How ‘Strategic Silence’ Helps Employees The highest-performing employees know when to speak and when to stay quiet, according to new research from Wharton’s Michael Parke that looks at how employees engage in “strategic silence.” ........ some of the highest-performing employees intentionally withhold information, ideas, or concerns until the time is right to speak up. ....... research findings challenge the predominant view that silence at work is inherently harmful. ......... employees who use strategic silence most effectively consider three factors in deciding when and how to speak up: issue relevance, issue readiness, and target responsiveness. ......... they wait until the recipient — usually a manager — is in the right cognitive (not too busy) or emotional state (not in a bad mood) to hear the message (i.e., responsiveness). ......... what they share is now perceived as deliberate, thoughtful, and well-timed. ........ employees trying to navigate the social and professional norms of their workplace, or even the mood of a mercurial boss. ....... building trust will enable more meaningful conversations, and he encouraged leaders to “check in” with their employees more frequently to establish open lines of communication. ........... Experts’ ideas should be challenged, and there should be room for healthy debate. ........ there has to be patience for low-quality voice ........ task-related strategic silence as opposed to silence on social issues, such as concerns related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). ........ organizations must ensure that employees feel confident and free to discuss DEI without fear of backlash or retaliation. ......... faking voice, where someone offers a little bit of input without full feedback or disclosure, and voice leakage, where employees talk to each other about a problem rather than directly to the managers capable of addressing it. .
Why the Medium Shapes the Message in Marketing What is the best medium for communicating with consumers? It depends on the content, according to the latest research from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger. ........ companies, consumers, and other marketplace actors are constantly communicating. ......... A range of marketplace actors is constantly communicating with various audiences in one way or another. ......... whether this seemingly subtle shift — speaking versus writing — might shape what we communicate. Whether the medium we communicate through might shape the message. .......... written reviews were much less emotional. ...... They use less highly emotional words and use a little bit more cognitive language explaining what something does or describing it even in positive terms. ............ Writing involves more deliberation or thinking about what to say, and that makes what we share less emotional. ......... we don’t think a lot about how the mode we’re communicating through — speaking versus writing — is changing that content. ........ The means we communicate ideas through actually change what we end up communicating by the nature of those mediums. ......... You can even think about the same idea in terms of negotiating. The more notes and things you write down ahead of time, the more organized you can be in your thoughts. ........... when you’re speaking to your boss, you’re producing content. When you’re a financial service agent talking to a prospect, you are producing content. .......... The advent of the typewriter or the computer made it easier to have written communication. Most recently, text messages made it much easier to shoot off quick missives to other people, and now even companies use those to interact with clients.............. It’s not that speaking is better than writing, and it’s not that writing is better than speaking. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with that interaction. If you want to be more careful and reasoned, writing is pretty good. It gives you the time to construct and find what you’re going to say. On the other hand, we have a lot of data in this paper that suggests that emotional content is often more impactful in a positive way. So, if you want to be impactful, speaking can be good to be persuasive to change others’ minds. ............ If I’m a brand, for example, and I’m encouraging people to create product reviews, it might be better to get them to speak because they will be more emotional. And in many product categories, that might be more persuasive. ......... If I’m a doctor or a lawyer, you could say, “I want to reason through my arguments first. I want to write them down.” But if I want to be particularly persuasive, maybe I need to be sure that’s not sucking out all of the emotion because that may make it feel lifeless when I communicate it. .
