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As Flexible Voting Options Scrutinized, Expert Says Online Voting Not a Safe Alternative
The popularity of — and controversies surrounding — early voting and mail-in ballots demonstrates a demand for more flexible voting options. But online voting shouldn’t be up for consideration, according to James Hendler, the head of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Hendler also chairs the U.S. Technology Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest and oldest society of individuals involved in all aspects of computing. In public statements expressing his own opinion and on behalf of the ACM, Hendler has discussed the vulnerabilities of online voting and the organization’s effort to press against its adoption. Hendler argues that online voting is not, and cannot be made to be, secure against malware and denial of service attacks — and that no app or underlying technology, including blockchain, holds potential to overcome those challenges. "The current state of mobile voting is that we are not ready to deploy it at scale, that it has significant technical and socio-technical aspects, particularly cybersecurity, that we need to worry about, and that there are alternatives,” Hendler said. “The ACM has worked hard as an organization to explain our evidence-based reasoning, and to express the hope that online-voting won’t be used now and in the foreseeable future.” In explaining why online voting is more complicated than online banking, shopping and other common internet activities, Hendler said, “The main reason that online voting is more complex is that it must maintain anonymity, no one is allowed to know how you voted. Securing online voting without providing access to identity is extremely difficult. There are other reasons as well including the staggering cost and the lack of a centralized US authority, but identity management remains the number one.” Under his leadership, the ACM’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee, along with leading organizations and experts in cybersecurity and computing, sent a letter to all governors, secretaries of state and other state election directors urging them not to allow the use of internet or voting app systems. Hendler has extensive experience in policy and advisory positions that consider aspects of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and internet and web technologies as they impact issues such as online voting and the regulation of social media and powerful technologies including facial recognition and artificial intelligence. In light of ongoing political unrest, Hendler is available to speak to diverse aspects of information technology as related to the election, AI in applications like policing, and the politics related to social media.
The events that led to the storming of the Capitol buildings last week have garnered attention from just about every news organization across the planet. Pundits and politicians have weighed in on both sides regarding whether President Trump’s words and actions need to be held accountable for the damage to America’s democratic institutions as well as the five people who have since died as a result of the events that occurred on January 6, 2021. Recently, University of Connecticut’s Richard Ashby Wilson, the Gladstein Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Law and an expert on hate speech and incitement on social media shared his perspective in an Op-Ed published in the Los Angeles Times. It’s a thoughtful, methodical, and excellent piece outlining why he believes, in his expert legal opinion, that President Trump crossed the line and now deserves to be held accountable for his crimes. This is a burning topic, and if you are a journalist looking for objective and expert opinion on this topic – then let us help. Richard Ashby Wilson is available to speak with media about this issue – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
Are vaccine passports legal in a post-COVID-19 era? Let our experts explain
As America and the world look to slowly round the corner of the safety measures enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the new coronavirus vaccines are giving hope of an eventual return to normal. However, with an active anti-vaccination movement afoot and many still skeptical of getting that essential poke in the arm, the World Health Organization said some government officials are suggesting the idea of vaccine passports. A simple piece of identification would end the uncertainty that comes with travel, work and the much sought-after leisure that often means crowded places and smaller spaces. The idea has already caught on in countries in Europe and South America. It may be the safety blanket many seek, but are vaccine passports actually legal? It is a question that’s beginning to get serious coverage. “Having proof of vaccination can be essential for a number of sectors other than health, but we cannot overlook the potential discriminatory consequences that may arise,” said Dr. William Hatcher, an expert in public policy and interim chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University. Another idea being floated is immunity passports, but Hatcher suggests¬ allowing only people with immunity to work might disadvantage those who haven’t gotten sick or those without the antibodies to prove it. It’s as if, in the eyes of their employer, their lack of infection constitutes a disability. The inequality that immunity passports could foster in these situations may be illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are also other ethical, practical, and cultural aspects to consider as well. If you are covering this emerging topic and are looking to know more, our experts can help. Dr. Hatcher is a professor of political science and interim chair of Augusta University’s Department of Social Sciences. He is an expert in the areas of public administration and social, economic, and political institutions in local communities. Hatcher is available to speak with media regarding the concept of vaccination and immunity passports. To arrange an interview, simply click on his name.
