Since offices shut down and so many people went home to work at the beginning of the pandemic, many have been worried about the extroverts. How would these individuals, who get their energy from being around others, cope with the isolation? How would t…
Should you change jobs, perhaps even careers? Few questions are more prevalent among ambitious professionals (with the possible exception of whether it’s time to change a romantic partner). Yet both questions are best answered by the old Faceboo…
If you’ve just founded a startup, you’re probably feeling that you’ve just made a huge mistake. Fortunately, this is probably not the case (at least not yet). One of the many problems with a crisis like our current one is that they…
Editor’s Note: Each week Maynard Webb, former CEO of LiveOps and the former COO of eBay, will offer candid, practical, and sometimes surprising advice to entrepreneurs and founders. To submit a question, write to Webb at dearfound…
For some of us, social media and digital content have been our saving graces during the pandemic—a critical way to stay in the know, keep connected, and maintain relationships. But they have their own stress-inducing downsides as well and can le…
Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable, and even amidst the extreme physical isolation of COVID-19 life, we’ve discovered that we can communicate effectively without face-to-face interactions, manage people and lead entire businesses from ou…
In 1991, at the age of 19, I came out to my parents. It took every ounce of energy I had to finally reconcile my inner truth, let alone the herculean effort to come forward and share this truth with my family. I was immediately disowned and left homele…
Bob Swan, CEO of Intel, knows that his participation in a monthly diversity executive committee meeting sends an important message to the chipmaker’s 110,000 employees. But that’s not why he does it.
“For me it’s very simple: In an effort to dramatically improve our performance, I try to engage on things that matter the most,” Swan told attendees of the Fast Company Innovation Festival. “And if I engage on them, others will engage on them because it is going to make us a stronger and better company.”
Intel in May announced ambitious diversity and inclusion targets, along with goals for sustainability and its supply chain, as part of its 2030 strategy. Much of that work falls to Barbara Whye, who also spoke at the Fast Company event. Whye is Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. She is also the corporate vice president of social impact and human resource.
Whye explained that Intel has been most successful in hitting its corporate social responsibility targets when it has integrated them into business operations. “Take diversity,” she said. “We tried to hire our way to success, but we found we couldn’t hire our way [to greater numbers of women and people of color] without addressing progression and retention.”
Whye and Swan both emphasized the need to measure and report progress around all its social responsibility goals. Last week Whye penned an article for Fast Company announcing plans to create a coalition of companies that would produce a global inclusion index to track progress in areas such as numbers of women and underrepresented groups in senior roles and equal pay.
Asked if shareholders had pushed back on the idea of the CEO devoting much of his time to human resources issues, Swan pointed to research suggesting that companies that invest in diversity and inclusion see their stock prices jump. “Our investors are asking, ‘Are you building the right teams, the right environment, the right culture, so that you can bring your purpose to life?’”
Swan added: “I would say over time the absence of these kinds of programs is going to be more of a problem in the eyes of an investor.”
The move to customer-centric thinking has generally been wonderful. For almost two decades, companies have turned to their customers to help call the shots, employing empathetic research to generate shelves of new products and services based on deep co…
When I talk to my friends who work at the big social networks, they always tell me they didn’t join for the money; they joined for the mission. Don’t get me wrong: Their paychecks are substantial. But they would have been substantial at A…
