#71 HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius: The New World of Work and the Biggest Trends in Business

What this episode is about

Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review, discusses his vision for the publication in the context of evolving business trends, emphasizing the importance of timely content in a rapidly changing world influenced by events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the social justice movement. He highlights his role in fostering a collaborative editorial environment while navigating complex relationships and staying attuned to the future of work, innovation, and leadership.

Key takeaways

• Leadership is a learnable skill; not just inherited charisma, tune in to your inner tennis pro.
• Too much wokeness? Let's hope for a return to natural conversation, minus the overthinking.
• Journalism is sturdy but fractured; diverse perspectives thrive, yet consensus on truth seems a distant dream.
• HBR champions eclectic solutions—innovation thrives when we embrace different paths, not just one right answer.
• Timeliness in publishing is vital; the battle between timeless insights and urgent truths rages on.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Tomlin (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Adi Ignatius (Host) · 17 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: AI Ignatious, Harvard Business Review
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Harvard Business Review
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Best Buy
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Net Positive, Paul Polman, Unilever
5. 20:00 – 24:33: Net Positive, Unilever

Notable quotes from "#71 HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius: The New World of Work and the Biggest Trends in Business"

• Conversation today thank you Lyn it's great to be here it is great to have you AI let's start with hbr what do you see as your primary responsibility as the editor I guess to…

  about Harvard Business Review · at 1:01

• That empowering your people can Inspire them to do remarkable things so this was a conversation with Uber ji the former Best Buy CEO who just had a beautiful little anecdote of…

  about Best Buy · at 12:50

• Led this giant company forward who has a new book in full disclosure we're the Publishers of it but it's a book called net positive and the idea is the world a better place…

  about Net Positive · at 19:05

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• AI Ignatious — Person · Main guest · 1 mention · first at 0:28
  Primary interview subject discussing trends in business, the future of capitalism, leadership, innovation, and hybrid work from his vantage point as HBR editor-in-chief.
  And Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with AI ignatious editor and chief of Harvard Business Review before…
• Lynn Tomlin — Person · Host · 2 mentions
  Hosts the Three Takeaways Podcast and guides the conversation through journalism, business megatrends, leadership, and the future of work.
  It's Lynn Tomlin welcome to another episode.
• Paul Polman — Person · Referenced business leader · 1 mention · first at 18:51
  Cited as an exemplar of sustainability-led, stakeholder-oriented leadership; discussed in connection with the 'net positive' idea and Unilever’s agenda.
  Things we talked about like vision and strategy and how do we innovate but also who are we in this world Paul Pullman who was the CEO of un lever for years and had the most…

Books & papers

• Net Positive — Book · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at 19:10
  Highlighted as a significant publication advocating for corporate responsibility and sustainability.

Companies & orgs

• Harvard Business Review — Company · Business focus · 3 mentions · first at 0:31
  Primary organization discussed, with insights into its editorial direction and platform strategies.
• Best Buy — Company · Case study · 2 mentions · first at 12:04
  Highlighted for its customer service approach under former CEO Hubert Joly.
• Unilever — Company · Case study · 2 mentions · first at 18:51
  Referenced as an example of a company with an ambitious sustainability agenda under former CEO Paul Polman.
  Things we talked about like vision and strategy and how do we innovate but also who are we in this world Paul Pullman who was the CEO of un lever for years and had the most…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with AI ignatious editor and chief of Harvard Business Review before joining hbr he was Deputy managing editor of time and before that he worked for the Wall Street Journal as bureau chief in Beijing and Moscow from his perch as editor of hbrr AI has a unique perspective today I'm excited to find out the biggest Trends in the business world and how he sees the new world of work including the future of the workplace Innovation and Leadership AI

0:59 welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today thank you Lyn it's great to be here it is great to have you AI let's start with hbr what do you see as your primary responsibility as the editor I guess to set a tone Once Upon a Time hbr was entirely about the timeless it didn't try to compete with the fortunes and the Forbes of the world which were doing the newsy the timely and that in the digital age and particularly after the Great recession particularly particularly during the age of covid kind of social justice era that we've lived in it seemed imperative to be timely so part of it is just helping to set a tone mostly though it's to pick good people and get out of the way and we have great women who edit the magazine who edit the website who run our book content division so then I just deal with the thorny issues that come up the relationship with Harvard Business School which is our shareholder but I

