In a year like no other, it makes sense that a handful of new words would pop up—and familiar terms would find a different spin and resonance. We asked HBS alumni and faculty to give their take on a few that will continue to make some noise in the year to come.

Meem Stock (noun)

Re·shor·ing (verb)

She·sesh·un (noun)

Ly·ing flat (verb)

Post·cook·ie (adj.)

Bi·o·rev·o·loo·shun (noun)

Dig·i·tul no·mad (noun)

Di·ver·si·ty wa·shing (verb)

Meem Stock (noun)

When the price of supposedly “dull” stocks like BlackBerry and GameStop hit the roof earlier this year, driven by social media buzz on platforms like Reddit, analysts took note, with some investors pocketing millions—and others losing their shirts. “A meme stock is a stock whose price has ripped far away from any sense of the firm’s underlying fundamental value,” explains Lauren Cohen, the L.E. Simmons Professor of Business Administration. “Many stocks considered ‘growth’ stocks share this same feature. But meme stocks layer onto this a very specific way that the gap develops, through a frenzy of usually social media–driven fervor.”

Meme stocks are reminiscent of past price bubbles in asset markets, Cohen observes. “In the Netherlands, episodes like ‘tulip mania’ in the 1630s saw the inexplicable skyrocketing of prices of tulip bulbs that ultimately crashed back to earth after a wild ride of erratic up-and-down price swings,” he says. What is different about the meme-stock era is technology, which has given investors ease of access to platforms through simple mobile apps and the ability to act on ideas using zero-cost trading tools like Robinhood.

On the positive side, Cohen notes, meme stocks signal levels of engagement with the stock market that haven’t been seen in decades. But the valuation of meme stocks is inflated to levels that are hard to justify, given the goods and services produced. (GameStop, for example, is up more than 900 percent YTD.) “That means, in the medium to long term, these stocks are likely to fall in value, which is not a great recipe for some of these excited, first-time investors,” he says. “Meme stocks aren’t making headlines at the moment because the fourth aftershock of an earthquake rarely does,” he explains, “and yet it can still be devastating.”

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Re·shor·ing (verb)

There were visible cracks in the global supply chain for US firms prior to the pandemic, Professor of Management Practice Joe Fuller admits, with overseas plants susceptible to everything from intellectual property theft to uneven product quality. But the novel coronavirus created chasms. “One thing that COVID-19 revealed is the extent to which business systems were predicated on global supply chains working with a very, very high level of reliability,” he says. “And that was overly optimistic; it worked only when everything clicked.”

The subsequent national conversation about minimizing risk through reshoring—that is, bringing American manufacturing facilities back to the United States—wrestled with the same challenges that have existed for decades: relatively high costs for labor and energy as well as the investment and time required to build factories in a country that has much more stringent environmental standards. “COVID-19 has changed only a few of the variables across industries,” observes Fuller. “And there’s no CEO out there who wants to be saying on her way out the door, ‘Well, I know I got fired, but at least now we have a plant in Elmira that provides US capacity for products at 50 percent higher cost per unit than what’s available on the world market.’”

But if the country does really want to get serious about reshoring, there are some ways forward, says Fuller. Companies might need to embrace automation technologies that can help reduce labor hours per unit, an approach Fuller has seen start to take hold in the garment industry. There could be regulatory aid, too, with Congress assessing lower tax rates on products from reshored factories, or requiring a certain percentage of demand to be available from US or USMCA sources. Those would admittedly be bold moves, notes Fuller, but it’s the kind of thinking needed to have reshoring make real economic sense: “You have got to make some fundamental changes if you’re going to change momentum behind off-shoring.”

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She·sesh·un (noun)

When female employment numbers were disproportionately affected in the early months of the pandemic, media were quick to run with a new term: shecession. To explain the phenomenon, researchers pointed out that women, particularly women of color, were more likely to be employed by the industries hardest hit by shutdowns, including leisure, hospitality, and retail.

But as employment numbers rebound, the shecession highlights more perennial, far-reaching factors than those found in the pandemic’s early months, says Manisha Thakor (MBA 1997). One is the ever-present gender pay gap: “Roughly five times more women than men live paycheck to paycheck,” says Thakor, author and founder of MoneyZen, a financial education consultancy. “The gender pay gap, in aggregate, has shifted 8 cents in 25 years, which is pathetic, and the wealth gap is even more extreme.” Women, on average, own 32 cents for every dollar a man owns; women of color own just a few pennies to that dollar.

