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What Data Scientists Really Do, According to 35 Data Scientists

burakpekakcan/Getty Images Modern data science emerged in tech, from optimizing Google search rankings and LinkedIn recommendations to influencing the headlines Buzzfeed editors run. But it’s poised to transform all sectors, from retail, telecommunications, and agriculture to health, trucking, and the penal system. Yet the terms “data science” and “data scientist” aren’t always easily understood, and are […]

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Whether a Husband Identifies as a Breadwinner Depends on Whether He Respects His Wife’s Career — Not on How Much She Earns

Harry Haysom/Getty Images Professional careers are notorious for demanding that people be single-mindedly devoted to work. It’s a demand that is often especially acute for men, who face rigid expectations that being a successful man requires having a successful career, and that “success” means power and money. Men have traditionally satisfied these expectations by taking […]

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Whether a Husband Identifies as a Breadwinner Depends on Whether He Respects His Wife’s Career — Not on How Much She Earns

Harry Haysom/Getty Images Professional careers are notorious for demanding that people be single-mindedly devoted to work. It’s a demand that is often especially acute for men, who face rigid expectations that being a successful man requires having a successful career, and that “success” means power and money. Men have traditionally satisfied these expectations by taking […]

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Whether a Husband Identifies as a Breadwinner Depends on Whether He Respects His Wife’s Career — Not on How Much She Earns

Harry Haysom/Getty Images Professional careers are notorious for demanding that people be single-mindedly devoted to work. It’s a demand that is often especially acute for men, who face rigid expectations that being a successful man requires having a successful career, and that “success” means power and money. Men have traditionally satisfied these expectations by taking […]

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Whether a Husband Identifies as a Breadwinner Depends on Whether He Respects His Wife’s Career — Not on How Much She Earns

Harry Haysom/Getty Images Professional careers are notorious for demanding that people be single-mindedly devoted to work. It’s a demand that is often especially acute for men, who face rigid expectations that being a successful man requires having a successful career, and that “success” means power and money. Men have traditionally satisfied these expectations by taking […]

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Designing AI to Make Decisions

Kathryn Hume, VP of integrate.ai, discusses the current boundaries between artificially intelligent machines, and humans. While the power of A.I. can conjure up some of our darkest fears, she says the reality is that there is still a whole lot that A.I. can’t do. So far, A.I. is able to accomplish some tasks that humans […]

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Networking Myths Dispelled

David Burkus, a professor at Oral Roberts University and author of the book Friend of a Friend, explains common misconceptions about networking. First, trading business cards at a networking event doesn’t mean you’re a phony. Second, your most valuable contacts are actually the people you already know. Burkus says some of the most useful networking […]

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Why Western Digital Firms Have Failed in China

Paper Boat Creative/Getty Images Many leading American digital firms, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Uber, have successfully expanded internationally by introducing their products, services, and platforms in other countries. However, they have all failed in China, the world’s largest digital market. The widely touted reasons for these failures include censorship by the Chinese government and […]

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The Best Way for Netflix to Keep Growing

jakob owens/unsplash Netflix has a lot to gain by becoming a multisided platform. Currently, Netflix is in the business of buying or making content, which it sells consumers access to at prices and on terms it fully controls (a monthly subscription). That’s unlike a platform such as YouTube, which enables myriad content providers to sell directly to […]

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The Best Way for Netflix to Keep Growing

jakob owens/unsplash Netflix has a lot to gain by becoming a multisided platform. Currently, Netflix is in the business of buying or making content, which it sells consumers access to at prices and on terms it fully controls (a monthly subscription). That’s unlike a platform such as YouTube, which enables myriad content providers to sell directly to […]

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The Best Way for Netflix to Keep Growing

jakob owens/unsplash Netflix has a lot to gain by becoming a multisided platform. Currently, Netflix is in the business of buying or making content, which it sells consumers access to at prices and on terms it fully controls (a monthly subscription). That’s unlike a platform such as YouTube, which enables myriad content providers to sell directly to […]

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The Best Way for Netflix to Keep Growing

jakob owens/unsplash Netflix has a lot to gain by becoming a multisided platform. Currently, Netflix is in the business of buying or making content, which it sells consumers access to at prices and on terms it fully controls (a monthly subscription). That’s unlike a platform such as YouTube, which enables myriad content providers to sell directly to […]

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Build Self-Awareness with Help from Your Team

Doug Perrine/Nature Picture Library/Getty Images There are lots of compelling reasons to build a better team. Great teams deliver stronger results, faster. They’re more innovative. They challenge you to learn more quickly and to be at your best.  And, let’s face it — they’re simply more fun to work with. Recently, I found a new […]

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There’s Only One Way to Break into China’s Crowded Retail Market

Martin Barraud/Getty Images China’s two retailing powerhouses, online commerce pioneer Alibaba and social media-gaming pioneer Tencent, have systematically established a duopoly of record proportions in record time. Combined, they have spent more than $20 billion in the past 12 months alone to change the way people in China shop. (The precise value of their investments […]

