Three Ways Companies Are Getting Ethics Wrong

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, November 29, 2022

by David Weitzner



Making business decisions that are both ethically and strategically sound has always been incredibly tricky. Leaders are called upon to act in a manner that is consistent with their personal values, builds solidarity and trust among diverse stakeholders, enhances their company’s reputation, and prevents scandals, while also being mindful of the bottom line.

This leadership challenge is getting ever more complex. Investors are measuring companies against environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) indexes. Employees are demanding extensive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments. And customers want to buy brands that are tied to strong corporate social performance (CSP).

As counterintuitive as it might seem in the burgeoning ethical complexity of ESG, DEI, and CSP, a few companies have found that when it comes to ethics, simpler is better. They meet the demands listed above by rejecting the notion that ethics are necessarily complex. They refuse to abdicate their ethical responsibilities; they craft value propositions that do not lean on social value initiatives to obscure or distract from how the company creates financial value; and they are transparent about how they do business with all stakeholders. Read the rest here.

What’s Your Return on Visibility?

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, October 26, 2021

by Michael Schrage



Digitalization driven by COVID-19 has accelerated and transformed management’s ability to track what and how workers are doing. This growth in networked visibility significantly increases the risk of institutional and interpersonal conflict, as well as challenges to cultural norms.

Many workers rationally fear that enhanced monitoring empowers management — and micromanagement — at their expense. When experienced as corporate surveillance, monitoring implies a lack of trust and an invasion of privacy, especially when people are working from home. That’s not sustainable; no one wants to feel spied on. Consequently, if not ironically, leaders are being pushed to make visibility far more visible.

While greater transparency around visibility can allay employee fears, it may also expose and provoke clashes in core values. If the interactions on a distributed work team, for example, are appropriately inclusive, but that negatively affects productivity, what happens next? Workers in general — and remote workers in particular — want credible narratives explaining visibility’s benefits, costs, and trade-offs. Opacity around visibility invites credible accusations of hypocrisy.

Visibility, like capital, compensation, and digital transformation, requires explicit purpose and policies. Leaders, not just HR and IT administrators, should explicitly manage visibility as an enterprise asset. Read the rest here.

Cloud-based HCM systems should come without surprises

Lent an editorial hand preparing this guide to preparing a reality-based business case for HCM:

Deloitte's Capital H Blog, July 3, 2019

by Marty Marchetti

The business case for cloud-based human capital management (HCM) systems can sound pretty compelling. What CHRO wouldn’t want fast access to the latest advances in HCM technology at a lower overall cost? But my colleagues and I help companies make the move to cloud HCM, and we often get a firsthand view of the mismatch between expectations and reality that was revealed in Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends study.

It is important to have a comprehensive and accurate total cost of ownership for cloud HR before your company commits to it, during the implementation, and after it is in place.

“No surprises” should describe your move to the cloud, and the following 5 questions can help you reduce them. Read the rest here.

Two Capabilities for Building Organizational Agility

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Boss Magazine, March 2019

by David Mallon

A few years ago, agility was considered a competitive advantage — a trait that a company could develop and nurture to get a leg up in its industry and markets. But late last year, when Forbes Insights conducted a survey of 1,000 executives across industries and geographies, 81 percent of them identified organizational agility as the most important characteristic of a successful organization. Today, agility isn’t about raising the competitive stakes; it’s an organizational trait needed to get into the game.

At its core, agility is simply the ability to change direction quickly in response to external conditions. The problem, of course, is that for the past century, people have been building companies that were anything but agile.

How can you make your company more agile? Focus your efforts on developing the two capabilities that define the trait: sense and response. Read the rest here.

Grow Faster by Changing Your Innovation Narrative

Learned a lot editing this one:

MIT Sloan Management Review, December 10, 2018

by George S. Day and Gregory P. Shea

Managers have no shortage of advice on how to achieve organic sales growth through innovation. Prescriptions range from emulating the best practices of innovative companies like Amazon, Starbucks, and 3M to adopting popular concepts such as design thinking, lean startup principles, innovation boot camps, and cocreation with customers. While this well-meant advice has merit, following it without first understanding your company’s innovation narrative is tantamount to going from symptoms to surgery without a diagnosis.

