The author argues that far too many companies continue to focus on a numbers- and data-driven approach to innovation. Strategy and innovation, he says, should not be a mere exercise in analytics, but a qualitative process in which analysis serves the insights born out of individual observation and reflection. He explains why so many business people are uncomfortable with the 'qualitative' world, providing six strategies for improving qualitative judgment in an organization.

Most of the time, the world moves forward in tiny increments, as individuals and organizations hone and refine existing models: governments modify their services in hopes of producing better results, and businesses bring out the next generation of their existing products and services. But every once in a while-backed by revolutionary thinking-the world moves forward in a huge leap to a fundamentally new equilibrium. The authors show that over time, such paradigm shifts have been driven by two entities: government policy innovation and business entrepreneurial creation. But a third driver has emerged between these two poles: social entrepreneurship. The best part: social entrepreneurship makes possible equilibrium shifts that neither government or business could achieve on their own.

The global financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States has adversely impacted the entire world. The author argues that the main driver of the crisis is global trade and capital imbalances, which, he shows, have unfolded in almost textbook fashion. He warns that if we misunderstand the roots of the imbalances that led to the global financial crisis, it is unlikely that we will choose policies that enable us to work our way out of them.

The late Stanford professor Elliot Eisner echoed Albert Einstein when he said: "Not everything that can be measured matters; and not everything that matters can be measured." In this caution lies a more pointed warning, says the author: when dedicated to the quantity-driven approach of scientific inquiry, we chronically overlook valuable qualitative aspects of our world. Artistic inquiry begins with a person experiencing qualities-then relates, shapes, and creates further qualities to create qualitative forms. Its findings entail personal understandings expressed through stories, prose, speeches, images, compositions, objects, actions and performances. In the end, for those seeking answers to demanding problems, both scientific and artistic are indispensable.

Legitimacy has been defined as "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for society." The author says that what we are witnessing today is a crisis of legitimacy. Young people around the world are disproportionately affected by everything that is going on, and he warns that if they decide that our institutions of democracy are no longer legitimate, we are in for a period of disruption in human history that will make the 1960s and the Arab Spring look like kids' stuff. He describes a new model of multi-stakeholder networks that is emerging to attack global problems. As a result, he shows that leadership can come from anywhere these days, which presents enormous opportunities for each of us.

Great innovation is often born of an ability to harmonize opposing tensions, the author argues. Like the pressure to avoid failure and the need to take risks; or the demands of getting results quickly and the freedom to search for 'the best way'. Unfortunately, all-too-often, the artful balancing of opposing tensions goes by the wayside, and compromises are made that sub-optimize efforts to create value. He introduces a technique that prevents compromise: intentional goal conflict. He provides two examples of this approach, cut from the annals of innovation at Toyota, to illustrate exactly how it works.

Good news out of MIT: labour market expert Paul Osterman does not believe that we are going to become a nation of brain surgeons and hamburger flippers. However, inequality does indeed exist within the labour market, and in this wide-ranging interview he describes how leaders must step forward to address the realities of the changing workforce through better job design. The bottom line, he says, is that low wages and high levels of inequality are corrosive to democracy. Moral outrage doesn't provide a strategy for moving forward, he says, but at the end of the day, the moral case for creating good, fair-wage jobs seems pretty compelling.

We rarely experience genuine innovation, the author argues, and when we do, it makes us nervous. Our most common reaction to something unprecedented is to prime ourselves for frustration-to throw our hands up and say we simply don't understand it. The lesson for designers and decision-makers alike is that the more innovative a product or service will be, the more familiar it needs to feel. He shows that product categories can be broken down along a familiarity/novelty continuum, and that in most cases, the most successful isn't the one that makes the biggest splash, but the product that correctly balances familiar cues with new benefits.

J. Craig Venter made waves in 1998 when he and his for-profit company, Celera, challenged the public Human Genome Project to a DNA sequencing race. (It ended in a tie two years later.) Fired from Celera in 2002, the biologist now runs a nonprofit institute and two biotech firms, overseeing the development of synthetic cells to be used in plastics, food supplements, and vaccines.

