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The combination of artificial and human intelligence will not only drive breakthrough discoveries, it will also free employees from mundane work. Already, human creativity and judgment augmented by the computational power of AI has led to breakthroughs in energy generation and storage, drug therapies and space exploration. Next, it could yield solutions to some of humanity's most intractable problems. And what lies beyond could be even more transformative: A convergence of information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology that promises to overhaul the very definition of what it means to be human.

Lurie took the helm at SurveyMonkey in the aftermath of tragedy: Dave Goldberg, the previous CEO and his longtime friend, had died suddenly at the age of 47. As a member of the company's board, Lurie first aided in the search for a replacement and then, after that person didn't work out, assumed the role himself. His employees were still in the grip of grief, fear, and anxiety. While continuing to provide them with emotional support, Lurie set about defining the company culture. When customers were asked what they valued most about the company's offerings, and employees what excited them about coming to work every day, the word that came up most often was "curiosity." Lurie and his team started encouraging and rewarding curiosity across the organization: celebrating the "question of the week" at town halls; using a peer recognition program to reward people for their candor; hosting the Goldie Speaker Series (named for the deceased CEO) to learn about success in other fields. They believe that when curiosity ebbs, people lapse into routine and complacency, exposing a company to disruption.

Innovative cultures are generally depicted as pretty fun. They're characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. They're seen as being psychologically safe, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical. And research suggests that these behaviors translate into better innovative performance. But despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable, and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. That's because the easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors: an intolerance for incompetence, rigorous discipline, brutal candor, a high level of individual accountability, and strong leadership. Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail.

As they fight for survival in the era of online shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting costs by slashing head count and budgets for training. But that erodes their biggest edge over e-tailers: a live person customers can talk to face-to-face. For every dollar a retailer saves on staffing, it may be losing several dollars in revenues and gross profits if customers leave stores empty-handed because they can't find a knowledgeable salesperson to help them. The solution lies in optimizing staffing and training for each store, but most retailers don't know how to do that. This article offers them a step-by-step approach. It involves analyzing historical data, conducting experiments, and assessing the results, and when applied systematically can add as much as 20% to the revenues of existing stores. Even better, if staffing increases at some stores are offset by cuts at others, and vendors fund product training, those higher sales will cost retailers little or nothing to generate.

While most firms are adept at defining product brands, they're less sure-footed with their corporate brands. What exactly does a parent company's name represent, and how is it perceived in the marketplace? A strong corporate identity provides direction and purpose, boosts the standing of products, aids in recruiting, and shores up a firm's reputation. To help organizations define theirs, the authors have devised a tool called the "corporate brand identity matrix." It guides teams through an examination of the nine components of corporate identity, which include mission, culture, relationships, and core values and promises. Often that exercise reveals broken links between the elements that executives need to align and strengthen. This article describes how companies have used the matrix to clarify their relationships with daughter brands, retool their identities to support new businesses, revamp their overall image, evaluate targets for acquisition, and more.

With emerging-market giants such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China experiencing slowdowns, investors, entrepreneurs, and multinationals are looking elsewhere. They've been eyeing frontier economies such as Nigeria and Pakistan with great interest--and enormous trepidation. Can one find serious growth opportunities amid extreme poverty and a lack of infrastructure and institutions? The answer, the authors argue, is yes. The key lies in "market-creating innovations": products and services that speak to unmet local needs, create local jobs, and scale up quickly. Examples range from MicroEnsure, which has made insurance affordable for 56 million people in emerging economies, to Galanz, which has brought microwave ovens to millions of Chinese consumers previously considered too poor to buy such an appliance. What's more, the essentials of development can be "pulled in" by market-creating innovators--and over time, governments and financial institutions tend to offer their support.

Impact investing--directing capital to ventures that are expected to yield social and environmental benefits as well as profits--provides investors with a way to "do well by doing good." But whereas the business world has tools for estimating a potential investment's financial yield, it lacks them for estimating social rewards in dollar terms. Now the Rise Fund and the Bridgespan Group have developed what they call the "impact multiple of money" (IMM) to demonstrate the value of putting impact underwriting on the same footing as financial underwriting. In this article they explain their six-step process for calculating it: (1) Assess the relevance and scale of a potential product, service, or project. (2) Identify target social or environmental outcomes. (3) Estimate the economic value of those outcomes to society. (4) Adjust for risks. (5) Estimate terminal value. (6) Calculate the social return on every dollar spent. The IMM, they write, "offers a rigorous methodology to advance the art of allocating capital to achieve social benefit."