An innovation narrative is an oft-overlooked facet of organizational culture that encapsulates employees’ beliefs about a company’s ability to innovate. It serves as a powerful motivator of action or inaction. We find innovation narratives in two basic flavors: growth-affirming and growth-denying, or some combination thereof.

Companies that lead — or aspire to lead — their industries in organic growth need to have a coherent, growth-affirming innovation narrative in place, and we will discuss why that’s important and what it can look like. But what actions support the development and maintenance of such a narrative? To answer that question, we tested 18 possible innovation levers and identified the four that are most relied upon by organic growth leaders to stay ahead of their competitors: (1) invest in innovation talent, (2) encourage prudent risk-taking, (3) adopt a customer-centric innovation process, and (4) align metrics and incentives with innovation activity. We will look at each one in turn.

These four levers will be familiar to innovation practitioners, but their effects intensify with managerial focus. They serve as so-called simple rules. That is, they avoid the confusion and dilution of effort that result from trying to pull too many levers at once or in an uncoordinated manner, and they channel and prioritize leaders’ efforts to embed a growth-affirming innovation narrative in their companies. Read the rest here.

The Four Building Blocks of Transformation

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

strategy+business, October 22, 2018

by Al Kent, David Lancefield, and Kevin Reilly




Illustration by Miguel Montaner

If you are a business leader, you are probably thinking about radical change. New industrial platforms, geopolitical shifts, global competition, and changing consumer demand are reshaping your world. You face upstart competitors with high valuations encroaching on your business, and activist investors looking for targets. Meanwhile, you have your own aspirations for your company: to be a profitable innovator, to seize opportunities, to lead and dominate your industry, to attract highly committed talent, and to carve out a socially responsible role in which your organization makes a difference. You also probably want to clear away the deadwood in your legacy system: practices, structures, technologies, and cultural habits that hold your company back.

The conventional response is a transformation initiative — a top-down restructuring, accompanied by across-the-board cost cutting, a technological reboot, and some reengineering. Maybe you’ve been through a few such initiatives. If so, you know firsthand how difficult it is for them to succeed. These efforts tend to come in late and over budget, leaving the organization fatigued, demoralized, and not much changed. They don’t take into account the fundamentally new kinds of leverage available to businesses that have emerged in the last 10 years: new networks, new data gathering and analysis resources, and new ways of codifying knowledge.

Successful transformations may be relatively rare, but they do exist — and yours can succeed as well. A transformation, in this context, is a major shift in an organization’s capabilities and identity so that it can deliver valuable results, relevant to its purpose, that it couldn’t master before. It doesn’t necessarily involve a single major initiative (though it could); but the company develops an ongoing mastery of change, in which adaptability feels natural to leaders and employees.

An effort of this sort can take place on a large or small scale; it can involve the front, middle, or back office; it can be conducted by any type of enterprise, from a startup to a global enterprise; and it will affect every aspect of the organization’s structure, including such functions as innovation, finance, marketing, sales, human resources, and operations. At any scale, it requires a cultural shift and highly engaged leaders, who take control of the organization’s future in these four ways... read the rest here.

If You Cut Employees Some Slack, Will They Innovate?

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, May 4, 2018

by Yasser Rahrovani, Alain Pinsonneault, and Robert D. Austin

The idea of using slack resources — in the form of time, technology, and support — to bolster employee innovation falls in and out of favor. The return on slack innovation programs can be prodigious: 3M Co. attributes the development of the Post-it Note to its 1948 decision to allow employees to devote 15% of their paid time to side projects; and Google says its “20% rule,” which upped the ante on slack time devoted to innovation, yielded Gmail, AdSense, and Google Earth. But few, if any companies, have stuck with time off for innovation and other slack-based programs for as long as 3M. Even Google has reportedly waxed and waned in its commitment to its 20% rule.

Given the significant investment that slack-based innovation programs require, the decision to adopt one shouldn’t be made off the cuff. But what are the factors underlying that decision and how should such programs be designed? To begin to answer these questions, we conducted in-depth interviews of knowledge workers in different industries to understand what motivated them to take risks and explore new ideas, and, more specifically, whether and how slack resources might have contributed to their innovativeness. We then created and refined an empirical model based on the factors and relationships that appear to influence employee innovation and tested it using a sample group consisting of 427 employees from North American companies.

