Joining a board

Traditionally, board members have been chosen from the executive ranks—but to some degree, this is changing, according to Harry Kraemer, a clinical professor of leadership at Kellogg, former chairman and CEO of Baxter International, and current board member for multiple private, public, and nonprofit organizations.

While the average age of a board member in the S&P 500 is about 63 years old, even early career professionals are increasingly being recruited to “fill the gap between generations and learn how to adapt to today’s changing business environment,” he writes in Harvard Business Review.

This opens up board-leadership opportunities to a wider swath of people. And once you have a board seat, strong performance and continued networking can go a long way toward earning you your next opportunity.

But getting on that first board is no easy feat. Kraemer offers a few tips for getting your foot in the door, no matter where you are in your career:

1. Start small (and local) with a nonprofit. “Identify a few smaller organizations you would be excited to work with. Is there anyone in your network who can introduce you (or who knows someone who can introduce you) to a board member or the executive director of that organization?” says Kraemer.
   
   
2. Consider your pitch. You will want to highlight your connection to the organization—maybe you’ve donated your money or time in the past, for instance, or have some other personal tie to the cause. But mostly, you will need to identify the skills that you can bring to assist them in fulfilling their mission. “What is the expertise (e.g., marketing, social media, finance, or other skills) that you could contribute as a board member? Are you great at fundraising? Do you have a knack for organizing volunteers?” says Kraemer.

For more on board membership, see the rest of Kraemer’s article in HBR.

Preparing for AI

In a recent The Insightful Leader Live webinar, Brian Uzzi and Dave Ferrucci offered their perspectives on how AI might change our work lives and our society—and what we can do to prepare. Uzzi is a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, while Ferrucci, who started and led the IBM Watson team through its landmark Jeopardy success in 2011, is founder, CEO, and chief scientist of the hybrid AI company Elemental Cognition, and an adjunct professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Impact on the labor market: Because AI models like ChatGPT excel at synthesizing vast troves of data, the jobs of knowledge workers—including accountants, attorneys, interpreters, and journalists—are the most likely to be affected. This doesn’t mean that every white-collar worker will lose their job, but it does mean they will need to start experimenting with how these tools can be used to assist them.

Human–machine partnerships: Ferrucci sees human–machine partnerships as inevitable—in nearly every profession. “It’s getting harder and harder to imagine that we will be working in isolation from artificial intelligence,” he says.

But there may be a learning curve as we adjust to the partnership. In our race to innovate more quickly, Uzzi cautions, “we might actually be putting ourselves on a path that ruins our best competitive advantage” over machines: our own human creativity. “There is a whole body of research in human creativity that says that speeding up your life eats away at your creativity.”

Ways to prepare: In the near term, as companies consider how they might launch their own fledgling human–AI partnerships, Uzzi advises firms to conduct an audit on their internal data, as a precursor to using it to train an AI system. Is it clean and accessible and well-managed? If not, it will need to be: that data will be “their secret sauce relative to their competitors.”

Ferrucci points out that firms will also need to dedicate time to understanding both the technology itself and ways it could fit into their operations. “Where can this help? Where can this make us more efficient?”

For more, you can read their piece (or watch their webinar) here.