Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2025 från Rotman Management

You have said that the new technologies of the 21st century can be used to create either heaven or hell — it depends on the choices we make. Please explain. The worst-case scenario is that AI will push hundreds of millions of people out of the job market and into a new ‘useless class.’ People will lose their economic worth and political power. At the same time, bioengineering will make it possible to upgrade a small elite into superhumans. Resistance to this superhuman elite would be almost impossible due to a total surveillance regime that constantly monitors not just what every individual does and says, but even what every individual feels and thinks. A related danger is that governments and corporations might acquire the ability to hack human beings —…

Complexity Fitness is a relatively simple concept that means being well-adapted to the complexity of your context. Increasingly this matters, because as humans, we are naturally fit for a more predictable world and, like it or not, much of what the world offers us is not predictable. As I work with clients, I find it helpful to remember that the resilience of any complex adaptive system — whether it be a country, a community or a company — depends on the existence and ongoing cultivation of three core qualities: fluidity, stability and connection. Let’s take a closer look at each. FLUIDITY: See and embrace the inherent complexity of the environment. One of the key things to remember about complexity is that, by definition, it is not controllable. That may seem…

IT IS UNDENIABLE THAT ONE of the most significant applications of AI lies in its potential to play a pivotal role in the accelerated fight against climate change, largely due to its ability to analyze and interpret large quantities of real-time data. For example, using machine learning (ML) algorithms, energy management systems can learn consumption habits and automatically adjust energy use to minimize waste while helping to forecast electricity demand. Similarly, AI can enhance environmental monitoring by analyzing satellite images to detect extreme weather events, changes in ecosystems like deforestation or ice melt and trigger early warnings for proactive intervention. In agriculture, smart algorithms can optimize the use of water and fertilizers, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, while AI holds great promise and potential, it should not come at…

• Convert your wages into something more powerful: an army of capital. • Leverage other people’s skill, scale and labour when it comes to investing with low-cost exchange-traded funds. • Keep your investment capital with an established broker, in a standard account with no fees. • Diversify assets to maximize long-term wealth and ensure no single failure is fatal. • Invest your capital in a half dozen low-cost, diversified funds, with the majority of your money in equities. • Try not to withdraw any investment capital or the investment income it’s earned until you are ready to retire. • Make the core of your long-term plan ‘file and forget’ investments — diversified, passive funds. • Take a more active role (or not) with a portion (20 per cent or less)…

CHANGE IS EVERYWHERE — and employees are feeling it. PwC’s latest Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey finds that more than half of workers feel there is too much change at work happening at once, and 44 per cent don’t understand why things need to change at all. At the same time, workers also report increased workloads, uncertainty about job security and pervasive financial struggles. Before you assume the picture is bleak, however, know that there are also strong signs of optimism and engagement. Most employees say they’re ready to adapt to new ways of working. Many are eager to upskill, and they see potential in using Generative AI (GenAI) to increase their efficiency. More than half agree that recent changes they’ve experienced make them feel optimistic about their company’s…

Work as we know it is changing fast. Why do we need a new approach to efficiency? With AI gaining territory over lower-level-thinking jobs, the knowledge-work spectrum is shifting toward an emphasis on idea generation, complex learning and problem solving. The industrial-era, factory-style concept of continuous work doesn’t fit into the ecosystem of the digital age. Efficiency is no longer defined by the quantity of output, but by its quality. That’s why I am proposing a new approach to efficiency that can make knowledge workers ‘hyperefficient.’ In the book, you explain how our brains switch between three different ‘gears’ every day. Can you describe what you call the Gear Network? The Gear Network is a metaphor I use to describe the brain at work. It is based on the brain’s…

IN DOWNTOWN TORONTO, as in many urban centres, offices are in the midst of an identity crisis. As organizations continue to grapple with a hybrid workforce, real estate investors across North America are sounding the alarm as more companies vacate their costly downtown footprints. One Wall Street Journal article went so far as to call the downtown office “toxic” to investor portfolios. As of Q2, 2024, overall office vacancy in Canada hit an all-time high of 18.5 per cent — with pundits saying not to expect a drop in that number any time soon. With the global pandemic in the rearview mirror, companies and politicians are increasingly calling for staff to return to offices. In June 2024, Toronto mayor Olivia Chow met with Bay Street firms to encourage them to…

IN RECENT MONTHS I’ve been working with a large, well-known organization whose very existence is being challenged by an onslaught of technology — AI, autonomy, quantum, cyberattacks, access to space, etc. — from aggressive competitors, both existing and new. These competitors are deploying these technologies to challenge the expensive (and until now, incredibly effective) legacy systems that the client organization has built for decades — and they are doing it at speed that looks like a blur to them. But the organization is also challenged by the inaction of its own leaders, who cannot let go of the expensive systems and suppliers they built over decades. It’s a textbook case of the ‘innovators dilemma.’ This company’s fate is not yet sealed. Inside it, I have watched incredibly innovative groups create…