A Highly Skilled Healthcare Workforce Could Be in Jeopardy From COVID-19
While all healthcare professionals have stepped up during the COVID-19 pandemic and are essential to providing quality care, registered nurses are with patients 24/7 and provide essential, consistent surveillance, often being the first to take immediate action and alert colleagues in order to save patients. “I cannot stress enough that it is not about beds and space, it is about having a high-quality and properly educated workforce to care for the patients in those beds and spaces,” says Donna Havens, PhD, RN, FAAN, Connelly Endowed Dean and Professor of the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing, who adds that the process depends on a highly skilled workforce. Though in some cases, because of the growing shortage across the nation during the pandemic, members of the workforce may not have the skills or experience to care for patients in the settings in which they may have been placed during the pandemic. Nurses who typically work in one particular clinical setting, e.g., pediatrics, may now be asked to provide care to adult intensive care unit (ICU) patients with very little education, if any, regarding the particulars of caring for this population. This may impact the quality of care—as well as increase distress and burnout among the workforce. The number of hospitalized patients is growing exponentially each day, and the healthcare workforce is expressing growing concern, distress, disappointment and anger about the numerous issues and challenges within the healthcare settings—as well as in regard to the general population disregarding healthcare experts’ and scientists’ guidance to adhere to practices that will mitigate the spread of the virus. Media coverage is articulating the workforce’s dismay and their calls for help—because they are tired, burned out and facing a struggle to go to work. While some traveling healthcare professionals, who practice by accepting assignments as temporary reinforcements across the country, were being sent to hot spots earlier in the pandemic, there are so many hot spots across the country today that this may no longer be a solution to ameliorate the shortage of quality care providers. Havens and colleagues at Villanova’s M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing launched a national 20-year study in May—the CHAMPS study—to explore the emotional and physical wellbeing of the healthcare workforce and those who support care. Their early findings document high levels of depression, stress and sleep issues. “Not only is the healthcare workforce growing tired, distressed and burned out, but many are also becoming ill themselves—many dying of COVID-19. This is demoralizing and severely impacts the number available to provide care. Some of the respondents from the CHAMPS study describe caring for healthcare colleagues who died from COVID while they were caring for them.” The World Health Organization designated 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and Midwife, and 2020 is also the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale, who founded the nursing profession. “How ironic that during this time, nurses find themselves working in surge hospitals in tents, basketball arenas, parking garages and so forth, just as Nightingale’s early career was spent implementing processes to improve sanitation and hygiene,” says Havens.
Resilience in the Face of COVID-19
Brunswick Senior Advisor Paddy McGuinness, former UK Deputy National Security Adviser, on how businesses can chart a course amid the fear and uncertainty. We are all becoming more familiar with this disease than we care to be—and may become yet more so. Still uncertainty remains. It began even with the terminology. Coronavirus is a descriptor, a general term. Under the microscope, the virus has crown-like spikes, hence corona. The common cold and variances of it are coronaviruses. COVID-19 (as in Corona Virus Disease 2019) is the effect that this particular coronavirus has on the human being—that’s the disease the world’s grappling with. That’s the distinction between the two terms. We’ve now spoken to more than 150 clients about their situation. That has given us a broad view of the corporate response across affected geographies from Asia, through the Middle East and Europe to the Americas, a window into how those responses have played out and the challenges continually unfolding. Here’s what we’ve been advising our clients: First, develop a single view that’s grounded in professional, well-sourced information. In government we called this “a commonly recognized information picture.” That view has to be based on the responsible medical experts: the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, Public Health England and similar bodies. You do not get it from the newspapers, from social media, from friends, or even your local medic. You operate on the basis of informed medical and public health advice. The current vocal challenge to that advice in Europe and the US is not reason to depart from it as your foundation for the actions you take. A leadership team needs to develop the discipline to clarify that generic narrative into a specific frame for their business context and then operate within it. It’s dangerous for leaders to start pretending they’re epidemiologists. Have a single view and stick to it. I’ve been on calls with leadership teams where there’s agreement on that view and then someone says, “But I read that the disease ...” Don’t go there. Don’t work on that basis. The uncertainty is difficult enough to deal with. Don’t add to it. You will be focused first on the safety—the human consequences—of