We found that different types of employees respond in different ways to slack innovation programs; that different kinds of slack resources are better suited to certain types of employees than they are to others; and that different kinds of slack innovation programs produce different kinds of innovation. Companies can use these findings to design more effective slack innovation programs and maximize their returns on slack resources...read the rest here

When SMART Goals Are Not So Smart

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, March 21, 2018

by Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller

We rarely question the need for goals, and the familiar acronym SMART instructs us that good goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based. But none of these attributes say anything about the context in which we are setting goals.

Are SMART goals effective in every context? If not, what kinds of goals are most useful in what kinds of contexts? These are important questions at a time when competitive environments are constantly morphing and new ones are unexpectedly emerging.

Why We Need Goals

Every company needs goals. Goals fulfill several functions: coordination (to align intentions); abbreviation (to summarize a complex effort); prioritization (to ensure that activities and processes don’t become an end in and of themselves); calibration (to tell us how to allocate or invest resources); and evaluation (to tell us if we are making progress).

In stable, predictable environments, it makes sense to set goals that are specific and measurable. For instance, some markets, such as confectionary and cosmetics, grow with gross domestic product (GDP) and follow relatively predictable trends. Thus, a company like Mars Inc. can plan out a multiyear strategy in its core categories.

In more dynamic and uncertain environments, however, SMART goals can be problematic. It’s hard to manage to specific, time-based targets when demand, technology, business models, and competitor sets are incessantly shifting, as is common in emerging or recently disrupted industries, like genetic testing services or augmented reality technology. In such cases, companies need goals to do other jobs, like prompt new thinking or encourage experimentation and learning in situations they have not encountered before. Read the rest here.

Accelerate Employee Learning to Increase Your Company's Clock Speed

Learning a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Boss Magazine, March 2018

by David Mallon

It’s not news that the pace of business is accelerating. The adoption rate of new technologies is on the rise: customer demand shifts with the click of a mouse, and new and disruptive competitors appear out of thin air. Increasingly, the clock speed of your company—its strategic and operational response times—is becoming a key determinant of its survival and success.

How can you increase your company’s clock speed? The first and perhaps best way to start moving the needle is to help increase the speed of employee learning.
Work is Learning

More than a half-century ago, Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media guru, wrote, “The future of work consists of learning a living (rather than earning a living).”

And so it has: Since the 1960s, fewer and fewer employees are doing rote work, and more and more of them are being called upon to do processing work—that is, work that requires ongoing employee learning. Thus, the ability to learn quickly has become a key enabler of both employee performance and organizational clock speed.

In an era when work is learning, long-established ways and means of employee training and development (T&D) are approaching their sell-by dates. Pulling people off the job to impart knowledge and skills is inefficient at best.

Increasingly, it’s ineffective, too. That’s because of the half-life of much of the knowledge and many of the skills that are being imparted is shrinking—especially when that employee learning is focused on jobs that people are doing today, but are less and less likely to be doing tomorrow.

Instead, companies should be enhancing the ability of employees to learn many new skills and to respond to constant change on the fly. They should be following the example of what we at Bersin call “High-Impact Learning Organizations” or HILOs. Read the rest here.

The Truth About Corporate Transformation

Learned a lot editing this article from the BCG Henderson Institute:

MIT Sloan Management Review, January 31, 2018

by Martin Reeves, et. al.

Corporate transformation sits atop the strategic agenda for many CEOs. While transformation is ideally undertaken preemptively, in practice it is much more commonly a reaction to changing — and challenging — circumstances. Such transformations represent a fundamental and risk-laden reboot of a company, with the goal of achieving a dramatic improvement in performance and altering its future trajectory.

Given the stakes, we were startled to find that the research underpinning the design and execution of corporate transformations is surprisingly thin. As a result, transformations are often guided by beliefs that, while seemingly plausible, are more anecdotal than empirical in nature. It’s time for a more evidence-based approach.

To study corporate transformation and its success factors, we analyzed financial and nonfinancial data of all U.S. public companies with $10 billion or more market cap between 2004 and 2016. We identified companies with a demonstrated need for fundamental change, namely, those companies with an annualized deterioration, relative to their industry average, in total shareholder return (TSR) of 10 percentage points or more over two years. This definition provided us with a large data set for empirical analysis including more than 300 companies across different industries over more than a decade.

