affects everything, including body weight, car and age you're going to die. In part this is because we compare ourselves consciously, but it's far more because we take subconscious cues about the value, acceptability and availability of certain actions.
That's how fashion works. We wear clothes a certain way. Flares, baggies, hipsters and skinny jeans. All become habitual for a certain generation and may keep influencing their sense of what is 'normal' for the rest of their lives. Others become habitual only for a season or two or three since they belong to habits that are deliberately manipulated. With the habit becoming the pattern of changing your clothing to accomplish the goal of feeling great or fitting in.
How long to change a habit? Dr Maltz noticed in the 1960s that it took about three weeks for amputee patients to stop feeling a phantom limb. He also noticed that self-image problems could be solved in a 21-day program. He concluded that neuro-connections develop if action is repeated or 21 days without missing a day.
The truth is that different habits take different time and effort to change. But work by Anne Graybiel at MIT has demonstrated how neural patterns are shaped in the basal ganglia that influences habits and actions.
Her experiments involved rats finding chocolate in a maze. It was found that at first brain activity was high throughout the whole maze as the rats brain learned the way to the chocolate. After time, brain activity was only high at the beginning and end of the maze. It appears that everything in between doesn't really require active thought or learning.
Individual humans do their learning when facing new experiences for the first time. They learn their way around the maze to find the chocolate and then stop learning. They stop learning without realizing that they have stopped learning. It's why organizations can so rarely change themselves.
The bad thing is that you can do things that aren't helpful or healthy or happy without thinking about why. And without asking why you are stuck in routines. You may even defend the status-quo while complaining about it. Even if you ask why other people's habitual behaviour may force you back into the same rut. [391 words]
[The Rest] To get groups learning new habits, the first step is new experiences. Their brains will engage because it is new. But the experience has to be new enough to engage, and engaging enough to prompt new thoughts. If it's a new idea delivered in an old way then prompts tell the brain to stop thinking. This, they say, is like any other meeting, memo, or mission. Been there, done that.
Second, do it more than once. Again and again. Until new habits develop to replace the old - because organizations just can't function without automatic behaviour.
Third, to help people, and organizations, to adopt new habits, we need to very precise about what the new habit looks like, how it sounds, how it feels, when it happens, and what will happen as a result. Because the brain needs to think its way from the comfortable, comforting, familiar old habit to a new behaviour that may be uncomfortable and discomforting. Or simply not yet habits.
Habits are linked to goals. We want the chocolate so follow a path through the maze. Explicitly engage people with thinking about connecting what they want with what they do and the result. If old habits don't deliver then a new behaviour can be built, designed from desire upwards.
Visualizing. Imagining. Drawing story boards. Acting out parts. Breaking it down into micro-responses, to things that are likely to happen. That's what allows the mind to willingly create new patterns that given time become the new way that things are done around here. A new habit is born. [261 words]
Source: Management-Issues https://www.management-issues.com/opinion/5955/old-habits-die-hard-new-habits-die-easy/
Part III: Obstacle How Businesses Can Recruit and Develop More Young People of Color Joiselle Cunningham and Angela Jackson , OCTOBER 5, 2020
[Paraphrase 7] For the college graduates of 2020, Covid-19 has disrupted dreams and shifted plans. But what about the millions of college students who dropped out this year before earning a diploma? Or others who graduated saddled with debt only to be underemployed in their first job? These students, many of whom are people of color, faced enormous challenges even before the pandemic.
Traditionally, job candidates with a college degree have been expected to launch their careers shortly after earning a diploma. But in his 2016 book There Is Life After College, writer and researcher Jeffrey Selingo found that only one-third of today’s graduates jump into careers or start down a path that will lead to “success” in the working world right after graduation. He refers to this group as “Sprinters.” Others, whom he calls “Wanderers” and “Stragglers,” have less linear paths.
What separates “Sprinters” from others are largely the opportunities to which they had access during their undergraduate programs. Eighty percent of the graduates in this group had at least one internship, 64% committed to a major without changing it, and 43% had less than $10,000 in student loan debt. Selingo concludes that these opportunities can spell the difference between when — and whether — a college graduate has access to a stable career path.
Such opportunities are much less available to people of color. Race remains a key factor in job attainment even for graduates who finish their college degrees. According to 2013 data, Black graduates aged 22 to 27 were two times more likely to be unemployed, a clear indication that discrimination remains a major problem in the labor market.
To make matters worse, about six in 10 students invest time and money in pursuing a degree they never finish. These students often wind up worse off than if they’d never set foot on campus in the first place. In fact, as recent as 2017, one study showed that only about five in 10 Black and Hispanic students who started in a four-year public institution completed their degrees within a six-year period, compared to about seven in 10 white and Asian students.
As we engage in conversations about recovery and reopening during the pandemic, many higher education institutions and employers are being forced to rethink long-standing practices that have resulted in Covid-19 having a disproportionate impact on youth of color. Many of these practices are entrenched in historical economic and environmental inequities born out of systemic racism. Now is the time for us to interrogate the pathways that ultimately distinguish a “Sprinter” from a “Wanderer” and to build equitable systems that meet the needs of all young people.
How can employers start?
Start Professional Development Early First, more must be done to reach students earlier in their academic careers to help them tap into job exploration, skills building, and professional development.