your course of action and then on the resilience of your business. That may cause you to anticipate some of the “Non Pharmaceutical Interventions” that government makes. Brunswick has. Having established your position, think through how you’re going to communicate it to employees, customers, and investors. What about your suppliers and regulators? How might you engage with local public health officials and local authorities? Exaggeration and understatement are equally unhelpful. These engagements need to be tailored, yet aligned within your broader narrative. Leaders also need to plan for reasonable worst-case scenarios. Covid-19 has already spread in a way that we hoped wouldn’t happen, and in a way that standard business continuity planning doesn’t cover. Now, many in the workforce have to work from home. Among other considerations, that produces additional cyber and data vulnerability. What if schools close and your employees have children at home they have to look after? What will your IT capabilities be if 20 to 40 percent of your team is incapacitated at any one time during the peak period? Are your HR teams prepared to deal with the most unfortunate case, where employees or their close relatives pass away? In extreme times, it can be tempting to take extreme positions. A lesson of crises is never to enter into something without knowing how you’re going to get out of it, how to reverse it. If companies are going to start shutting down their operations, how are they going to open again? On what justification? Taking fixed positions amid great uncertainty can prove restrictive—or counterproductive—when circumstances change. Resilience is the ability to respond and recover to the state prior to the event, having learned the lessons of the event. Respond and recover—that’s the long-term goal here. Covid-19 will pass. We know from other pandemics that recovery does come. How can you position yourself to take advantage of that recovery, to get back with speed and strength? Because some companies will. Now more than ever senior leaders need to talk about how things will be the other side of the crisis and to describe signs of recovery. This is easiest for enterprises with transnational reach. They recount what is happening in Asia as the disease passes so that European and US stakeholders can see beyond the immediate demands of emergency response. On a personal level, stick close to the medical experts and the people who know what they’re talking about. I may well get Covid-19 here in the United Kingdom. I assume that, like the vast majority of healthy people who get it, I will experience mild to moderate symptoms and recover just fine. If I don’t, I want health services to be available. I want the spread to be managed at sustainable levels, so I am doing what Government asks of me and avoiding all but essential contact with others and unnecessary travel. I expect that more will be asked of me, my family and colleagues before we are through this. I wouldn’t let Covid-19 overwhelm you in your daily life, given what we know. That’s certainly my intention: carry on with as much normality as possible, support others and use the unexpected circumstances to prepare for the recovery phase which will come.
Criminals are opportunists, and the COVID-19 global onslaught has brought with it not just health threats but cybersecurity risks, too. Within weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak, hackers have already commandeered the virus to unleash cyberattacks, sending emails purporting to provide coronavirus guidance laced with cyberattack software. In one more alarming case, they appear to have attacked a hospital and forced it to cancel operations and take key systems offline. As the outbreak continues to intensify, the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that the volume of these attacks will likely increase, pointing to the increased registration of coronavirus-related webpages. Criminals are opportunists, and the COVID-19 global onslaught has brought with it not just health threats but cybersecurity risks, too. As companies move to protect the health of their workforce, it’s also important to protect the systems they’re using to run their businesses. It’s especially important for hospitals to shore-up their cyber defenses. If they don’t, just as they are racing to respond to COVID-19, they could face situations like University Hospital Brno in the Czech Republic, which earlier this month was forced to divert patients and cancel planned operations while it worked to address an attack. The most likely cyber threats are email “phishing” campaigns that use the coronavirus as a lure to get the recipient to open an attachment that contains malware. According to the NCSC, such “phishing” attempts are happening on a global scale in multiple countries, which has led to both a theft of money and sensitive data. Similarly, known hacker groups have been launching websites purporting to sell masks or other safety-related measures for coronavirus, possibly to use them as another vector for cyberattacks. The NCSC has also cautioned that these attacks are “versatile and can be conducted through various media, adapted to different sectors and monetized via multiple means, including ransomware, credential theft, bitcoin or fraud.” The cybersecurity firm ProofPoint has seen a rise in these cyberattack emails with COVID-19 themes since January. Both ProofPoint and IBM’s X-Force cybersecurity unit identified a campaign that targeted users in Japan with an email masquerading as a coronavirus information email that carries with it a potent type of cybercrime software. In the US, the Secret Service recently warned of