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BOSTON — MARCH 15, 2023 — Whether you’re a seasoned global CEO analyzing new ways of delivering long-term value for your company or an ambitious, newly minted manager, odds are high that you’re evaluating the role business might play in making meaningful societal impact. That’s why Harvard Business School (HBS) last year established the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society (BiGS) and why today we are introducing The BiGS Fix: Actionable Intelligence to Drive the Next Generation of Capitalism.

In The BiGS Fix, we will share a free and regular flow of ideas from Harvard’s community in accessible, relevant, streamlined, and shareable formats. We want you to come here to learn about exclusive or recent HBS research around issues where business and society overlap -- and occasionally collide -- such as climate change, inequality, and challenges to democracy.

You can also expect exclusive commentary and Q&As from seminars or convenings, which often feature global leaders. We will also tip you off to compelling Harvard Business Review and Working Knowledge articles that you may have missed. Ultimately, we hope you will read The BiGS Fix while drinking your morning coffee and that you will share its actionable intel with your colleagues and industry networks.

Public face of BiGS

For now, this is the most public face of BiGS, the research institute launched by HBS Dean Srikant Datar and HBS Professor Debora Spar during a live-streamed conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last year. “BiGS strives to explore how capitalism is functioning in the 21st Century, to engage with the challenges and understand its strengths, and to articulate how business might make it better,” Datar said. And as BiGS Director Drew Keller notes, research can be groundbreaking, but can quickly become irrelevant if the people best positioned to use it don’t know it exists.

And that’s why we want to be transparent about our ambitious goal.

By sharing our research in unconventional ways, we aim to accelerate the time it traditionally has taken for research to affect practice and ultimately scale positive change. The stakes arguably have never been higher, which makes your job more challenging than ever. We know you need the best information you can find to influence the next generation of capitalism and we want to help.

Editor’s lens

As editor and occasional writer, I will leverage my experience as both a national business journalist and a corporate communications leader who has supported Fortune 300 C-Suite leadership to offer you important insights from world-class sources. I’ve both chronicled and witnessed transitional and transformational behavior and have experienced how hard it can be for changemakers inside multinational corporations to break the status quo -- in fact, that’s why I joined BiGS. I believe rigorous, evidence-based scholarship can lead to business outcomes that can be better for people and our planet.

Our writing style will at times be part journalistic, part strategic corporate communications, part helpful and part teaser to keep you coming back for more as you strive to balance profit, people, and planet.

What to expect in the coming months

Speaking of teasers, here’s a sneak peek at a few topics we’ll explore for you in coming issues:

  • Do conventional corporate diversity training programs really work?
  • Is your marketing program built on racist coding?
  • Can banks really help decarbonize the world by yanking loans to coal companies?
  • What did Covid teach us about Big Pharma’s pricing model?

We’ll also queue up world-class research on new accounting frameworks invented at HBS and new business models for Big Pharma being used in the real world that can help save lives.

Along the way, we’ll point you in the direction of more smart content such as:

  • HBS podcasts that represent the BiGS mission. We currently have three under this umbrella: Climate Rising by HBS Professor Mike Toffel; Deep Purpose by HBS Professor Ranjay Gulati, and The Future of Work by HBS Professor Joe Fuller and HBS Professor Bill Kerr. Expect exclusive Q&As with the professors behind them.
  • New YouTube series. Later this month, we will debut our video series featuring our world-class professors and fellows, starting with HBS Professor Peter Tufano sharing his latest research on ways businesses can best address climate change.

We want to hear from you

If you’re familiar with HBS’s storied case method, then you know that we pride ourselves on asking the right questions. But I’m sure you will have questions, too, so please reach out to ask questions or share ideas and comments. You can reach me at bdelollis@hbs.edu or on LinkedIn.