Credit: Mimi Phan
MIT Sloan alumnus Matt Beane and Mitsui Career Development Professor and assistant professor were named to the 2021 Thinkers50 Radar list on Jan. 21. The list features management thinkers expected to make an impact in the coming year.
Matt Beane: Working with intelligent machines
Thinkers50 describes Beane as a “leading researcher on better working relationships with robots.” His research explores what advances in robotics mean for managers and the workplace, including recent papers on knowledge management for collaborative robots and what robotic surgery can teach us about “shadow learning” when approved methods for learning and training fail.
Beane, SM ’14, PhD ’17, is an assistant professor at University of California Santa Barbara and a digital fellow at both the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab.
Where to start: Beane’s TED Talk, “How do we learn to work with intelligent machines?” and his article “Working with robots in a post-pandemic world,” co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson in MIT Sloan Management Review.
Jackson Lu: What happens when culture meets globalization?
Thinkers50 credited Lu with “telling research on the upsides and downsides of globalization for individuals, groups, and organizations.” His paper on the “bamboo ceiling” suggests the reason East Asian people are underrepresented in leadership positions in America is partly due to cultural differences in assertiveness.
Where to start: In addition to his work on culture, Lu’s list of publications includes work on fighting COVID-19 misinformation, and the psychological, economic, and social effects of air pollution.