Further, we trained a proprietary algorithm to quantify the strategic orientation of companies, based on semantic patterns within the “Management’s Discussion and Analysis” section of 70,000 10-K filings. We built a prediction model to identify formalized transformation programs, based on restructuring costs and major corporate announcements (as reported by Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC). And we conducted a multivariate regression analysis to determine the impact of a number of factors on change in TSR during transformations...Read the rest here.

How to Keep More of What You Make

Learned a lot about how to shelter wealth in private businesses while lending an editorial hand here. Read the rest at https://lnkd.in/gEFvJpu

Three Career Tips for the Purposeless

In which, I vent my frustration with the fetishization of purpose...

LinkedIn Pulse, October 3, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

“I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively,” Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard’s Class of 2017. “The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.”

Baloney. A sense of purpose is like an appendix. If you’ve got one, good for you. If you don’t, you’re not missing anything important.

I’ve always been purposeless. As a kid, I kinda worried about it. I thought I was missing something essential because all I wanted to be was a New Jersey Lottery winner. (In those days, the grand prize was a cool million. Pretax. Woo-hoo!)

But getting a purpose was never a burning issue for me. Getting a job was far more important. I needed money—mainly because the only thing my parents ever agreed on was that one kid wasn’t enough.

Sans purpose, it did take me a long time—15 years—to find work that worked for me. But I learned some lessons along the way. I offer them here as shortcuts to everyone else who drew a blank ticket in the purpose lottery. Read the rest here.

Why Airbnb will always be a better business than Uber

Learned a lot about the nuances of platforms while editing this one by Jonathan Knee of Columbia Business School

MIT Sloan Management Review, Sept. 15, 2017

by Jonathan A. Knee

The dramatic influence of the internet on how businesses operate and the emergence of a handful of gigantic, digitally enabled corporations have led to breathless pronouncements regarding the importance of a peculiar new class of monopolies built on digital platforms. These platforms, it is argued, fuel network effects that lead inexorably to winner-take-all marketplaces. This perspective is invariably coupled with infectious optimism and investment euphoria regarding the extraordinary scale and strength of network-effects businesses.

In theory, the key attribute of a network-effects business is its momentum-driven flywheel. Every new participant increases the value of the network to existing participants, attracts more new users, and makes the prospect of a successful competitive attack ever more remote — thereby bolstering the relative attractiveness of the business. The imagined innate indomitability of network effects stems at least in part from the breathtaking strength of notable platform businesses, like Facebook’s social network or Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The problem is that not all platform businesses exhibit network effects. Moreover, even a cursory survey of the landscape does not support the oft-repeated assertion that such effects are “likely to strengthen a market’s winner-take-all tendency.” For every Facebook and Microsoft, there are literally hundreds of network-effects businesses operating in crowded sectors or in sectors where it is not clear that anyone will ever turn a profit. Take, for example, the once hot peer-to-peer lending space, which after more than a decade has attracted dozens of aspiring entrepreneurs and spawned a billion-dollar IPO but nevertheless has largely been a bust. The first mover in U.S. P2P lending, San Francisco-based Prosper Marketplace Inc., continues to struggle to achieve consistent profitability, and the billion-dollar IPO of San Francisco-based Lendingclub Corp. quickly ended in tears for investors.

Nor are digital platforms necessarily better businesses than the analog versions that they displace. Analog malls had the benefit of their shoppers being many miles away from competing malls, and the benefit of their retail tenants being committed to long-term leases. On the internet, platform competitors are only a click away and companies regularly and dynamically optimize their customer reach across competing platforms and directly via their own sites.

It is not that marketplace businesses built on e-commerce platforms do not have advantages or that they cannot thrive. Rather, it is that the mere existence of network effects tells entrepreneurs and investors relatively little about the attractiveness of a particular business. For example, there is almost no fundamental difference in the network effects enjoyed by Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc., the global leaders in the ride-hailing and short-term lodging marketplaces, respectively. Yet, other characteristics of those industries ensure that Airbnb will enjoy dramatically stronger results than Uber will ever achieve. Read the rest here.