Many companies looking for breakthroughs struggle to move beyond incremental ideas, because cognitive biases trap people in the status quo and prevent them from seeing big opportunities. But four tactics can help firms overcome biases and think far more creatively: (1) Science fiction. Sci-fi writers have foreseen all kinds of innovations. When Lowe's invited some in to envision its future, it got ideas for augmented reality phones, service robots, 3-D printing, and other new technologies that boosted sales. (2) Analogies. These can help innovators make big leaps too. For instance, when Charlie Merrill applied the analogy of a supermarket to the brokerage business, he changed the industry. (3) First principles logic. Often it helps to reexamine foundational assumptions and rebuild from the ground up. That's how Regeneron cut drug development costs 80%. (4) Exaptation. Why do we use something for one purpose and not another? Asking that question led to the creation of the Flex-Foot, a revolutionary prosthetic that doesn't look anything like a foot but acts like one.

In the digital economy, scale is no guarantee of continued success. After all, the same factors that help an online platform expand quickly--such as the low cost of adding new customers--work for challengers too. What, then, allows platforms to fight off rivals and grow profits? Their ability to manage five aspects of the networks they're embedded in: (1) Network effects, in which users attract more users; (2) Clustering, or fragmentation into many local markets; (3) The risk of disintermediation, wherein users bypass a hub and connect directly; (4) Vulnerability to multi-homing, which happens when users form ties with two or more competing platforms; (5) Network bridging, which allows platforms to leverage users and data from one network in another network. When entrepreneurs are evaluating a digital platform business, they should look at these dynamics--and the feasibility of improving them--to get a more realistic picture of its long-term prospects.

Despite heavy investments to acquire talented data scientists and take advantage of the analytics boom, many companies have been disappointed in the results. The problem is that those scientists are trained to ask smart questions, wrangle the relevant data, and uncover insights--but not to communicate what those insights mean for the business. To be successful, the author writes, a data science team needs six talents: project management, data wrangling, data analysis, subject expertise, design, and storytelling. He outlines four steps for achieving that success: (1) Define talents, not team members. (2) Hire to create a portfolio of necessary talents. (3) Expose team members to talents they don't have. (4)  Structure projects around talents.

Research shows that leaders consistently rate their own meetings very favorably--and much more positively than attendees do. When managers assume that their meetings are going well, they are less apt to solicit feedback and seek opportunities to improve. As a result, frustrations that attendees commonly cite (such as irrelevant agenda items, overly long duration, lack of focus) persist, leaving people disgruntled and disengaged. This article helps managers learn to diagnose their meeting problems, better prepare for and facilitate the gatherings they lead, and seek feedback to further hone their skills.

In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer must figure out how to handle an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. His head of sales and CFO are constantly at each other's throats, and the tension is having a bad ripple effect on their teams and the rest of the organization. Should he change the company's compensation scheme to encourage better collaboration, get the executives coaching, or do more team-building activities? Or should he fire one or both of the warring executives? This fictional case study by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden features expert commentary by Scott Salmirs and Dale Winston.

The Hollywood superagent turned Silicon Valley adviser discusses winning over clients and building creative teams.

In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer must figure out how to handle an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. His head of sales and CFO are constantly at each other's throats, and the tension is having a bad ripple effect on their teams and the rest of the organization. Should he change the company's compensation scheme to encourage better collaboration, get the executives coaching, or do more team-building activities? Or should he fire one or both of the warring executives? This fictional case study by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden features expert commentary by Scott Salmirs and Dale Winston.

In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer must figure out how to handle an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. His head of sales and CFO are constantly at each other's throats, and the tension is having a bad ripple effect on their teams and the rest of the organization. Should he change the company's compensation scheme to encourage better collaboration, get the executives coaching, or do more team-building activities? Or should he fire one or both of the warring executives? This fictional case study by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden features expert commentary by Scott Salmirs and Dale Winston.

