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This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Responding to a recently published essay, a reader pushed back against the view that managers must prepare for radical and rapid change in a digital world; he argued that this position may be overly alarmist. The discussion continues.

Innovation is a perennial management challenge. That's why, for decades, MIT Sloan Management Review has been publishing new research and insights about innovation, from business school researchers as well as from leading business executives and consultants. For this article, the authors tapped into that knowledge base. They combed through the MIT SMR archives, looking for older articles with innovation insights that today's MIT SMR readers might have missed but that still remain timely and have wide relevance. The authors winnowed their list to 12 essential innovation articles from the MIT SMR archives. They distilled key concepts from those archival articles into 12 brief innovation insights contained in this article. The insights cover a range of innovation-related topics -from managing innovative employees to innovating in different ways -and draw on work by researchers from a number of universities, including Cambridge Judge Business School, Harvard Business School, London Business School, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. How do people process different inputs and make complicated decisions? Researchers have long sought to shed increased light on the inner workings of the human brain and how people process different inputs and make complicated decisions. The topic is of particular interest to managers. This article reviews a selection of recent articles from academic journals. The researchers examined the following topics related to decision making: •How "psychological distancing"can mitigate the negative effects of information overload; •How greater ambidexterity -- the ability to switch between practices supporting "exploitation"of familiar options and "exploration"of new ones -- can lead to better decision-making performance; •How well-designed decision default rules can lead to desirable outcomes; •How allowing one's mind to wander can lead to as much satisfaction with one's choices as controlled methods; •How seeking advice affects perceptions about competence; •And how people tend to overemphasize past performance in creating expectations for the future.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In 1994, when Interface Inc.'s founder and CEO Ray Anderson began to think about his legacy, it made him uneasy. Deep down, Anderson realized that the business model of the commercial carpet manufacturing company he had founded 20 years before was based on "digging up the earth and turning petroleum and other materials into polluting products that ended up in landfills"-not something he wanted his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to remember him by. So at age 60 Anderson broke with the old model and began anew. Standing up to naysayers (whose ranks included associates, suppliers and Wall Street analysts), he set out to transform Interface from a traditional business built on consumption and waste to one whose focus -that is, beyond profitable growth -would be zero waste and restoring the earth. Since the start of the journey, Anderson and his associates have confronted technical barriers that no one could have anticipated. But inch by inch, kilowatt-hour by kilowatt-hour, recycled pound of carpet by recycled pound of carpet, Anderson's vision has moved closer to reality. In addition to becoming increasingly efficient in its energy and materials usage -for example, 89% of Interface's global electricity and 28% of its total energy come from renewable sources -Interface prides itself on its ability to turn an increasingly large percentage of its carpet into new product. It is also proud of the influence its sustainability efforts are having on other companies. This article presents a timeline showing how Anderson's "mental model" changed and how he and his company moved along the road to sustainability.