There are many possible ways to present choice options to a target audience, and the selected presentation can have a significant impact on what people decide. The authors argue that the way choices are presented-known as 'choice architecture'-can lead decision makers to consider both the intentions of the choice architect and how their decision will be construed by others. And there are important implications for its effectiveness. As a result, the implicit interaction between decision-makers and choice architects is a crucial factor to be considered in the crafting of effective behavioural policy and organizational strategies.

Small factors in a context - whether it be in a government service, a financial institution or a retail environment - either facilitate or impede the end user in accomplishing an objective. University of Toronto behavioural economics expert Dilip Soman shows that if these factors are designed to facilitate a good decision, they are called 'nudges'. But in some cases the contextual variables actively impede activities that are in a consumers' best interest. This is called sludge, and it exists in all walks of life. He discusses where sludge is most common, the biases it targets, and what to do about it.

No one would argue that the Internet has changed the way we life, work and play. But given the growing understanding of common human biases, organizations have two choices: exploit those biases or 'nudge' people in the right direction, for their benefit. The authors describe some of the key areas where the Internet is doing damage to our well being, and how to turn things around to shape the evolution of the digital world to build fairer, better markets.

A difficult conversation is anything that is hard for someone to talk about. It can range from asking your boss for a raise to providing negative feedback to a subordinate to complaining to your neighbour about his dog barking. These conversations are particularly tricky because there is often a gap between what people are really thinking and what they say. In a wide ranging interview, two experts on the topic show that every difficult conversation is really about three things (what actually happened, our identity and our feelings). They provide tips for turning difficult conversations into learning conversations that benefit all parties.

The ability to make a compelling presentation is a critical competency for career success. Yet studies show at least 25 percent of us experience significant public speaking anxiety. The authors provide six scientifically proven strategies aimed at improving your mindset and reducing your fear of public speaking. These include 'deconstructing your beliefs' and 'visualizing your optimal performance'. In the end, they show that the objective of desensitization is twofold: To unlearn an association between an anxiety-inducing situation and an anxious response; and to reassociate feelings of safety, relaxation and confidence with the feared stimulus.

The extraordinary success of people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey is often attributed in part to their high levels of passion for what they do. The author argues that this sentiment is both exactly right-and only half of the story. He describes his research findings, which show that in some cases, showing passion for your work can engage those around you and inspire them to join you in your quest. But in several specific scenarios, showing passion can alienate coworkers and lead them to work against you.

Conventional wisdom says that 'if you see something, say something'. But in reality most people fail to do so. The authors-neuroscience experts from the Neuroleadership Institute-show that the three primary drivers of employee silence are ambiguity, asymmetrical power dynamics and social threat. They argue that by embracing perspective taking and by paying attention to five key elements, leaders can encourage a culture of speaking up.

Few people would argue that innovation is vital to every organization's growth and competitiveness. Yet most are still struggling to put it into practice. The author-a co-founder of BEWorks, a leading behavioral economics consulting firm-shows that regardless of industry, people struggle with having a 'paradoxical accountability' - for maintaining systems and ensuring their smooth operation, while simultaneously being expected to disrupt and improve those systems. She shows that Behavioural Science is leading the charge to provide innovators with a long-overdue method to tackle their problems-in a way that is measurable, observable, and testable, making innovation an ongoing reality for your organization.

In an increasingly complex world, the scarcest collective resource of the modern leadership team may just be the most important one: attention. In vigilant organizations, executive attention is leveraged for greater agility and advantage, whereas in vulnerable ones, misdirected attention creates blind spots, myopia and delayed reactions. In an excerpt from their latest book, the authors show that a deeper awareness about our own decision biases due to cognitive, emotional and social factors is critical in managing attention in any organization-and ensuring it is vigilant rather than vulnerable.

As a 100-year-old cooperative of dairy farms with shared production and distribution resources, Cabot has long championed a different kind of capitalism: one that values good governance, the environment, the community, employers, and customers as much as it does profits. But a marketing chief suggested that the company do more than track and report on ESG measures--that it commit to those five pillars of sustainability by applying for B Corp status, a designation given by the nonprofit B Lab to mission-driven companies that meet or exceed all its criteria. Although the process lasted two years, Cabot passed on its first try and continues to push its scores higher. This article offers lessons for companies trying to do the same or simply to improve their ESG performance: Listen to your in-house futurists; don't shy away from being first in your industry, sector, or geography; and trust that success will come when you work together for the common good.

If a company wants to be fast on its feet, transform end-to-end customer experiences, and continuously outpace competitors, it needs more than lots of agile teams. A truly agile enterprise requires that the company's top officers--most, if not all, of the C-suite--embrace agile principles, too. In this article the authors describe how such an agile leadership team functions, how it differs from the conventional corporate-style executive committee and from other agile teams, and what agile means for senior executives' day-to-day work lives. The job of a conventional agile team is to create innovative solutions to a problem--be it the need for a new product or service, a better business process, or an advanced technology to support new offerings. The job of an agile leadership team is to strike the right balance between standardizing operations and pursuing innovation. Most agile team members dedicate virtually all of their time to their agile roles, but that's not possible for executives. They have to simultaneously build and run the agile enterprise operating system, oversee business units and functions, serve as mentors and decision makers, and handle the crises of the moment.

