Introduction

Leaders grapple with bringing accountability into everything they do, for both internal audiences and the wider community of stakeholders. Here is some of the real-world research and analysis you’ll find in this collection of articles from MIT Sloan Management Review:

From “Investing for a Sustainable Future”:

• MIT SMR global research shows that investors pay attention to sustainability performance: 75% of surveyed investors cite improved revenue performance and operational efficiency from sustainability as strong reasons to invest.
• More than 60% of investors believe that solid sustainability performance reduces a company’s risks.
• Just as significantly, 57% of investment firm board members say they avoid companies with a poor sustainability footprint.
• But only 60% of surveyed managers in publicly traded companies believe that good sustainability performance is materially important to investors’ investment decisions.

From “The Pitfalls of Project Status Reporting”:

• Executives can’t rely on project staff to accurately report project status information or speak up when they see problems.
• In one study, project managers wrote biased reports 60% of the time, with their bias more than twice as likely to be optimistic (that is, overly upbeat) than pessimistic.
• Individuals with a higher propensity for risk-taking or higher career aspirations are more likely to misreport a project status, according to another survey.
• Overconfidence is an occupational hazard in the executive suite: “Many of the auditors we interviewed told us that executives often downplayed the seriousness of the problems presented or, worse, simply ignored their reports regarding troubled projects,” write the authors.

From “The Question Every Project Team Should Answer”:

• Not articulating why a project is being pursued is a frequent cause of project failure.
• A clear “why” statement aligns the efforts of team members, leaders, and other stakeholders, and helps maintain support of a project from its pitch to its payoff.
• Five common impediments to a real understanding of “why” include a bias toward leaping into action and a tendency to gravitate toward a familiar challenge and solution.

From “Is Your Company Ready for HR Analytics?”:

• Companies that use human resource analytics pay attention to modeling, measuring, and managing employee network dynamics and to making sure that analytical HR models provide business insights along with statistical performance.
• A typical rookie mistake when deploying analytical models is a blind obsession with statistical performance and overly complex analytical models.
• Analytical models in HR need to be constantly back-tested by contrasting the predictions against reality. For example, both prehire effectiveness (a metric calculated by determining which recruitment channels provided the candidates with the right profiles) and post-hire effectiveness (calculated by determining which recruitment channels produced the best candidates) should be constantly evaluated.

From “Why Making Money Is Not Enough”:

• “We argue that the best way to maximize profits over the long term is to not make them the primary goal,” write authors Ratan Tata (former chairman of the Tata Group), Stuart L. Hart (Cornell University, Emergent Institute), Aarti Sharma (Sustainable Value Alliance LLC), and Christian Sarkar (Double Loop Marketing).
• “Those who focus obsessively on their own happiness are usually narcissists — and end up miserable,” write the authors.
• “Similarly,” they continue, “companies need a purpose that transcends making money; they need sustainability strategies that recognize that you can make money by doing good things rather than the other way around.”