Latest news with #BCGHendersonInstitute
Forbes
30-07-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Lessons From NASA: How Failure Begets Success
Organizations need to learn from failure, encourage constructive discussions, debates, and even ... More dissent, and move forward. Many organizations—and their leaders—don't recognize the value of trial and error. They want the Moon shot to succeed, perfectly, the first time. But as Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, our internal think tank, describes, embracing 'experimentation, fast learning, adaptation, and innovation,' especially on big 'super-projects,' can make long-term success more likely. NASA, which has been dealing since 1958 with the challenges and (sometimes) chaos of trying to put people and machines in space, can attest to that. Failure Is An Option, And Sometimes It's Necessary Few projects have been bigger than the early U.S. space program, sparked initially by the then Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch and then by President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to land U.S. astronauts on the Moon and safely return them to Earth. The U.S. space program encountered numerous setbacks and failures, both before and since the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing—most tragically, the Apollo 1 fire during a pre-launch test in 1967, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, each of which resulted in multiple fatalities. The ultimate test for any organization or team, however, is whether it is capable of analyzing the source (or sources) of such failures, correct the problem(s), and move forward. What isn't an option—and shouldn't be an option—is wallowing in failure. As Robert (Bob) Gibbs, NASA's Assistant Administrator for mission support until his recent retirement, told me recently, whether an organization benefits from failure, or gets dragged down by it, largely depends on how its leadership reacts to setbacks. NASA, Moon Shots, Potholes, And Mars Today's space commercialization and exploration programs are driven by increasing collaboration between government and the private sector. These missions not only aim to return to the Moon, but to go far beyond. The science and technology are challenging and the missions unforgiving. Errors and failed attempts go with the territory. That means the road to success likely will have any number of dead ends, detours, and potholes—a familiar path SpaceX seems to be following with its super-sized, 400-foot- tall Starship rocket, designed to support interplanetary travel. First stop: Mars. At this writing there have now been nine Starship tests, several of them explosive failures. Every failure, however, produces valuable information and insights, bringing the team closer to success. How You React To Failure Is Key According to Gibbs, who also served as the U.S. space agency's chief human capital officer during his tenure there, organizations can react to setbacks in one of two ways. One common approach is the 'kill the messenger' approach, he told me. That's when leaders 'make it absolutely clear that failure is not acceptable, and ensure those associated with it don't advance and are seen to 'pay a price'.' This approach effectively kills discussion about what went wrong and guarantees that your team will become even more risk averse, he stressed. Yet, this is the way many leaders respond to adversity—probably because it's hard for many leaders, for both personal and financial reasons, to be open about failure. The alternative is to learn from failure, encourage constructive discussions, debates, and even dissent, and move forward. This is the approach that NASA has embraced, Gibbs says. It's how engagement and innovation thrive and learning from failure becomes part of the culture. One way an organization can demonstrate this principle is to talk candidly about failures. According to Gibbs, NASA does this through its publicly available lessons learned system. To evaluate whether your organization truly embraces failure as part of its learning process, Gibbs suggests that you take the test below. If you answered yes to all of Gibbs's questions--which come from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and are included in NASA's Lessons Learned Information System--you have created an environment where employees can fail, learn, innovate and move forward, an environment for success. One of the most-often repeated quotes about one of the world's most-impactful inventors is Thomas Edison's alleged description of his serial failures on what became known as the light bulb. 'I have not failed,' he reportedly said. 'I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.' The rest is history.
