There are many open questions about whether corporate purpose should have instrumental or moral foundations, how to put boundaries around who counts as a stakeholder and how engagement can lead to the fair distribution of value. We are in the midst of a great burgeoning of experimentation in both research and practice to continue to answer these questions. The agenda is ambitious — and necessarily so. Purpose-driven leadership is not just for CEOs. It is going to take each and every one of us — in our roles as practitioners, stakeholders and academics — to transform our own practices and seek the radical transformations that have the potential to save our society and our planet. Make no mistake: Progress depends upon it.

Since 2000, women's representation in health professions has increased steadily across the globe. In 2019, nearly half of all doctors in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development were women. And labour force survey data from 57 countries indicate that the majority of health-care workers in higher wage occupations under the age of 40 years are women. Although progress in women's representation is worth celebrating, numerical parity belies the challenges women continue to confront in medicine.

It's tempting to think that an inclusive approach to analytics is just an add-on to a day-to-day job, or worse, isn't profitable. But those are all just myths, say GATE's Sarah Kaplan and Lechin Lu. Gender Analytics is a process to embed insights about gender and its intersections with race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, Indigeneity and other factors to create inclusive product, service and policy design. Despite having a potentially significant impact on society, the idea of inclusive analytics is often misunderstood, though it’s recently risen to prominence as companies prioritize equity and diversity not just in their talent management but also in how they go to market. And there’s a significant upside to the shift: Applying a gender and inclusion lens to product and service development could result in new opportunities for businesses.

It would be difficult to find a field today where AI is not involved in some respect. It has become so ubiquitous that some researchers have suggested it is a new type of infrastructure. Rather than being physical and visible like roads, AI is often invisible, but it is nevertheless a moderator of social relations and organizational practices and actions — including the distribution of power. Social relations and values have long been reflected and reproduced in technology, and AI is no exception. But this also means that the enduring bias, discrimination and inequality that are deeply rooted in society may also be deeply rooted in this technology.

Global authorities such as WHO and the International Labour Organization have proposed interventions to improve the telecommuting experience, such as establishing work–life boundary strategies, designing ergonomic remote workplaces, and maintaining regular social interactions. However, the potential negative gendered consequences remain under-acknowledged. When women work from home, they report a disproportionate increase in domestic labour, childcare-related disruptions, and declines in productivity and mental health. If not addressed, teleworking might exacerbate existing gender inequities in career advancement, health, and rights, among others, especially as global telecommuting rates continue to climb throughout 2022 and beyond.

Everybody wants to generate breakthrough ideas. Few people know how to do it. Conventional practice is to pick a vague challenge (“We need innovative ideas!”) and then randomly brainstorm in the hopes of stumbling onto the next Spotify or Slack.

The pandemic has exposed how care work is essential labour on which the economy depends. It has also shown that care work is devalued, disproportionately falling upon women, people of colour, and immigrants, and that risks are absorbed by vulnerable and precarious care workers. It has accentuated the existing global labour shortage in care. Care policies as well as care infrastructure have proved inadequate to address the needs of both caregivers and care receivers. Addressing the importance of care work as our society recovers from the pandemic is an opportunity to capitalize on changes needed to create a more equitable and sustainable economy. 

In the face of climate change, rising economic inequality, systemic racism and the COVID-19 pandemic, it is once again time for a new set of guidelines. While the 1994 guidelines — which concern best practices around board independence and oversight — continue to be relevant, they served the governance needs of the 1990s. Two-and-a-half decades later, we ask, Where is the leadership in a world in crisis? The guidelines we have developed in response to this question are based on the principle that companies must account for the interests of all stakeholders — what we call 360º governance. Canada must upgrade its corporate standards or risk being left behind.

Gender Analytics is a methodology that can be useful both in creating innovation insights that improve impact and in avoiding downside risks, and it should be embedded into everything an organization does. It’s not just an evaluation tool to analyze retrospectively what impact your policy, product, service or process has had. It’s not just a nice-to-have feature you might discuss from time to time. This is something that can shape how you strategize, plan, innovate and serve customers.

Economic policy-making has, over the past hundred years or more, stripped out caring from our understanding of what makes the economy tick. Caring – for children, for elders, for the planet – sounds to many like a distraction from the main attraction, especially during the pandemic, when what we need are jobs and robust economic growth. But as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a grinding halt, locking down working parents and idling activity in many sectors, it became clear that if we don’t put caring back into the economy, we can’t achieve economic recovery. The pandemic has revealed economic fault lines that must be addressed. We can’t “get back to normal”; we need to create a better normal. And we certainly won’t be able to build back better without making the caring economy a critical component of federal recovery plans.

It is astounding to see so many companies taking stands against racism. But mea culpas will ring hollow if they are not followed by real action. Progress to date has been slow and inconsistent. In 2002, 12 Fortune 500 company CEOs were Black. Today, that number is four, and all of them are men. Many leaders are at a loss about what they can do personally to move the needle on such dismal numbers — not only at the top, but throughout their organizations. They’d like to be what’s sometimes called an “ally.” The problem is that a lot of supposed allyship can just be performative: It sounds nice but impedes real action on racial and gender justice. The answer comes in two parts: stepping aside and stepping in front.

In moments of crisis, companies quickly shift their attention to survival. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Under these circumstances, businesses are scrambling to cope with employee safety and enforced shutdowns, among many other challenges. So it may seem misguided to focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) now. But, in fact, there might be no better time. Resolving these trade-offs can be a source of innovation.