For all the hype around bossless companies, managerial authority and hierarchy are still the best ways to ensure coordination, cooperation, creativity, predictability, and accountability in large organizations. But authority and hierarchy must be aligned to a company's specific needs. To fine-tune them, leaders should consider the need for speed in decision-making, the extent of employee knowledge, what knowledge is truly required, employee feelings of ownership, and procedural justice.

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the business landscape. It is also affecting the roles of top managers within firms. Our survey of more than 160 senior managers in Europe suggests that digitalization, rather than encouraging more decentralized forms of management, will lead to an expanded role for headquarters and further empowerment of top managers. While acknowledging the benefits of the digital transformation, in this Executive Digest we identify five key challenges for newly empowered top managers and offer solutions for these digitalization traps.

Innovation in family firms is often driven by family assets, valuable resources that are particularly prevalent in family firms. For example, they have particularly strong networks that can be deployed in an innovation context. These family assets can over time atrophy and stifle rather than stimulate innovation performance. However, family firms can fight this process by institutionalizing innovation within the family and the firm by means of family and corporate governance and through incentivizing key individuals in the innovation process.

The Industrial Revolution brought the decline of small-scale, cottage production and the rise of large, integrated businesses; Adam Smith's invisible hand was replaced with what business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., called the "visible hand"of management. But now that pendulum appears to be swinging the other way -to a system of loose networks, virtual businesses and peer-to-peer interactions. A supposed hallmark of the new economy has been the decline of managerial authority. Management gurus, consultants and pundits have proclaimed that hierarchy is out. Modern organizations such as online retailer Zappos have come to favor flat hierarchies with widely distributed authority. And yet, given the demands of the current environment, authors Nicholai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein argue that managerial authority is still essential in situations where (1) decisions are time-sensitive; (2) key knowledge is concentrated within the management team; and (3) there is need for internal coordination. Such conditions, they observe, are also hallmarks of our networked, knowledge-intensive and hypercompetitive economy. While it is true that many knowledge workers no longer need a boss to direct them to tasks or monitor their day-to-day progress, the authors contend that the role of managers and the definition of "authority"needs to change. Managers need to move away from specifying methods and processes in favor of defining the principles they want people to apply or the goals they want people to meet. In other words, the main task for top management is to define and implement the organizational rules of the game. To be sure, procedures for defining rules and frameworks can themselves be delegated and nested. Indeed, when a company's key assets are knowledge workers whose skills and behaviors are difficult to assess objectively, companies will need to increasingly rely on more subjective assessments of performance, which must be carried out by managers.