Bloomberg
22-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Unpacking Geopolitics Behind the AI Race
AI regulation needs a global approach, according to Nikolaus Lang, managing director and senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and global leader of the BCG Henderson Institute. He discusses the geopolitics of AI with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on 'Bloomberg Tech.' (Source: Bloomberg)
Fast Company
07-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How to keep a workplace functioning the in the face of layoffs
A surge in layoffs during the first half of 2025 has neared record-breaking pace, with March's total alone the third highest number of single-month layoffs in history, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That total was eclipsed only by April 2020 and May 2020 during the pandemic. The 696,309 layoffs announced through May of 2025 represent an increase of 80% over the first five months of last year and are just 65,000 short of matching 2024's total layoff numbers. The reasons for these enormous numbers are multifaceted, ranging from staffing and funding cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and their ramifications to companies leaning in to automation and artificial intelligence to sluggish sales. And while the reasons may vary, business realities remain the same, even in the midst of layoffs. How can companies making cuts also keep the employees who remain productive —and retain top talent? 'The best people have other opportunities elsewhere and who wants to be on an unstable ship, right? So that's exactly the right question,' says Deborah Lovich, a Future of Work fellow at BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group's think tank. Show compassion Lovich says that, throughout the layoffs, it's important to 'treat people who depart with dignity, humanity, support.' In addition to being the right thing to do, they may become customers or partners in the future. Finally, doing so sends a signal to those who remain. 'How you treat people in hard times is what the soul of the company is,' she says. Allison Vaillancourt, a vice president in the Organizational Effectiveness Practice at HR & benefits consultancy Segal, adds: 'Demonstrate compassion during the layoff process: People want to be part of an organization they feel good about, and they will be looking for evidence that others are being treated as kindly as possible during this difficult time.' Address the aftermath Lovich says that, as your team plans what happens after the layoffs, use the opportunity to 'add employee enjoyment of work into the criteria for reshaping the workplace.' It's a good time to streamline processes and focus on adding more of what employees enjoy in their work. Carolyn Troyan, president and CEO of HR consulting firm Leadership 360, says it's important to allow for a 'grieving period,' but to also begin addressing concerns about redesigned workflow and other issues. 'That's usually the first thing I hear from employees: 'They're just going to lay people off, and I'm going to have to take all this extra work. How am I really going to do that?'' Leaders need to ensure that their high performers know that they can come forward if they have concerns—especially when no one wants to come forward and admit that they can't do all of the work left after their teammates have been let go. Spot engagement surveys can help managers spot friction points that may indicate high-performers and other employees are unhappy. Troyan also says managers may want to look at redesigning physical space so empty workstations aren't a constant reminder of missing former co-workers. Be responsibly transparent Troyan says that it's a good idea to be transparent about the layoffs and the current employees' role in the company going forward to help them feel secure in their future roles. Managers may want to share their vision for the future, including potential career paths for high performers. Amy Mosher, chief people officer at Isolved, a provider of human capital management solutions, adds that it's important to help employees understand why they're happening. 'There are reasons why we have to make these decisions,' she says, and helping employees put them in context and realize that the decisions weren't made capriciously may not make them easier, but may help calm the concerns of the employees you wish to retain. Communicate in as many way as possible The methods by which layoffs are communicated will vary by company and situation—and larger companies may be required to give advance notice in the case of mass layoffs —but Mosher says some companies may simply send out a mass email or other communication after the fact to answer basic questions. But the communication that matters when trying to retain top performers comes from individuals, she says. She recommends 'deputizing' everyone who works in a leadership capacity in the organization to participate in keeping top performers engaged. 'Whether they're a supervisor or not, you have a lot of leaders in your organization,' Mosher says. 'Make sure that you've identified who those people are and deputize them so that they understand the why and they feel comfortable articulating it.' Make sure you involve the behind-the-scenes leaders—the administrative worker who has all of the answers or the gregarious IT worker who is the go-to person for computer issues. Engage those leaders and ensure they understand the reasons for the decisions. '[Make sure they] understand what's going on here, so that [they] can articulate it to other people at the water cooler,' she says. Identify your best people—and their managers It's a good idea to have regular discussions, perhaps quarterly, about your top talent so your management team is aware of the organization's high performers, says Troyan. 'Having some of those talent conversations as part of your operating model, you're just ready to go and have the list,' she says. However, if you don't have that list, it's a good idea to connect with your various departments and have them identify their top team members so the company can work on keeping them, she says. And one of the first things you should do with those top performers is offer reassurance, says Vaillancourt. 'Let top performers know they are highly valued and have a future with the company.' Consider offering retention bonuses to ensure your top performers know you are serious about wanting them to stay, she adds. She also advised considering the potential downsides of voluntary separation incentive programs, as they can be more attractive to top performers than to the individuals a company would like to release. Top performers may think, 'I can go anywhere, so let me get some money.' If organizations are not careful, these programs can deplete top talent.
Mint
16-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
If You Can ‘Like' Everything, Do You Value Anything?
