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In 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment was subjected to the most devastating hack in corporate history. Highly sensitive data--salary details, private e-mails (some of them harshly critical of top Hollywood talent), unreleased movies--was leaked for all the world to see. For good measure, the hackers wiped out everything on Sony Pictures' servers. Then they threatened retaliation against any theaters that proceeded with the release of "The Interview," a Sony comedy involving the fictional assassination of North Korea's Kim Jong-un. In this edited interview by HBR's editor in chief, Lynton talks about the company's initial reactions: It had to keep the business operating; deal with employees who feared that their information would be made public; deal with the press, which was publishing some of the leaked e-mails; deal with the parent company in Tokyo; and deal with the FBI. He discusses lessons learned, advice for other executives caught up in similar crises, and the paramount importance of projecting "a sort of cheerleading optimism."

Maybe you haven't had to take a test as part of a hiring process, but you probably will in your next job search. About 76% of organizations with more than 100 employees rely on assessments for external hiring, especially for senior positions. It helps to know what companies are measuring and the tools they're using. (1) Competence. Aptitude tests can evaluate skills, abilities, and potential. Some companies use situational judgment tests, which present scenarios that correspond to particular roles. (2) Work ethic. Self-report questionnaires can assess traits such as ambition and reliability. (3) Emotional intelligence. Psychological tests, scenario-based tests, and performance tasks can measure empathy, self-awareness, and emotional literacy. You can set yourself up for success by practicing, scheduling tests for the time of day when you're most focused and alert, and answering questions in a way that presents your best self. Tests aren't just for the employer's benefit. They can also reveal how things work in an organization and which traits matter most--invaluable information in any job search.

The noted documentarian on waning attention spans and why business leaders should study history.

A survey of five books investigates the seemingly universal insistence on feeling good.

That some companies are choosing to invest in better-trained and more service-oriented workforces should be no surprise. With increasing competition, technological advances and globalization, many companies, especially those selling services, have come to realize that employee expenditures are more than a cost: Employees are the face of the business and sources of innovation and organizational knowledge. They interact with customers at every touch point and create lasting brand impressions. They personify the company's service philosophy and are expected to live by its culture and values. While the products and services many companies offer can appear quite similar on the surface, exceptional service can be a competitive advantage. Competing through service is only possible when the organization treats its employees as a valuable resource. Well-known service-focused companies, including Whole Foods Market, Starbucks, Marriott International and Southwest Airlines, have long invested in initiatives focused on maintaining a holistic framework of making both their customers and their employees happy. Herb Kelleher, the founder and chairman emeritus of Southwest, summarized this philosophy well when he said, "You put your employees first, and if you take care of them, then they will take good care of you, and then your customers will come back, and your shareholders will like that, so it's really a unity." Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, echoed this view: "[Employees] are the true ambassadors of our brand, the real merchants of romance and theater, and as such the primary catalysts for delighting customers." For the past two decades, employee engagement has been a topic of interest both in the academic literature and among managers.

The Holy Grail of modern online marketing is video content that "goes viral,"meaning that it captures an enormous number of views and leads audiences to share, comment or click that they "like"a video. Various experts have ventured theories about what kind of content makes for a hit. The advice varies widely and is even contradictory. Depending on the expert, success is thought more likely if a video is humorous, shocking, dramatic, topical, warm, arousing, angry, scary, socially beneficial, cute, violent, sexy, uplifting, intriguing, quirky, interesting, authoritative, tear-jerking, educational, controversial or baby- and animal-filled. One of the reasons for the various views is that researchers have often looked at only popular videos and did not compare the popular clips with the content almost no one saw. To see if they could clarify some of the contradictions, the authors examined a mix of popular and unpopular videos, then systematically coded and empirically tested the effect of each element on some relatively objective and observational measures of viewer engagement. The authors assigned a team of research assistants to watch 750 videos and to independently score each on a range of attributes. Did the video feature babies, attempt to be funny or use sexually suggestive content? How would watching the video make the typical viewer feel? They collected information on dozens of different video elements and correlated these with three measures of engagement: the number of times people left comments on the video, the overall "liking"index for each video (calculated by subtracting the number of "dislikes"from "likes") and the number of views. The authors' key finding? Emotionally surprising videos generated liking and views more than any kind of specific content element they studied. The authors also looked at novel and incongruous content and found that both were associated with feelings of surprise, which increased views and liking.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The globalization of companies can be -and frequently has been -looked at in different ways: in terms of the internationalization of sales or assets, cross-border supply chains or shared services, organizational structures, functional policies (marketing standardization versus customization) and so on. In this article, the authors look at much less-studied individual measures of globalization: the extent to which the executives who head the world's largest corporations -at the CEO level and at the level of the managers listed as reporting directly to the CEO -are native or not to the country where the corporation is headquartered. Some studies indicate that national diversity in the top management team can be associated with better performance. What's more, the presence -or absence -of nonnative executives in a company's top management team can send a signal to employees outside the home country about the long-term career prospects for foreign middle managers already in the company as well as for potential hires. The basic pattern emerging from the authors'research, both at the CEO and the top management team level, is unmistakable: Even at the world's largest companies, natives generally rule the roost. In 2013, 67 of the Fortune Global 500 companies (13%, or about one in eight) had a foreign-born CEO. The share has barely budged since 2008. Looking at the full top management teams, the authors found that on average 15% of the top management team members, excluding the CEO, are nonnatives. The authors examine some of the possible reasons for this and look for correlations that may explain why certain countries have higher rates of nonnative CEOs. They then examine several levers for enhancing a company's ability to deal with international differences and distances.

