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Culture is easy to sense but hard to measure. The workhorses of culture research--employee surveys and questionnaires--are notoriously unreliable. Studying the language that employees use in electronic communication has opened a new window into organizational culture. New research analyzing email, Slack messages, and Glassdoor postings are challenging prevailing wisdom about culture. Some of the findings: (1) Cultural fit is important, but what predicts success most is the rate at which employees adapt as organizational culture changes over time. (2) Cognitive diversity helps teams during ideation but hinders execution. (3) The best cultures encourage diversity to drive innovation but are anchored by shared core beliefs.

In today's fast-changing business environment, employees' continual development is essential. That's leading to a new and more powerful role for chief learning officers: They're not just trainers anymore; they're transformers who are reshaping organizational capabilities and culture. The authors interviewed CLOs at 19 large companies and found that transformers are revamping their organizations' learning goals, learning methods, and learning departments. Their efforts offer a road map for anyone wishing to build a stronger workforce. With respect to learning goals, the aim should be not just to teach employees specific skills but to cultivate broader capabilities, including strong leadership, digital literacy, and a growth mindset. With respect to learning methods, the trend is to move away from traditional classroom instruction and adopt approaches that can provide learning to more employees, in more-customized ways. (Think online and audio courses, videoconferencing, interactive simulations, and formal opportunities for employees to reflect on and apply what they've been taught.) Finally, with respect to transforming learning departments, the key is to make them leaner, more agile, and more strategic by curating useful external content, encouraging peer teaching, measuring the impact of training, and providing tools to tailor learning plans to individuals.

Many executives assume that customer data can give you an unbeatable competitive edge. The more customers you have, the more data you can gather, and that data, when analyzed, allows you to offer a better product that attracts more customers. You can then collect even more data, repeating the cycle until you eventually marginalize your competitors. But this thinking is usually wrong. Though the virtuous cycles of data-enabled learning may look similar to those of network effects--wherein an offering increases in value to users as more people adopt it and ultimately garners a critical mass of users that shuts out competitors--they are not as powerful or as enduring. Nevertheless, under the right conditions, customer data can help build competitive defenses. It all depends on whether the data offers high and lasting value, is proprietary, leads to improvements that can't be easily imitated, or generates insights that can be quickly incorporated. Those characteristics do give firms an advantage. And when learning from one customer rapidly improves an offering for others (think Google Maps), people will care about how many other people are adopting it, and it will enjoy those sought-after network effects.

Judgment--the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions--is "the core of exemplary leadership," according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Likierman believes that a more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible for people to learn and improve on it. He approached CEOs at a range of companies, from some of the world's largest right down to start-ups, along with leaders in the professions: senior partners at law and accountancy firms, generals, doctors, scientists, priests, and diplomats. He asked them to share their observations of their own and other people's exercise of judgment so that he could identify the skills and behaviors that collectively create the conditions for fresh insights and enable decision makers to discern patterns that others miss. As a result, he has identified six key elements that collectively constitute good judgment: learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery. He describes these areas and offers suggestions for improvement in each one.

It can be cognitively demanding to understand how a system or organization made up of many very different interconnected elements actually works. But the fact that such systems or organizations are difficult to understand doesn't make them inherently bad. In addition to its more obvious costs, complexity confers critical benefits, especially in dynamic and uncertain environments. The authors draw on their experience and perspectives in business, biology, and physics to offer some reflections on the nature, benefits, and costs of complexity and provide some guidance on managing it. Their recommendations: In growing your organization, make sure that it remains modular in structure and that all components and connections conform to a small number of simple operating principles. Embed a bias for change, avoid imposing too many controls on your people, and let the market judge which changes work. Finally, always optimize your organization globally and keep fixing, repairing, and pruning.

To conduct international commerce, businesses have built an intricate system of networks that move money, information, and components around the world. These networks may look decentralized, but all too frequently, they have major choke points. The majority of global finance transactions, for instance, are relayed through a single organization in Belgium. Many global tech firms depend heavily on the chips Qualcomm makes for Android devices. A huge proportion of global communications are routed through private servers on U.S. soil. Increasingly, these choke points are being turned into political weapons by governments, and companies are getting caught in the cross fire. The stakes are high: Firms can go out of business if they're cut off from critical networks. They need to analyze their exposure and develop a strategy to protect themselves.

Most of us think of ourselves as good people. We set out to be ethical at work, and we hope that in pivotal moments we will rise to the occasion. But when it comes to building an ethical career, good intentions are insufficient. Decades' worth of research has identified psychological processes and biases that cloud people's moral judgment, leading them to violate their own values, and often to create contorted, post hoc justifications for their behavior. How can we ensure that we will consistently do the right thing in our professional lives? The authors argue for a mindset shift to what they term "moral humility"--the recognition that we all have the capacity for ethical transgressions if we aren't vigilant. They suggest a three-stage approach for staying on the straight and narrow: Prepare in advance for moral challenges, including instituting proper safeguards; make good decisions in the moment; and reflect on and learn from moral successes and failures.

In this fictional case, an associate director of business development at a gaming company is selected for a prestigious cross-functional innovation group. When one of her peers in the work group isn't able to meet his deadlines because of his heavy workload, she picks up his slack. But at the end of the project, she needs to give him a rating in the company's new peer-feedback system, and she's worried that if she's honest, it will hurt his career and cause trouble for her. Should she give him the low rating she thinks he deserves? Or should she give him a pass this one time? This fictional case study by Anthony J. Mayo, Joshua D. Margolis, and Amy Gallo features expert commentary by Dan Goldenberg and Aiko Bethea.

