Leading After The Election | Are You Doing Remote Work Right? | Upwork's Plans To Reinvent Freelancing

Plus: 12 Cybersecurity CEOs Share What They Learned Leading During The Pandemic

With last night’s launch of Crew Dragon, SpaceX’s second crewed mission for NASA that sent four astronauts on a six-month journey to the International Space Station, the revolutionary company “has further cemented its status as the dominant force in commercial spaceflight,” writes Forbes Contributor Jonathan O’Callaghan.

The success of the Falcon 9 rocket, which marks the first time in nine years that the U.S. has been able to send astronauts to space on a routine missions, is one more step toward human space transportation and a paragon of the power of teamwork and collaboration.

It’s juxtaposed with my son’s and his teammates’ capping of their nine-year youth football career last night with a final W. A much more “grounded” example, it was no less a display of the persistence that can come from a team of individuals working as one toward a common goal, one forged long ago and captured despite the challenges of the pandemic.

As we close out the last few weeks of 2020, company executives are looking forward even as they’re wrapping up a tumultuous year, seeking to take learnings from the massive business shifts wrought by the pandemic—think years of digital transformation boiled down to a matter of weeks—and they’re mapping out the strategies and paths forward to embolden their teams to come together, emerge stronger and get the W.

Don’t miss two big events here at Forbes this week that will dive into those issues and more—Episode 2 of the Forbes CIO Next series, and Episode 3 of the Forbes CMO Summit virtual series.

This digest of Forbes content is your weekly touchpoint as you negotiate internal, external and cultural factors. We hope you find it useful, and let us know what else you’d like to see here.

Have a good week.

Leadership & Strategy

The U.S. stumbled its way through the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Now that the second wave is imminent, it may be worth looking overseas for a better approach to crisis leadership. Enter the Dutch.

As the dust from the election  slowly settles, there’s bound to be some lingering political tension in your workplace. Here’s a guide for leaders looking to keep their teams conflict-free. 

Much will change when Biden takes office, but don’t expect CEO activism to be one of them. The social advocacy that many corporate leaders adopted—whether genuinely or strategically—during Trump’s presidency will likely remain as a branding cornerstone even after Inauguration Day.

By The Numbers

5%

The amount of a “work from home tax” proposed by Deutsche Bank. 

Analysts at Deutsche Bank recently proposed a 5% “privilege tax” on the wages of those who have been able to work from home during the pandemic to shore up state finances. The proposal is unlikely to generate any positive feelings toward the embattled German bank, which was fined $150 million this year for its dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.

Innovation & Transformation

The coronavirus job market may be grim for most, but for IT workers, GM is offering a lifeline. In an effort to accelerate its electric and autonomous vehicle divisions, GM is hiring 3,000 tech workers to develop a deep, in-house bench of technical talent. 

GM’s hiring blitz will be facilitated by an ambitious new remote-work program, but is that their best bet? Sid Sijbrandij, founder of GitLab, built his $3 billion business without ever opening an office, and he has some strong words for companies looking to halfheartedly commit to working from home. Is your organization doing remote work wrong?

Major shifts that rely on new technology come with risks, and it’s doubly so for artificial intelligence. While AI can offer impartial analytical tools, it can also reinforce and magnify human error.

The CxO Profile

Across Forbes