Blockchain is poised to disrupt trade finance

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Next in Tech blog, August 3, 2017

by Grainne McNamara

Trade finance has enabled the exchange of goods for millennia. Babylonian cuneiform tablets dating back to 3000 BC mention the kind of promissory notes and letters of credit that still underpin international trade. And, aside from incremental improvements in the ways and means of trade finance, not all that much has changed in the fundamental elements of this approximately US$40 billion sector of the financial services industry over the past 5,000 years.

That is, until now. The advent of blockchain technology is on the verge of revolutionizing trade finance—and it threatens to leave behind any financial services company that doesn’t move with the times. Read the rest here.

There's One Question You Must Ask Before Solving Any Problem (It's Also the Most Underrated Management Skill)

Inc., May 20, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

It's often said that most business books would make better articles, but there's an article in Sloan Management Review that turns the truism on its head. The article, titled 'The Most Underrated Skill in Management,' would make a great book. What is this skill? It's the ability to formulate a problem statement.

"There are few questions in business more powerful than 'What problem are you trying to solve?'" write authors Nelson P. Repenning, Don Kieffer, and Todd Astor. "In our experience, leaders who can formulate clear problem statements get more done with less effort and move more rapidly than their less-focused counterparts. Clear problem statements can unlock the energy and innovation that lies within those who do the core work of your organization."

To learn more about this most underrated skill, I interviewed Nelson Repenning, MIT Sloan School of Management Distinguished Professor of Systems Dynamics and Organizational Studies and chief social scientist at ShiftGear Work Design. Read the rest here.

Investing in America’s Data Science and Analytics Talent

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand on this joint report:

Increasingly US jobs require data science and analytics skills. Can we meet the demand? The current shortage of skills in the national job pool demonstrates that business-as-usual strategies won’t satisfy the growing need. If we are to unlock the promise and potential of data and all the technologies that depend on it, employers and educators will have to transform.

This joint report from BHEF and PwC provides groundbreaking data science and analytics market intelligence informed by a Burning Glass Technologies workforce analysis and real-time survey data of business and higher education leaders from Gallup. The findings of this report document the emergence of the hybrid economy, in which companies in all sectors have become increasingly digital-intensive organizations. It also recommends at eight actions for change to put the supply of skills in balance with the demand.

Download the full report here

The Flare and Focus of Successful Futurists

Enjoyed editing Amy Webb's adaptation of her book, The Signals Are Talking, for MIT Sloan Management Review:

Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting signals, which are harbingers of what’s to come. They look for early patterns — pre-trends, if you will — as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream. The fringe is that place where hackers are experimenting, academics are testing their ideas, technologists are building new prototypes, and so on. Futurists know most patterns will come to nothing, so they watch and wait and test the patterns to find those few that will evolve into genuine trends. Each trend is a looking glass into the future, a way to see over time’s horizon. This is forecasting: simultaneously recognizing patterns in the present and thinking about how those changes will impact the future so that you can be actively engaged in building what happens next — or at least be less surprised by what others develop. Forecasting is a learnable skill, and a process any organization can master.

Joseph Voros, a theoretical physicist and professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, offers my favorite explanation of future forecasting, saying it informs strategy making by enriching the “context within which strategy is developed, planned, and executed.” The advantage of forecasting the future in this way is obvious. Organizations that can see trends early enough to act can gain a first-mover advantage. They can also help shape the broader context, keenly understanding how developments in seemingly unconnected industries will affect them. Most organizations that track emerging trends are adept at conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead.

While futures forecasting is a professional and academic discipline going back more than 100 years, few companies employ futurists. That’s starting to change as more leaders become familiar with the work futurists do. Accenture, Ford, Google, IBM, Intel, Samsung, and UNESCO all have futurists on staff, whose work is quite different from what happens within the traditional R&D function.

The futurists at these organizations know that their tools are best used within a group — and that the group’s composition matters tremendously to the outcomes they produce. Within every organization are people whose dominant characteristic is either creativity or logic. If you’ve been on a team that includes both groups and didn’t have a great facilitator during your meetings, you probably clashed. If it was an important project and there were strong personalities representing each side, the creative people felt as though their contributions were being discounted, while the logical thinkers — whose natural talents are in managing processes, projecting budgets, or mitigating risk — felt undervalued because they weren’t coming up with bold new ideas. You undoubtedly had a difficult time staying on track, or worse, you might have spent hours meeting about how to have your next meeting. This is what I call the “duality dilemma.”

