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Together, organizational behavior professor Matthew Feinberg and sociologist Robb Willer have extensively studied why liberals and conservatives so rarely succeed at persuading each other — and how to overcome these challenges. They find that people tend to make arguments that appeal to the ethical code of their own side, rather than the values of those they are trying to...
With a workforce of 90,000 spanning 119 international destinations and 234 domestic locales, developing effective communications company wide poses challenging questions across regions, languages, and cultures. United Airlines’ CEO Oscar Munoz believes success is rooted in a set of values that serve employees, customers, and long-term innovation. But across such diverse cu...
What is a university if not a true marketplace of ideas — a place where scholarly pursuits in history, science, literature, philosophy, art, and mathematics can be nurtured and questioned, where crosscurrents of diverse thought and perspectives can co-exist? Today, students are challenged by the notion of an open society, tested on the one hand by values of free expressio...
The award-winning economist Mariana Mazzucato has been called the “world’s scariest economist.” Why? She challenges us to reconsider capitalism as it exists today. Focusing on innovation-led, inclusive, and sustainable growth, Mazzucato examines the critical — and misunderstood — role that governments play in fostering innovation. Her latest book, The Value of Everything,...
Who decides what something is worth? The price of health care doesn’t follow many of the rules of other commodities because it is so inelastic — people value restorative treatment and will almost always try to pay for it. And what happens when we confuse price with value? Care ends up being undervalued and things like medication end up being more expensive. Rather than gen...
To heal in the face of climate change, we must recognize that we’re in a relationship with the Earth—and that’s been part of the value system of Indigenous communities since the beginning of time. In this session, the Reciprocity Project will show three short films, then invite discussion about time-honored and current Indigenous ways of being.
In the innovation process, ideation is the creation of a great idea. But that’s not enough. Scaling is required to create value for great ideas, and this stage requires skills the entrepreneur often does not natively possess. Braddock Scholars is a response to this need. This Aspen Institute program chooses promising business ventures, profit or not-for-profit, from the wi...
Silicon Valley is notoriously a boys’ club, perhaps to society’s detriment. What effects do discrimination and inequality in this sector have on our culture, society, and economy? What happens to technology when the executives, engineers, and designers who produce it are mostly male? Who are our most powerful advocates for diversity in the tech industry, and how are they f...
Bold thinking is most often seen at the margins. Organizations with small staffs and lean budgets, unweighted by habit and committed to impact, are approaching familiar problems in unfamiliar ways. They are testing new ideas to bring health care that last mile, finding creative ways to support small farmers, adapting cost-saving techniques from low-resource settings, and g...
Aspen Ideas: Health Engaging Local Issues Series: The Roaring Fork Valley isn’t meeting the demand for affordable housing, not only for low-income residents, but for households earning well over the region’s average median income. It’s a problem that echoes across the country, as the feds cut funding for affordable housing and gentrification and displacement becomes common...
As technology drives economic change, the discussion of the future of work seems to be binary: either dystopian or rose colored. The public policy debate has congealed around a set of silver bullet solutions — from universal basic income to coding for all — that reflect Silicon Valley’s strategy for addressing economic inequality. But what if the best strategy isn’t a sing...
Meet three disruptive business leaders — all part of the Aspen Global Leadership Network — who drive significant economic value by leveraging emerging technologies to create sustainable, inclusive, and efficient business models in drug delivery, banking, and community-focused finance. Putting values-based leadership first, they address societal needs and drive economic gro...
There are any number of pressures on corporate leaders to take the fast lane to profitability, starting with shareholder demands. Increasingly, however, CEOs are taking a longer view of management and its broader stakeholder responsibility, and making calls that might risk profit in favor of doing the “right thing” for society by virtue of the value systems their firms and...
Eastern traditions are increasingly influencing the West as meditation, yoga, and structured time for inward reflection draw new followers. More than just a personal quest, it is also being encouraged at some corporations, through health plans and scheduled activities, because they see “centering” as a way to advance their core values. How do yoga and meditation promote pe...
David Skorton became the 13th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution on July 1, 2015. A board-certified cardiologist who previously served as president of Cornell University, Skorton entered the institution at a time of transition and renovation, with new museums like the National Museum of African American History and Culture slated to open soon and major overhauls on o...
You know his work: the iPod, the iPhone, the Nest. What you might not know is that Tony Fadell — a top Silicon Valley designer, engineer, entrepreneur, and mentor — is not the kind of tech leader who is on a constant mission to break things. He is passionate about making excellent products excellent — but feels equally strongly that not everything needs to be blown up. Hea...
Food labeling covers a range of issues important to consumers from personal health and well-being to healthier production systems. Consumers and advocates have been pushing for an assortment of food labels: GMO, organic, worker justice, animal welfare, and nutrition facts, to name a few. Meaningful labels can allow consumers to vote with their dollars to support their valu...
Americans now owe a staggering $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, according to Forbes. With growing online opportunities catered to self-taught learners and the ever-evolving digital nature of work in the modern world, do we still need to sit in classrooms to get a college education? Are companies and government institutions rethinking the long-standing requirement of a f...
The world doesn’t lack for creative ideas — it lacks people to champion them. Once you have an idea, how do you communicate it? Adam Grant, Wharton’s top-rated professor and a New York Times bestselling author of Originals, will share insights on how to speak up without getting silenced, and how to find allies in unexpected places.
Cryptocurrency is largely seen as an investment vehicle in the United States, with regular reporting on its value in the marketplace. But in other countries, especially in the developing world, such currencies are increasingly used for routine transactions, displacing more traditional money. There is growing trust and interest in this blockchain-based mechanism for both tr...