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How Self-Care Became So Much Work

mark ralston/Getty Images The United States is no stranger to self-improvement, from the meditation and essential oils of the 60s to the Jane Fonda aerobics tapes of the 1980s and the fat-free-everything 1990s. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841, sounding a bit like a modern SoulCycle instructor. From […]

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How B2B Software Vendors Can Help Their Customers Benchmark

Gillian Blease/Getty Images Knowing which organizations perform the best on any particular dimension used to require subjective surveys or painstaking research. Today, the data to answer those questions exists — it’s captured by the software-as-a-service firms whose services companies use to run their businesses. Mainstream software companies are beginning to hold “data mirrors” up to […]

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New Supply Chain Jobs Are Emerging as AI Takes Hold

alashi/Getty Images Companies are cutting supply chain complexity and accelerating responsiveness using the tools of artificial intelligence. Through AI, machine learning, robotics, and advanced analytics, firms are augmenting knowledge-intensive areas such as supply chain planning, customer order management, and inventory tracking. What does that mean for the supply chain workforce? It does not mean human workers will […]

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What the Best Nonprofits Know About Strategy

William Andrew/Getty Images After years of working in tech startups, which strive to transform underdog status into competitive advantage, I dove into the nonprofit world. The contrast was striking: Too few nonprofits use the advantages of their nonprofit status. In doing so, they miss out on a huge opportunity. The nonprofit model has a strategic edge beyond tax […]

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The Risks and Benefits of Using AI to Detect Crime

Patrick George/Getty Images Companies are using AI to prevent and detect everything from routine employee theft to insider trading. Many banks and large corporations employ artificial intelligence to detect and prevent fraud and money laundering. Social media companies use machine learning to block illicit content such as child pornography. Businesses are constantly experimenting with new […]

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Poor Communicators

Is miscommunication a constant problem at your workplace? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Holly Weeks, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Failure to Communicate. They talk through what to do when […]

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Research: Business School Really Does Influence How Students Make Decisions Later On

Andy Roberts/Getty Images The overarching goal of most business schools is to train future leaders to lead. But how well schools meet this goal, and to what extent their teaching influences their students’ leadership, is an open question. Does business school education really shape students’ minds and behaviors many years later, when they’ve reached decision-making […]

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Why the World Needs Doctors with These 3 Qualities

David Leahy/Getty Images Doctors are sometimes blamed for the ills of the U.S. health care system, but our five-year research project in India and the U.S. revealed the opposite. Almost every high-performing health care organization we studied was led by a medical professional (something that academic research has also found). What we found, while collecting case studies for […]

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Why Opening Up at Work Is Harder for Minorities

Katherine Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School, discusses research showing that African-Americans are often reluctant to tell their white colleagues about their personal lives — and that it hurts their careers. She says people should expect and welcome differences at work, and she gives practical advice for strengthening connections among colleagues of different racial […]

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How New Technologies Could Transform Africa’s Health Care System

KATERYNA/KONSCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images In early June, at the invitation of the European Commission to Brussels (Belgium), I toured some fascinating AI and blockchain-based projects, which the Commission is funding. Across industrial sectors, from healthcare to energy, from construction to retail, engineers are creating new technologies with potentially disruptive implications for the current architectural order […]

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How to Earn a Reputation as a Fair Manager

SuperStock/Getty Images At some point in your career, you likely encountered a manager you believed was unfair. You probably thought to yourself, “When I’m a manager, I’m never going to be like that!” Now that you’ve been promoted to a management position, you’re probably dedicating significant amounts of time and energy to making unbiased decisions, […]

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A Blueprint for Digital Companies’ Financial Reporting

Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images On July 25, 2018, Facebook lost market capitalization of more than $100 billion in just two hours of trading after it announced its quarterly performance, despite exceeding analysts’ earnings forecasts. What caused this slump? It failed to meet its revenue and subscriber growth targets. This example illustrates that investors consider information beyond just […]

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The Right Way to Spend Your Innovation Budget

Walker and Walker/Getty Images Innovation is famously difficult — many projects end up losing money, frustrating employees, and going nowhere. And yet corporations and governments spend billions of dollars annually pursuing innovation. This huge spending would generate more value for businesses and societies if the innovation success rate were just a little higher. Is there a […]

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The Right Way to Spend Your Innovation Budget

Walker and Walker/Getty Images Innovation is famously difficult — many projects end up losing money, frustrating employees, and going nowhere. And yet corporations and governments spend billions of dollars annually pursuing innovation. This huge spending would generate more value for businesses and societies if the innovation success rate were just a little higher. Is there a […]

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The Right Way to Spend Your Innovation Budget

Walker and Walker/Getty Images Innovation is famously difficult — many projects end up losing money, frustrating employees, and going nowhere. And yet corporations and governments spend billions of dollars annually pursuing innovation. This huge spending would generate more value for businesses and societies if the innovation success rate were just a little higher. Is there a […]

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The Right Way to Spend Your Innovation Budget

Walker and Walker/Getty Images Innovation is famously difficult — many projects end up losing money, frustrating employees, and going nowhere. And yet corporations and governments spend billions of dollars annually pursuing innovation. This huge spending would generate more value for businesses and societies if the innovation success rate were just a little higher. Is there a […]

