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When Unconventional Power Shifts and Flat Firms Become More Than a Trend

In the face of societal and generational change, will organizational hierarchies fall flat—and could the end of hierarchies spell the future of work? Delve investigates such critical management and business questions in the cover story of Delve’s Spring 2023 digital magazine Reworking Bureaucracy. Changes to work life in the post-pandemic era are well known and intimately felt. Lately, the workplace zeitgeist has also shifted to questioning the purpose of workplace hierarchies, revealing implications for staff retention, employee loyalty, career trajectories, and company culture. The prospect of a post-hierarchical workplace is a double-edged sword.

Why Environmental, Social, and Governance Investment Standards Need an Indigenous Perspective

In the high-stakes realm of finance and investment, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria play a larger role than ever in companies’ decision making and commitment to creating shared value. In this accelerated transition toward cross-sector economic change, whose interests are centred and whose concerns are left out of the sustainability conversation? Recent research out of the Desautels Integrated Management Student Fellowship (IMSF) program, with the support and consultation of Desautels professors, finance-sector experts, and Indigenous business owners, found an absence of Indigenous notions and viewpoints in ESG reporting standards. An Indigenous perspective on ESG could lead to more inclusive, equitable, and truly long-term sustainability policies in investment.

Why the Job You Apply For May Not Be the Job You Get

When most people apply for jobs, they expect the job description to match the job that will be filled. But between the interview and the actual hiring, job duties sometimes evolve. At a time when many people are making career changes and employers are facing uncertainties and struggling to find employees, understanding why jobs change is crucial. In their recent study on startup hiring, Desautels Professor Lisa Cohen and co-author Sara Mahabadi found that when the job someone applies for doesn’t end up being the same job they are hired for, the consequences can be mixed for both job hunters and workplaces.

Why Digital Currencies Could Change the Future of Central Banking

Central Bank Digital Currencies represent a possible next step in the technological evolution of banking and the financial intermediation sector, with advances in privacy, fraud protection, and efficiency—but their roles and risks on the high-tech path forward are only now becoming clear. Some of the world’s largest economies are considering issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a digital form of a country’s currency that could be used to make online and mobile payments, and many smaller countries have already adopted one. Experts recently debated the future of CBDCs at the Desmarais Global Finance Lecture at the Desautels Faculty of Management.

Where Artificial Intelligence Meets Management Insights and Solutions

How can Artificial Intelligence augment and even improve management of and within organizations? In the interdisciplinary arena of management, AI is being applied to big-picture issues of organizational strategy and supply chain operations, as well as the ethical details of human resources and the many moving parts of the retail industry. Researchers at the McGill Desautels Faculty of Management provide insights on how AI can be used to increase organizations’ knowledge and operations through data analysis, and even contribute to strategic organizational change.

How Collaborative, Open-Minded Management Could Heal Healthcare

Walk into any hospital and you’ll witness a complex, multi-level system of personnel in action, interacting with each other, with patients, and with high-tech equipment around the clock. Given this complexity, healthcare systems naturally face management challenges—the COVID-19 pandemic amplified those challenges and introduced new ones, including rampant staff shortages due to illness and burnout. How can management insights gleaned from the pandemic help healthcare move forward into sustainable systems that prioritize the well-being of both practitioners and patients?

Managing Ourselves Out of Climate Change

Sustainable solutions to climate change are nowhere near simple, traversing science, business, culture, and beyond. From organizational strategy to supply chain operations, management stands out as a critical link between people searching for answers in every industry and academic sector. Interdisciplinary by nature, management research is uncovering new ways to solve a complex global problem. Read about and listen to three recent Delve podcast episodes focused on management solutions to climate change.

Can Loyalty in Investor Relationships Calm the Competitive Disruption of ETFs?

On the surface, the Exchange Traded Fund or ETF is a simple idea: a financial product that gives investors the opportunity to invest in a set of stocks tracked by a market index, without having to buy shares in each one. Yet this relatively straightforward concept has become a major disruptor in the sphere of money management. In the past few years, mutual fund managers started to also manage ETFs for their clients—a way to potentially alleviate competition, maintain client loyalty, and keep institutional money within a growing family of funds.

Could New Algorithms Ensure Everyone Pays Fair Prices Online?

Dynamic pricing algorithms set the prices we pay online—and few rules govern how they work. Even if an algorithm doesn’t ostensibly consider race at all, research shows that it can be biased and discriminatory on the basis of race, as well as gender, economic level, and other personal information openly gathered from consumers. Desautels Professor Sentao Miao developed an approach to dynamic pricing that builds in fairness constraints to protect consumers, proposing algorithms that keep prices fair across groups and over time.