1:58 think if I'm doing my job right the people who are really running these platforms don't get a lot of interference from me as a journalist Audi how do you see truth or carefulness today about being non-confrontational or non-controversial is that becoming a casualty of our current highly polarized environment that's a big question there are moments when I despair about journalism and truth and there moments that I think we'll pull through that this is an awkward adjustment moment in some ways I think journalism has never been stronger in the sense of the diversity of ideas that are out there and are accessible mostly digitally from just a wide range of perspectives what's missing is some consensus about basic truths and that's the part I despair about I mean I think that could change it might take a catastrophic event to bring us together again I don't necessarily mean an alien invasion but

2:57 that might help I guess if you think about so the mainstream Publications that you think of the New York Times Washington Post I mean you can look at them and say they're biased or predictable or something like that on the other hand and I cut my teeth with institutions like this I was at the Wall Street Journal I was at Time Magazine and whatever you say about bias and slant what we learned was to take our job seriously to investigate facts to not run things unless we had confirmed or double confirmed or confirmed the facts that then made it into a narrative that doesn't mean it's Flawless it doesn't mean that these institutions haven't made mistakes and published things that turned out to be wrong but that was basically at the core that you have to get it right your reputation depends on that and your sense of self depends on that so I do think Discerning readers still appreciate that and understand the

3:49 value that Publications with that kind of mission can bring you're getting it sounds like more into the kind of I guess the extreme wokeness and if that prevents us from saying anything because we're too afraid to say anything and I think that's a real issue and I think Academia is dealing with it journalists are dealing with it but I guess I'm still in the camp that thinks there's a positive side to that that is getting us away from I don't know casual tropes or something like that or stereotypes that I mean we're just a little more conscious about what we say I think wokeness is excessive and hopefully we've hit Peak woke and we'll get back into something a little bit more natural and conversational and human but I certainly don't think it's a bad thing that that has been part of the debate Audi what are the most important business ideas that you have learned as the editor of hbr one is that leadership counts that

4:44 maybe seems obvious but it really counts and it is a skill that can be learned as readily as you can learn how to serve a tennis ball it's not just that you're born into it and you either have it or you don't I mean obviously that matters to General Charisma or something but that you can really learn leadership and you can learn how to get the most out of your employees how to listen to what your customers are saying there's a discipline to all this that people should take seriously and obviously that's self-serving because obviously implicit is places like Harvard Business Review can help you along the way but they can't and that's real another thing is so Harvard Business Review we don't have a point of view the way say The Economist does where you know the economist you know their worldview in each and every sentence that they publish and we tend to be eclectic and we publish the views of the authors who

5:34 are usually not staff writers and what that means is to me is there are different ways to solve problems at work there different approaches to Innovation and that inconsistent doesn't mean that the science behind this is junk to me it means so you need to focus you need to have a strategy that to succeed you need to have a vision and then think about how do I get there and how do I test my way along the path and how do I learn from these experiments along the way my point is there's not one direction to growing a company and to Innovation but as long as you have discipline along the way with whatever path you've chosen the other thing would just be and this is really what we do there different ways to impart ideas in the old days for Harvard Business Review was about long form stuff that was based on exhaustive research and that is one way that people learn but there are other ways that

6:26 people learn well it can be through a podcast like this or video or a simple a 2 by two or or a simple data representation or something like that so I've learned that people have different learning I I've talked to CEOs about hbrr and they've just said I would not read an hbr article if you put a gun to my head and it's not that they were criticizing us it was just that's not how they learn and there're different learning styles and if we're smart we're thinking about different platforms to connect with the different brains out there among our potential audience and Audi what is your engagement across different platforms which platforms are more important which ones are less so it's interesting you might think that print is waning and in some ways it is we used to do 12 issues a year we now do six but print is by far the most premium expression of hbr that's out there if you look at a print version of hbr you