A student must decide whether to break his promise and leave the company that sponsored his MBA when he is offered a dream job by a Silicon Valley start-up. Expert commentary comes from Carolin Oelschlegel, a principal at Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), and J. Frank Brown, managing director and COO of General Atlantic, a global investment firm, and former dean of INSEAD.

A student must decide whether to break his promise and leave the company that sponsored his MBA when he is offered a dream job by a Silicon Valley start-up. Expert commentary comes from Carolin Oelschlegel, a principal at Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), and J. Frank Brown, managing director and COO of General Atlantic, a global investment firm, and former dean of INSEAD.

Launched in 1956 in California's emerging wine region, Williams-Sonoma soon moved to San Francisco because so many of its customers lived there. In 1970 the founder created a catalog to serve people around the country--and that was the beginning of the company's data collection and analysis. Knowing where its catalog customers lived informed decisions about where to locate its stores. As the company grew its brick-and-mortar presence, it also built up its mail-order business, acquiring a garden products catalog, the Hold Everything catalog, and Pottery Barn. In 2000 it launched fully transactional websites for its two leading brands. Today analytics infuses and enhances all areas of the business, from personalized website content for each visiting shopper to shipping and inventory management to extremely high-touch customer care centers. Williams-Sonoma comprises seven brands and has annual revenue approaching $5 billion. It accounts for 4% of all home furnishings sales in the United States, almost half of which come through the web, making it the 21st largest online retailer in the country.

Though corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming, most Americans are not sharing in the economic recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new ones tend to be insecure and underpaid. One of the major causes: Instead of investing their profits in growth opportunities, corporations are using them for stock repurchases. Take the 449 firms in the S&P 500 that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period, they used 54% of their earnings--a total of $2.4 trillion--to buy back their own stock. Dividends absorbed an extra 37% of their earnings. That left little to fund productive capabilities or better incomes for workers. Why are such massive resources dedicated to stock buybacks? Because stock-based instruments make up the majority of executives' pay, and buybacks drive up short-term stock prices. Buybacks contribute to runaway executive compensation and economic inequality in a major way. Because they extract value rather than create it, their overuse undermines the economy's health. To restore true prosperity to the country, government and business leaders must take steps to rein them in.

The author, a strategy and international-business professor at Harvard Business School, has come to a conclusion that may surprise you: Trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of institutional maturity, educational norms, language, and culture vary enormously from place to place. Students of managerial practice once thought that their technical knowledge of best manufacturing practices (to take one example) was sufficiently developed that processes simply needed to be tweaked to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they have to be reworked quite radically--not because the technology is wrong but because everything around it changes how it will work. There's nothing wrong with the tools we have at our disposal, but their application requires contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was acquired. Until we can better develop and apply contextual intelligence, failure rates for cross-border businesses will remain high, what we learn from experiments unfolding around the world will remain limited, and the promise of healthy growth in all parts of the world will remain unfulfilled.

Language pervades every aspect of organizational life. Yet leaders of global organizations--where unrestricted multilingualism can create friction--often pay too little attention to it in their approach to talent management. By managing language carefully, firms can hire and develop the best employees, improve collaboration on global teams, and strengthen the company's footing in local markets. Language proficiency--either in a lingua franca, or shared language, or in a local language--does not guarantee high performance. Recruiters may favor fluency over other capabilities. They may rely on external hires with language skills rather than grooming internal candidates with the capacity and motivation to learn new languages. And leaders may give expatriate assignments not to the best candidates but to people who speak certain languages. To hire and promote the best people, firms may need to provide training to meet global and local language needs. Fluency in a language also does not equal cultural fluency. For leaders, understanding the cultural background of each team member and customers is as essential as learning to conjugate new verbs. The same can be said for employees at all levels: Even when they are fluent in the lingua franca, a lack of cultural understanding can cause significant misunderstandings. To prevent such rifts, language training must include cross-cultural education.

