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What distinguishes companies that have built advanced digital capabilities? The ability to collaborate. Research finds that a focus on collaboration -both with and without technology, both within organizations and with external partners and stakeholders -is central to how digitally advanced companies create business value and establish competitive advantage over less advanced rivals.

But focusing on results alone is not enough. Demographic, cultural, and technological changes have led to a workforce that demands a set of operating principles characterized by core values such as transparency, trust, inclusion, and real-time collaboration to help guide behaviors and decision-making in companies. Finally, studies have shown that millennials are deeply motivated by corporate social responsibility and a compelling sense of purpose. Together, these forces make the case that companies that fail to aspire to align purpose, performance, and principles will also fail to attract the best talent. Furthermore, to achieve the kind of transformations that today's fast-moving economy often requires of businesses, executives need engaged, committed employees who have opportunities to contribute their knowledge. Purpose and principles can help engage employees in support of high performance. The authors acknowledge that while it is easy for executives to say they aspire to build companies that are simultaneously purpose-driven, performance-focused, and principles-led, it is a difficult accomplishment to achieve. There are often inherent tensions and conflicting goals associated with trying to achieve all three aims. How can executives align purpose, performance, and principles so that they can lead their organizations through major changes? The authors'research and experience suggest the task requires not only a set of leadership skills that they describe but also five mindsets that encompass the embedded tensions that face leaders of large, complex organizations. Executives must learn to reconcile these tensions by mastering a series of five conflicting yet complementary dualities: urgency and patience; collective and individual accountability; coaching and driving performance; student and teacher; and humility and boldness.

In the 2017 Digital Business Report, MIT SMR and Deloitte find that digitally maturing companies are achieving success by increasing collaboration, scaling innovation, and revamping their approach to talent.

Disruption from artificial intelligence (AI) is here, but many company leaders aren't sure what to expect from AI or how it fits into their business model. Yet with change coming at breakneck speed, the time to identify your company's AI strategy is now. MIT Sloan Management Review has partnered with The Boston Consulting Group to provide baseline information on the strategies used by companies leading in AI, the prospects for its growth, and the steps executives need to take to develop a strategy for their business.

Corporate executives need to move beyond only managing their own companies and become active influencers within broader systems.

In recent years, "design thinking"has become popular in many industries as established companies have tried to apply designers'problem-solving techniques to corporate innovation processes. Key elements of the design thinking methodology include fast iterations; early and frequent interaction with customers; agile process design with less hierarchy; and a learning-by-doing approach that involves building prototypes and creating mock-ups of any kind as early as possible in the process. Over the past seven years, the authors have helped more than 20 companies pursue more than 50 design thinking initiatives and have found that such initiatives rarely proceed according to the textbook model. Innovation, they note, is an inherently messy process that conflicts in many ways with established companies'processes, structures, and corporate cultures. For example, they note, many established companies punish failure, which discourages the risk-taking design thinking requires. What's more, the design thinking methodology calls for egalitarian, self-organized teams, but this isn't how most large companies work. In fact, the design thinking teams the authors studied tended to have clear process and project owners, usually senior managers who often supervised 12 to 15 design thinking projects at a time. The authors argue that companies need to take five steps to take full advantage of the potential of design thinking. They recommend that companies (1) encourage top managers to champion design thinking initiatives, (2) balance intuitive and analytical thinking on design thinking teams, (3) set ground rules that give design thinking teams the autonomy they need to function well, (4) integrate design thinking into the company's product development processes, and (5) focus on learning rather than on profits as metrics for design thinking projects.

Much as relationships in social networks have been analyzed to understand and influence how ideas flow among people, researchers wondered whether it might be possible to use the structure of product recommendation networks online to understand or influence how demand flows among products. The short answer is yes, and the implications for marketers are important.

Chinese companies are increasingly investing in companies overseas. But to reach advantageous agreements with Chinese direct investors, Western managers need to prepare themselves for differences in negotiating style.

At most companies, innovation is a top managerial priority. Many managers look at successful innovators such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. with envy, wishing that their companies could be half as innovative. To boost and benchmark innovation, managers often use quantitative performance indicators. Some measure innovation as results or outcomes, such as sales from new products; others measure innovation as a process, using metrics such as the number of innovation projects; some rely on input metrics; and still others focus on the innovation portfolio by looking at factors such as the percentage of investments in breakthrough projects versus line extensions. The key managerial challenge, the authors argue, does not lie in identifying metrics; there is no shortage to choose from. Rather, they say, it is understanding the problem that measurement should solve for the company and, based on that insight, designing and implementing a useful innovation measurement framework that is appropriate to the organization's needs. To do this, managers need to understand the innovation challenges the company faces, how innovation is currently measured, and the extent to which current measurement practices help or hinder efforts to achieve innovation goals. Only then will they be able to steer clear of common innovation measurement mistakes, such as placing too much value on data at the expense of meaning, or getting bogged down with too many measures that provide contradictory advice and incentivize employees to do the wrong things. The article contains a step-by-step framework that allows managers to identify whether their current innovation measurement practices need to change and, if so, how to go about measuring innovation more effectively. The framework is also aimed at companies that do not currently measure innovation but would like to start.

