Crocs weren’t created to be beautiful. 200 pairs of distinctively shaped, lightweight footwear were created for the 2001 Fort Lauderdale Boat Show. They sold out quickly. This was the brand’s first step to superstardom. More than 720 million pairs of Crocs have been sold since then, and the company is enjoying its fourth straight year of impressive revenue growth. This despite the fact that the fashion world deemed Crocs hideous, one of mankind’s worst inventions ever. How did this happen? Read More
hile his country is in crisis, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is emerging as a masterful communicator and charismatic leader whose management style is reminiscent of some of the greatest statesmen in history, according to Wharton management professor emeritus Michael Useem. Read More
How much sleep do you get each night? Most of us know that eight hours is the recommended amount, but with work, family, and social commitments often consuming more than 16 hours of the day, it can seem impossible to make the math work. Perhaps you feel that you operate just fine on four or five hours a night. Maybe you’ve grown accustomed to red-eye flights, time zone changes, and the occasional all-nighter. You might even wear your sleep deprivation like a badge of honor. Read More
The pandemic has prompted us to reevaluate our approaches and philosophies toward work—not just our work-life balance, but our working lives as a whole. When the world could so suddenly change, what is that we value most?
On this podcast episode, we discuss the keys to making ethical decisions in your professional and personal life. “A mistake that some leaders make is to assume that the people in your organization share your core values. Some of the time some of them do, but there’s a bunch who don’t, and those are the most difficult sorts of situations.” Read More
Before a recent virtual talk I gave to an executive team, the moderator asked attendees to share in the chat box how they were feeling that morning. The answers were, without exception, emphatically cheerful: Productive! Energized! Thrilled to be here! These are wonderful feelings—but what are the chances that these responses were an accurate representation of an entire team’s emotional life? Read More
2020 was highly disruptive moment in the history of higher education. The global pandemic accelerated changes that were already underway towards online and hybrid learning, with educational institutions making the transition to virtual learning seemingly overnight (with mixed results).
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Homes are our living partners, and they hold enormous ability to influence ample opportunities and positive possibilities on our behalf. Yet, we often dismiss a house as mere architecture and diminish its power to sway those desired transformations. Read More
What’s the best way for a brand to engage with its competition? Many brands focus their marketing efforts exclusively on their own strengths rather than acknowledging competitors — and when they do talk publicly about competing brands, it’s typically to criticize them. Consider, for example, the “Mac vs. PC” TV ads that pitted a stodgy, suit-wearing PC user against a younger, hoodie-clad Mac user; the decades-long “Cola wars” between Pepsi and Coke; and today’s ongoing battles among light beers. Read More
Reporting increases across all its strategic growth markets and categories in 2021, sports brand adidas noted the importance of a proportion of products and marketing being locally relevant: in the case of China, it puts the figure at 30%. Read More