Lack of social supports, such as child care and paid sick leave, is another ever-present issue the pandemic laid bare. It could explain why some women have elected to leave the workforce altogether: “Women have hit a mental wall,” Thakor declares. “The data show that the number of working women who’ve experienced negative health consequences as a result of the pandemic is 10 to 12 percentage points higher than men. It’s stress, a sense of being overwhelmed, depression—all of the conditions that occur when you have too much on your plate.”

The silver lining of all this, Thakor explains, is that “we’re seeing the seeds of something that will ideally blossom over the coming decade. At the end of the day, it is becoming increasingly clear that companies that truly embody both DEI and ESG values are on track to be long-term winners.”

Thakor points out that these companies have been shown to attract and retain talented employees, to increase the attractiveness of product and service purchases by like-minded customers, and to foster environments of creativity and community. “What does that lead to? In a well-run company, growth, profits, and—over time—stock price appreciation,” she concludes. If these seeds are carefully tended to by pioneering companies, Thakor says, a virtuous cycle will kick in as other companies strive to emulate industry leaders.

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Ly·ing flat (verb)

It started with a post earlier this year, in a forum run by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Instead of striving and sweating for a good job, a home, and a family, it suggested a minimalist lifestyle of tang ping (“lying flat”). Although the post was later deleted by Communist Party officials, lying flat has nevertheless become a rallying cry for Chinese youth burned out by a punishing cycle of overwork, whether studying for college entrance exams or following the “996” norm of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. “I will slack off at work…I am a blunt sword to boycott consumerism,” declared a manifesto published later on the social platform Douban.

What’s behind this “poisonous chicken soup,” as Chinese officials call it? The number of college graduates in China has increased immensely over the past three decades, from 2 million in 1990 to some 40 million today, says Bill Kirby, the T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration. Those numbers add up to intense competition for prestigious, well-paid jobs, and high pressure to perform—if a position is secured. “It’s a crisis of rising expectations,” says Kirby, noting that the unemployment rate for young Chinese stands at around 14 to 16 percent. When surviving “examination hell” and college itself doesn’t offer any guarantees—why bother at all?

So, is lying flat here to stay? Or is it just fun to say? The overriding culture of hard work in China will continue, Kirby believes: “I shouldn’t be surprised if, a couple of years from now, we’ll be reading about the startups by some of these young people who are lying flat,” he notes. Even so, tang ping continues to echo in the online forums where China’s youth congregate. The concept has parallels in other countries, including the United States, where an increasing number of young people are rejecting the demands of investment banking and consulting jobs. “This is not going to stop China’s trajectory,” Kirby allows. “The real question is whether it could be seen as a wake-up call for Chinese business and government, to understand the social costs of overwork.”

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Post·cook·ie (adj.)

Cookies—those bits of data that track online browsing history and save your passwords—aren’t going anywhere. But third-party cookies that allow a shoe advertisement to follow you from page to page will become a thing of the past sometime in 2023, when Google, the last browser holdout, crumbles them once and for all.

The impact of this looming post-cookie reality is significant, says Sunil Gupta, the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration and co-chair of the Executive Education program on Driving Digital Strategy. “With third-party cookies, I can follow your path across sites. Without that information, there’s the potential to misallocate ad dollars to sites where conversion rates aren’t as high,” he says. In addition, industry critics believe the elimination of third-party cookies could give an unfair advantage to entities that already have an abundance of first-party information on its users, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. “The advertising ecosystem is quite complex, with hundreds of different players who will face challenges because they rely on third-party cookies,” Gupta explains. “Is it good if the power is being shifted to larger players like Google and Facebook which have first-party data? That remains a big question.”

Gupta expects companies will adapt in the post-cookie era by relying more on contextual advertising—a bit of a throwback. “If you’re reading the Wall Street Journal, I might show you an ad for financial services,” he summarizes. Companies also are becoming more aware of the need to capture what data they can through first-party cookies, by creating value through content. He offers the example of the website Glossier, whose strategy is focused on serving its audience useful beauty tips without directly selling products.

But Google isn’t completely shutting down the online ad industry, says Gupta. In March, the tech giant unveiled its new cookie-alternative technology called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), a browser standard that will allow companies to target large groups of users with similar interests while allowing users to retain relative anonymity.