Identifying the optimal prices for products was once a time-consuming process. That's changing as businesses start to take advantage of advances in machine learning, increases in computing speed, and greater availability of data.

"Megaprojects"-defined as projects with budgets exceeding $1 billion -are important contributors to numerous sectors, including health care, defense, mining, telecommunications, transport, energy and water infrastructure, sporting events, science, and manufacturing. They represent a significant proportion of many nations'economic activity and profoundly affect productivity, social cohesion, and the environment. Yet megaprojects have proved notoriously difficult to deliver on time and on budget; one estimate suggests that 90% of them end up over budget. Based on more than 10 years of research into a number of megaprojects in London, including the infrastructure for the London 2012 Olympics and the construction of two new terminals at Heathrow Airport, the authors conclude that one way to manage the uncertainties inherent in megaprojects is to innovate throughout the course of the project. What's more, they argue that their suggestions are applicable to all large-scale, long-term projects -not just projects with billon-dollar budgets.

The authors analyzed the mathematics of innovation as a search process for viable product designs across a universe of components. They then tested their insights using historical data from four real environments and concluded that companies can have an advantaged innovation strategy by using information about the unfolding process of innovation. But there isn't one superior strategy. The optimal strategy, they found, is both time-dependent and space-dependent. Based on their findings, the authors developed a five-step process for constructing an information-advantaged innovation strategy. Step 1. Choose your space: Where to play? It's not enough to analyze markets or anticipate customers'needs, the authors say. To innovate successfully, you also need to understand the structure of your innovation space. Step 2. Select your strategy: How to play? Measure the evolution of complexity in the space by analyzing the distribution of product sizes in terms of the number of unique components in products. If complexity is low and stable, the authors say, it's an indication that the space is still in its infancy, which argues for an impatient strategy. If complexity is high, then the space is maturing and a patient strategy will be the best approach. Step 3. Apply your strategy: How to execute? If you follow an impatient innovation strategy, the objective is to adopt or develop components that enable the company to bring relatively simple products to market quickly. Managers should ask themselves how they can be first. However, if the characteristics of your chosen innovation space imply that a patient strategy is more appropriate, your objective should instead be to maximize future innovation options. Step 4. Sense shifts and adapt: How to extract a switch signal? You need to monitor the complexity of your innovation space and compete on access to information in order to detect valuable strategy-switching signals before competitors.

To gain competitive advantage from supply chain analytics, companies need to reduce the time it takes to act on the insights those analytics generate.

If something does go wrong, the hope is that having a comprehensive program will help convince regulators that the company's compliance initiatives were "effective,"the standard used in U.S. sentencing guidelines. Unfortunately, even today's most comprehensive programs won't curtail corporate wrongdoing or the government intervention that follows. Volkswagen AG's compliance program didn't stop its employees from installing "defeat device"software to cheat emissions tests, nor did Wells Fargo & Co.'s policies prevent its employees from opening new customer accounts without authorization. More than 15 years after the Enron Corp. scandal, most companies know very little about how employees make ethical decisions or the psychological mechanisms that cause them to perform unethical and illegal acts. Even fewer have compliance strategies aimed at curbing such behaviors. The goal of this article is to pull together the burgeoning field of behavioral ethics, which provides insight into how individuals make ethical decisions, with the work of criminologists who study individual and corporate criminality. The author seeks to explain why corporate compliance efforts are falling short and how those efforts can be improved. In addition, he offers practical and cost-effective strategies for improving compliance programs that focus on employee behavior, which he says is the best way to make compliance truly effective. Corporate compliance depends on the behavior of individual employees. If employees, officers, and managers always acted in a law-abiding and ethical manner, compliance failures would rarely occur. But that is not realistic. That is why companies need to be aware of how and why employees act the way they do. This starts with understanding how people make decisions generally and how that translates to ethical decision-making.

