Winter 2024

Rotman Management

The Magazine of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management

Rotman Management1 min read
Rotman Management
Editor-in-Chief Karen Christensen Contributors Charley Butler, Walid Hejazi, Edna Lopez Avila, Freeda Khan, Sarah Kaplan, Gave Lindo, Charles Martineau, Jordi Mondria, Andreas Park, Richard Powers, John Trougakos, Victor Tung Marketing & Communicatio
Rotman Management3 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Big-Picture Thinking
IN 1994, JEFF BEZOS was working in finance in New York City. The Internet was just emerging, but it was growing at an incredible rate of over 2,300 per cent per year. He had an epiphany: e-commerce was the future. Bezos did some research and discover
Rotman Management13 min read
ESG RISK: What’s on Your Radar?
IN THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT, ESG risks pose one of the greatest threats to public companies’ abilities to deliver predictable results. A recent Bank of America study calculated that 24 ESG incidents in the period 2014–2019 cost U.S. public companies o
Rotman Management7 min read
Thought Leader Interview: Mauro Guillén
The old model of living life sequentially, from school to work to retirement, has always defined each generation of Boomers, Millennials, etc. But these divisions are based on assumptions about these groups that are disappearing. A revolution has beg
Rotman Management1 min read
The Facts About Age
32 years: Growth of the average life expectancy at birth of Americans since 1900, from 46 to 78 years. 19-25 years: The average life left at age 60 for Americans, Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians. 13-17 years: Years of life left at age 60 that w
Rotman Management6 min readLeadership
Is It Time To Reimagine The C-suite?
LIKE SO MANY THINGS IN RECENT YEARS, the fundamental role of the C-suite has changed. In the past, the leadership team’s job was to keep the existing machine humming, optimizing for efficiency and profitability. But now the challenge goes beyond deli
Rotman Management4 min read
As the World Shifts, So Must Leaders
Great leaders are defined less by enduring traits and more by their ability to recognize and adapt to the opportunities created by a particular moment. They can sense the zeitgeist—the spirit, ideas and beliefs that define a period—and seize it. The
Rotman Management12 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Generative AI: What Leaders Need To Know
WHEN OPENAI REVEALED CHATGPT in late 2022, people clambered to test it. They asked complicated, open-ended questions, requested long-form narrative, and often got impressive results. Not even four months later, the company released GPT-4, the next ge
Rotman Management9 min readMotivational
BEATING BURNOUT: Addressing Emotional Exhaustion at Work
EMPLOYEE BURNOUT has become a global concern. In a survey of over 1,000 respondents by Deloitte, 77 per cent said they had experienced burnout at their current job, while a whopping 91 per cent said unmanageable stress or frustration impacts the qual
Rotman Management4 min read
Coming Soon? The Four-Day Workweek
In February 2023, researchers made global headlines when they announced that their four-day workweek experiment had been a success. Over six months, they had asked about 30 companies that collectively employed 1,000 people to give their teams an extr
Rotman Management11 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
THE AI DILEMMA: Uniting Four Logics of Power
A TURNING POINT OCCURRED just as we were finishing up our book, The AI Dilemma. New digital tools — mostly based on natural language processing (NLP) systems and deep learning models — were released in rapid succession for free to the public. These g
Rotman Management8 min read
The Experience Mindset: A MULTIPLIER OF GROWTH
DAY IN AND DAY OUT, employees carry the torch for the values and mission of their organization. They are the facilitators of every moment that matters — all of the positive connections and the negative pain points encountered by both customers and th
Rotman Management11 min read
Achieving The Promise Of Corporate Purpose
EVEN BEFORE THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, discussions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues were becoming commonplace. In 2019, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, famously issued a challenge to CEOs to pur
Rotman Management10 min read
Exploring the DeFi Landscape: YIELD FARMING AND PHANTOM LIQUIDITY
LENDING AND BORROWING MARKETS are vital to the economy, providing individuals, businesses and governments with access to capital for investments, expansions and innovative projects. Without borrowing, economic growth would be severely limited; and wi
Rotman Management9 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
When Crowds Are Not Wise: How Social Networks Impact Stock Prices
ACCORDING TO CNBC, more than one third of new investors are using social media to research investment advice. If such advice is independently produced by different contributors, it can benefit investors, because research shows that averaging independ
Rotman Management8 min read
How To Be A change Agent
IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE EVERYONE — regardless of race, gender or orientation — was accepted equally and provided with equal opportunity. It might sound like a pipe dream to some, but the fact is, there are people working on the ground every day to make