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The Right Way to Spend Your Innovation Budget

Walker and Walker/Getty Images Innovation is famously difficult — many projects end up losing money, frustrating employees, and going nowhere. And yet corporations and governments spend billions of dollars annually pursuing innovation. This huge spending would generate more value for businesses and societies if the innovation success rate were just a little higher. Is there a […]

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How to Beat Mid-Career Malaise

Lynn Koenig/Getty Images We all have times when we wonder, “Am I at the right company? Am I in the right job? And is this all there is?” These questions are especially agonizing for mid-career professionals who may be searching for fulfillment while juggling demands at home and intense financial pressures to earn. How should you address a mid-career crisis? What actions […]

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How to Beat Mid-Career Malaise

Lynn Koenig/Getty Images We all have times when we wonder, “Am I at the right company? Am I in the right job? And is this all there is?” These questions are especially agonizing for mid-career professionals who may be searching for fulfillment while juggling demands at home and intense financial pressures to earn. How should you address a mid-career crisis? What actions […]

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Make “Fairness by Design” Part of Machine Learning

dlanor s./unsplash Machine learning is increasingly being used to predict individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and preferences across an array of applications — from personalized marketing to precision medicine. Unsurprisingly, given the speed of change and ever-increasing complexity, there have been several recent high-profile examples of “machine learning gone wrong.” A chatbot trained using Twitter was shut down after […]

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Make “Fairness by Design” Part of Machine Learning

dlanor s./unsplash Machine learning is increasingly being used to predict individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and preferences across an array of applications — from personalized marketing to precision medicine. Unsurprisingly, given the speed of change and ever-increasing complexity, there have been several recent high-profile examples of “machine learning gone wrong.” A chatbot trained using Twitter was shut down after […]

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Make “Fairness by Design” Part of Machine Learning

dlanor s./unsplash Machine learning is increasingly being used to predict individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and preferences across an array of applications — from personalized marketing to precision medicine. Unsurprisingly, given the speed of change and ever-increasing complexity, there have been several recent high-profile examples of “machine learning gone wrong.” A chatbot trained using Twitter was shut down after […]

 | 

Make “Fairness by Design” Part of Machine Learning

dlanor s./unsplash Machine learning is increasingly being used to predict individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and preferences across an array of applications — from personalized marketing to precision medicine. Unsurprisingly, given the speed of change and ever-increasing complexity, there have been several recent high-profile examples of “machine learning gone wrong.” A chatbot trained using Twitter was shut down after […]

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Learning from GE’s Stumbles

Roger Martin, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, offers two main reasons General Electric has lost its competitiveness. GE’s stock has been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Martin blames pressures from activist investors as well as a short-sighted mergers and acquisitions strategy. He’s the author of “GE’s Fall […]

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How Managers Can Prevent Their Teams from Burning Out

Kenny Williamson/Getty Images No organization wants to burn out its employees. And yet, according to new research, companies’ efforts to prevent prolonged stress among their staffs are falling short. When Deloitte recently surveyed 1,000 full-time employees in the United States, we found that that 77% had experienced burnout at their current jobs, and more than […]

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Landing Amazon HQ2 Isn’t the Right Way for a City to Create Jobs. Here’s What Works Instead

Melissa Ross/Getty Images Amazon’s highly visible search for a second headquarters has offered one tremendous public benefit: it has raised public awareness of what bad economic development is. Even Saturday Night Live satirized the lengths to which local officials will go to woo a major company, which include offering massive amounts of taxpayer subsidies, despite […]

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3 Ways AI Is Getting More Emotional

Wunderfool/Getty Images In January of 2018, Annette Zimmermann, vice president of research at Gartner, proclaimed: “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” Just two months later, a landmark study from the University of Ohio claimed that their algorithm was now better at detecting emotions than people […]

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3 Ways AI Is Getting More Emotional

Wunderfool/Getty Images In January of 2018, Annette Zimmermann, vice president of research at Gartner, proclaimed: “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” Just two months later, a landmark study from the University of Ohio claimed that their algorithm was now better at detecting emotions than people […]

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3 Ways AI Is Getting More Emotional

Wunderfool/Getty Images In January of 2018, Annette Zimmermann, vice president of research at Gartner, proclaimed: “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” Just two months later, a landmark study from the University of Ohio claimed that their algorithm was now better at detecting emotions than people […]

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3 Ways AI Is Getting More Emotional

Wunderfool/Getty Images In January of 2018, Annette Zimmermann, vice president of research at Gartner, proclaimed: “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” Just two months later, a landmark study from the University of Ohio claimed that their algorithm was now better at detecting emotions than people […]

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“Lean In” Messages and the Illusion of Control

Shana Novak/Getty Images In a world in which men dominate leadership roles, should we focus on changing the systems and structures that favor men at women’s expense? Or should we emphasize the tactics individual women can use to get ahead? Our research explored this question. The first message, that it’s processes and organizations that need […]