Not long ago, many observers worried that ever-expanding multinationals -many of which had revenues exceeding the gross domestic products of smaller countries -were going to take over the world. But as globalization marches onward, powerful local companies are increasingly winning out against multinational competitors. This is especially true in emerging markets, where multinationals are assumed to enjoy superiority and CEOs are counting on growth. In China, the ice cream, laundry detergent and appliance markets provide interesting examples of this phenomenon. Despite the presence of multinationals in these markets, the market-share leaders are local companies. A similar pattern is being repeated in other emerging markets. The authors note, however, that in some cases multinationals have been able to resist the market gains of local competition, whether through first-mover advantages or by acquiring the leading local players and nurturing their local identity and strengths. For decades, multinationals were able to make good returns by acting as efficient global conduits for assets that were difficult to transfer, including intangibles such as product designs, technologies, management systems and company cultures. Transfers within the multinational company were more efficient than obtaining those assets through open-market transactions. However, a number of forces have been eroding that advantage. First, in the drive to reduce costs, established multinationals increasingly focused on activities with the highest returns. This meant that lower-value activities were outsourced and often offshored to emerging economies, creating global markets in which local companies can also source components and services. The result is that once-closed value chains have been opened up, enabling local players to source "plug-and-play"modules that can be combined to create products very similar -and sometimes superior -to those of foreign multinationals.

