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Enterprises that own multiple businesses often have a flawed approach to strategy: They focus too much on the makeup of their portfolios and too little on enhancing the businesses in them. Strategies for adding value to a corporation's businesses fall on a continuum. On one end the businesses in the portfolio are completely unrelated; at the other they have many similarities. Each place on the continuum requires a different kind of organizational structure and specific management processes to support it. To succeed at execution, you need to determine where on the spectrum your business falls and then align your portfolio selection, structure, and processes with your vision of how to add value.

Today artificial intelligence can be harnessed by nearly anyone, using commands in everyday language instead of code. Soon it will transform more than 40% of all work activity, according to the authors' research. In this new era of collaboration between humans and machines, the ability to leverage AI effectively will be critical to your professional success. This article describes the three kinds of "fusion skills" you need to get the best results from gen AI. Intelligent interrogation involves instructing large language models to perform in ways that generate better outcomes-by, say, breaking processes down into steps or visualizing multiple potential paths to a solution. Judgment integration is about incorporating expert and ethical human discernment to make AI's output more trustworthy, reliable, and accurate. It entails augmenting a model's training sources with authoritative knowledge bases when necessary, keeping biases out of prompts, ensuring the privacy of any data used by the models, and scrutinizing suspect output. With reciprocal apprenticing, you tailor gen AI to your company's specific business context by including rich organizational data and know-how into the commands you give it. As you become better at doing that, you yourself learn how to train the AI to tackle more-sophisticated challenges. The AI revolution is already here. Learning these three skills will prepare you to thrive in it.

Two brothers who founded a successful company in Côte d'Ivoire must make a decision about how to bring their daughter and niece-educated in Paris and currently working there-into the family business, a company founded in 1988 and now one of West Africa's most successful conglomerates. She has surprised them with an ultimatum: She will come back, but only as COO, in charge of some grand expansion plans. Two experts-both with deep expertise in African family businesses-offer their advice in accompanying commentaries.

Four new books and a podcast discuss the use of perception-altering drugs: Psychedelic Outlaws, by Joanna Kempner; Have a Good Trip, by Eugenia Bone; Trippy, by Ernesto Londoño; More! The Microdose Diet, by Peggy Van de Plassche; and Luminous, from Wisconsin Public Radio.

Soft-spoken as a child, Chung found her voice as a journalist and in 1993 was named coanchor of the CBS Evening News. In this interview she talks about her determination to climb the ladder, how she navigated sexism in the workplace, and more.

Two brothers who founded a successful company in Côte d'Ivoire must make a decision about how to bring their daughter and niece-educated in Paris and currently working there-into the family business, a company founded in 1988 and now one of West Africa's most successful conglomerates. She has surprised them with an ultimatum: She will come back, but only as COO, in charge of some grand expansion plans. Two experts-both with deep expertise in African family businesses-offer their advice in accompanying commentaries.

Two brothers who founded a successful company in Côte d'Ivoire must make a decision about how to bring their daughter and niece-educated in Paris and currently working there-into the family business, a company founded in 1988 and now one of West Africa's most successful conglomerates. She has surprised them with an ultimatum: She will come back, but only as COO, in charge of some grand expansion plans. Two experts-both with deep expertise in African family businesses-offer their advice in accompanying commentaries.

When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. What leaders need to do instead is conduct rigorous discussions that assess any findings and whether they apply to the situation in question. Such conversations should explore the internal validity of any analysis (whether it accurately answers the question) as well as its external validity (the extent to which results can be generalized from one context to another). To avoid missteps, you need to separate causation from correlation and control for confounding factors. You should examine the sample size and setting of the research and the period over which it was conducted. You must ensure that you're measuring an outcome that really matters instead of one that is simply easy to measure. And you need to look for-or undertake-other research that might confirm or contradict the evidence. By employing a systematic approach to the collection and interpretation of information, you can more effectively reap the benefits of the ever-increasing mountain of external and internal data and make better decisions.

Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) has the potential to radically alter how business is conducted, and there's no doubt that it will create a lot of value. Companies have used it to identify entirely new product opportunities and business models; to automate routine decisions, freeing humans to focus on decisions that involve ethical trade-offs, empathy, or imagination; to deliver customized professional services formerly available only to the wealthy; and to develop and communicate product and other recommendations to customers faster, more cheaply, and more informatively than was possible with human-driven processes. But, the authors ask, will companies be able to leverage gen AI to build a competitive advantage? The answer, they argue in this article, is no-unless you already have a competitive advantage that rivals cannot replicate using AI. Then the technology may serve to amplify the value you derive from that advantage.

