In this Lean Blog Interviews podcast episode, professor Nelson Repenning shares insights drawn from his decades of experience studying system dynamics, lean thinking, and organizational learning. He explains how leaders often fall into the "capability trap" — spending their days firefighting immediate issues instead of improving the underlying system.

Amazon is likely able to automate jobs faster than most of its rivals because of its scale, said associate professor Lawrence Schmidt. "It's not at all crazy to think that Amazon might want to shed certain types of roles, or refrain from hiring additional people in certain types of roles, if they can be quickly automated," he said. "Regardless of what happens to counts of jobs overall you would expect there to be reallocation."

"Models need so much more data and in multiple formats," said principal research scientist George Westerman. "Where it used to be making sense of structured data, which was relatively straightforward, now it's: 'What do we do with all this unstructured data? How do we tag it? How do we organize it? How do we store it?' That's a bigger challenge."

At a Bitcoin focused event this month research scientist Christian Catalini made the case that open networks and interoperability are the foundation of the next era of payments. Catalini argued that the future of money depends on shared infrastructure, not walled gardens — and that the battle for openness is ultimately cultural, not technical.

Studies of the economic impacts of climate change often look at long-term, national costs. A new BPEA study by professors Christopher Knittel and Catherine Wolfram takes a different approach, focusing on the current household level costs attributable to changing weather. Professor Wolfram joined the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity to discuss the research.

Professor Retsef Levi said he aspires to find "the nuanced science-driven 'middle'" between vaccine skeptics and believers. "I think there are currently two religions," he said. "There is one religion that says no vaccine is good for anybody, and there is another religion that says every vaccine is good for everybody, every time. My take," he continued, "is that I'm going to think about every vaccine — and the risk and benefits of these vaccines — with respect to different people with different risk profiles."

In his new book, "Shared Wisdom, Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI," professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland delves into the theory around social communications, and how people utilize information together, to think about a way forward in the age of AI.

Costco is one of the companies that professor of the practice Zeynep Ton has studied at length. Almost every year for the past decade, Costco founder Jim Sinegal, whom Ton calls her "business hero," has taken her M.B.A. students on a tour of a local warehouse, where he inspects merchandise and obliges selfie requests. A student once told her that visiting Costco with Sinegal was, after her wedding day, the best day of her life.

Research scientist Ranjan Pal and co-authors wrote: "Agentic AI will bring new, complex types of cyber threats. Therefore, we should have a multi-layered and intelligent approach to protect against them using both existing protective measures as well as new ones designed specifically to prevent the operation of autonomous systems."

Guadalupe Hayes-Mota (SB '08, LGO: MBA '16, SM '16) wrote: "Recognizing pharmacists as providers at the federal level would allow them to bill Medicare and Medicaid for clinical services like chronic disease management, preventive screenings, and immunizations. States should also expand scope of practice so pharmacists can prescribe for minor ailments and adjust chronic medications. Ethically, failing to use trained professionals to their full ability wastes expertise while patients go without care."

Professor Y. Karen Zheng said smallholder farmers, who represent 80% of the world's farms and produce more than half of global food calories, remain among the most vulnerable groups despite their critical role in global food security. "Smallholders feed the world, but they're often the ones struggling the most," she said.

In a recent visit to the Tec de Monterrey Business School in Mexico City, senior lecturer Paul Cheek discussed the challenges of entrepreneurship and innovation in the country and the role of Artificial Intelligence in business transformation.

The Indian government is currently working on a new scheme focused on bringing back Indian-origin "star faculty" and researchers currently based abroad. Senior lecturer Chintan Vaishnav said: "Financially, Indian universities may never match global salaries, but there's an emotional pull. Strong signalling will attract talent. On the output side, select the right people and let them work. Oversight should be light, focusing on long-term relationships rather than transactional exchanges."

Postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza-Saa (PhD '23, SM '19) said: "Now that AI is here, we must embrace it. Not just to be more productive, but to do things that were not possible before. In other words, we should use AI to reinvent ourselves."