Forbes - 'Tis The Season to Start Planning

Plus: Meet the World's Top Female-Friendly Companies

Hello everyone,

We’re starting this Thanksgiving week with a mix of emotions, from grief for those who died after a driver plowed through a holiday parade in Wisconsin to gratitude for friends, family and colleagues. For leaders, it’s a time of year when planning and budgets are under review. Whether you’re contemplating how to get people back to the office or how to be an employer of choice for veterans, there are a lot of decisions ahead. So in this issue, let’s look at some of the factors that you may want to take into consideration.

To start, I’m thrilled to announce a new partnership with HundredX, a mission-based insights and analytics company that incentivizes people to share customer feedback as a way to provide funding for more than 200 charities and causes nationwide. The result is a vast pool of consumer insights that point to key trends, inflection points, and ideas for new innovation. We’re working with HundredX on a major list to measure a brand’s customer impact and will bring you exclusive insights through this newsletter to help in connecting the dots. Be sure to check out this month’s spot analysis in the Numbers section below. 

Here’s some other food for thought from our team that may help shape your thinking as you contemplate the challenges ahead. Enjoy the holiday and see you again next week.

Have a great week.

Diane

What's Next

Thanksgiving coincides with the high holiday of shopping known as Black Friday. With supply chain issues, labor shortages and inflation, the atmosphere in stores might feel a little more subdued this year. But the biggest change is not what people are buying but how they’re buying. The migration to online shopping is just the start. Alex Sternlicht reported today on SoftBank’s $300 million investment in shopping platform LTK.  What sets LTK apart from other shoppable platforms like Instagram is its laser-sharp focus on helping content creators not only influence what we buy but become the place where we buy.  As cofounder Amber Venz Box told Sternlicht: “We think that a creator should be able to offer someone a shopping experience that is competitive with every retail experience in the world.”

Leadership & Strategy

One way to spur gratitude among employees? Share the wealth. Jena McGregor reports that some of Chobani’s hourly workers could make up to $1 million or more in stock awards when the fast-food operator goes public. For context, founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya has described the idea of maximizing profits for shareholders “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life. In reality, business should take care of employees first.”

Another way to attract and retain talent? Treat them as human beings. While AI tools can speed up the hiring process by sifting through resumes at rapid speed, managers have to be sensitive to algorithmic bias. Martin Giles reports on digital bounty hunters who are tracking whether AI-driven hiring tools reinforce discrimination.  Here’s what he found.

By The Numbers

Across Forbes