Himanshu Shekhar suggests a framework of “aligning with macro and accomplishing in micro” for controlled and sustainable future growth. Many businesses operate on the assumption that resources like clean air, water, and predictable weather are freely provided by nature. However, the planetary boundaries framework vividly shows that natural systems are limited in their capacity to provide these natural resources and ecosystem services. The combined impact of business activity is exceeding the limits on many of these systems. Businesses must update their assumptions about what nature provides “for free” and act to address growing scarcity concerns.

Saeed Rahman, Natalie Slawinski, and Monika Winn examine how pioneering companies in agriculture, agri-food, and other sectors can build and leverage ecological knowledge (knowledge about the very ecosystems they rely on) to develop innovative practices that help regenerate social and natural systems. In doing so, these companies can reap benefits for their business and help turn our unsustainable agricultural systems into systems that sustain a growing human population without severely degrading or destroying ecological systems necessary for agriculture and other industries.

P.J. Stephenson and Judith Walls call for a “new biodiversity paradigm for business.” They show that current corporate guidelines for engaging on biodiversity are inconsistent and confusing, leaving companies unable to manage nature-based risks, capture nature-based opportunities, and prevent disruptive climate change. To correct these inconsistencies, they identify fundamental issues that businesses and other actors must resolve in the links between market systems and the nature systems that generate biodiversity.

This issue explores how to make needed changes happen by examining three systems change topics. First, how can we use the linkages between environmental and economic systems to change market structure and, consequently, how actors compete? Second, how do we redefine waste to alter how market actors impact the natural environment through producing and disposing of materials? Third, what system changes can we accomplish through innovation or by using technologies like IT, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to address unsustainable practices?

This issue explores how to make needed changes happen by examining three systems change topics. First, how can we use the linkages between environmental and economic systems to change market structure and, consequently, how actors compete? Second, how do we redefine waste to alter how market actors impact the natural environment through producing and disposing of materials? Third, what system changes can we accomplish through innovation or by using technologies like IT, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to address unsustainable practices?

We believe that a radical shift in MBA education is needed. Instead of transmitting existing knowledge or developing a set of functional skills, students must become comfortable with the process of thinking based on America’s unique contribution to the history of philosophy: pragmatism. 

Companies continue to explore DEI and implement initiatives to create a culture of acceptance and understanding, while carrying out their missions and remaining profitable. But building an effective DEI strategy calls for a new mindset among business leaders if current and future initiatives are going to succeed. This Executive Update offers four “mini-starters” to explore the DEI issue in more depth.

Northwestern Medicine has developed a very innovative NLP application — integrated within the hospital EHR system — designed to solve a practical and pressing healthcare problem: missed follow-ups associated with incidental findings from diagnostic imaging. This Advisor explores the significance of this innovative artificial intelligence application.

The inner-leader journey will help you see reality more as it truly is and give you the insight, wisdom, and courage to share it with others. I believe it is critical for our teams and team members to make this shift in order to thrive and achieve success in a turbulent world.

In this Executive Update, we explore taking a process perspective to show how concepts such as sustainability and the circular economy look in the physical world. Making these concepts concrete reveals a singular criterion for achieving a circular economy: every output generated by every process should have a consumer who uses it productively. This criterion provides managers with actionable steps and ways to measure their organization’s progress toward sustainability.

In this Advisor, we talk about two of the near-term challenges in the pharma data processing space: data standards and data quality management.

Helen Chen brings our focus on process and mechanisms to the domain of market-based social activism (MbSA), in which a business seeks to align its activities with moral principles to drive positive change at the society scale. Chen presents the Pyramid of Forces for Good framework that can be used to better organize MbSA to develop a “market for virtue” in which morally sound business activities outcompete those that are morally questionable. A market for virtue applied to green performance is based on three building blocks: (1) valid and reliable green-performance measurement, (2) fair and equitable green-performance valuation, and (3) efficient and scalable green-value apportionment. Establishing a market for virtue would make green practices economically profitable, fundamentally changing the economic system that currently makes unsustainable practices more economically profitable than green practices.

Rachana Shah explores system stability and points of intervention in a specific, highly complex system: the New York City Waste system. Shah uses systems theory to analyze specific actors and their actions to reveal key leverage points for change within the system. She prioritizes the leverage points by their potential for impact on the system, elucidating exactly what each leverage point can change, who will be affected by the change, and what effect the change could have on the system. She then explores the negative feedback processes that resist systems change, pointing out that the higher in impact a leverage point is, the more a system will resist it. Shah’s analysis demonstrates how actors can decompose a system into subsystems, identify key change points, and prioritize each change point by balancing its potential for impact against its potential to generate negative feedback from the system that cancels out the impact of the leverage point. Her focus on actors and their actions raises a valuable point for systems analysis. The way you analyze a system influences what you believe to be the key leverage points in the system and influences the effectiveness of systems change strategies built from that analysis. Conceptualizing the waste system as actors and actions highlights leverage points related to actors themselves. However, this way of viewing the system may obscure system processes and leverage points not related to actors, such as technological leverage points around material production and distribution or biophysical leverage points around waste decomposition.

