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Faculty Viewpoints

  • To Be More Charismatic, Take the Focus off Yourself

    In an excerpt from her book Influence Is Your Superpower, Yale SOM's Zoe Chance explains how to avoid “anti-charismatic” behaviors that we fall back on when we’re feeling powerless, including overusing personal pronouns and adding unnecessary apologies and caveats.

    A man speaking into a megaphone and holding a sandwich board that reads "I thought maybe..."
  • Beyond Resolutions: Research-Based Suggestions for 2022

    We asked faculty from the Yale School of Management for their advice—philosophical, professional, and personal—for our readers for the coming year.

    A colorful mosaic
  • A Year Later, Most CEOs Are Keeping Their Post-Insurrection Promises

    Recent news stories have asserted that corporate leaders are reneging on their pledges to withhold contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying election results on January 6, 2021. But Yale SOM's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who hosted one of the meetings where those pledges were made, writes that CEOs remain deeply troubled by threats to democracy, and that campaign records show that most corporate PACs aren't giving to election objectors.

    Senator Josh Hawley gestures to demonstrators as he enters the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
  • Is Climate Risk More than Markets Can Handle?

    Yale SOM finance professor Stefano Giglio lays out the unique complications of grappling with climate risk, and explains his own work on stock portfolios that hedge climate change.

    A satellite image of Miami, Florida
  • Is the Fed Ready for the Next Financial Crisis?

    Yale SOM’s June Rhee discusses how the lessons of the global financial crisis prepared policymakers for COVID, and what tools they’ll need for future crises.

    The Federal Reserve building, photographed through a black metal frame
  • GE’s Split Unravels a Massive Management Mistake

    General Electric CEO Larry Culp announced this week that the company would split into three separate firms. Prof. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld writes that Culp was acknowledging the failure of an approach—the highly diversified industrial conglomerate—that dates back to Jack Welch’s tenure in the 1980s.

    A General Electric facility in Belfort, France, reflecting in a body of water.
  • No, Machiavelli Did Not Say It’s Better to Be Feared Than Loved

    The leadership lesson attributed to Machiavelli’s The Prince is one of many truisms that are frequently distorted for ideological purposes, writes Yale SOM’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. Such distortions can lead to flawed decision-making in the boardroom, according to Sonnenfeld.

    A distorted image of Machiavelli
  • How Leaders Can Fend Off Unwanted Email Introductions

    Leadership expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld offers advice for CEOs who are repeatedly ambushed by former associates playing online matchmaker.

    A hand holding an envelope coming out of a computer screen
  • Soaring COVID Rates in the South Show Why We Need Vaccine Mandates

    The data shows that low vaccination rates in southern states are leading to thousands of needless deaths, write Albert Ko of the Yale School of Public Health and Anjani Jain and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale SOM.

    Nurses with a COVID-19 patient in the intensive care unit at NEA Baptist Memorial Hospital in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in August 2021.
  • Exploring Alternative Futures

    Professor Paul Bracken has spent a lifetime studying the complex systems like international business, technology, and the military. A pioneer of scenario planning, he looks at how organizations really work and how they both drive and are shaped by major trends in order to predict possible futures.

    Paul Bracken teaching