7:20 would not think we are retreating from print we really put a lot of our heart and soul into that so it may be a smaller number of people who really want print but but it's a really valuable group and they people who still collect copies and all so print is still very much part of the mix podcast your evidence of the explosion podcast we now have a number of podcasts we have a network where we're bringing an outside podcast and think we can go that further video we have more than 13 million followers on LinkedIn so LinkedIn suddenly becomes a very effective platform for us to do video we have a live show that we go live on LinkedIn and suddenly from that 13 million followers we will have really engaged audience of thousands and thousands and thousands of people who will watch who will pose questions and then the outliers we've become very active on Tik Tok which I find surprises a lot of

8:11 people just because we're a 100y old brand and think of Tik Tok as for teens basically but we have a sub brand called Ascend which is for people who are new to the job market who are just dealing with work challenges for the first time so we're not taking hbr content and adapting it we're really creating new content by people in their 20s for people in their 20s who are just at that stage of their career and are interested in will engage with that platform so interesting what are the mega trends that you're seeing the biggest is the future of capitalism who knows where it's going but there seems to be evidence or certainly little points along the way that this era of if you want to call it Milton Freedman economics that has dominated the Corpus scene for roughly 50 years is over or is evolving that there's a realization that and Freeman himself was I don't want to reduce his ideas to a simple line but in

9:12 his name people really push the idea that shareholders come first that fiduciary duty of CEOs is to deliver to shareholders and that means to deliver to shareholders in the short term quarterly with guidance all this stuff that I think leaders started to think well that's the law or that's the law in Delaware where most companies are based it's not really it really was that was a mega Trend and that the law is more complicated and certainly doesn't say that you have to do everything for the short term at the expense possibly the long term fiduciary duty is keeping a company healthy and profitable and responsible to shareholders over the long term so anyway it was just a particular approach so I feel like we're in a different era and there various proof points the business Round Table talking about stakeholders Larry Fink who run Black Rock and has more trillions of assets under management

10:03 than anybody else on the planet and is changing the rhetoric at least what that becomes what a multi-stakeholder capitalism really looks like we don't know yet I mean I think that's still happening and it's fair to ask whether action is matching the rhetoric but I think in more and more companies it is and employees are demanding it and customers are demanding it so I feel like that's the mega mega Trend that capitalism is evolving business is evolving businesses see they're comfortable speaking out on social issues they see governments being feckless and that businesses can and need to step up and at the very least in the ecosystems that are a business they can do the right thing in terms of whatever issues are important to them sustainability diversity long-term thinking whatever it is 10 years ago no CEO wanted to speak out on social issues or political issues you think of Michael Jordan even the sneaker pitchman who

10:58 said I don't speak out on racial issues because his quote was Republicans by sneakers too and now I think with social media if you don't speak up the masses will interpret your silence in whatever way they want so neutrality almost isn't an option so then speak up then on the issues that matter to you or to your customers or your employees so those are sort of related but I guess two big trends in business right now your new series Audi on the new world of work is wonderful what are the three most important ideas you've learned about the future of work well thank you for asking that this is a show that we launched a couple of months ago and the idea is to interview a top tier CEO every episode to really talk about we're in a transitional moment just in terms of how we work and whether it's hybrid or physical and this evolution of cap all the stuff's happening and we've had some great guests we had Sati Nadella of

11:56 Microsoft and Indra Dey the former CEO of Pepsi and Paul Hudson of Santa and Paul pman of un lever and most recently Uber ji the former CEO Best Buy anyway yeah what have I learned I think that people want agency you sort of learning that elsewhere but as we think about going back to work there are a lot of conflicting and contradictory things that people say they want but one thing that's really clear is that people want agency in their lives this kind of work life balance and it's not just younger people that was almost a cliche about younger employees but that people have had a taste of agency during the past year and a half plus where those of us who are lucky enough to have the option have been working from home so they're willing to come back to the office and get that there's some positives but that agency is really important to be able to decide when you work where you work and how you work so that definitely came out

12:48 of that another thing came out of it that empowering your people can Inspire them to do remarkable things so this was a conversation with Uber ji the former Best Buy CEO who just had a beautiful little anecdote of a customer I there was a woman who bought a dinosaur for a kid and it broke and the head came off and they went back to Best Buy to exchange it or get it fixed or whatever and a standard response would have been oh oops sorry here's a new one but the employees who felt empowered and felt inspired did this whole thing where they dressed up as doctors and took the dinosaur into a room to operate on and came back probably switch them but ended up with the St so they delighted the customer in a way that would make a CER customer for life and the key to that was really empowering people on the front line so they can do a remarkable thing and then maybe lastly the metaverse is probably coming more

