ABOUT AFTER HOURS:Listen in as Harvard Business School faculty discuss hot topics at the intersection of business and society. In this final episode of the season, Youngme Moon, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Mihir Desai discuss the stories they’ll be watching this summer, including how businesses will re-open. They also offer an extended set of recommendations for watching, reading, and other projects during the summer months. ABOUT CLIMATE RISING:Business and policy leaders join Harvard Business School faculty to discuss what businesses are doing, can do, and should do to confront climate change. Explore different approaches to modeling and managing climate risk from the vantage points of industry leaders Robert Litterman, a seasoned risk management expert; Nushin Kormi, a specialist in sustainable finance; and Kevin Stiroh, a financial regulator. The discussion, moderated by Professor Ramana Nanda, focuses on the concept of transition risk—the potential consequences if climate regulations are imposed gradually or suddenly—and investment strategies to prepare for and mitigate this risk. This is one of 4 new episodes this summer based on live content from the Harvard Business School Climate Risk conference held earlier in 2020. ABOUT COLD CALL:Cold Call distills Harvard Business School’s legendary case studies into podcast form. Hosted by Brian Kenny, the podcast airs every two weeks and features faculty discussing cases they’ve written and the lessons they impart. Not many Chinese companies open manufacturing facilities in the U.S., but automotive glass maker Fuyao is considering just that. Harvard Business School professor Willy Shih examines the factors that go into deciding where companies should locate production facilities. The case, “Fuyao Glass America: Sourcing Decision,” focuses on the world’s second largest automotive glass producer as it expands from China into the U.S. and explores a core question facing managers who want to produce physical products for world markets. To meet a very aggressive cost target, management is faced with two options: fulfilling its contract with its new Ohio factory or its factory based out of Tianjin, China. Unlike the Ohio factory, the Chinese factory produces below the cost target, but it also incurs extensive shipping costs and requires a far greater amount of inventory holding. ABOUT MANAGING THE FUTURE OF WORK:Harvard Business School Professors Bill Kerr and Joe Fuller talk to leaders grappling with the forces reshaping the nature of work. Amazon in the summer of 2019 announced a sweeping five-year plan to bolster the skills of a third of its US workforce—close to 100,000 worker-learners. The plan includes apprenticeships, partnerships with local community colleges, and internal programs. As Amazon’s Vice President of Workforce Development, Ardine Williams, notes, the initiative isn’t philanthropy. She argues that Amazon’s investment in training workers—even if some ultimately leave for higher-paying jobs—makes good business sense. ABOUT SKYDECK:Skydeck features interviews with alumni from across the world of business, sharing lessons learned and their own life experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Era of Zoom has physically changed the way we work. But according to Rachel Greenwald (MBA 1993), some of the core tenets of interpersonal communication that were important in the office remain just as important in our new digital workspaces—we just need to adjust our techniques. Greenwald is a matchmaker, New York Times-bestselling author, and a business communication consultant, and in this episode of Skydeck, she tells contributor April White about the parallels between the business world and the dating world, the important difference between talking and connecting, and why this crisis has already fundamentally changed the way we communicate. |
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