scams from online criminals posing as sellers of high-demand medical supplies to prevent coronavirus. They’ll require payment upfront and not send the products. Cyber criminals have also been posing as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sending fraudulent emails from the former and “creating domain names similar to the CDC’s web address to request passwords and even bitcoin donations to fund a vaccine” for the latter. In addition to the use of the coronavirus as a cyberattack vector, the growing need for working remotely to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 has increased companies’ exposure to cyber threats. The increase in remote work creates more opportunities for hackers to make inroads from less secure locations. Companies should also ensure they can provide adequate security when their whole workforce is remote. They should quickly work through the security implications of workers choosing to switch to insecure personal devices. With national-level pressures on home broadband, staff will also resort to mobile hotspots, which are often less secure. And enabling remote connectivity at scale, with the right security configurations, can be a challenge even with months of preparation time. A recent US Department of Homeland Security COVID-19 cybersecurity notice pointed to the importance of making sure that security measures are up to date for companies’ remote access systems. Additional measures to consider include enabling multifactor authentication—which can require two or more steps to verify a user’s identity before granting access to corporate networks. The NCSC is also working to identify malicious sites responsible for phishing and cyberattack software. A final looming cyberthreat related to Covid-19 is disinformation. The World Health Organization and other agencies have for months been combatting disinformation campaigns spreading false information about the origins of and treatments for COVID-19—reports that seed more confusion and increase risks to society. All of that means that computer virus risks are emerging as the biological virus spreads—and both are a threat to business. Cyber risk mitigation efforts should account for the different ways that a company can be affected, including impacts on the technical, operational, legal and reputational aspects of a business. Often, the reputational effects of a cyberattack are more significant than direct the business or technical impact. To mitigate all of the potential impacts of cyberattacks taking advantage of the Covid-19 outbreak, companies should: Review and update crisis and cybersecurity response plans, and ensure internal and external communications response plans are robust. Confirm that members of the crisis management team understand their roles and responsibilities. Make sure all communications channels have the latest security patches. Review and update access controls, particularly when remote access is used heavily, to make sure that only those who require access to sensitive systems to do their jobs have it. Take extra care when handling medical information. For companies managing employees who have contracted Covid-19, it’s important that personal health information is handled with strong security measures, including encryption. Educate employees about the cyber risks that may attempt to capitalize on fear of the Covid-19 virus—whether it be phishing email or disinformation. Covid-19 poses a number of short- and long-term challenges to business resilience, and the virus’s trajectory is quick and unpredictable. But it’s possible to anticipate and mitigate a number of the cyber threats that will try to ride the virus’s coattails. The companies that do will be more resilient and better positioned to withstand the direct health and operational effects of the virus.
Best-selling author Peter Singer talks with the Brunswick Review about winning the increasingly crowded and contentious war for attention What do Isis and Taylor Swift have in common? According to author and digital-security strategist Peter Singer, both the terrorist organization and pop star are fighting for your attention online and employing similar tactics to try and win it. ISIS kicked off its 2014 invasion of Mosul with the hashtag, “#AllEyesonISIS.” More recently, the terror group posted photos of its members holding cute cats in an effort to make them more relatable – tactics familiar to most celebrities and online marketers around the world. These online battles, the rules governing them, and their real-world impact are the focus of Mr. Singer’s latest book, LikeWar, which he coauthored with Emerson T. Brooking, at the time a research fellow with the Council of Foreign Relations. “A generation ago people talked about the emergence of cyber war, the hacking of networks. A ‘LikeWar’ is the flip side: the hacking of people and ideas on those networks. Power in this conflict is the command of attention,” says Mr. Singer, who in addition to his writing is also a strategist and Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Pretty much everyone who posts online – from governments to marketers to reality TV stars – is a combatant in this fight for virality, according to Mr. Singer. Triumph in a “LikeWar” and you command attention to your product or propaganda or personality. Lose and you cede control of the spotlight and the agenda. Mr. Singer recently spoke with Brunswick’s Siobhan Gorman about the trends he’s seeing in LikeWars around the world, and what companies can do to avoid being on the losing end. What were you most surprised by in researching LikeWar? One of the more interesting characters in the book was at one time voted TV’s greatest villain: Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star on MTV’s “The Hills.” He’s basically one of these people who became famous almost for nothing. But what Pratt figured out really early was the power of narrative, which allowed him to become famous through, as he put it, “manipulating the media.” In the same week, I interviewed both Pratt and the person at the US State Department who’s in charge of the US government’s efforts to battle ISIS online. And Pratt, this California bro who’s talking about how to manipulate the media to get attention, understood more of what was playing out online than the person at the State Department. Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star… understood more of what was playing out online than the person at the State Department.” How much have online conflicts changed the rules in the last few years? First, the internet has left adolescence. It’s only just now starting to flex its muscles and deal with some of its responsibilities. The structure of the network changes how these battles play out. So, it’s this contest of both psychological but also algorithmic manipulation. What you see go across your screen on social media is not always decided by you. The rule makers of this global fight are a handful of Silicon Valley engineers. Another aspect of it is that social media has effectively rendered secrets of any consequence almost impossible to keep. As one CIA person put it to us, “secrets now come with a half-life.” Virality matters more than veracity; the truth doesn’t always win out. In fact, the truth can be buried underneath a sea of lies and likes. And the last part is that we’re all part of it. All of our decisions as individuals shape which side gets attention, and therefore which side wins out. But you highlight that this is playing out differently in China. Exactly. There are two different models shaping the internet, and shaping people’s behavior through the internet, playing out in the West and in China. Essentially, internet activity in China is all combined. Look at WeChat, which is used for everything from social media to mobile payment; it’s Amazon meets Facebook meets Pizza Hut delivery. And you combine that with an authoritarian government that’s had a multi-decade plan for building out surveillance, and you get the social credit system, which is like Orwellian surveillance crossed with marketing. The social credit system allows both companies and the government to mine and combine all the different points of information that an online citizen in China reveals of themselves, and then use that to create a single score – think of it as your financial credit score of your “trustworthiness.” For example, if you buy diapers your score goes up, because that indicates you’re a parent and a good parent. If you play video games for longer than an hour your score goes down because you’re wasting time online. And it’s all networked. Your friends and family know your score. It creates a soft form of collective censorship; if your brother posts something that’s critical of the government, you’re the one who goes to him and says, “Knock it off ’cause you’re hurting my score.” And you do that because the score has real consequences. Already it’s being used for everything from seating on trains and job applications to online dating. Your score literally shapes your romantic prospects. So, you have this massive global competition between Chinese tech companies and other global tech companies not only for access to markets, but also for whose vision of the internet is going to win out. How can companies win a “LikeWar”? Everyone’s wondering: What are the best ways to drive your message out there and have it triumph over others? The best companies I’ve seen create a narrative, have a story and have emotion – in particular, they have emotion that provokes a reaction of some kind. It’s all about planned authenticity. That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s about acting in ways that are genuine, but are also tailored because you’re aware that the world is watching you. A good comparison here is Wendy’s versus Hillary Clinton. Wendy’s is a hamburger chain – not a real person – but it acts and comes across as “authentic” online and has developed a massive following. They’re funny, irreverent. Yet Hillary Clinton – a very real person – never felt very authentic in her online messaging. And that’s because it involved a large number of people – by one account, 11 different people – all weighing in on what should be tweeted out. Inundation and experimentation are also key. Throwing not just one message out there, but massive amounts of them. Treating each message as both a kind of weapon, but also an experiment that allows you to then learn, refine, do it again, do it again, do it again. How do you measure and gauge battles online now? Is it just volume? It all depends on what your battle is, what your end goal is. Is it driving sales? Is it getting people to vote for you, to show up to your conference? This is what the US gets wrong about Russian propaganda and its disinformation campaigns. We think they’re designed to make people love or trust a government. From its very start back in the 1920s, the goal of propaganda coming from the Soviet Union, and today Russia, has been instead to make you distrust – distrust everything, disbelieve everything. And we can see it’s been incredibly effective for them. First, we need to recognize that we’re a part of the battle. In fact, we’re a target of most of the battles. How effective have disinformation campaigns actually been in the US? What can be done? One of the scariest and maybe saddest things we