How DAOs Could Bring Organizational Trust and Transparency Decentralized autonomous organizations -- DAOs -- hold much promise, but practitioners and governments must be aware of risks, says Wharton’s Kevin Werbach, co-author of a DAO Toolkit that was released at this year’s World Economic Forum....... “There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of these DAOs that have been created with many billions of dollars of digital assets in their treasuries ...... It raises all kinds of fascinating questions about what it means to have an organization that’s decentralized and is on a blockchain, where people may never meet each other, where they try and govern it using votes based on tokens.” ........ A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is basically a company, a firm or an organization that operates on a blockchain. Instead of using traditional legal contracts and relationships in a traditional firm, it uses the code of what are called “smart contracts,” or code that executes on the blockchain to handle the various different relationships about governance and decision-making, payments, employment and so forth. All of that happens digitally on a decentralized network. ......... You can design governance structures however you want. These are global phenomena. .......... people who don’t necessarily know each other have to figure out how to work together in this decentralized way. You have to figure out how to make decisions and vote and how to effectuate the decisions, and decide where you want hierarchy and someone in charge of particular functions versus everyone having the opportunity [to make decisions]. ........ We have centuries of work in corporate law in different countries about what the different corporate forms are. Which of them, if any, apply to DAOs? These are new kinds of corporate forms, essentially catalyzing a lot of the discussion about the nature of firms and the nature of corporate governance......... In a traditional corporation, you have a lot of structure that is imposed and is hard to change. Here, organizations can figure out potentially what the right way is to design something for their particular situation. ........ There’s [also] the positive potential that this is a new form of decision- making. ....... Many of the biggest DAOs are decentralized finance platforms ...... There’s no one who has the power behind the scenes to take the money and run. It’s a collectively governed entity. We’re seeing a lot of interest in that in the crypto space, in the digital asset trading space, in using these governance mechanisms. That’s just a starting point. The potential is incredibly broad. .......... a new and powerful kind of trust, because they are open and transparent, and you’re not required to trust one central administrator who has all the control. Potentially, they can be much more trustworthy than traditional systems. .
ChatGPT Passed an MBA Exam. What’s Next? Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Ethan Mollick weigh in on ChatGPT and why the controversial software has limitless potential to improve education, business, and a range of industries...... When prompted to explain the bottleneck process at a hypothetical iron ore factory in Latin America, ChatGPT aced it. ........ “Wow! Not only is the answer correct, but it is also superbly explained” ....... can produce high-quality written responses to complex questions in a matter of seconds. .......... With its incredible speed and accuracy, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to improve the teaching process, customize learning, make business more efficient, and save precious time that could be used more productively by humans. ........
“This is going to be big, and there is reason to believe we have only seen the beginning.”
.......... ChatGPT is a “tipping point” in artificial intelligence. The technology is far better than previous iterations, making it more than just a clever toy. A wide range of people and industries can use it to conquer the mundane and free themselves to focus on more important work and innovation........ one student used it to create code for a startup protype using code libraries they hadn’t seen before. ......... “They completed a four-hour project in less than an hour” ........ “Would Chat GPT Get a Wharton MBA?” The answer is a solid “yes,” with the professor giving the chatbot a final grade of B to B-minus for its performance on a five-question experiment he designed. While the bot earned top marks on the first question about bottlenecks, it did not do as well on every question. Surprisingly, it performed the worst when prompted with a question that required simple math calculations. ......... “If you think about your computer, it might be stupid and dumb at many things, but at least it will get the math right. This was the opposite.” ....... ChatGPT does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions, including those based on case studies. The answers are correct, and the explanations are excellent. .......... ChatGPT at times makes mistakes in relatively simple calculations at sixth-grade level math. ......... ChatGPT is remarkably good at modifying its answers in response to human hints. ....... Even more remarkable, it seems to be able to learn over time so that in the future the hint is no longer needed. ........ it has the opportunity of boosting my productivity as well as the productivity of our students ........ businesses could save time and resources using the technology to generate written communication for clients and stakeholders or build customized data sets, and educators could use it to generate a syllabus or lecture notes. ......... “Bullshit is convincing-sounding nonsense, devoid of truth, and AI is very good at creating it.
You can ask it to describe how we know dinosaurs had a civilization, and it will happily make up a whole set of facts explaining, quite convincingly, exactly that.
It is no replacement for Google. It literally does not know what it doesn’t know, because it is, in fact, not an entity at all, but rather a complex algorithm generating meaningful sentences.” .
