September 2019

In 2014, CVS CEO Larry Merlo made the controversial decision to pull tobacco products from the store’s shelves. The decision immediately caused a 7% drop in stock price and cost the business $2 billion in revenues in the following year.

Yet, Merlo argued that this short-term sacrifice was necessary to promote CVS’s long-term competitiveness as the decision allowed the firm to position itself as a healthcare company, which would not be possible were the firm to continue selling tobacco products.

Carey and colleagues provide an account for how Merlo and the board of directors were able to promote and achieve a strategy that would cost shareholders in the short-term. First, Merlo had considerable discretion and autonomy as a CEO. Second, Merlo was able to convince the board to see the value of a long-term orientation, in part due to board members’ experiences on other boards facing similar decisions. Merlo and the board developed an approach, built on this understanding, for selling the firm’s strategy to investors and market analysts. The authors also document how other firms, including 3M and Verizon, made significant investments in R&D and innovation that paid off in the long run but at the expense of short-term gains.

Over the last several years, workers and firms have both come to place an increased premium on internal hiring and mobility. While it remains rare for workers to spend their entire career within the same organization, workers would prefer to advance their careers with their current employer, as internal moves are less risky, provide stability, and allow workers to take on more new responsibilities than other firms are willing to provide.

Organizations have come to realize that internal hires are both less expensive and more effective than external hires. As a result, nearly half of all open jobs are now filled internally, and that percentage is even higher as one moves closer to the C-suite.

In a recent study, I set out to better understand how jobs are filled internally. It turns out that the vast majority of internal hires are made through posting or slotting. Posting is a formal, market-oriented process in which a hiring manager posts an open job to an internal job board and invites interested internal candidates to apply.

What happens to disaster-affected communities once the nonprofit organizations (NGOs) and media circus fly off to the next disaster? Our recently published research on the work of returnee social entrepreneurs in Haiti addresses this important question.

Aside from the recent Oxfam scandal where aid workers exploited sex workers, Haiti’s progress in rebuilding since the devastating 2010 earthquake has been conspicuously absent from the news. Our research explores how longer-term disaster recovery and rebuilding actually takes shape.

Understanding the means by which communities can recover from disaster and build better, more resilient institutions (schools, physical infrastructure, workplaces, etc.) is a non-trivial matter. After most extreme natural hazards, communities struggle to cope with them and bounce back, often for years. This is partly because effective institutional support and organizing templates are frequently absent during the post-disaster recovery.

Our research shows that institutional workers, specifically social entrepreneurs, are key social actors that can fill the institutional voids and build community capacity.

Our spouses, our parents, and our children are often the first lines of defense against challenges in life. We lean on them as we navigate our first jobs or raise funds for a new home. We ask them for help when we fall ill. When their help is not enough, we turn to public safety nets provided by schools, hospitals, and government programs. However, these safety nets are grossly inadequate to catch the vulnerable. What is more, the family support system is threatened by growing divorce, single parenthood, and poor health among vulnerable populations.

Getting and staying married is becoming a phenomenon of the upper classes. People with less education and less income are increasingly opting to forgo marriage. Instead, they often enter parenthood alone or within cohabiting relationships that are unstable with few legal protections. The divorce rate, while on the decline for upper-class families, is still at a historical high among couples with the least education.

The Marikana massacre, in which 34 striking mineworkers were shot dead by police on 16 August 2012, was a tragic and historic event in South Africa. A judicial commission of inquiry set up to investigate how it came about put much of the blame on the police.

It was also critical of the mining company, Lonmin. In particular, the commission highlighted the company’s failure to live up to its promise to build 5,500 houses for workers. It only built three. This created a situation, according to the commission, in which “large numbers of Lonmin workers live in squalid informal settlements… creating an environment conducive to the creation of tension, labour unrest, disunity among its employees or other harmful conduct”.

Even a Lonmin executive conceded this link in one of the commission’s hearings.

But how was it possible for Lonmin to renege on its promise to build 5,500 houses? After all, this was a formal commitment made in terms of the Mining Charter of 2002 and thus legally binding.