Makena Lane has a gift for producing results, even in the challenging retail context of the 2010s, but she also has a knack for "ruffling some feathers" in the process. Recruited to a Fortune 500 grocery and pharmacy retailer after climbing to Associate Principal in McKinsey & Company's retail practice, she successfully grew their high-margin yet highly competitive beauty category beyond anyone's expectations. Yet then she was passed over for promotion, receiving the feedback that her "concerning" and "abrasive" interpersonal style had made it impossible to promote her. Instead of a promotion, Lane is offered an executive coach. The case offers a uniquely in-depth (and intimate) view of how Lane approaches the one-year coaching engagement and the outputs from it, including her pre-coaching self-reflection, agreed-upon purpose and outcomes, 360 feedback, the coach's advice to her, an in-depth coach's final report, and Lane's one-pager of lessons learned. At the end of the year of coaching, Lane's boss unexpectedly departs, leaving Lane with a direct path to promotion. Senior leadership now once again faces the difficult decision of whether to promote Lane, this time based on their assessment of whether Lane has authentically transformed through coaching or just taken superficial steps to check off boxes on the way to promotion.

Longfor, a real estate company in China, treats every customer as an individual with distinctive tastes, preferences and needs; the homes it designs emphasize aesthetics, comfort, landscaping and lifestyle in a holistic way. Likewise, its organizational culture emphasizes equality and professionalism in a country where hierarchy and deference to authority are the norm. Its approach to HR (recruitment, training, evaluation, compensation, role-modeling) is completely at odds with common practice in China. The case asks: Is it possible to succeed in business with an organizational culture that is alien to the society in which the company operates? How can emotional capital be generated and embedded in a company to facilitate strategic innovation?

Apple Watch (B) is a companion case to Apple Watch (A). The (B) case describes events that took place immediately after the Apple Watch launch in April 2015. It details Apple Watch product lines, market reactions, and impact on the overall smartwatch product category. The title of the (B) case poses a question regarding the prospect of Apple Watch as an early follower in the smartwatch category. When used in conjunction with the (A) case, the (B) case allows students to consider whether the Apple Watch is a good idea and an opportunity for Apple, as well as issues that influence marketing decisions the company might consider. The (B) case relies on the diffusion of innovation concept promulgated by the work of Everett Rogers to explore the realities and challenges of introducing new technologies to consumers.

As developing economies grow and become more connected, new and exciting entrepreneurial opportunities arise across markets and industries. Smartphones, the best sensors on earth have already been deployed and new technologies, such as Machine Learning, Robotics and Blockchain, will allow problems to be solved at a scale like never seen before. Despite this fertile ground for new endeavors, success not only requires a unique technology fit but great execution in adverse environments. This case includes three vignettes featuring Latin American robo-advsing platform, Alkanza, Indian AI-enabled medical device startup, Sigtuple and emerging Turkish Venture Capital firm, ScaleX. It describes the unique opportunities and distinct challenges of applying deep technologies in developing economies through the eyes of three groups of entrepreneurs scaling technology-based endeavors.

The case deals with issues on the management of values in a family organization when it is growing and undergoing a generational transition. The organization at the center of this study is Aravind Eye Care System (Aravind), a non-profit organization managed as a trust but fully financially self-reliant, both for its current expenses and its expansion needs. It gave about 50% of its services free, and though its medical competence was unquestioned, its executives believed that its main strength was its value system. Though it may not be fully correct to call it a "family organization" (many of its top management people were not from the family at the time of the case events), family members were seen as having a special responsibility in not only managing the organization but also as custodians of its values and legacy. Its founder, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (Dr. V), had passed away in 2006, and his siblings, who were responsible for building the hospital in its early years, had largely dissociated themselves from its day to day operations and even some aspects of its strategic management. The units were run by the second generation, who would themselves be retiring in a few years. The third generation members were already functioning at the lower levels of the organization, and in another five to ten years, the fourth generation would be coming in. The case presents Aravind Eye Care System's situation in this context, with a view to identifying the problems in retaining its legacy, which all of its executives agreed was not only invaluable but also the source of its competitive strength. It describes the different mechanisms employed in the organization to preserve the values and culture, such as recruitment, training, communication as regards the norms of behavior to patients, colleagues and staff and the reflections of its executives. regarding the continuance of the legacy.

In October 2016, the founder of Summer Swim Academy-a provider of swimming lessons and lifeguarding services to families in Burlington, Ontario-was reflecting on the organization's second full season of operations. The founder had been providing services in Burlington for the past six years and had been operating the business formally under the Summer Swim Academy brand for the past two years. She wanted to evaluate the possibility of expanding her business, either geographically or to a year-round operation, in order to achieve a profit goal of $50,000. To determine whether this goal was attainable, she needed to assess geographic and service-delivery expansion options for Summer Swim Academy.