Rotman Management8 min read
CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: The Skill of the Century
WE’VE ALL HEARD STORIES of cringe-worthy cultural faux pas in the world of business. It could be a Western business executive who accepts a business card from a Japanese counterpart and proceeds to put it in his back pocket — an action that is seen a
Rotman Management3 min read
Questions for: Erin Meyer, Author, The Culture Map
At one time, employees primarily collaborated with colleagues from their own country, but today, many are part of global networks connected with people scattered around the world. What are the implications? Most managers have little understanding of
Rotman Management6 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Sustainable Growth: FROM VISION TO REALITY
Steven Cohen: Those of us in the developed world have a far greater environmental impact than people in the developing world, but there is great political pressure in the developing world to increase material wealth, and that pressure will lead to in
Rotman Management4 min read
Sustainability Tools: The Regenerative Compass
We are well into what climate experts are calling ‘the decisive decade’ for sustainability and Net Zero commitments. And yet, significant action and momentum are missing in most organizations. Even in companies that have made bold commitments for 203
Rotman Management5 min readLeadership
Q&A
I wrote the book because many people still don’t understand what it means to create and foster an inclusive organization. I learned through research that, on average, companies spend US$8 billion per year on inclusion training, but that roughly 95 pe
Rotman Management7 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Automating Creativity: Using AI as a Creative Engine
AN ASTONISHING CHANGE is occurring in the landscape of human creativity: there is now evidence that AI can help make us more innovative — if we use it properly. The core irony of generative AIs like ChatGPT and Bing is that they were supposed to be a
Rotman Management2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Automating Creativity: Sample Output from Anthropic’s Claude 2
PROMPT 1: “Generate 15 original start-up ideas that could be a good fit for Y Combinator” (Zero-shot approach) Results: 1. An app that provides real-time translation for conversations: Use AI and speech recognition to offer live translation during in
Rotman Management7 min read
Q&A
We believe that every organization in this country has a responsibility to advance reconciliation. In June 2020, we released a Reconciliation Action Plan in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action Number 92. It called on
Rotman Management6 min readGender Studies
Q&A
We all want to accelerate progress within our organizations and in society at large. But Zuckerberg’s quote implies that a certain amount of wreckage is the necessary price we have to pay for inventing the future. We can either make progress or take
Rotman Management6 min readSmall Business & Entrepreneurs
Q&A
Think about a start-up, but at scale. An archetypal tech start-up is an egalitarian band of people on a mission. It’s not terribly hierarchical — people do whatever needs to be done, but they’re all pointed in the same direction. They keep iterating
Rotman Management6 min read
Q&A
No is such a simple two-letter word, but it’s really hard to say. Through my research, I’ve identified three main reasons for this and they all relate to other people. The first is our concern for relationships. We want to have, and keep, our friends
Rotman Management6 min read
The Creative Power of Constraints
IF YOU THINK about how creativity is changing in the 21st century, it’s impossible not to think about social media and platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. After many years with the CBC in 2020 I joined the leadership team at TikTok. Even be
Rotman Management8 min read
Management: Philosophy in Action
LOOKING BACK OVER MY CAREER, I sometimes I think of a roller-coaster as an analogy for the relative arbitrariness of a career: there are ups and downs, not necessarily related to personal effort or work. Today’s success does not guarantee tomorrow’s
Rotman Management6 min read
In an Era of Digital Everything, Is Lean Still Relevant?
NO ONE WOULD argue that digital technologies are taking the world by storm. Spending on these technologies and services worldwide was US$1.85 trillion in 2022 — a 185 per cent increase over the last five years. Undoubtedly, digital tools have shifted
Rotman Management6 min readLeadership
The Power of Contextual Intelligence
IN GREEK, THE WORD EIDO means two things: ‘to see’ and ‘to know.’ In English, we use the term ‘intuition’ to describe the unique application of one’s observations and learned knowledge. Many business leaders and CEOs apply their intuition to make tou
Rotman Management7 min readLeadership
Q&A
There is so much rhetoric out there in business, especially in tech: Fail fast, fail often. Let’s have a failure party. It’s important to recognize that not all failure is alike. None of those tenets distinguish between the type of failure we should

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