During his 20-year career as a professional boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard won world titles in five weight classes, became the first in his sport to earn more than $100 million in prize money, and helped fuel fans' interest in boxing following Muhammad Ali's retirement. In this interview he talks about bypassing boxers' traditional reliance on promoters, why he retired repeatedly, which of his fights is most worth rewatching, and more.

In this fictional case, an associate director of business development at a gaming company is selected for a prestigious cross-functional innovation group. When one of her peers in the work group isn't able to meet his deadlines because of his heavy workload, she picks up his slack. But at the end of the project, she needs to give him a rating in the company's new peer-feedback system, and she's worried that if she's honest, it will hurt his career and cause trouble for her. Should she give him the low rating she thinks he deserves? Or should she give him a pass this one time? This fictional case study by Anthony J. Mayo, Joshua D. Margolis, and Amy Gallo features expert commentary by Dan Goldenberg and Aiko Bethea.

In this fictional case, an associate director of business development at a gaming company is selected for a prestigious cross-functional innovation group. When one of her peers in the work group isn't able to meet his deadlines because of his heavy workload, she picks up his slack. But at the end of the project, she needs to give him a rating in the company's new peer-feedback system, and she's worried that if she's honest, it will hurt his career and cause trouble for her. Should she give him the low rating she thinks he deserves? Or should she give him a pass this one time? This fictional case study by Anthony J. Mayo, Joshua D. Margolis, and Amy Gallo features expert commentary by Dan Goldenberg and Aiko Bethea.

Large established organizations need to innovate as much as small entrepreneurial firms. The problem is, it takes real creativity to build something new out of something old. Harvard Professor and innovation expert Gary Pisano introduces the concept of 'creative construction', which entails redesigning an enterprise in a fundamental way while still operating the core business. He defines four types of innovation that large enterprises should embrace, and argues that all four types likely have a place in every organization's innovation portfolio.

Data science may well prove to be the most rewarding and exciting profession of the 21st century. That's because advances in computer processing speeds and reductions in data storage costs are enabling us to reach conclusions from large data sets in ways that were simply not possible 20 or 30 years ago. However, the author shows that this seismic shift in business comes with several key issues for society: data privacy, biased algorithms, ethics and transparency. In the end, he says, a continuing challenge for the human race will be to address these issues and figure out how to partner with machines in ways that benefit rather than harm humankind.

We often assume that only purely digital companies like Google or Netflix can be called 'algorithmic'. But the reality is that every type of organization, at every scale, will soon live and breathe by its capacity to leverage data, automation and algorithms to be more effective and create better customer experiences. The author shows that as a result, a new breed of leader is emerging with an ability to use machine intelligence to transform organizations - and reinvent the world. He argues that these 'algorithmic leaders' are different from traditional leaders in three key ways.

Since 2006, China has been in fast-forward mode as government ministries have rolled out ambitious plans to make the country an innovative society, with a growing emphasis on science and technology and the declared aim to become a world leader in advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence (AI). Can China meet its lofty goals? In this article, the author summarizes some of the advantages China enjoys over other countries -as well as the challenges it faces in making its vision a reality.

Disruption is no longer a once-in-a-career problem to be dealt with. It's a constant cycle. Technology is increasingly creating the tools your competitors - incumbents and entrepreneurs alike - are using to build new digital products and services that target and release latent demand and serve unmet needs. The authors, senior leaders at Accenture, call that potential revenue 'trapped value' - and they argue that if you don't get to it before others, you may find not just your future growth disrupted, but your current business as well.

No one would argue that that online and mobile banking have transformed the financial services industry. Tech-savvy customers welcome online banking for its convenience, and banks view it as a way to increase efficiency. But the author argues that despite the rapid growth of digital tools and solutions, personal relationships remain critical in the financial sector. She describes her research findings, which indicate that there are hidden costs to abandoning personalized banking relationships - and that such relationships between borrowers and lenders can benefit both parties.

Despite widespread agreement on the importance of creativity, leaders often fail to recognize creative ideas-or worse, reject them outright. The authors summarize research pointing to a variety of conditions that bias managers toward judging creative ideas negatively. Heeding the call for tools that aid in the recognition of creativity, they then describe their model for successfully pitching ideas in organizations, which, assuming true idea novelty, features two critical proactive behaviours on the part of the employee: idea enactment and influence tactics.

In a world plagued by information overload, it is not surprising that we often resort to categorical thinking to simplify incoming information. The problem is, this habit can manifest itself in a tendency to group individuals on the basis of social categories including race, gender and age. Further, such categories are often imbued with associations and expectations - a.k.a. stereotypes. One little-discussed sub-category of stereotypes is 'occupational stereotypes' - collections of traits or attributes with which individuals associate members of different occupations. The authors describe their research into these stereotypes, showing how they lead to occupational segregation and impact vocational choice, recruitment and selection.

The billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla talks to Creative Destruction Lab Founder Ajay Agrawal about the AI-generated opportunities (and dangers) that lie ahead. In particular, he points to the potential of AI to increase income disparity to dangerous levels that could lead to societal unrest. He also argues that lower skilled jobs like truck driver and restaurant worker will likely be fine, but that higher skilled knowledge-based jobs like radiologists are in trouble. On the bright side, AI could eradicate unsatisfying work; we are at the beginning of a continuous 'hypercycle' of innovation; and the future is shapeable: Technology doesn't rule; it serves. We get to decide on its goals.