Your first book, Mindmasters, is a cautionary tale about personal data that is ultimately empowering. Tell us about it. Mindmasters is the deep, dark but also delightful story of personal data. Whether it’s posting on social media, using our credit card, carrying our smartphones 24/7, or using devices like Alexa, we all generate tons of data. Every interaction with technology leaves a digital footprint — but few of us understand how the sum of these footprints creates this incredibly intimate picture of who we are and gives those who collect them a lot of power over our lives and choices. Understanding people’s needs and preferences can be extremely powerful in helping them accomplish their goals and making them better off, so that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it can…

IN ECONOMICS, a supercycle refers to an extended period of booming demand, elevating the prices of commodities and assets to unprecedented heights. It can stretch across years, even decades, and is driven by substantial and sustained structural changes in the economy. My colleagues and I believe we are in the midst of a technology supercycle. This wave of innovation is so potent and pervasive that it promises to reshape everything from the intricacies of global supply chains to the minutiae of daily habits, from the corridors of power in global politics to the unspoken norms that govern our social interactions. Driving this seismic shift are the titans of technology and three of their inventions: artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology and a burgeoning ecosystem of interconnected wearable devices for people, pets and…

THE WORLD IS UNDERGOING a radical transformation that will impact the futures of over a billion young people. Generative AI (GenAI) is fundamentally reshaping the world of work in ways that we are only just beginning to understand, creating once-in-a-generation economic opportunities while at the same time threatening to increase global inequality if action is not taken on a global scale. Today, many of the world’s 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 are struggling to find and maintain decent and meaningful work due to a mismatch between the demands of the labour market and the skills they have developed. This challenge will be further exacerbated as employers integrate GenAI into their operations. As we stand on the precipice of this new era, it is our collective responsibility to…

Karen Christensen: You spent over a decade as Google’s Chief Innovation Evangelist. Early on, you noticed that ‘Googlers’ shared a distinct outlook that guided their approach. Please describe it. Frederik Pferdt: After working with thousands of Googlers in my first few months, it became clear to me that every person I encountered shared what I call a ‘future-ready mindstate.’ This outlook isn’t about following a specific process or pre-set methods; it’s a dynamic way of thinking and being. If you are asked to picture someone who is highly innovative, you might picture them in a certain type of environment, using specific processes and resources. But something very different was happening at Google, and it consisted of three elements. First, Googlers shared what I call radical optimism, which means seeing the…

CREATING INCLUSIVE SOCIETIES AND WORKPLACES where individuals feel accepted, safe and secure is a high-level goal that is now widely recognized by leaders across industries. However, the progress towards achieving this goal has been slow. One in four Black workers in the U.S. still report experiencing discrimination at work; female job applicants in China continue to face blatant gender discrimination; and in many places around the world, significant barriers continue to thwart individuals with disadvantaged identities, including workers with disabilities, those who are LGBTQ+, older in age or of low socio-economic status. Past approaches to promoting inclusion have predominantly focused on eliminating discrimination. Whereas this approach has brought awareness to discriminatory behaviours, the remedies are often hard to implement, do not directly address inclusion, fail to produce desired outcomes and…

DESPITE ALL OF OUR DIFFERENCES — real and perceived — the vast majority of people have one thing in common: Everyone wants to be happy. And yet extensive research shows that we often fail to maximize our happiness by making poor decisions and choosing suboptimal options — even when we can accurately predict which option generates more pleasant consumption experiences. As a result, understanding and correcting human biases is crucial to maximizing both our own happiness as well as that of customers and consumers of all types. Research has primarily focused on identifying human bias. However, simply knowing about possible errors does not automatically help consumers correct them. A more effective strategy is to understand why mistakes happen and address them using behavioural interventions that tackle the root cause. In…

When Method came out, it took the world by storm because nobody had ever thought to make the soap that sits next to the sink look great. Talk a bit about the early days. The fact was (and is), we look at our dish soap much more than we actually use it. Yet no one had thought about these products as being part of the look of your home or a form of self-expression. Back in 2000, I was working on the business plan for Method right when HGTV was taking off; MTV Cribs was popular and IKEA was expanding in the U.S. It was the first time people everywhere really started to consider their homes to be a form of self-expression. The products I saw on the shelves everywhere seemed…

You recently joined the Rotman School to study some fascinating aspects of Indigenous entrepreneurship. Tell us about your work. I joined Rotman in September 2024 as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow to extend my PhD research, where I studied Indigenous self-employment and entrepreneurship. For my role here, I proposed a project called, ‘Sacred Work: The Entrepreneurship of Indigenous Spiritual Practitioners.’ In this study, I hope to learn from self-employed ceremonial workers, like Indigenous Fire Keepers. Within many Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, Fire Keepers light and care for sacred fires while Indigenous ceremonies and events take place. I first started thinking about the relationship between Indigenous spiritual work and entrepreneurship a few years ago when I attended a research conference on Kwanlin Dün territory in Whitehorse, Yukon. During the conference,…

