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Where should leaders focus when managing multiple, simultaneous change initiatives? Recent research by the authors explores the experiences of a global technology company that attempted two concurrent large-scale change initiatives. In this scenario, consistency around content, procedure, and normative expectations as perceived by employees stood out as the pivotal success factor.

The core of every great strategy is a valid argument. The authors have developed a flexible system of three activities constructive debate, iterative visualization, and logical formalization to help leaders arrive at such arguments. They offer tips to help savvy leaders conduct strategic conversations, analyze potential options via strategy maps, and test the logic of strategic arguments in order to make sound decisions that will result in sustainable success.

In this interview, the first in MIT Sloan Management Review's Leading With Impact series, Tassilo Festetics discusses his role as vice president of global solutions at Anheuser-Busch InBev with coach and consultant Chris Clearfield. Festetics describes the benefits of building cutting-edge applications in-house to improve the brewer's products and service, and the value of fostering an environment that encourages open communication.

Behaviors that spark organizational learning and growth also require a great deal of courage often because they involve speaking truth to power or challenging one's sense of self. Since they feel so risky, they don't happen nearly as frequently as they should day to day. In this article, the authors offer a framework for encouraging the behaviors and making them safer for employees to exhibit.

Investors had lost confidence in Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. It was once one of the world's most valuable private technology companies, valued at USD45bn after four years of operation. With Xiaomi, founder Lei Jun had created an internet company with an online business model that made tech-driven products with minimal margins. It focused on building value around the phone with products and services. Consumers quickly became fans. In 2014, Xiaomi became China's best-selling smartphone brand and also the world's third largest. Investors anticipated continued growth. But the excitement around the company did not last long. In 2016, Xiaomi's overall smartphone shipments fell 36% from the previous year after a series of supply chain issues. To revive investor confidence, Lei adjusted the company's strategic direction and led a series of internal restructurings. Its long-awaited IPO in 2018 was priced at the bottom of the range and raised USD4.7bn, less than half of its initial target. Worse, six months after the IPO, the company's market capitalization had dropped by half. According to some analysts, the company had been "overhyped" and Xiaomi was "just a hardware company." But the image of Xiaomi as a value-for-money brand stuck. Some even gave it the nickname "assembly house." What could Xiaomi do to revive the confidence of investors?

The shortcomings of the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile were fully exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they must be remedied before the next large-scale public health emergency. This will require government and industry to work together to build backup capacity and standby capability, not just more inventory.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC), one of the world's largest banks, was confronting the advent of open banking in its retail banking business. In late 2020, policy makers and regulators were advocating movement toward open banking with growing enthusiasm as a way to stimulate competition in the financial services sector and thus, encourage greater value creation for consumers. JPMC, however, seemed to embrace open banking while also resisting it, aggressively building out the technical infrastructure required for open banking while also blocking some third-party financial services companies from accessing customers' Chase bank accounts, citing data security and privacy concerns. Open banking seemed fraught with risk, but might it represent new and significant opportunities for banks? In either case, what should the approach to open banking be for an established bank like JPMC?

Protests against racial injustice in the summer of 2020 resulted in a raft of corporate statements against racism, along with new racial equity initiatives. To effect meaningful change, businesses must maintain their commitments over time to address the concerns of their employees, customers, and other stakeholders. The authors suggest ways employers can ensure that their anti-racist statements continue to be backed by concrete actions.

In early 2021, an investor wanted to invest in Bitcoin. However, because of the high volatility of the currency, she wanted to know when to buy and sell Bitcoin to avoid the price fluctuations caused by various short-term phenomena. Her main objective was to generate the maximum profit possible based on the moving average strategy. How could she use this strategy to profit from Bitcoin's price movement?

Companies that experience big fluctuations in demand can incur significant costs: overtime and lost sales when demand is too high, and idle capacity and excess inventory when demand slumps. But it's possible to better manage this variability by looking at one's customer list as a portfolio and targeting new customers whose demand patterns are complementary to those of existing customers.

Korean pop music (K-pop), once limited to an Asian market, broke its cultural boundaries and became global in 2012 when Psy's song-and-dance video "Gangnam Style" went viral around the world. The subsequent global success of the Korean idol boy band BTS confirmed that K-pop had a place in an international music market. With international performances and major US awards since its debut in 2013, BTS was carefully analyzed by those who wanted to identify the reasons for its success. Factors such as the band's active use of social media and quality transgenerational content were commonly identified, but media reports pointed mainly to the influence of the band's fan group, or ARMY, and its social media influencers, known as hommas, as reasons for BTS's success. Big Hit Entertainment (Big Hit), BTS's talent agency, needed to sustain the band's unprecedented success. What should Big Hit consider in developing a sustainable competitive advantage in a global music market increasingly taking advantage of new media?