The duality dilemma is responsible for a lack of forward thinking at many organizations. Read the rest here... 

Zero-based trade for CPG leaders: Five steps for raising the impact of your trade promotions

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, March 8, 2017

by David Ganiear and Edward Landry


The next wave of profitability for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies will come from zero-based trade (ZBT). This adaptation of zero-based budgeting goes beyond cost management of trade promotion. It helps manufacturers rethink their patterns of spending and increase the profitability of this all-important way of reaching end consumers in retail stores. Trade promotion, which directs shopper awareness at the point of sale, is a valuable strategic capability. In the annual expenses of a CPG company, it typically ranks second; only the cost of goods sold is greater.

ZBT represents a five-step process for raising the impact of that spending. The first step is to diagnose your situation and look for previously unseen opportunities for improvement. Second, develop trade promotion strategies that are aligned with your business strategy, reflecting both the financial returns you expect from your trade promotion investment and the level of freedom you have to redeploy it. Third, employ trade optimization levers — budgeting, pricing, analytic planning, and post-event analysis — to implement these new strategies. Fourth, bring your overall trade budgets in line with your new approach. Finally, give this new ZBT practice the enabling capabilities needed to sustain it over time. Together, these steps add up to a new overall trade promotion strategy that can yield millions in savings for your CPG company and give it a customer-facing competitive edge. Download the white paper here.

2017 Chemicals Trends

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, January, 2017

By Vijay Sarathy, Marcus Morawietz, Jayant Gotpagar, and Jeremy Bebiak

Chemicals companies face a formidable challenge: delivering profitable growth in a hypercompetitive, low-growth world.

The structural headwinds in the chemicals industry are blowing like a gale out of the global economy. In a funk since peaking in 2007, global economies have been unable to reach the 35-year GDP growth average of 3.5 percent in six of the past eight years. And the two years of “high” growth were more of a bounce back from the sharp downturn of 2009 than precursors of a sustained turnaround.

Within this problematic macroeconomic environment, made worse for many multinationals by the strong dollar, demand for chemicals has fallen. Overall industry sales growth increased an anemic 2.1 percent in 2016 as the sector faced declining industrial production and broad inventory rightsizing by many of its customers. Chemicals companies that sell petroleum-based products often fell short of these industry averages because lower oil prices led to sharp top-line declines, sometimes in the range of 30 to 40 percent. Only naphtha-based producers benefited from oil price weakness, because it translated into materials cost reductions of about 60 percent for some companies, which greatly improved profit margins. Read the rest here.

Private-sector participation in the GCC: Building foundations for success

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, Jan. 30, 2017

by Hilal Halaoui, Salim Ghazaly, Karim Aly, Joe Youssef Malek, and Rawia Abdel Samad

The governments of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have decided to change their economic development model. The state-led approach which relied upon natural resources successfully raised incomes from developing to developed country levels in a little over a generation. However, that model is no longer appropriate as it is undermined by oil dependence, a lack of workforce diversity and skills, a growing need for public services, and insufficient innovation.

One effective response is private-sector participation (PSP). GCC states are already using PSP, but have wielded it tactically and ad hoc. As a result, they have not tapped its full potential. Instead, a comprehensive strategic program of public–private partnerships (PPPs) and privatization initiatives that covers all major sectors of the economy is needed to define a country’s PSP plan. If GCC states can successfully develop, launch, and execute such a PSP program, they can transform their economies. The GCC states could avoid US$164 billion in capital expenditures by 2021 and generate $114 billion in revenues from sales of utility and airport assets alone, and up to $287 billion from sales of shares in publicly listed companies.

Furthermore, GCC states could narrow the innovation gap with other countries, enhance the delivery of and access to government services, and improve their infrastructure. To capture these benefits, GCC governments will need a rigorous and comprehensive approach to PSP and a clearly articulated, long-term implementation plan that encompasses all economic sectors. Such an approach rests on three foundational elements: A governing policy for PSP that is either a standalone policy or part of a broader national policy; a legal framework that encompasses the new laws or modifications to existing laws necessary to facilitate PSP activities; and an institutional setup that clearly defines and allocates authority over PSP to existing government entities or establishes new entities to govern it. Download the white paper here.