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Bi·o·rev·o·loo·shun (noun)

As the months of the pandemic ticked by, many of us were transfixed by progress updates on vaccine development. Moderna’s mRNA technology, we learned, uses molecules to carry the genetic instructions to prompt an immune response. That development—one we now take for granted—is just the start of innovations in health care and beyond. According to McKinsey’s Kevin Sneader (MBA 1993), that same approach, as well as other combinations of biological science and technology, have the potential to launch a biorevolution with dramatic impact across multiple sectors.

In addition to further health care innovations, Sneader and researchers at McKinsey’s Global Institute estimate that as much as 60 percent of the world economy’s physical inputs could be produced biologically. As an example, Sneader notes that the fermentation process can be repurposed to create artificial silk and self-repairing fabrics; we also can look ahead to the possibility of more lab-raised “impossible” meats, drought-resistant crops, and food suited to our particular biochemistry, eliminating the issue of allergies and other food sensitivities. “The world has been very focused on the digital revolution, and understandably so,” Sneader says. “But the confluence of biological science, automation, and AI will create a gateway to new levels of innovation.” It all adds up to an enormous opportunity, he adds, with a potential global impact within the next decade of $4 trillion annually.

As exciting as this sounds, ethical considerations exist around the misuse of human genetic information, Sneader acknowledges, as well as the possibility that some innovations will exacerbate the inequality between wealthier and less developed countries. “There’s a need for regulatory oversight,” he admits, “but these developments do open up a lot of exciting possibilities that used to be the stuff of science fiction.”

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Dig·i·tul no·mad (noun)

The phrase digital nomad popped up over two decades ago, but workers who use technology to travel and work remotely have increased in number even as pandemic restrictions loosen and companies offer increased flexibility to compete for talent. Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration, has researched digital nomads and the larger work-from-anywhere (WFA) phenomenon since 2015. “The idea behind WFA is that it allows workers to choose their own geography, which is distinct from the work-from-home model,” he explains. WFA can also include shorter remote stints, such as a four-week “workcation” in Barbados, for example.

Choudhury expects digital nomadism and WFA to remain robust trends: “Now you can live in a cheaper location if you’re raising a young family. You might choose to live closer to your aging parents, or you might want to live in New York if you love theater,” he says. “WFA fundamentally solves many issues around not being able to get a work visa or a green card, and it addresses the difficulty dual-career families face when one spouse relocates and the other also has to find a new job.” Temporary work visa programs, with relatively low barriers to entry—in countries ranging from Estonia to Indonesia to Portugal, for example—are turbocharging digital nomadism and WFA, notes Choudhury, spurred by government desire to increase local consumer spending.

WFA has given a boost to midwestern American towns and cities as talent relocates from more expensive, coastal areas, Choudhury adds—a phenomenon he’s now studying in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But there’s a potential downside, too, as foreign workers who can’t obtain US immigration visas begin to move elsewhere, such as Canada. “There are so many implications,” reflects Choudhury, who is currently researching WFA in the unexpected context of manufacturing. “It’s a fascinating phenomenon that will only continue to grow and evolve.”

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Di·ver·si·ty wa·shing (verb)

As president and CEO at The Partnership from 1991 to 2005, Benaree Wiley (MBA 1972) headed a nonprofit focused on supporting and strengthening Boston-area companies in their efforts to attract, develop, and retain professionals of color. More recently, events surrounding George Floyd’s murder and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement further sharpened corporate America’s determination in working toward inclusion. Businesses have committed millions of dollars to advancing equity. Millions likewise have been spent on advertising such efforts, leading some critics to cry “diversity washing,” an offshoot of earlier references to “greenwashing” and “woke washing,” when describing inauthentic approaches to environmental and progressive social issues.

Wiley’s experience at The Partnership and her perspective from decades on corporate boards give a clear sense of why businesses need to do the real, hard work behind creating diversity and inclusion. “The world is changing,” she says simply. “More and more prospective employees and investors are going to care about a company’s actions around diversity—even those who aren’t people of color. Companies that don’t embrace this change are missing out on a significant portion of the talent pool and the marketplace, honestly.”

When it comes to the “how,” Wiley is equally straightforward. Take away the emotion and politics that so often swirl around issues of race, she advises, and focus: “That means having clarity of vision, time lines, and metrics, to see when you’re on target and when you need to recalibrate. If companies approach this topic with the same strategic resolve they use with any other issue they want to drive for results, we could see a real difference—we could make it happen.”

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