Business leaders must make sound, data-based decisions about their company's geographic footprint to ensure that they can meet future global challenges. The author's analysis of the Fortune Global 500 finds that COVID-19 will have a lasting effect on the geography of competition, regardless of vaccine availability. He identifies two misconceptions leaders should avoid and points to three trends that that could reshape companies' geographic footprints in the wake of the pandemic.

To prosper in dynamic times, businesses need to change their approach to rule-making and adherence. To transition to creating dynamic rules "rules that are built to change through collaboration, experimentation, and learning" leaders must help spread the correct mindset throughout their organizations. There are three specific steps that leaders should take to facilitate that shift: Increase employee involvement in rule-making, embrace rapid experimentation, and enact rule audits.

MUNICH, GERMANY, JANUARY 2019. Bastian Nominacher pondered how much Celonis had changed from its start in 2011, when he and his two co-founders were coding in a crammed 15-square-meter room in his flat. Reaching unicorn valuation felt "like driving a car at 250 kilometers per hour while changing the wheels," he liked to say. It had been quite a ride. The journey had entailed sending a thousand hand-written letters to leads, dropping in (uninvited) to a fancy golf club to pitch Celonis to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tycoon, bootstrapping without external funding for seven years, despite the prevailing view that technology startups should aim to scale as fast as possible ... and a few even less glamorous activities that sounded quite surreal today. Graduating into the unicorn club had attracted the attention of prospects, current clients and competitors alike. The surge in leads required not only growing the sales team but also tightening the ties with SAP's sales team. Current clients were asking for increasingly complex projects requiring tighter integration with their information systems; hence, Celonis' younger management team had to pitch to more senior executives. Finally, the focus on scaling prompted Celonis to undergo a technological shift towards a cloud-based platform model and Celonis launched the Intelligent Business Cloud in October 2018. Was that not too much for the client base? Would the company culture survive the fast growth? And would the founders' leadership team survive the transformation?

Quarterly earnings calls present an opportunity for businesses to share how their long-term financial performance is tied to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. They can overcome obstacles to discussing ESG in these calls by laying the groundwork for interest in ESG, adapting the call schedule, explaining and reporting on the return on ESG investment, developing cross-functional collaborations, and staging the call as theater.

Blockchain is a digital, distributed, immutable ledger designed to build trust among parties without requiring an independent, third-party arbitrator or intermediary. The technology has potential to improve a variety of industries, including the complex, fragmented, analog food supply chain. In this case study, the fictional director of food safety at Walmart, Frederick Durmot, seeks to leverage blockchain for supply chain safety and transparency. The key dilemma is how to make Walmart's blockchain implementation successful. While food safety improvements may alone represent a win for the company, blockchain could also have major impacts on supply chain efficiency, product design, and social and environmental issues. The major risk to consider is unwanted scrutiny due to heightened transparency in the supply chain.

Managers often go through invisible leadership transitions, with additions to the scope of their roles without any changes in their official positions. Survey results show that leaders experience such transitions as 27% more difficult to navigate than formal ones, due to a lack of authority, difficulties in communicating effectively, and insufficient opportunities for self-improvement. The authors offer four key steps that can help leaders through the transition.

Businesses have lacked robust tools to detect, measure, and manage smells in a scientific way until now. Two emerging branches of digital olfaction technology one focused on the digital detection and analysis of different odors, and the other on the digital transmission and re-creation of smells could potentially revolutionize a range of industries. The authors outline a variety of use cases for olfactory technologies, along with actions businesses can take to capitalize on them.

Most companies are struggling to realize artificial intelligence's potential to completely transform the way they do business. The problem is, they typically apply AI in a long list of discrete uses, an approach that doesn't produce consequential change. Yet trying to overhaul the whole organization with AI all at once is simply too complicated to be practical. What's the solution? Using AI to reimagine one entire core business process, journey, or function end to end, say three McKinsey consultants. That allows each AI effort to build off the previous one by, say, reusing data or enhancing capabilities for a common set of stakeholders. An airline, for example, focused on its cargo function, and a telecom provider on its process for managing customer value. Scaling up AI involves four steps: (1) Identify an area where AI will make a big difference reasonably quickly and there are multiple interconnected activities and opportunities to share technology. (2) Staff the team with the right people and remove the obstacles to their success. (3) Reimagine business as usual, working back from a key goal and then exploring in detail how to achieve it. (4) Support new AI-based processes with organizational changes, such as interdisciplinary collaboration and agile mindsets.

Conceptual frameworks like the BCG growth share matrix and SWOT analysis have had an enduring impact on business strategy and practice. The author provides seven evaluation criteria comprehensiveness, utility, validation, clarity, memorability, integration, and differentiation leaders can use to create more effective frameworks for their businesses.