Tom O’Toole is a Clinical Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. Previously, he was Associate Dean of Executive Programs and Executive Director of the Executive Fellows Program at Kellogg. O’Toole is a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company. He serves on the board of Alliant Energy and has been a director of…
Adhering to the latest fashion trends may be an unwritten social expectation in many educational and business contexts. However, Dr Dorottya Sallai argues that the detrimental impact fast fashion causes to the environment goes far beyond the benefits it offers. When people update their wardrobes every season, they may not realise that the manufacturing of just one simple cotton T-shirt requires approximately 2,700 litres of water. However, hyper-consumption of fast fashion continues. Would behaviours…
Matt Harrison Clough/Ikon Images In an unpredictable economy and fractured media landscape, marketing leaders are navigating a period of profound transformation and disruption — and as AI technologies evolve, the pace of change will only increase. In response, the highest priorities of chief marketing officers today are shifting, and understanding their concerns is essential to…
Gillian Blease/Ikon Images Corporate sustainability is facing headwinds. Net-zero pledges are being quietly walked back. Regulatory pressure is loosening in some parts of the world. Shareholders are demanding stronger business cases. Inside companies, sustainability leaders sometimes spend more time defending their function than expanding it. The familiar question “Where is the value?” has returned with…
The Insightful Leader brings you another episode of Life, Automated—a podcast from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity. Kellogg Professor Sébastien Martin speaks with host Jess Love about AI’s pedagogical potential. In his own operations-management class, students trade PDFs for lifelike chatbots, log conversations with Socratic AI tutors, and use AI to explore the kinds of social…
“You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.” Though these words by American businessman Harvey Mackay are mostly meant to be provocative, they’re not too far off from capturing what it’s like to navigate the business world today. Whether it’s a higher salary, a better deal, or the right to give…
Nick Lowndes/Ikon Images Businesses are striving to adapt ever faster to keep pace with rapid change, and yet B2B marketing practices have remained surprisingly static. Sure, the tactics have shifted to digital executions, and the use of data has made targeting B2B buyers more precise, but marketers remain rooted in fundamentally flawed assumptions about the…
PPaint/Ikon Images Dry rot. A Potemkin village. The Wizard of Oz. What do those things have in common? In each case, they may look good on the surface, but it’s only an illusion. Wood afflicted with dry rot looks just fine until the tree it’s in topples down. Grigory Potemkin is said to have tried…
Phil Bliss/theispot.com A vice president of product opens her laptop on a Monday morning to find that the AI model her team had worked with for the past six weeks to build a customer workflow has been leapfrogged by a cheaper, faster alternative. Again. Her Slack feed is blowing up with links to the announcement.…
Grundini/Ikon Images How does a fossil fuel company become the world’s largest developer of offshore wind? How does a software company written off for missing the mobile revolution become one of the world’s most valuable companies in the age of AI? Ørsted and Microsoft have faced a puzzle familiar to many leaders: When technological, regulatory,…