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This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. Blockchain technology has the potential to transform how businesses are organized and managed. It allows companies to eliminate transaction costs and use outside resources as easily as internal resources. The implications for areas such as accounting, contract negotiation and enforcement, sales and marketing, and capital investment are myriad. Companies should start exploring how this technology could impact their industry and processes.

One of the world's most influential management thinkers discusses a new model for tackling the world's 'wicked problems'-issues such as poverty, inequality and climate change: Global Solution Networks (GSNs). Collaboration among nation states-while still necessary-is now insufficient to deal with these issues, he says, describing how GSNs operate. He also discusses his latest work on the opportunities presented by blockchain technology. What if there were a next generation of the Internet, he asks, where we could conduct peer-to-peer transactions-not just to exchange information, but to exchange value and money? We can't do that yet without a powerful intermediary-like a credit card company or PayPal; but before long, the Blockchain will make it-and much more-possible. In the end, he says, the first era of the digital age has not fully delivered on its promises. Through GSNs and the Blockchain, we will have another opportunity to rewrite the economic order of things-and dramatically improve the state of the world.

Legitimacy has been defined as "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for society." The author says that what we are witnessing today is a crisis of legitimacy. Young people around the world are disproportionately affected by everything that is going on, and he warns that if they decide that our institutions of democracy are no longer legitimate, we are in for a period of disruption in human history that will make the 1960s and the Arab Spring look like kids' stuff. He describes a new model of multi-stakeholder networks that is emerging to attack global problems. As a result, he shows that leadership can come from anywhere these days, which presents enormous opportunities for each of us.

The executive director of the Global Solution Networks program at the Rotman School of Management calls on business leaders to engage with other sectors in addressing issues of sustainability, social justice, and public well-being.

Globalization and instant communication have changed the rules of the game for business. Today's organizations are being held to stringent and fluctuating sets of standards by unrelenting 'webs' of stakeholders who are quick to pass judgment on their behavior. In what is becoming an ultra-transparent world, every step and misstep is subject to scrutiny and every company with a brand or reputation to protect is vulnerable. The author argues that for most businesses, it increasingly makes sense to opt for openness. He describes three key elements of openness that modern organizations should embrace: transparency, opening up the business model and placing intellectual property in an open commons. In doing so, he says, a firm will embrace the three dimensions effective organizations for the 21st century.