Harvard Business Review – November/December 2024

November–December 2024

Harvard Business Review (October 22, 2024) – The latest issue features:

Why Employees Quit

New research points to some surprising answers. 

Summary.   

The so-called war for talent is still raging. But in that fight, employers continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades. Why? Because they’ve been so focused on challenges such as poaching by industry rivals, competing in tight labor markets, and responding to relentless cost-cutting pressures that they haven’t addressed a more fundamental problem: the widespread failure to provide sustainable work experiences. To stick around and give their best, people need meaningful work, managers and colleagues who value and trust them, and opportunities to advance in their careers, the authors say. By supporting employees in their individual quests for progress while also meeting the organization’s needs, managers can create employee experiences that are mutually beneficial and sustaining.

Personalization Done Right

The five dimensions to consider—and how AI can help

Summary.   

More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like.

Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024). Drawing on decades of work consulting on the personalization efforts of hundreds of large companies, they have built the defining metric to quantify personalization maturity: the Personalization Index. It is a single score from 0 to 100 that measures how well companies deliver on the five promises they implicitly make to customers when they personalize an interaction.

The authors argue that personalization will be the most exciting and most profitable outcome of the emerging AI boom. They describe how companies can use AI to create and continually refine personalized experiences at scale—empowering customers to get what they want faster, cheaper, or more easily. And they show readers how to assess their own business’s index score.

Design Products That Won’t Become Obsolete

News: U.S. Election Final Days, Putin Welcomes The BRICS Leaders To Russia

Monocle Radio Podcast (October 22, 2024): Vladimir Putin brings Brics leaders to Kazan, our US politics correspondent brings us the latest two weeks before the presidential election and we discuss King Charles’s testy visit to Australia. Plus: a check-in from San Francisco’s Urban Transformation Summit.

The New York Times — Tuesday, October 22, 2024

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Inside the Last-Ditch Hunt by Harris and Trump for Undecided Voters

Both campaigns are digging through troves of data to find these crucial Americans. They both think many are younger, Black or Latino. The Harris team is also eyeing white, college-educated women.

Harris Sets Record for Biggest Fund-Raising Quarter Ever

Donald Trump is raising less money than he did during his run in 2020, building a far smaller campaign than Kamala Harris.

As Harris Courts Sun Belt, Housing Costs Stand in Her Way

Shuttered factories and trade deals helped turn working-class Midwesterners against Democrats. Will the high cost of housing do the same in the Sun Belt?

Harris’s Faith, Inside and Outside the Black Church

Her biography embodies the multifaith, pluralistic and increasingly secular America she is bidding to lead.