Brand-new markets are like the wormholes of science fiction, where the usual rules of time and space do not apply. When a market has just been born, the forces of competition there are constantly in flux, it's unclear who your customers really are, and conventional strategies just don't make sense. How then can you navigate this constantly shifting terrain? Over the past few years, two business school professors have interviewed entrepreneurs and corporate innovators in new fields such as genomics, augmented reality, and fintech. They discovered that the most successful ones practice something called "parallel play," exploring and testing the world the way preschoolers do. Instead of trying to differentiate their businesses, they observe what others in the market are doing and borrow ideas. After relentless experimentation, they commit to a single template for creating value. But rather than quickly optimizing that template, they leave it partially undetermined and pause, watch, and wait. As they gather serendipitous insights and the market begins to settle, they refine their models bit by bit.

Why do large corporations sell off business units to PE firms that make a fortune by selling them a few years later? The author, a former Rotman School dean, argues that the answer is rooted in the way many corporations value their businesses and projects. Their basic mistake is to compare estimates of future cash flow with the amount of cash put into a business as a capital investment. Although this sounds perfectly reasonable (and largely follows conventional practices for measuring economic value added, or EVA, and its equivalents), it can anchor performance measurement in a historical number that very quickly loses its relevance. As Martin explains, once an investment has been made in an asset, the company's expectations about the value that investment will create are, in effect, publicized. Thus a company assessing the performance of its investment should base its measures not on the cash put in but on the current value of the asset or capability in question, which--and this is the critical point--includes the value that the market already believes the company will create or destroy with that asset or capability. Martin describes an approach that is grounded in market expectations about future value.

One of the most promising applications of emerging blockchain technology is supply chain management. Blockchain--the digital record-keeping system developed for cryptocurrency networks--can help supply chain partners with some of their challenges by creating a complete, transparent, tamperproof history of the information flows, inventory flows, and financial flows in transactions. The authors studied seven large U.S. corporations that are exploring how blockchain might improve their supply chain operations. Their early initiatives show that the technology can enable faster and more cost-efficient product delivery, make products more traceable, streamline the financing process, and enhance coordination among buyers, suppliers, and banks. There are special requirements for using blockchain in supply chain management: restricting participation to known, trusted partners; adopting a new consensus protocol; and taking steps to keep errors and counterfeits out of the supply chain. But if implemented thoughtfully, the authors suggest, blockchain could pay big dividends for companies in a host of industries.

New CEOs are typically focused on creating and implementing a strategy, building a top team, and driving culture change. Optimizing administrative workflow may not seem to be a priority. But a former CEO who now advises boards argues that many chief executives need a chief of staff (CoS)-someone who goes beyond the executive assistant role to help the office function smoothly. According to one CoS, the role encompasses being an air traffic controller for the leader and the senior team, an integrator connecting work streams that would otherwise remain siloed, a communicator linking the leadership team and the broader organization, an honest broker when the leader needs a wide-ranging view without turf considerations, and a confidant. In this article Ciampa outlines what a CoS does, the qualities one needs to succeed, and the ways companies typically design the role (with varying levels of responsibility) to help make a CEO more focused and productive.

Trust is the basis for almost everything we do. It's the foundation on which our laws and contracts are built. It's the reason we're willing to exchange our hard-earned paychecks for goods and services, to pledge our lives to another person in marriage, and to cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. It's also the input that makes it possible for leaders to create the conditions for employees to fully realize their own capacity and power. So how do you build up stores of this essential leadership capital? By focusing, the authors argue, on the three core drivers of trust: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers. This article explains how leaders can identify their weaknesses and strengths on these three dimensions and offers advice on how all three can be developed in the service of a truly empowering leadership style.

The huge threat posed by digital technologies and models throws many established companies into a panic. In response, they often make big, bet-the-farm moves that fail badly. It's much wiser to take an incremental approach to digital transformation, say McGrath and McManus. Building on a technique McGrath helped develop in the 1990s--discovery-driven planning--the two advise executives at traditional firms to take things step-by-step. Rather than attempting an all-or-nothing pivot, incumbents should exploit their greater resources and knowledge and explore a variety of ideas at once. By continually finding ways to fix problems with digital technology, testing and refining assumptions about what works, getting new information, and minimizing risks, they can learn their way gradually toward an effective digital response. Consider Best Buy's strategy for striking back at Amazon. Best Buy overhauled its processes so that it could cut costs and match prices; turned its stores into an asset by allowing online orders to be picked up there (avoiding delivery headaches); charged brands fees to be in ministores within its outlets; and built a staff of tech consultants who strengthened customer relationships.

A lot of global health problems can be prevented by persuading people to alter their behavior--something marketers excel at. That's why brands have a critical role to play in tackling these challenges, says Sidibe, Unilever's first social mission director. In this article she offers any brand that wants to achieve a social purpose a five-part framework for success: inspiring individuals to change behavior; winning internal backing; measuring performance at multiple levels; partnering with governments, NGOs, and other firms; and sparking a broader movement. This approach has allowed Unilever's Lifebuoy and Knorr brands to make great strides in reducing disease and poor nutrition in the developing world, while enhancing their profiles and their growth, and it could help other brands, like Carling Black Label beer, which has taken on the task of combating domestic violence.

If you have a big job, the thinking goes, you should focus on it obsessively so that you excel and position yourself for the next role. But, in fact, such single-mindedness can stymie your career. Leaders need to find ways to expand their range of knowledge, skills, and connections outside their daily work. This goes beyond attending conferences or even taking classes; it requires meaningful engagement in outside activities, such as work on boards, in teaching or public service, in mentoring start-ups, and in leadership roles for associations and clubs. This article explains how to find time in your hectic schedule, identify the side gigs that will be synergistic with your personal interests and current job, and get your employer's buy-in. Taking on extracurricular activities isn't always easy, but in the end it can open up opportunities for you and become your personal competitive advantage.