discovered is that the US is now the story that other nations point to as the example of what you don’t want to have happen. There’s no silver bullet, of course. But one example was something called the Active Measures Working Group, a Cold War organization that brought together the intelligence community, diplomats and communicators to identify incoming KGB disinformation campaigns and then develop responses to them. We’re dealing with the modern, way more effective online version of something similar, and we haven’t got anything like that. There are also digital literacy programs. I find it stunning that the US supports education programs to help citizens and kids in Ukraine learn about what to do and how to think about online disinformation, but we don’t do that for our own students. What can people like you or me do? First, we need to recognize that we’re a part of the battle. In fact, we’re a target of most of the battles. And we need to better understand how the platforms work that we use all the time. A majority of people actually still don’t understand how social media companies make money. The other is to seek out the truth. How do we do that? And the best way is to remember the ancient parable of the blind man and the elephant – don’t just rely on one source, pull from multiple different sources. That’s been proven in a series of academic studies as the best way to find the facts online. It’s not exactly new, but it’s effective. Where will the next online war be fought? The cell phone in your pocket, or if we’re being futuristic, the augmented reality glasses that you wear as you walk down the street. It’ll come from the keepsake videos that you play on them. If you want to know what comes next in the internet there have always been two places to go: university research labs and the porn industry. That’s been the case with webcams, chat rooms and so on. What we’re seeing playing out now are called “deep fakes,” which use artificial intelligence to create hyper-realistic videos and images. There’s also “madcoms,” which are hyper-realistic chat bots that make it seem like you’re talking to another person online. Combine the two, and the voices, the images, the information that we’ll increasingly see online might be fake, but hyper-realistic. The tools that militaries and tech companies are using to fight back against the AI-created deep fakes are other AI. So, the future of online conflict looks like it’ll be two AIs battling back and forth. Let me give you a historic parallel, because we’ve been dealing with these issues for a very long time. The first newspaper came when a German printer figured out a way to monetize his press’s downtime by publishing a weekly collection of news and advice. And in publishing the first newspaper, he created an entire industry, a new profession that sold information itself. And it created a market for something that had never before existed – but in creating that market, truth has often fallen by the wayside. One of the very first newspapers in America about a century later was called the New England Courant. It published a series of letters by a woman named Mrs. Silence Do-good. The actual writer of the letters was a 16-year-old apprentice at the newspaper named Benjamin Franklin, making him the founding father of fake news in America. In some sense it’s always been there, using deception and marketing to persuade people to your view.
Under Armour’s response to a cyber attack achieved the seemingly impossible: Rather than fueling outrage, it actually drew praise. Brunswick’s Siobhan Gorman reports. In late March last year, Under Armour learned that its MyFitnessPal app, which tracks diet and exercise, had a data breach that affected 150 million users. It’s not uncommon for companies to take several weeks—or even months—to publicly announce a cyber attack of that scale. Under Armour did so in four days. Tokë Vandervoort on What Made The Difference 1. Relationships External relationships are how we found out about the breach, and they’re how we knew which advisers and expertise to bring on board right away. We had those in place and had put a lot of effort into maintaining them and keeping them up to date. Internally, the trust we’d built allowed us to move as quickly as we did. Both paid huge dividends. 2. Preparedness I don’t know anybody whose incident response team meets every other week, but ours does. Sometimes we’re just shooting the breeze, but other times we’re asking: “What’s going on in the business? What are you hearing? What’s happening?” We enjoy a great relationship with the product team, the engineering team, the IT security team, the IT team ... It’s not just sharing information, but also getting to know one another, which ties back to the importance of relationships—knowing what’s going on and who to call. 3. Practice We do a table top every year for a data incident. I’ve heard people say table tops are too expensive—we make up our own. Security and privacy get together and create a two- or three-hour game. One year it’ll be a supply chain issue, another year it’ll be a data event. We invite decision-makers from across the organization so that people then have a sense of what it feels like to make decisions without full information and to have to do so under a lot of pressure. People appreciate not just how hard these decisions are, but they know who the other people are, and the issues that they’re confronted with. The companies that have the most confident response are the ones where everybody knows their roles—not some giant team of people who have never worked together. When you have complete clarity of purpose, focus and leadership, you can get anything done.