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the early 2000s, software developers at several different internet startups more or less independently came up with ways for users to express approval (and in some cases disapproval) with minimal effort and — a big deal in those days of slow internet connections — without having to reload the page. At news aggregator every 'digg' or 'bury' helped determine which articles would be featured and which would not. Online community similarly used upvotes and downvotes, as well as a 'cool' button labeled 'C!' Blog platform Xanga had an 'eProps' button that allowed readers who didn't want to leave a comment to at least acknowledge that they appreciated a post. Review site Yelp Inc. aimed to reward users for reviewing restaurants and other businesses by having readers label the reviews 'useful,' 'funny' or 'cool.' Video purveyor Vimeo Inc. set out to emulate Digg, but as a company executive later told Fortune, 'we didn't want to call it 'Diggs,' so we came up with 'Likes.'' The Vimeo 'Like' button was introduced in November 2005. Facebook, after a year and a half of pushback from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, debuted its thumbs-up 'like' symbol in February 2009, catapulting the concept from social media experiment to mainstream ubiquity. Since then, according to estimates from the BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group's in-house think tank, people worldwide have clicked or pressed 'like' in some form more than 300 trillion times. This chart and the story told above are borrowed from Like: The Button That Changed the World, a new book from BCG Henderson Institute Chairman Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson, currently the CEO of artificial intelligence company Quid Inc. and, in September 2004, employee No. 1 at Yelp. While packing for a move, Goodson stumbled across a sketch he had made in May 2005 of thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols for use with Yelp reviews — not the approach the company chose, but a sign of what was to come. He showed it to his friend Reeves, and this book is the result. My initial impression upon seeing the title was that it was about just the Facebook thumbs-up, and I wondered whether that justified an entire book. In fact, Reeves and Goodson's account encompasses hearts, checkmarks and every other single-touch method of signaling approval or at least acknowledgment online and manages to combine journalistic details and consulting-firm frameworks in charmingly enlightening fashion.(1) Along the way it raises many questions about what the like button has meant for the world, some of which it answers. Much of the power of digital liking, Reeves explained when I talked to him about the book, lies in how it blends two key drivers of human social behavior, signaling simultaneously that: This combination helped supercharge the rise of advertising on social media, as likes enabled advertisers both to get instant feedback and to segment audiences in ways that hadn't been possible before. It also helped fry lots of social media users' brains by subjecting them to endlessly recurring popularity contests that often rewarded the most extreme and outrageous online behavior. I use the qualifier 'helped' because it's clearly not just the 'like' button that did these things. Also crucial were the ability to share social media posts or videos and to see how often they'd been shared or viewed. Advertisers now often favor measures of online engagement and behavior that are more nuanced and harder to fake than likes. But it all started with liking. As I contemplate my own use of thumbs-ups and hearts and other such low-effort interactions, I worry that their very ease of use is chipping away at the ties that bind me with others. Again, this is a broader phenomenon than just the like button. Facebook and LinkedIn have made it easier than ever to stay in touch with old friends and colleagues, but their rise has coincided with a sharp decline in how many close friends Americans say they have. For more than a decade now I have been at least vaguely aware of what almost everyone I've ever known is up to, and have signaled my approval of countless meals, children's accomplishments and dog photos. But all this seems to have translated into less real-world contact, not more. There's a small but growing behavioral-science literature emphasizing the value of effort, which had previously been seen only as a cost to be avoided. 'While it is clear that people will work hard to obtain something of value, what has been largely overlooked is the notion that working hard can also make those same things more valuable,' psychologists Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav and Christopher Y. Olivola wrote in a 2018 summary of recent research in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. 'Effort can even be experienced as valuable or rewarding in its own right.' The ability to click on a thumbs-up or some other symbol of acknowledgment or approval is of a piece with many other recent innovations that remove friction and effort from interactions online and transactions online and off. I'm not going to deny that most of these innovations are useful. But without actual friction, the physical world would be pretty much impossible to navigate, and I suspect that may be the case with metaphorical friction as well. More From Bloomberg Opinion: (1) It is published by the Harvard Business Review Press, of which I was the editorial director more than a decade ago. I don't think this affected my opinion of the book but figured I should at least mention it. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of 'The Myth of the Rational Market.' More stories like this are available on
