“Build back better” is an expression coined by a UN task force charged with coming up with improved disaster-recovery plans. For them, building back better meant using recovery after calamities—they were thinking of earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes—to restore equitable social systems, revitalize livelihoods, and protect the environment. Don’t just rebuild houses—install clean water systems. Don’t just improve early warning systems— create safer roads and dwellings. For us in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, build back better means making good on the commitments to stakeholders that everyone was so eagerly talking about last year.

Workplaces and executive boardrooms should reflect the world’s diversity, and lots of companies are using the so-called “business case” for diversity to instigate action. But, popular as it may be, it’s a failed strategy. Corporate leaders would be better served if they stopped trying to justify diversity with profit margins and stock charts—a mentality that can ultimately hurt the very groups these policies are meant to help (more on that in a moment)—and instead embrace diversity because it is the right thing to do.

Trade-offs, conflicts, and challenges, however, can be the source of innovation and transformation. Companies can develop explicit and coherent plans for addressing the tensions created by trade-offs. The stories of two large, well-known organizations, Walmart and Nike (as well as Levi Strauss & Co., mentioned below), show the ways that well-known organizations with varied stakeholders manage trade-offs. This is not to glorify or vilify them, but simply to show how frequently interests and agendas can conflict and highlight the kinds of difficult decisions that arise most often in today’s globalized economy. Coping with stakeholder trade-offs forced Nike to come up with less toxic glues and more environmentally friendly materials for its shoes and Walmart to pressure suppliers to change both products and their packaging to reduce waste and the environmental effects of shipping.

Women leaders are often portrayed in popular culture as suffering from Queen Bee Syndrome (think Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada). The media is filled with advice about “what to do if you work for a Queen Bee.” But what if the Queen Bee isn’t real? Or at least she’s sorely misunderstood? Gendered differences in expectations make us see Queen Bees when they aren’t really there. Looking across a wide range of studies, there is no evidence that senior women are less helpful (or more harmful) to junior women than senior men are to junior men. Studies find little evidence that women are more competitive towards other women than men are towards other men. And women and men do not differ in their use of aggression. Indeed, having a female manager is, with few exceptions, either positive or neutral on women’s rates of promotions and wages.

Today we’re facing a whole slew of social, economic and environmental crises—gun violence, climate change, gender inequality, job dislocation, food insecurity, plastic pollution and the opioid epidemic, to name just a few. The responses from governments are often inadequate. Indeed, the problems are so complex that no single sector can address these challenges alone. Policies may not go far enough, or simply cannot address the entire issue. And, as we are seeing in the United States, governments may actually be pulling back on regulations meant to address these crises. What’s interesting is how often corporations are stepping in to fill the void.

In 2008, author Rebecca Solnit’s now famous essay, Men Explain Things to Me, set off a firestorm. Though Solnit didn’t use the term “mansplaining,” the essay is credited with birthing the term that’s now part of regular parlance. Women (and other underrepresented groups such as people of colour and non-binary people) had finally found a way to articulate that phenomenon they routinely experienced, particularly at work. Yet, fixing the women” is a costly solution for women, and could result in companies losing valuable female employees. It will ultimately be ineffective without organizational change. Women shouldn’t be asked to “handle” mansplaining. Organizations should handle it for them.

While people in the Western world often assume that extended families in developing countries are oppressive to women who marry into them, family support can actually enable women to take on paying jobs outside the home.

Viewing social and economic development as a series of interpersonal interactions can help us understand why development outcomes sometimes diverge from policy goals, and how gendered interactions shape social and economic development.

Female-led startups find it harder to obtain funding than those led by men; women are often not hired or promoted at the rate of men; and even in the 21st century, women are not paid equally for the same work. The bottom line: the belief that we operate in a meritocracy takes us off the hook from examining the potential for bias in our evaluations of women-led businesses and women leaders.

Investing with a gender lens can create financial and social impact by increasing women’s access to capital, promoting workplace equity, and creating products and services that improve the lives of women and girls.

In turbulent markets, it can be hard for established companies to choose new strategic directions. But by rethinking the past and present and reimagining the future, managers can construct strategic narratives that enable innovation.

Most companies invest a significant amount of time and effort in a formal, annual strategic planning process — but many executives see little benefit from the investment. One manager told us, “Our planning process is like a primitive tribal ritual — there is a lot of dancing, waving of feathers and beating of drums. No one is exactly sure why we do it, but there is an almost mystical hope that something good will come out of it.” Another said, “It’s like the old Communist system: We pretend to make strategy and they pretend to follow it.” Management thinker Henry Mintzberg has gone so far as to label the phrase “strategic planning” an oxymoron. He notes that real strategy is made informally. Our own research on strategic planning supports Mintzberg’s observation: We found that few truly strategic decisions are made in the context of a formal process. But we also found that, when approached with the right goal in mind, formal planning need not be a waste of time and can, in fact, be a real source of competitive advantage. Companies that achieved such success used strategic planning not to generate strategic plans but as a learning tool to create “prepared minds” within their management teams (to paraphrase Louis Pasteur).