THE HQ COMPANIES ARTICLES

Our Latest News

YES, AND ...

Download this article as a PDF file.

There is no formal standardized source of racial/ethnic, LGBTQ+, or disability data regarding board composition among U.S. companies. Yet board diversity in all its forms has repeatedly been shown to improve company bottom lines.

• A 2022 study of over 4,000 North American companies once again showed that board gender diversity increases board effectiveness and is tied to better financial performance ...

• A study of 3,690 US firms from 2005 to 2019...reported that board genetic diversity improves carbon and governance performance and ESG disclosure.

• In an ongoing human capital/talent shortage environment, Accenture confirmed in 2023 its 2018 report findings: hiring persons with disabilities adds to the bottom line and those numbers have grown in the five years between reports.

There are Human Capital Management (HCM), Environmental/Climate Disclosure, and Diversity SEC regulations in process currently.

Given that these three issues—HCM, Climate, and Diversity—are closely related...bundling these topics by using a “Yes…and” approach can be easily utilized...

Read the full article.

THE "SNIFF TEST"—A BIG AI ISSUE RESOLVED

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

AI has the power to grow or destroy your CEO/CFO/COO/CMO/GC career. Using an inexpensive, easy-to-implement “sniff test” before allowing any big data/AI generated information into your company’s financial, legal, operational, and/or marketing databases can keep your career (and your company), your health, and maybe even your life from joining the AI casualty list that includes:

• The CEO, COO, President, and Counsel of Sports Illustrated were fired—and the Sports Illustrated publisher lost its licensing—after publishing several articles with fake author names and headshots from an AI-generated image website.

• Six U.S. lawyers were sanctioned for citing several previous court cases proving precedence that emerged as fake AI-ChatGPT cases. The judge stated that ethics rules impose on attorneys “to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”

• Mayo Clinic and American Society for Health-Systems Pharmacists’ Long Island University’s research have discovered the following regarding ChatGPT advice: the answers for medical, pharmaceutical, suicide, addiction, and sexual assault questions are often incomplete, inaccurate, or even dangerous to a person’s health if followed.

WORSE, ChatGPT fabricates realistic “deceptive forgeries of scientific references, even listing the names of real authors with previous publications in scientific journals.”

Something needs to be done that will keep such information out of your company’s databases where it will be used to create systems, products, services, marketing materials, strategies, etc. that could be based on false information. ...

Read the full article.

DESIGNING OPTIMAL FIT

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

Corporate profits and growth (new markets/products, new/existing clients) happen through employing the best mixture of innovation, people, processes, and culture alignment. The heart of the puzzle is identifying, then executing, what would work best for your particular company and situation. Answering the 3 questions below will point the way to designing the optimal fit for all stakeholders—customers, community, and workforce from executives through rank and file—that actually delivers the desired profits and goals.

1. Does your company produce products/services that are exploitative innovations, i.e., are they improvements/changes to existing products/services? Example: are your company’s products/services like the Apple iPhone 14, which is an improvement on the first-generation Apple iPhone? If yes, then: ...

Read the full article.

IS IT TIME FOR A CHIEF RISK OFFICER (CRO)?

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

Risk is like a wildfire—it shoots up in multiple locations and spreads quickly. You think that you have it contained, then BOOM, there it is again. In environments that have hot dry seasons, fire crews are on standby, totally prepared to extinguish fires. Yet over 70% of non-financial corporations do NOT have a Chief Fire Officer, aka Chief Risk Officer (CRO), reporting to the CEO and part of the Executive Team (GC [compliance/legal], CFO [finance], CISO [data & systems], CHRO [people], etc.). ...

Read the full article.

THE ECHO EFFECT'S IMPACT ON YOUR CAREER

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

The Echo Effect is real and quite dangerous to your career growth, especially because the world is now so connected and in such rapid flux. An Echo Effect occurs when a group of individuals have the same shared traits, which means that no matter how many people are in the group, their similarities will result in their opinions and biases echoing the same sentiments, which may or may not be reflective of the larger environment facing you as a member of a Subject Matter Expert (SME) team, a department, the company, and/or its board.

Your career growth is dependent upon the contribution you make as a SME, within your department, towards your corporation’s goals, and/or to your corporate board’s strategies.

QUESTION: How many people—and which people—do you talk to before you form your insights, provide your recommendations to your team, your department head, your corporate leaders, your board? ...

Read the full article.

LESSENING REPUTATIONAL RISK

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

An article co-authored by Kathy Graham that was featured in the Practice section of NACD's Directorship for Boardroom Intelligence magazine.

1. The risk of unmet stakeholder expectations is incinerating business value.

2. Enterprise risk professionals recognize that it is vital to understand the expectations of stakeholders, which is only possible via the reporting of knowledgeable staff who have their fingers on the pulses of those stakeholders. These critical reporting processes are vulnerable to human frailties, such as the biases of management.

3. There is a path to mitigate human capital systemic bias, ensuring more reliable enterprise intelligence for the purposes of reputation risk management. This path is built around three core actions: ...

Read the full article.

The HQ Companies

ADVANCING YOUR CAREER THROUGH WEAK TIES

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

What does a person’s professional success—be it as an entrepreneur, employee, executive, or Board Director—have to do with a drop of water in a small pond becoming part of the ocean, which contains 96% of all water? The larger your weak ties, the more you’ve moved from being a drop of water in a minor body to tapping the potential of the whole ocean.
Here’s what you need to do to make that happen. ...

Read the full article.

EFFECTIVE BOARD REBALANCING

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

Companies have had to dramatically change their marketing, supply chain, operations, etc., strategies as they’ve faced global pandemics, digital impacts, China and Russia declarations of intent to expand their physical borders, divided political parties/major changes in government practices/people, ESG impacts, corporate shareholders now including all stakeholders, etc.

Public, private, and nonprofit companies that have fiduciary boards—i.e., boards with a real legal voice in providing direction, strategy, risk/marketing oversight, and succession planning—are now facing that their board size is perhaps no longer optimal AND/OR that their board directors might not have the skill sets needed to optimally face these fast-changing market/economy situations.

The question is what does a company do to confront this dilemma?

If large enough a company, many are choosing to do nothing except perhaps add a few more seats to the board that are filled with individuals with the appropriate skills/mindset.

However, if a company has gone through serious rightsizing and/or is small without the option of adding a few more new board directors, the following is an approach many are taking to rebalance their board appropriately. ...

Read the full article.

SUCCESSFUL AND EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

Download this article as a PDF file.
Download the Summary Infographic.

“You don’t exist if no one can see you.” Fred Luthans’s research shows that this quote applies to corporate leaders, since:

  • Managers who get promoted most quickly in an organization are NOT the managers who do the best job.

  • The big difference between Successful Managers (those who get promoted fast) and Effective Managers (those with the highest quantity / quality work AND highest employee satisfaction / commitment ratings) is that:

    ► Successful Managers spend 48% of their time networking, i.e., “socializing, politicking, interacting with outsiders.” Effective Managers spend 11% of their time networking.
    ► Getting promoted quickly in a company results from time spent with bosses / outside influencers.

    ► Effective Managers spend 44% of their time communicating, i.e., “explaining their decisions and seeking information from colleagues / employees.” Successful Managers spend 28% of their time communicating.
    ► Delivering the highest corporate productivity / lowest turnover results in fewer, slower promotions.

Both Successful Managers and Effective Managers also lose big time with above behaviors because: ...

Read the full article (with sources).



The HQ Companies is a registered trademark ® of The HQ Companies, Inc. | Copyright © 2024 The HQ Companies, Inc. | All Rights Reserved. For Personal Use Only.