Elon Musk tells Twitter’s employees he wants the service to ‘contribute to a better, long-lasting civilization.’ In an effusive and at times rambling address, he touched on topics as varied as growth, potential layoffs, anonymity, Chinese apps, the existence of alien life-forms and even the cosmic nature of Twitter. ........ The meeting, which Mr. Musk participated in from his cellphone in what appeared to be a hotel room, suggested that he was set on closing the blockbuster acquisition. ........ Musk, who is on the hook for a breakup fee of $1 billion if he walks away. ........ Musk said he hoped to expand the service to more than one billion users across the world. That would be nearly four times the number of current users. He added that he was hands-on at Tesla and expected to be so at Twitter. .......... he said a broad lack of in-office participation could contribute to a dwindling “esprit de corps” and hoped that people would be willing to go into the office more in the future. ......... He also brought up the Chinese apps WeChat and TikTok as aspirational, given that WeChat is so embedded in people’s daily lives in China and TikTok is “not boring.” ........ he wanted to make was adding payments technology to Twitter. Ideally, users would be able to send money back and forth through the service, similar to how products like Venmo or Square Cash operate. ........ Musk, a longtime power user of Twitter with more than 98 million followers, has long said he believes the company’s potential is underutilized. He has added that he hopes to rejuvenate the service outside the eye of the public markets by taking the company private and making significant changes to how Twitter operates. ........ he would not allow criminal acts to be carried out on the network. He said that he also didn’t want to make people use their real names on Twitter and that there was utility in using pseudonyms to express political views on the service. ......... He said he wasn’t a traditional C.E.O. and pointed to his title at Tesla, which is Technoking.
President Xi Jinping’s ideological and unpredictable China has a trade footprint seven times as big as Russia’s—and the world relies on it for a variety of goods from active pharmaceutical ingredients to the processed lithium used in batteries. ........ One indication that companies are shifting from efficiency to resilience is the vast build-up in precautionary inventories: for the biggest 3,000 firms globally these have risen from 6% to 9% of world gdp since 2016. Many firms are adopting dual sourcing and longer-term contracts. The pattern of multinational investment has been inverted: 69% is from local subsidiaries reinvesting locally, rather than parent firms sending capital across borders. This echoes the 1930s, when global firms responded to nationalism by making subsidiaries abroad more self-sufficient. .......... In energy, the West is seeking long-term supply deals from allies rather than relying on spot markets dominated by rivals—one reason it has been cosying up to gas-rich Qatar. Renewables will also make energy markets more regional. ....... The long-run inefficiency from indiscriminately replicating supply chains would be enormous. Were you to duplicate a quarter of all multinational activity, the extra annual operating and financial costs involved could exceed 2% of world gdp. ......... The choke-points autocracies control amount to only about a tenth of global trade, based on their exports of goods in which they have a leading market share of over 10% and for which it is hard to find substitutes. .......... if you are a consumer of global goods and ideas—that is to say, a citizen of the world—you should hope globalisation’s next phase involves the maximum possible degree of openness. A new balance between efficiency and security is a reasonable goal. Living in a subsidised bunker is not.
A New Genre of Work traditional corporations with bloated management and poor incentives for employees and users no longer effectively create value. Rather than focusing on practicing the craft at hand, tremendous energy is wasted optimizing for zero-sum games of equity vesting, salary negotiation, and organizational politics. .......... Companies now recognize that, without a steep increase in transaction or bureaucracy costs, they can flexibly scale up or down throughput through a new class of labor—freelancers. ........ The product sees an absence of credit or attribution to freelancers at an organizational level. While their work may have persisted in sustaining the essence of a product, their very own identity as a contributor is abstracted away by the company. ....... Traditional companies, with rigid hierarchies but abundant resources, make competing for attention internally exhausting for all participants. ...........
It’s clear that the most thorny problems facing humanity today—climate crisis, cybersecurity, income inequality to name a few—will not be solved by one corporation or one individual. These problems need to be addressed with the scale and efficiency of a corporation, without compromising on individual autonomy, creativity, and ownership. They require fluid and multidisciplinary collaboration that transcends the borders of institutions, from corporations to nation-states.
........ They demonstrate how with a clearly defined goal and a well-defined action — contributing capital — a group of people can be coordinated in record speed. .......... Once a worker leaves the organization, their identity is effectively erased and they must rebuild and retell their narrative within the context of another institution. Web3 allows contributors to have ownership over their body of work while their entire system of record exists on-chain, providing the context needed for contributors’ reputation to become legible to multiple communities. Contributors can even thrive through pseudonymous accounts that ensure privacy. ........... In traditional systems, compensation and authority are explicitly defined and pre-negotiated (titles, roles, and compensation), even though trust and responsibility are implicitly earned. Token mechanisms create infinite possibilities for how credit can now be attributed granularly to all project contributors. ......... Tokens also enable stronger value allocation among contributors, as votes of high trust or appreciation. Creating more multidimensional opportunities for power and authority to flow between individuals and communities will enable a higher degree of overall decentralization.