In 2008 Abbott introduced a revolutionary new device, FreeStyle Navigator, designed to improve the lives of the world's more than 500 million diabetes patients by offering continuous glucose monitoring with technology that could translate an electrochemical signal from the body into precise, real-time data. Doctors and patients who tried the device appreciated it-but it was bulky, hard to manufacture, and expensive. And without widespread adoption, it wouldn't have the hoped-for impact. Abbott's leaders soon realized that they needed to go back to the drawing board. Four years later they launched FreeStyle Libre, a reimagined continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system in which an even smaller sensor applied to a patient's arm sends data directly to a smartphone app every minute. It is now used by millions globally, and by the end of 2024 it will have generated more than $6 billion in revenue, making it one of the most successful medical devices-as measured by usage and sales-in history. The pivot from the Navigator to the Libre was a deeply consequential decision for Abbott, and others can learn from the principles the company's leaders followed to arrive at and then execute on that choice.

MIT Sloan School of Management's Juanjuan Zhang and three coresearchers explored the relationship between genetics and sales performance. They studied 117 salespeople at an Asian telemarketing company over the course of 13 months. They cross-referenced employee DNA with performance metrics, such as revenue produced, the ability to identify selling opportunities, and effort. The conclusion: The employees with superior sales performance were genetically different from the rest of the group.

Though celebrity influencers get lots of attention, they often don't produce sales. When Bocconi University's Maximilian Beichert and colleagues looked at the data on close to 2 million purchases and hundreds of paid influencer endorsements, they discovered that influencers with fewer than 10,000 followers delivered far better returns. In this article Beichert shares his findings along with tips on getting the best results from influencer campaigns.

Established in 2004 as a Global Business Services (GBS) hub for Tesco PLC, Tesco Business Solutions (TBS) in Bangalore had grown impressively to more than 2600 employees by April 2023. Spearheaded by Sumit Mitra, CEO of TBS, and supported by Somnath Baishya, Chief People Officer (CPO), TBS has transitioned from a shared service provider to a provider of advanced solutions, including finance, property management, supply chain, product, promotion, pricing, and more. Mitra and Baishya's innovative HR strategies, which emphasized hyper-personalization of employee experiences, had earned accolades for exceptional people practices in India as well as in global business service centers. The comprehensive initiatives implemented at TBS significantly increased its employee value proposition (EVP) and positioned the company as a top employer for highly skilled knowledge workers. While TBS's innovative HR strategies allowed the company to effectively compete for talent in a fiercely competitive labor market, they also increased the need for substantial organizational resources to sustain hyper-personalized employee experiences. Managing diverse individual needs remained a constant challenge for Baishya and his team, requiring careful curation, delivery, and expectation management strategies. The case provides frameworks for control, scalability, and manageability. It also addresses the challenges of hyper-personalization of employee experiences. As a result, HR personnel can multiply the value of employees and emerge as true value creators in organizations.

In 1997, Patrick Awuah had a dream: to bring liberal arts education to Ghana. Amid the country's declining economy and pervasive corruption problems, Awuah saw education as an opportunity to reverse its fortunes by investing in the next generation of African leaders. Five years later, he and his team established Ashesi University, which differentiated itself from Ghana's traditional educational model by remaining privately funded (and therefore independent from Ghana's public school system), religiously unaffiliated, and - in service of its mission of developing future leaders - operative under an honor code that allowed students to take exams without supervision, an unprecedented practice in Ghana. This case follows Awuah's efforts to establish and grow Ashesi University and provides insight into the role that leadership can play in operationalizing purpose, especially in entrepreneurial ventures.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 125035.

Spreadsheet supplement for 8461.

Spreadsheet supplement for 8448.

Headquartered in Singapore, DBS Bank, one of Asia's leading financial services groups, embarked on a multi-year digital transformation under CEO Piyush Gupta in 2014. It was then that DBS also began experimenting with AI to drive value for the business and customers. As the bank scaled the use of AI, it developed an internal P-U-R-E framework for ethical AI governance. In 2022, DBS started experimenting with Generative AI use cases. It had to consider how best to leverage its existing capabilities and adapt its governance frameworks in deploying Gen AI to drive additional value while managing emergent risks.

This note highlights how machine learning is being used to decarbonize (reduce GHG emissions) several key sectors including electricity, transportation, building, industrial processes, and agriculture -- and how machine learning is being used to accelerate efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (carbon removal).