One of the most effective and proactive steps employers can take is to expand quality internships for young people of color. No online training module or YouTube video can replace the learning that takes place when a young person interacts with professionals in their industry of interest. Just as companies are increasingly sharing the diversity numbers of their full-time employees, they need to examine the demographics of their internship cohorts and establish diversity goals. Offering compensated career exposure through onsite and remote experiences can ensure that students have information about their options early on.
In addition to internship programs, industry and skills-specific programs are partnering with businesses to provide students of color with effective learning opportunities. CodePath.org, for instance, is an organization that works with major employers, including Facebook and Google, to create open-source computer science courses that are targeted specifically to underrepresented students and can be taught on any campus. The courses are aligned to the tech industry’s fastest-growing specialties, like cybersecurity and mobile app development, and they are nimble enough to evolve with frequent technological changes. Within one year of completing a course, 85% of Black and Latinx CodePath.org alumni landed tech jobs at companies such as Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, and others.
Increase Access to Technology This is a good start when companies are deciding where to place their efforts. But employers must also take into account that many youth of color who need these types of programs do not have access to them due to the digital divide. Low-income and rural communities in particular often lack access to high-speed internet and effective access to technology. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have increasingly voiced concerns about their student populations’ lack of access to the connectivity and infrastructure needed to effectively participate in online learning.
The good news is that businesses can also work to create change here. One option that has proved effective is partnering and supporting organizations already doing this hard work with success. Rheaply, for example, is a climate tech company that combines a resource-sharing network with a user-friendly asset management platform that allows corporations to donate laptops to students and communities in need. In another effort, Kapor Capital’s SMASH — a program that provides students of color with intensive STEM education, culturally relevant coursework, and access to resources and social capital — recently announced support for an initiative to donate 5,000 computers and internet access to college-age students who have been impacted by Covid-19 and are learning to code. Both these organizations can serve as examples for businesses looking to make a positive impact.
Similar partnerships can be made at the hiring level. Several organizations are already working with employers to create more equitable opportunities for recent grads of color. Braven, for example, works with businesses and universities alike to launch students into “strong first jobs,” empowering young people to lead within the companies and organizations they join following graduation.
Braven partners with large public universities to build career education into the undergraduate experience through a credit bearing course fueled by volunteers from the professional workforce. It provides first generation college students and students of color, who often feel disconnected from campus, with a network of supporters to build a sense of belonging, and it works within and across universities to foster a generation of diverse leaders. According to Braven’s 2018-2019 impact report, their “300 graduates between 2016-2018 have outpaced their peers nationally in strong job attainment by 23 percentage points (69% vs 46%) within six months of graduation.” These types of programs empower young people to learn more about career opportunities while offering talent solutions within companies.
Businesses that want to be proactive about reaching local talent can also take a look at the 538 workforce boards and 1,600 job centers across the country, where many urban youth go to look for jobs in their immediate communities. Such resources represent a huge opportunity for employers not only to be good corporate neighbors but also to invest in burgeoning talent in their backyards. [1170 words]
[The Rest] Improving Hiring Practices When it comes to actual hiring practices, separate efforts must put into place to ensure that graduates of color can thrive in a post-Covid world. Human Resource departments and hiring managers need to challenge the notion that talent comes only from certain institutions or that particular achievements serve as a proxy for success. Research has shown that diverse teams result in greater innovation and, therefore, we can assume, better financial performance. For businesses to put this finding into practice, they cannot continue to hire based on the myth that only those who attend elite institutions during their formative years are eligible for entry-level positions. Instead, they must expand where they look for talent — which should be everywhere.
To begin, companies should screen resumes without names and schools and use clear rubrics. Organizations like Deloitte, HSBC, and the BBC have begun using this method of blind recruitment, removing name, age, education, and other indicators that might unintentionally introduce bias into the hiring process. The goal should be for organizations to align their hiring rubrics, screening questions, and tests with the skills needed in a specific position rather than using degrees from elite institutions or references from people they know as proxies. While networks still remain critical to getting a job, many young people of color and first-generation college students lack access to the most influential networks. Organizations like America Needs You and Beyond 12 are intentionally closing the college access and network gaps so that even those who traditionally have been disconnected can make the valuable connections they need.
Once a candidate is being considered for a role, managers should pose the same questions to each applicant and ask them to perform tasks similar to those required for the position in order to test their skill sets accurately. In this way, managers can start to remove biases that often favor those with a fancy resume or an Ivy League education. Examples of organizations that are working with businesses to help create this kind of change include The Equity Lab and 228 Accelerator. Both are aiming to help companies reimagine their HR practices, training routines, and other systems to support diverse talent and challenge bias.
Students from Black-led organizations and HBCUs, and students of color throughout the United States, are the talent that industries are overlooking. These are the people who could have filled the more than seven million jobs that were vacant before Covid-19. Employers who want to thrive during and after this pandemic need to be more intentional about finding them. This means working with organizations that can help them do so, and actively creating opportunities to help these students succeed.
If young people of color continue to be overburdened with debt and are not provided with a fair chance to gain the skills they need to pursue their interests, companies and communities will lose out on their talent, passions, and contributions. Supporting young people and their aspirations can build the inclusive economy that our nation needs [501 words]
Source: Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2020/10/how-busniesses-can-recruit-and-develop-more-young-people-of-color
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发表于 2020-10-7 00:57:26
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