13:39 quickly than we realize I can't tell you what it is or what it will be but somebody just asked me the other day if I wanted to buy digital property on the metaverse and I said no and that may be one of these things 20 years from now I'm like ah it's so stupid that was my opportunity to get in the ground floor so interesting I have done two conversations relevant to what you've just talked about one with Robert chalini who is the Godfather of influence and what he says which I found fascinating is that I would have thought that Flawless service was the goal but it actually shouldn't be what is much more memorable is something special done for a customer like in the case of the dinosaur and the toy because that is much more memorable than simply getting the toy and having everything work well yeah I think employees have to feel like they can do that and that they have that agency to do remarkable things like that

14:39 that's true and that is a big change how do you see Innovation changing so I'll go back to the LinkedIn live show so and to the interview I did with sadella again I've asked him and I've asked others what is the key to Innovation because it's something hbr readers always want to know how to innovate how to create a culture where you perpetually innovate how do you innovate in a way that prevents someone else from disrupting your very business model and I thought his answer was great he said the key to Innovation is empathy that it's really when you're inventing something you're trying to connect with human wants and desires and create the thing that is desired but doesn't exist yet so that to figure that out more than data or more than it's empathy and being able to put yourself in other people's shoes and really think about human needs so I just love that answer it was a surprise and it got a lot of response

15:35 when we got people commenting people just love that because it sounds good it sounds warm but it's actually really profound so that might be what the key to Innovation is all about but on a more mundane level what I was saying before about experimenting these are cliches about failing and iterating and all these things but there's magic in that and I think the big Silicon Valley startup companies understood that a long time ago but there's still companies that are trying to figure out how do I be digital what does that mean and part of it it means having the discipline to iterate your way toward Innovation that matters I think many people don't realize how important trying and failing is I know Jeff Bezos always says most people don't realize how many things Amazon has tried and failed at before coming to things that work yeah and part of that is not shaming the team that created the thing that ended up not

16:29 flying and we've written about companies that have celebratory funerals for products that are phased out or that didn't work just to sort of put closure on but also it's process and it's as natural as anything you do and not something you sweep under the carpet and don't dare talk about you're absolutely right yeah I love the comment and I'm not sure who said it but it's something to the effect that if you haven't failed at anything you haven't tried enough things exactly AI how do you see leadership changing I think it's changing in ways that we've already talked a bit about there are a lot of people my age I'm a baby boomer late Boomer who complain about younger generations of employees who are demanding constant attention I seem in sort of a different place I think younger employees are reminding us what management is what leadership is it's not just coming to work and sitting at your laptop and I don't know

17:24 answering emails that is a lot of work and I sometimes forget what I did before that was work but that that Demand on us to lead people and to be conscious of what individuals are doing and what teams are doing and to acknowledge and to praise and to step in and criticize adjust if necessary I think leaders sometimes get into position and then get lazy about all that and forget to do that forget to walk around and connect so I think good leadership now is about empathy is about vulnerability is about being human as an inspiration not superhuman the leader is the superum person who knew everything that's kind of outdated but the leader who is superum and vulnerable and transparent is I think far more likely to connect with employees than the omniscient CEO of the past and then there are the other issues we talked about which is engagement in social issues I mean we know that employees want to work for companies that share

18:28 their values it's overwhelming we know that customers want to buy from companies that they think share their values and it may be that it's overstated that at the end of the day people care about price more than they'll admit in a survey but certainly it matters what a company stands for so leadership ends up being a very delicate dance of not only thinking about other things we talked about like vision and strategy and how do we innovate but also who are we in this world Paul Pullman who was the CEO of un lever for years and had the most ambitious agenda genda the most ambitious sustainability and un Development Goal agenda of any CEO I've ever seen it was remarkable even as he led this giant company forward who has a new book in full disclosure we're the Publishers of it but it's a book called net positive and the idea is is the world a better place because your company's in it so it's not just are we