The authors argue that systems are designed to produce their results, even when their results are far from perfect. Systems also have internal “negative feedback processes” that maintain system stability by canceling out disruptions. Overcoming these stabilizing systems can be challenging, and pushing a system far enough to initiate change can result in sudden, highly disruptive shifts to a new system. Rather than cause such disruptive change, the authors advocate for incremental shifts to avoid the kind of wholesale disruption that could leave financial, social, and political systems in shambles.

The authors examine the beliefs driving the dominant capitalist and democratic systems that govern the West. They believe we need to change the way we think to imagine a future where all life flourishes. For them, social transformation must be at the scale of previous transformations like the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Accomplishing this will require change across many social systems, but the authors target one in particular: MBA programs. The authors opine that business schools must ground MBA programs in the liberal arts and science traditions of the great medieval universities while challenging students to approach their work as a calling and using organizational methods and resources to create values-driven, society-scale change.

John R. Ehrenfeld looks to the present model of the brain, in which fundamental rationality is taken for granted, and asks if the answer to the need for systems change lies in the ways the human brain works. This argument raises provocative and (perhaps) discouraging implications. If our economic, social, and political systems reflect the biological structure and function of the brain, what is the potential for changing those systems? Does systems change require fundamental change to cognition, and, if yes, how might that be accomplished? What are the ethical implications of equating systems outside the body with systems inside the body, given the apparent diversity of human thought and behavior? Do we risk valuing one way of thinking over others? If yes, will the privileged group occupying positions of political power decide system structure and function?

This first of two Amplify issues probes the necessary scope and scale of systemic solutions. What does systems change mean? What systems need to change, and how? Which possible future world do we want, which do we need? How can markets deliver such change?

The authors conclude this issue of Amplify by analyzing systems for governing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in markets in the US. They argue that public-private partnerships (PPPs) have the potential to fill the void in market governance left by the failure of the government to enact comprehensive climate change legislation. The authors highlight the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as a tool that provides companies and other organizations with the means to make specific, credible plans to achieve decarbonization. They argue that aligning PPPs with SBTi target setting would be an effective mechanism to accelerate carbon emissions reductions.

When looking at the characteristics of both the Industrial Revolution and the new knowledge revolution, there is a synergy between them that is critical to helping us understand how to reconcile them.

Healthcare and life sciences companies are applying machine learning, Internet of Things, big data analytics, wearables, blockchain, and other advanced technologies across various processes and operations. Simply put, the degree of innovation taking place within these industries utilizing these technologies is stunning — even to the point where we are seeing new business models that could potentially threaten existing industries.

The elusive question, “Are we doing enough?” is the one we ask privately and quietly when reflecting on our progress toward workplace inclusivity. We ask this question among ourselves and feel somewhat reassured that no one else quite knows the answer either. However, bigger questions remain: Why are the achievements of diversity, equity, and inclusion always somewhere in the future? Why are they always “bonuses” beyond profitability, sustain­ability, and achievement of an organization’s mission?

Curt Hall focuses on the benefits of integrating unstructured data into electronic health records. He describes how biometric data, lifestyle data, and general healthcare information can come together to help clinicians, researchers, and health/wellness companies better understand the effect of patient health behaviors and lifestyles on potential approaches and treatments. More personalized medical treatments, improved health trend identification, and lower healthcare costs are all possible outcomes.

Five Arthur D. Little Partners and Principals predict that big data will move the healthcare industry’s digital transformation forward, providing better admission rate estimation, more effective chronic-care treatments, and a reduction in medication-error rates. Their article includes detailed descriptions of eight drivers of data-driven healthcare: technology trends, data quality and availability, data security, an enabling ecosystem, public-private partnerships, patient participation, the need for better change management, and the development of employees with data analysis skills.

Cutter Expert San Murugesan looks at why health data is so valuable to cybercriminals, why criminals are often successful in their attacks, and the cost of these breaches. He outlines seven technologies/approaches that can help: authentication and access control, encryption, data anonymization, mobile device security, monitoring and auditing, artificial intelligence, and zero trust. Murugesan concludes with a list of processes that should always be in place to secure health data.

Jacek Chmiel examines current challenges in the data processing space. He outlines the issues stemming from multiple health data standards, the need for more developed data quality processes, and the industry’s perhaps unnecessary aversion to data streaming. Chmiel offers hope in the form of federated analytics and federated learning to allow more collaborative data processing between countries and proposes increased use of automation. He also advocates for employing publicly and commercially available data sets and looks at how natural language processing, machine learning, and quantum computing are the future of data-driven pharma.