CONVERSATIONS ARE THE ENGINE OF INNOVATION AND CHANGE, and as a result, now more than ever, leaders need to play a vital role in creating conversational spaces for genuine dialogue. These are spaces where people trust that they can candidly share their ideas, mistakes and successes, be their whole selves and courageously explore a mix of perspectives that spark creative solutioning. Creating such an environment is no easy feat. We live in fraught times that can affect feelings of trust and support inside our organizations, and amid this uncertainty and turmoil, our willingness to be open, vulnerable and engaged is often thwarted. Much has been written in recent years about ‘safe’ and ‘brave’ conversational spaces and their benefits. However, we would suggest that safe spaces don’t go far enough and…

Cecilia Skingsley: You have said that at this moment in time, too few people understand the global financial system. Please explain. Yuval Noah Harari: Currently, I would say maybe one per cent of the population truly understands how the financial system works. And with AI, that number could go down to zero, creating an environment where no human being — no president or prime minister, no one at the central banks — understands finance anymore because AI has made it too complicated. If power shifts from humans to algorithms — basically, to an alien form of intelligence — it could lead to a political and social crisis of a kind we have never encountered. I think about it this way: farmers grow the food we eat, textile workers produce the…

DEVELOPMENT — the growth over time leading to a larger perspective — is something you have been doing your whole life. You might think of it as ‘maturing’ or ‘changing.’ But what I will explore in this article is the pattern of thinking that underlies our decisions and our actions — everything, really. Here’s the bottom line: everything you think or do is shaped by how big a world you can comprehend, how many perspectives on reality you can hold, how much you go with your preexisting assumptions versus questioning them and crafting them. Every parent knows this is true for kids. When a threeyear-old in the bathtub sees the water going down the drain, she makes a fairly straightforward connection between the disappearing water and her body and toys…

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC presented a novel health and safety problem for organizations of every size and industry worldwide. The key challenge was creating a safe in-person environment without disrupting core business functions. Business leaders needed to innovate on several fronts simultaneously to ensure compliance with public health guidance. Decision-making challenges were intensified by profound variability in COVID-19 policies across geographic regions, since public health responsibilities are typically shared by federal, sub-national governments and local municipalities. In the midst of shutdowns, the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) recognized the shared need across workplaces to develop a cost-effective system for reopening the economy. While the main interventions for limiting virus spread included physical distancing, use of personal protective equipment and housekeeping and ventilation, Rapid Antigen Screening (RAS) represented a promising additional layer of…

SCREENAGERS. DIGITAL NATIVES. The TikTok generation. It’s hard to find an epithet for those born between the mid 1990s and early 2010s — aka Gen Z — that doesn’t call out a dependency on technology. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume, then, that those between the ages of 12 and 25 would glom onto everything generative AI. But that’s not what we found. IDEO embarked on a data-driven approach paired with qualitative research with a group of Gen Zs, asking them what they think about the AI that so many companies are rushing to fold into new and existing products. The findings immediately challenged many of the prevailing assumptions about Gen Z. As companies begin to leverage AI to power everything from art and music generators to dating apps…

Your latest book looks at design thinking as a source of ‘nonlinear advantage.’ What do you mean by that? In my experience, linear approaches to innovation and a lack of diverse input cause creativity to stagnate. In the book, I look at some of the tactics we might we use instead to create greater potential for natural serendipity, creative sparks and connections. As people navigate today’s forest of ambiguity in pursuit of innovation, I hope to provide some new vectors to help them find their way through what is destined to be a very nonlinear journey. What do you mean by ‘vectors’? Each phase or step you take in an innovation journey is what I characterize as a vector. It could be a push to learn more about a target audience,…

You believe a particular mindset is extremely valuable right now for decision-makers of all types—whether they work in an office tower or a factory, in marketing or supply chain. What is it? I have studied venture capital, start-ups and corporate innovation for over two decades, and early on it became clear to me that VC investors have a unique approach to decisionmaking compared to traditional organizational leaders. VCs are intermediaries who connect innovators with good ideas but no money to investors with money but no ideas, and they are known for their extraordinary ability to spot opportunities. They are able to identify emerging trends, how to bring new industries into being, and when to hold them and when to fold. Their unique mindset has made them the force behind world-changing…

IN RECENT YEARS, the field of applied Behavioural Science has had much success in helping to solve business and societal problems. But we have seen a recent wave of books and papers reflecting on the state of the field and advocating for a more nuanced approach to practising it. Indeed, the recent book, What Works, What Doesn’t (and When) (Rotman-UTP Publishing, 2024) is replete with cases showing that sometimes, rolling out a behavioural intervention that has been successful in one setting produces no effects whatsoever in a different setting; while in other instances, there is a fair degree of heterogeneity. In particular, the behavioural intervention might work for a subset of the population but not for another subgroup, resulting in weak overall effects. Proponants of applied Behavioural Science have their own…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way we relate to the future. In my work as a futurist, I have spent close to a decade helping global decision-makers gain clarity and prepare for the future(s). And I see the same thing happening in almost every client interaction I have: People make strategic plans, set ambitious goals, and try to anticipate what’s coming next. But when they finally ‘get there,’ the future has shifted yet again. Collectively, we always seem to be chasing tomorrow — but it never quite arrives. Many people imagine the future as a big leap — an extraordinary disruption that will shift everything overnight. This mindset is reinforced by the stories we tell ourselves, the media we consume and corporate cultures that glorify immediate, sweeping…