19:19 minimizing the damage we do but it's a more aggressive recasting is the world a better place because your companies in and I think more and more companies are realizing they either want to be that because that feels right or that there is pressure from employees from customers and even increasingly from shareholders that you need to get it right in terms of the externalities you create in terms of the ESG things we can measure so I think leadership got a lot more complicated but it's also it's more interesting good leaders are more inspirational now when they get it right I also had a conversation with Paul pman on his idea of companies being net positive I first heard about him when he was leading Unilever in a very different way from other companies so you're right he's been an absolute leader in thinking about the company the broader footprint of the company on everybody on its employees on its customers on its

20:17 shareholders on the planet and making sure that the company is what he calls net positive yeah AI before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already touched upon or what should I have asked you that I did not well the burning issue both at our company and that our readers want to know and we haven't really talked about this is just is it hybrid is it physical is it a combo people need the technology to feel comfortable about this new hybrid world that companies can say all right we're mandating that you come in or we're mandating that you stay home or we're going to do something in between but whatever you decide you need technology that makes it work and a lot of people have this experience now where you you got some people in the office around a conference table and some people at home and it's all flipped so the technology

21:12 is sort of better for the people at home because Zoom is actually very intimate we talk about Zoom fatigue and say physical is better and okay physical is better but Zoom is a very intimate technology and you can communicate very well one-on-one or with small teams now some of the people around a conference room and you can't really see them other people we haven't solved that there are solutions but we haven't adopted that I think this is a really interesting time where a whole lot of companies are experimenting I hope they'll share the results of their experiments and the Innovations they come up with in hbrr and other places because we can't just say oh we need to experiment and someday we'll figure it out people want to know what's working quickly and obviously as we record this there's another potentially dangerous variant of covid-19 that could change things but we are coming to a place where or some day

21:58 this will end and we'll still have the same questions about hybrid and how do we do it that is not going to go away so that's the only other thing I would mention that it's a call for people to come up with and share Solutions because everyone else out there is hungry to figure out how to do this right AI what are the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with okay this is a fun exercise so number one takeaway these are just personal philosophical things I guess is one act like it matters pretty much in everything you do Jack well Welch had a formulation like that whatever you think of Jack Welch but he could be very inspiring and the way he put it was whatever division you're in maybe it's not your dream job but it's where you are like make it the coolest place make it the place to be while you're there otherwise what are you doing so I would say whatever you're in I don't know you're playing tennis

22:49 what you know just act like it matters I don't mean to be hyper competitive but just act like it matters and certainly it work okay number two and this I thought about the other day my father just turned 101 okay this is Paul ignatious and he's doing great I was trying to think what is the secret to being 101 and part of it his genetics part of it is lock part of it is Diet probably but I realized one of the things for him he doesn't hold grudges most people by the time they're 30 or 40 already have a bunch of grudges that maybe animate them the haters make you want to get better but I also think it probably eats you up inside and I don't know why he's this way and I held more grudges than he does but he hasn't and there plenty of people he could hold grudges against but he hasn't and I think that has given him an inner peace that is part of the reason why he is healthy and happy at age 101 and I guess

23:38 the last thing and this is truly silly but play I still play softball on teams with 20s something I play tennis as much as I can I do way too many Crossroad puzzles I play little guitar yeah I'm not good at any of this stuff but I just believe in it the play is something that I think keeps me youngish and reasonably happy happy so I would urge everyone to keep that a part of their steady diet AI this has been wonderful thank you so much thanks then this is really fun if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that three takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three take bo.com

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#71 HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius: The New World of Work and the Biggest Trends in Business"?

Lynn Tomlin (Host), Adi Ignatius (Host).

What is "#71 HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius: The New World of Work and the Biggest Trends in Business" about?

Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review, discusses his vision for the publication in the context of evolving business trends, emphasizing the importance of timely content in a rapidly changing world influenced by events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the social justice movement. He highlights his role in fostering a collaborative editorial environment while navigating complex…

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

7 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Harvard Business Review, AI Ignatious, Lynn Tomlin, Net Positive, Best Buy, Unilever. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#71 HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius: The New World of Work and the Biggest Trends in Business"?

The episode runs 25 min; the transcript is about 4,614 words in 27 timestamped sections.

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