This short, fictitious case provides a basis for discussing brand valuation for several purposes (e.g., capitalization of intangible assets on post-M&A balance sheets, input into managing and leveraging the brand across the business, setting transfer prices to optimize international taxation, setting rates for brand licensing agreements, evaluating brand ROI, and co-branding revenue splits between parties). It does so from the perspective of a luxury brand's chief marketing officer (CMO), Lena Müller, who is furthermore worried how the choice of valuation method might affect her annual bonus. Lena is particularly concerned by the vastly different valuations ascribed to leading brands by two of the leading league table providers, Brand Finance and Interbrand, who use different methods to do so.

At the end of 2018, international markets were no longer paying a premium for Ecuadorian roses. Despite globally recognized product quality, mainly attributed to a longer vase life, Ecuadorian rose growers found it extremely difficult to achieve attractive levels of profitability. A multi-year analysis of US-based data showed just how pronounced this trend was (see Exhibit 1). Being one of Ecuador's chief exportable products, and generating more than 100,000 jobs, the industry needed a change. How could this small Latin American country reimagine how it competes in this global market?

This case provides an inside glimpse into the unraveling of crisis management effectiveness at the hands of an organization's leader. In the dark of night, a runaway train owned by the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA) jumped the track, setting off pools of fire that decimated the tranquility of the French-Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic. More than 1.5 million gallons of petroleum crude oil, spewed from 62 of the train's tank cars, turned the town into an inferno. Forty-seven townspeople were incinerated. In the heart of town, homes and businesses were destroyed. Every crisis tests the mettle of its leaders. This case captures lessons of what not to do when representing your organization in crisis. The tragedy is a dramatic platform to explore and evaluate the extraordinary challenges that leaders encounter in crisis, from untangling causes and contributing factors attributable to their organization, to facing into the devastating impact. Through verbatim transcripts contained in the case and publicly-accessible videos, details are brought to light as they unfolded, including crisis leadership offenses of speculation, finger-pointing and cross-cultural insensitivity.

This case provides an exceptional opportunity to evaluate attribution and fact, error and blame, active failures and latent conditions as an organization manages a crisis that it has caused. At approximately 1:30 a.m. on July 6, 2013, an unmanned runaway train owned by the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA) derailed, burst into flames, and set off explosions that destroyed the center of Lac-Mégantic, a quiet town in Québec, Canada. Forty-seven victims were incinerated as residential, commercial, and historical buildings and the people in them were swiftly reduced to ashes. Unlike many other crisis-based cases that focus on executives and managers, the protagonist is an operator, an MMA train engineer, who is publicly scapegoated by his company's chairman even before the facts are in. Despite facing charges of criminal negligence causing deaths, the engineer, out-of-towner Tom Harding, reaps the support of Lac-Mégantic residents, including many whose families, community, dwellings, and businesses have been decimated by the tragedy.

Mike Maples Jr. founded the micro-VC firm Floodgate in 2006, after a successful career as an entrepreneur with two startup IPOs under his belt. At the time, he had identified a group of overlooked founders in Silicon Valley: those who wanted to raise only $1 million or less, a growing group since costs involved in launching a company had been declining significantly as a result of technological advancements and innovative management approach, such as "lean startup". In the following decade, he invested in a stream of successful companies, including Twitter, Digg, Chegg, Twitch.tv, Demandforce and Weebly. In the mid-2010s, however, the Micro-VC category, which Maples had helped create, was quickly becoming crowded. Additionally, the sources for early-stage funding multiplied: angel investors, "super-angels", crowdfunding platforms and traditional later stage VCs expanding into seed investing turned into competitors. The combination of intense competition and high availability of investable funds had one natural consequence: founders could command higher valuations and choose from many potential investors - it was an entrepreneurs' market. Determined to preserve his position as a thought-leader and successful investor in Silicon Valley, Maples set off to understand how he could, once more, positively influence the VC industry through an entrepreneurial approach. Based on deep analysis of past investments, he developed a suite of frameworks to help entrepreneurs navigate their companies' trajectories at a time when getting to the next funding round and commanding ever-richer valuations became an obsession in the entrepreneurial community.