Researchers urge: Learn from (someone else’s) experience
Measuring your performance as a business is critical. If you want to grow and be successful, you need to understand what you do well—and not so well. To paraphrase a couple of old adages, we all learn from our mistakes and our experience. But in today’s bumpy and fast-changing business landscape, measuring performance can be tough; tougher still if yours is a complex organization or industry. Whatever you’re looking at to gauge your firm’s performance—whether it’s customer satisfaction, say, or repeat purchases—your measures might well be less than perfect. And that’s because of noise—abstruse or unreliable data that makes it hard to unpack key metrics accurately and to learn from them. How successful a firm is in negotiating this performance measure noise depends on how that firm learns, said Kristy Towry, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting at Goizueta Business School. She has led a study that looks at the way organizations and the people in them manage their learning. And she finds that we’re way more adept at cutting through the noise when we learn from each other, rather than basing our learning on our own firsthand experience. What the study found: What Towry and her colleagues found was that when there’s a lot of noise in the data we’re working with, our strategic learning is considerably improved when our learning is vicarious—that’s to say, when we learn from each other. This is down to how much of the big picture we see, said Towry. And experiential learning can make us myopic. “We know from psychology and from the results of this study that experiential learning—basing what we learn mainly off our own firsthand experience—can limit us. Experience tends to make us over-focus on what is happening in the here and now or what has just happened. We forget what happened before and don’t build that into our decision-making.” Vicarious learning, on the other hand, helps us to see the bigger picture. “When we’re learning from each other, it’s also experiential, but the learning is augmented by other people’s experience, meaning that we have a broadened perspective," said Towry. "We’re better able to see the big-picture patterns and trends.” When there’s a lot of noise and complexity to negotiate, vicarious learning helps us make better decisions. And this has huge implications for businesses operating in today’s environment. “Our world is not cut and dried at the best of times. Right now we are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and the fallout on world economies and trade. The business context for most firms operating in this context is very far from stable, so we can assume there’s a lot of complexity and noise affecting our performance indicators. And with so much change afoot, the experiences we are all having in the workplace are what I would call fairly idiosyncratic,” said Towry. “Business leaders should be very aware of this.” To optimize strategic learning and thrive in complexity, firms need to find ways to allow vicarious learning to happen, she said. That means thinking about how to break down barriers to knowledge sharing, be they organizational silos or emerging challenges associated with things like remote working. Sharing information, insight, and understanding is essential. Kristy L. Towry is John and Lucy Cook Chair and Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. To learn more about this research or to talk with Kristy – simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
Businesses must have a strategy for a messy tomorrow
John Kim is a Senior Lecturer in Organization & Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He is a management consultant with more than 20 years of experience working with executives to make difficult decisions and implement sustainable change. Recently, John published a piece that details a ‘Strategy for a messy tomorrow’ where he outlines how businesses must have a strategy development and implementation for an unpredictable business world. The piece is attached and a must read, especially in these turbulent and unpredictable economic times. In the article, he focuses on three key points: 1.Beware of False Choices “One thing we try to teach here at the business school is to be careful of false choices. Business is incredibly dynamic. Every industry is now a technology business, and the corporate playbook that evolved to protect profits is quite outdated.” Kim notes that Thomas Friedman poetically described this new normal in his 2005 book The World is Flat, and over the last 15 years, competition has only accelerated because of the explosion of two resources: cheap money and data. Kim notes that it’s a great environment to start or fund a business because interest rates have been low for the last 10+ years. There are dozens of new entrants in all industries, and all parts of the value chain, who are often well-funded, flexible, and are not weighed down by legacy business models and assets. The big winners are the customers who have increasing choice, lower prices, and great value capture. 2.The Challenging Environment From his corporate experience, Kim sees two significant challenges to strategy implementation. First, senior leaders turn over quickly. “It’s hard to have consistency of vision and leadership and implementation when there is such a movement in the C-suite with someone moving in and someone moving out every 5–6 months. So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of strategies either don’t follow through or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and strategy gets a little bit muddled as a result.” Secondly, when the strategy does eventually make it to the ground-floor and needs to be executed, things have often moved on, and the market responses are rarely the ones you expect. Riffing on Peter Drucker’s famous quote on uncertainty, Kim explains to his students that, “Instead of trying to think of something brilliant to do tomorrow, why don’t you think of something very actionable today that prepares us for what we know will be a totally messy, crazy, unpredictable tomorrow.” 3.A Business Executive’s Response The business executive’s job is to not only set the direction, build a climate of trust, and create the energy for change—but also to be willing to test the assumptions and constraints around a given problem. Increasingly the answers will lie outside of a given industry, and thus require leaders to be broader in their horizon-scanning and more open to alternative paths forward. If you are interested in learning more about why business do indeed need a a strategy for a messy tomorrow – the let us help. John Kim is available to speak regarding this topic – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