What prompts people to come up with their best ideas? Even Steve Jobs, renowned for his digital evangelism, recognized the importance of social interaction in achieving innovation. As CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, Jobs explicitly instructed the architect of Pixar's new headquarters to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges released creative juices that fueled innovation. Empirical studies confirm what Jobs intuitively knew. The more diverse a person's social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative. A diverse network provides exposure to people from different fields who behave and think differently. Can Twitter make employees more innovative? Does having more diversity in one's virtual connections mean that good ideas are more likely to surface, as in the face-to-face world? To answer this question, the authors analyzed employee Twitter networks. EMC Corporation, a leading company in the information storage and infrastructure industry, was one of the five companies the authors studied, analyzing hundreds of ideas submitted by EMC employees. The researchers found that, while Twitter users and non-users generally submitted the same number of ideas, the ideas of Twitter users were rated significantly more positively by other employees and experts than the ideas of non-users. The researchers also found that there was a positive relationship between the amount of diversity in one's Twitter network and the quality of ideas submitted. However, the authors argue that just exposing oneself to diverse fields, opinions and beliefs on Twitter by itself is not sufficient to enhance innovativeness. Additional capabilities are needed to ensure that the ideas triggered via Twitter would be transformed into real innovative outcomes. A critical ability is individual absorptive capacity -the ability of employees to identify, assimilate and exploit new ideas.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Recent corporate crises such as BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill debacle and the Libor rate-fixing scandal in the City of London have a common thread. The troubles simmered below the CEO's radar, and by the time the problems were revealed, most of the damage had been done. As organizations and business environments become more complex, how are executives supposed to keep tabs on what competitors and employees are doing? Although many management experts have assumed that better information systems and more data are the most promising way forward, authors Davide Nicolini, Maja Korica and Keith Ruddle are skeptical. Rather, they say, the way for senior executives to "stay in the know"is by assembling and maintaining what they call a "personal knowledge infrastructure."And while information technologies may be part of this personal knowledge infrastructure, the authors say technology is just one of the components. The article is based on a two-year study of the day-to-day work of seven CEOs of some of the largest and most challenging hospital- and mental health-based organizations in England. As settings for studying the challenges of using information and knowledge to stay on top, the authors note, health-care organizations sit at the crossroads between the private and public sectors and are expected to meet multiple, often competing, demands. The authors sought to answer a simple question: How did the CEOs know what they needed to know in order to be effective at their jobs? While the importance of informational roles to executives is well established, the authors take the idea a step further, arguing that managers -and especially senior executives -are only as good at acquiring and interpreting critical information as their personal knowledge infrastructures.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Successfully incorporating today's digital technologies requires companies to work in new ways. To explore how digital technologies are changing the way companies do business, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte surveyed more than 4,800 respondents and interviewed 19 business and thought leaders. The central question the authors asked: How are companies using digital technologies -such as social media, data and analytics, mobile devices and cloud computing -to compete and operate differently? Using results from these quantitative and qualitative data, the authors provide insights on the state of digital business and what managers need to know and do to navigate and benefit from these trends. A key concept behind this research is digital business maturity. The authors asked survey respondents to "imagine an ideal organization transformed by digital technologies and capabilities that improve processes, engage talent across the organization, and drive new and value-generating business models"and then to rate their company against that ideal on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the closest to the ideal). Forty-five percent of respondents placed their companies in the middle or "developing"group (ratings 4-6), while 29% put their companies in the higher "maturing"category (ratings 7-10). The remaining 26% placed their companies in the lower "early"group (ratings 1-3). Perhaps the main insight is that the key drivers of digital transformation are not the digital technologies themselves but business factors -in particular, strategy, culture and talent development. Effective digital strategies are less about acquiring and implementing the right technology than about reconfiguring the business to take advantage of the information these technologies enable.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The business world is rapidly digitizing, breaking down industry barriers and creating new opportunities while destroying long-successful business models. Given the amount of turmoil digital disruption is causing, authors Peter Weill and Stephanie L. Woerner of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research say it's time for companies to evaluate these threats and opportunities and create new business options for the more-connected future of digital ecosystems. In recent research, board members at large companies estimated that 32% of their company's revenue would be under threat from digital disruption in the next five years; 60% of board members felt their boards should spend significantly more time on this issue next year. Despite the threats from companies including Uber, Airbnb and Amazon, increasing digitization offers opportunities for companies to leverage strong customer relationships and increase cross-selling, the authors argue. The authors offer a framework, supported by examples, for helping managers think about their competitive environments. "The combination of moving from value chains to ecosystems and increasing consumer knowledge,"the authors write, "provides business leaders with four distinct business models, each with associated capabilities and relationships."Companies can choose to operate as (1) suppliers, (2) omnichannel businesses, (3) modular producers or (4) ecosystem drivers. The authors found that businesses focused narrowly on value chains were at a disadvantage compared with those that thought more broadly about their business ecosystems. Companies that had 50% or more of their revenues from digital ecosystems and understood their end customers better than their average competitor saw 32% higher revenue growth and 27% higher profit margins than their industry averages.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The 2015 Data & Analytics Report by MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS finds that talent management is critical to realizing analytics benefits. This fifth annual survey of business executives, managers and analytics professionals from organizations located around the world captured insights from 2,719 respondents. It finds that organizations achieving the greatest benefits from analytics are also much more likely to have a plan for building their talent bench. That talent plan includes (1) giving preference to people with analytical skills when hiring and promoting, (2) developing analytical skills through formal training, and (3) integrating new talent with more traditional data workers.

School nurse Hazel O'Leary and her supportive principal, Jamal Morden-Jones, strive to effectively respond to weight-related cyberbullying at their middle school. While there is a district-wide bullying prevention and intervention program guide that supposedly has all the necessary guidance on the subject, the duo still find themselves scrambling to implement the plan in the school, highlighting the gap between policy and practice. As the case study ends, Hazel prepares to initiate her school's first foray into the world of logic models for public health program planning.

It is May 2007, and Jose Rodriguez has just won the election for mayor of Santa Barbara de Tapirin, a small town located at an oil area in Venezuela's mid-eastern region. Santa Barbara de Tapir'n is the capital of a scarcely populated municipality with abundant fiscal revenues coming largely from transfers made by the national government to communities in oil areas. The town is nevertheless a quiet, isolated place, with little economic activity, high unemployment, and unreliable public services with incomplete coverage. Despite this, in recent years, a large number of low-income immigrants have arrived in town, attracted by the oil economy, (illegally) seizing lands in Santa Barbara's outskirts. Jose Rodriguez wants to turn the town around, leading it out of its economic stagnation and guiding it to a path of greater prosperity and development. To this end, he has asked a team of advisors to help him gain a better understanding of the causes underlying Santa Barbara's stagnation and to formulate impactful solutions. This case describes a complex scenario so that students can explore a town's issues as viewed from the vantage point of a mayor, using standard techniques to analyze public policies. It also provides information that can be used in social investment project elaboration trials.

