PolicyCast

Iris Bohnet, a leading researcher into gender bias and Harvard Kennedy School's academic dean, discusses the ineffectiveness of traditional diversity training programs and the need to focus on fixing processes rather than people. Topics explored include strategies for reducing bias in the hiring process, the impact of language in job advertising, eliminating bias in interviews, biases affecting women's promotions, and performance support bias in the workplace.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman has been at the table for some of the most challenging negotiations in recent history. She’s held talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and sparred with Iranian officials to hammer out the 2015 nuclear weapons deal. Now she’s brought what she’s learned about authentic leadership, diplomacy, and succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field to a new book, which is titled “Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power and Persistence” Ambassador Sherman is a professor of the practice of public leadership, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is also a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group and former U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs. For more about the Center for Public Leadership, please visit https://cpl.hks.harvard.edu/. PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Harvard Kennedy School Lecturer Mark Fagan is spearheading the Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, helping to ensure government officials can successfully navigate the impending robot car revolution. Mark talks with host Thoko Moyo about how AVs could have disruptive impacts on traffic safety and congestion, public transit, jobs, and even data privacy. The Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative consults with stakeholders both inside and outside of the United States. Through research, teaching, and work with decision makers in administrations, with technologists and business leaders from AV companies and startups, and with other practicing professionals from the autonomous vehicles space, the initiative seeks to improve policymakers’ capacity to deal with this fast-emerging technology. They find actionable policy and strategy options to help create infrastructure that is livable for humans and AVs, and that helps mitigate the social consequences of the AV revolution. For more on the initiative, please visit: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/taubman/programs-research/autonomous-vehicles-policy-initiative PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Harvard Kennedy School's PolicyCast is back! Enjoy this preview of our relaunch with host Thoko Moyo of upcoming episodes featuring autonomous vehicles expert Mark Fagan, Center for Public Leadership Director Ambassador Wendy Sherman, and Professor Erica Chenoweth, who has conducted groundbreaking research on the effectiveness of nonviolent civil movements. Our relaunch starts Monday with Harvard Kennedy School Lecturer in Public Policy Mark Fagan, who is leading the Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. The initiative is working to help local governments prepare for the impacts of driverless cars, which are already being field-tested across the U.S. and which will could have major impacts on traffic congestion, public transit ridership, public safety, and even data privacy. Future episodes will feature conversations with HKS professors, researchers, and other experts about public policy, public leadership, politics, media, international relations, and more. PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Professor Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, and Tim Cheston, a research fellow with the center’s Growth Lab, explain how they leveraged data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity to assess the knowhow of more than 130 countries and predict their economic growth over the next eight years. Learn more about CID's new growth predictions: http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/growth-projections/

Robby Mook, co-director of the Defending Digital Democracy Initiative and former campaign manager to Hillary Clinton, explains why he and fellow co-directors Matt Rhoades (Romney 2012) and Eric Rosenbach (Belfer Center) came together to create a series of “playbooks” for political campaigns and election officials to help secure against cyber security threats. Read more about D3P at https://www.belfercenter.org/D3P

HKS Professor Maya Sen, co-author of the new book “Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics,” explains how she and her colleagues were able to pinpoint the extent to which slavery continues to affect political beliefs to this day.

Lecturer John Park, director of the Kennedy School’s Korea Working Group, lays out the stakes for both North and South Korea, as well as China and the United States, as they enter into negotiations over denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

In the first part of an ongoing series on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Dr. Gary Samore, the Belfer Center’s executive director for research, describes the history of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development and subsequent international efforts to dismantle it, including a landmark 1994 agreement which he helped negotiate. He details the negotiating tactics employed by North Korea in the past, expresses skepticism over the possibility of a complete denuclearization, and weighs in on the Trump Administration’s negotiating strategy.

Cathryn Clüver-Ashbrook, executive director of both the Future of Diplomacy Project and the Project on Trans-Atlantic and European Relations out of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, describes the changing nature of relations between Europe and Russia, providing historical context, examining contemporary factors such as the Syrian civil war and Russian election meddling, and describing how the new Project on Trans-Atlantic and European Relations, chaired by HKS Professor Nicholas Burns, seeks to find solutions to the emerging challenges.