Executives on the front lines of managing across borders share their insights: Luc Minguet, of France's Michelin, talks about the importance of cultural training not just for managers taking on assignments abroad but also for local employees who work with colleagues from around the world. He describes how his own experience learning to communicate across cultures reflects the tire-maker's broader practices. Eduardo Caride, of Madrid-based Telefonica, explains how the relatively young multinational is investing in a diverse talent mix as it strives to become a truly global company. Whereas early on, leaders relied on exporting Spanish managers abroad, he notes, the street now runs both ways. Takeo Yamaguchi, of Japan's Hitachi, details his efforts to create standardized global HR systems and processes across the conglomerate's 948 separate companies. "Three years ago, we had no systematic way of tracking employees, evaluating performance, or identifying future leaders," Yamaguchi says. "Today we do." And Shane Tedjarati, from the United States' Honeywell, talks about how the industrial powerhouse is shifting its strategy toward new regions, such as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. "We call these markets 'high-growth regions' instead of emerging markets," says Tedjarati, "because they now account for more than half of Honeywell's total growth."

A quarter century into the digital revolution, many companies still agonize over whether to invest significant resources in digital capabilities. Meanwhile, customers--who are used to weaving their digital and physical worlds tightly together--wonder why companies haven't done the same. The author and his colleagues at Bain have worked with and studied hundreds of companies around the globe that are trying to cope with the swiftly changing marketplace. Most industries, he writes, are still in the early stages of what he calls "digical" transformation--and the greatest barrier they face is inexperience with its execution. Drawing on Bain's study of leaders from 20 global industries, he presents five rules that can help: (1) Build your strategy around digital-physical fusion. It can be your new competitive edge. (2) Add links and strengthen linkages in the customer experience. (3) Transform the way you approach innovation. (4) Organizational separation is just an interim step. (5) Build a digical-savvy leadership team that includes the CEO. Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Nike, Disney, and Burberry are among the companies whose efforts in this realm have paid off mightily.

The 2013 cyberattack on Target is just one recent example of a growing phenomenon: attacks involving connected companies or direct employees. According to various estimates, at least 80 million of these attacks occur in the United States each year--but the number may be much higher, because they often go unreported. Upton and Creese head an international research project whose goal is to aid organizations in detecting and neutralizing threats from insiders. Their team includes computer security specialists, management educators, psychologists, and criminologists, and their findings challenge conventional views and practices. "The doors that leave organizations vulnerable to insider attacks," they write, "are mundane and ubiquitous." In this article they discuss the causes of growth in the number of insider cyberattacks, the reasons behind them, and five ways to tackle the problem: Adopt a robust insider policy at every level of the organization; raise awareness of phishing and other ploys; screen new hires thoroughly; employ rigorous subcontracting processes; and monitor employees, letting them know that you will observe their cyberactivity to the extent permitted by law.

At first glance, China, which is known for large, often inefficient state-owned enterprises, might appear an unlikely source of fresh management thinking. Yet Chinese companies have a lot to teach the world about today's business imperatives: responsiveness, improvisation, flexibility, and speed. To cope with their turbulent environment, the Chinese have developed those capabilities and learned to build everything--from skilled recruits to suppliers to capital sources--from scratch. They manage very differently, too: Eschewing Western-style matrix organizations, they favor flat, loose structures that allow them to jump on new opportunities and expand quickly. They roll out new products constantly and localize offerings with a vengeance. They're also adept at nonmarket strategies, particularly navigating local politics and relationships with the state. Indeed, China's entrepreneurial companies may well be the vanguard of an era in which the ability to adapt quickly, navigate messy environments, and use unproven talent yields a global competitive advantage.

Stressed out. Overcommitted. Distracted. This is how many people feel today. Everyone is struggling to have meaningful work, domestic bliss, community engagement, and a satisfying inner life. But committing to better work/life balance isn't the answer. It assumes you must make trade-offs among the four main aspects of your life: work, home, community, and self. A more realistic and gratifying goal is better integration through "four-way wins," which improve performance in all domains. Integration starts with embracing three principles: be real, be whole, and be innovative. This article outlines the skills that bring those principles to life and shows how to hone several critical skills with exercises such as: "Four circles," in which you assess the importance of each domain and then diagram the extent to which the values you pursue in them are compatible; "Talent transfer," in which you examine all your skills, from mentoring colleagues to organizing family activities, and how each might be used to achieve different ends; "Crowdsourcing," in which you gather solutions for problems from creative friends and test them out. Through these and other exercises, you can find the path to a more fulfilling and less hectic life.