Supplement to case IE0013. It is May 2007, and Jose Rodriguez has just won the election for mayor of Santa Barbara de Tapirin, a small town located at an oil area in Venezuela's mid-eastern region. Santa Barbara de Tapir'n is the capital of a scarcely populated municipality with abundant fiscal revenues coming largely from transfers made by the national government to communities in oil areas. The town is nevertheless a quiet, isolated place, with little economic activity, high unemployment, and unreliable public services with incomplete coverage. Despite this, in recent years, a large number of low-income immigrants have arrived in town, attracted by the oil economy, (illegally) seizing lands in Santa Barbara's outskirts. Jose Rodriguez wants to turn the town around, leading it out of its economic stagnation and guiding it to a path of greater prosperity and development. To this end, he has asked a team of advisors to help him gain a better understanding of the causes underlying Santa Barbara's stagnation and to formulate impactful solutions. This case describes a complex scenario so that students can explore a town's issues as viewed from the vantage point of a mayor, using standard techniques to analyze public policies. It also provides information that can be used in social investment project elaboration trials.

By May 2015, Zivame, an Indian online lingerie retailer, had established itself as a market leader in this category by providing traditionally conservative Indian women a reliable solution to help them confidently purchase their most intimate wear while avoiding any confrontation with sales executives, mostly men, of brick-and-mortar stores. It helped its customers understand their lingerie needs, browse through styles, order their right size and get their orders delivered quickly at their doorstep without any embarrassment. Reliable customer care, availability of various national and international brands and a wide range of sizes and styles had made the brand popular in its target market, averaging 1,200 daily orders, almost a 200 per cent jump from the previous year. Can Zivame reach its goal of becoming a billion dollar enterprise in the next five to seven years or will confining itself to the women's lingerie segment become a hurdle to future growth?

In India, customers were used to the idea of buying groceries in stores. BigBasket.com, India's first online grocery retailer, was set to break this mindset. Customers were signing up at an aggressive rate based on word-of-mouth. With a commitment to provide a top-quality product assortment at competitive prices, BigBasket successfully provided last-mile delivery to customers across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai. While traditional brick and mortar grocery retailers were struggling, BigBasket became the first online grocery retailer to report a breakeven in March 2014 in one of the cities where it operated.<br><br>Brick and mortar grocery retailers had started focusing on a hybrid model and analysts believed that hybrid models had more profit potential than pure online grocery retailers. Despite this, BigBasket had arranged funding from venture capitalists, receiving the highest-ever amount of Series A funding among the online retail industry in India. BigBasket leveraged innovative, customer-centric policies that not only boosted customer confidence but also enhanced overall profit margins. Could it permanently change the shopping habits of consumers? Was the breakeven a short-term phenomenon for BigBasket or would it achieve similar performance in other cities? Would online grocery retailing be profitable in the long run?

Ola Cabs, a pioneer in the taxicab aggregation business in India, was confronting several issues that were posing serious challenges to the company. The government had temporarily banned cab services offered by aggregators due to an incident involving an assault on a female passenger. Subsequently, new regulations were put in place to protect passenger safety, which stipulated that cab aggregators must obtain a licence under the radio taxi category. This was a major blow to Ola Cabs as it was a technology platform provider that connected customers with cab owners. The situation required quick resolution as Ola Cabs was going through a major phase of unprecedented growth and had set ambitious targets in terms of revenue. The company had been growing at a rate of 40 per cent month on month, and had more than 50,000 cabs in its network, which spread across 28 cities.

In September 2014, the chief executive officer of Michel Nassif et Fils, an importer and producer of food and printed goods headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon, is trying to figure out what decisions he needs to take to ensure the development of the company that had been founded by his grandfather a century ago. At the age of 48, right after the birth of his first son, he realizes that he needs a plan to ensure a viable future for this family-owned company. He knows that succession planning will involve the entire management team, none of whom currently has a leadership position. As had his father and grandfather before him, he alone makes all decisions for the company. He is considering whether to pick a potential successor internally to be trained and prepared for senior management or to remain at the head of the company until his son is old enough to take over.