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Performing volunteer work for a charitable cause can help employees develop valuable skills for their jobs. But programs with that goal can backfire if volunteers believe that their employer's real motive is to profit through improved performance. People are more receptive when managers are transparent about the gains that can be achieved for all parties and when they're given time and space to reflect on their experiences.

This case details the challenges Collin Wallace faced at FanGo, a mobile ordering technology company that he founded based on technology that he developed as a college student. The case explores critical decisions that Wallace had to make, including in which market to apply his technology, whether to pivot to another market, and whether to sell his company to a strategic acquirer.

New research shows that organizations seeking innovative ideas from crowdsourcing platforms can gain more responses to their problem statements by engaging contributors' imaginations while not limiting their creativity. The authors suggest five best practices for using crowdsourcing sites: personalizing the problem, challenging solvers to surpass the status quo, explaining customer needs, asking engaging questions, and highlighting tensions to be resolved.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for leaders to ask their employees to cross ethical lines. Though they may do so in an effort to enhance short-term results, for instance, or to gain personal benefits, they also run the risk of negatively affecting their employees' motivation and task performance over the long term.

It's hard to understand why successful leaders suddenly fail to meet expectations what the authors term leader derailment. While personalities are sometimes to blame, organizational context plays a significant role. Companies can help prevent derailment by identifying the most challenging demands leaders must overcome early on and providing them with better support systems.

Focal Systems, with fresh new Series B funding and more new orders than it could handle, believed its novel out-of-stock detection system would prove the sweet spot in the automation of traditional brick and mortar retail stores. Small cameras on store shelves could automatically log any products in need of resupply, but also order the items to restock, saving store managers valuable time each day. Stores would see lower labor costs but also would benefit from a more efficient resupply system. The competition for automation in retail was stiff, and becoming more intense. How could Focal convince retailers to give its innovative technology a try-and could the company fend off the competition?

We are moving toward a new work operating system that will deconstruct work into tasks/projects that may be assigned not only to employees but also to machines and contingent workers in talent marketplaces. This shift has profound implications for leaders. Some will increasingly act as project managers, while top-level leaders will gain new challenges in orchestrating an increasingly fast-moving style of working characterized by continual change and a lack of hierarchy.

Research into companies building workforce skills to compete in a tech-driven future finds that the most committed demonstrate a set of best practices for learning and development. These emphasize alignment with an organization's strategic direction, and flexibility in execution.

Allstate's Data, Discovery, and Decision Making group (D3) had started as a small group of data scientists helping to quantify insurance risk accurately, but by 2017 the group had ballooned to 300 employees offering data capabilities to the firm's business verticals (e.g., Claims or HR). Allstate's senior leadership team had recently defined the strategic objectives that should be driving D3 projects, but it quickly became apparent that D3's current structure was incongruent with these strategic goals. Both D3 members and leadership agreed: A reorganization was necessary. However, an earlier reorganization, which had reassigned employees without their input, had left them feeling burned. Senior leaders didn't want to make the same mistake twice but knew they didn't have time to post and review applications for each position in the new structure.

The persistent skills gaps across U.S. industries won't be bridged until companies rethink how they train workers. Workforce intermediaries community-based nonprofits, labor union affiliates, industry associations, industrial extension programs, and state-funded workforce and community college systems are partnering with companies to meet the challenge of rethinking fundamental assumptions about skills and prioritizing their continued development.

Could AI-based X-ray scanning platform make flying safer? Airport security officers had just seconds to decide if someone's luggage contained a knife, gun, explosive, or other potential safety threat, and the human eye was not designed to focus for hours on a scanning screen. This case study describes the founding and early years of Synapse Technology, which aimed to improve airport security performance by leveraging advances in computer vision to detect these types of threats with far greater accuracy. The company set out to develop the AI solution they believed would work, building an AI model and then feeding it training data on which types of weapons and other items to flag as a threat, as passengers' luggage went through the screening process. The case study explores the technical as well as entrepreneurial challenges in this new AI frontier, including locating a real-world test venue, and then determining how to measure and explain the return on investment to potential clients.

Organizations depend on data, and keeping data safe from cyberattacks can't be just the domain of IT anymore. Companies need a clear, comprehensive cyber resilience plan for managing all aspects of data and setting cross-functional responsibilities for keeping that data safe. This article outlines the key players and their responsibilities in taking a proactive, cross-functional approach to corporate cybersecurity.

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.

Many employees unexpectedly were required to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. With this abrupt change came the challenge of blurred lines between career and personal life. Lacking designated home office spaces, countless individuals had to create improvised work setups in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms -- wherever there was space. Moreover, the closure of schools forced many working parents to attempt productivity while concurrently supervising their children. As a result of these changes, numerous employees have experienced lower work productivity, lessened motivation, increased stress, and poorer mental health. One approach that may help employees going through the challenges associated with working from home is mindfulness. Mindfulness may be particularly beneficial as it can (1) help employees mentally disconnect from work when they need to; (2) improve individuals' attention to work tasks and thereby improve their performance; and (3) allow workers to better manage screen fatigue. In this installment of Work/Life Balance, we elaborate on how mindfulness may help employees deal with these work issues, explain how mindfulness can be cultivated, and provide a list of mindfulness techniques. We also provide a set of recommendations for managers and team leaders responsible for their employees' wellbeing and productivity.

Digital transformation is rapidly changing the competitive landscape and the war on talent for today's organizations. As part of this economy, organizations and their HR units must continuously reevaluate leadership structures and practices that exploit core competencies while allowing for innovation (i.e., leadership ambidexterity)and incorporate big data with predictive analytics. In this vein, understanding how HR executives can create better solutions around this problem remains sparse. Specifically, what frameworks can HR executives apply to identify potential alignment failures in leadership succession planning in light of newer emerging markets? What internal decision-making traps need to be recognized? Finally, what specific forms of data and evidence must test these plans for relevance and recharge and renew the talent-to-strategy pipeline? In this article, we examine these questions by reviewing the gaps in the literature and identifying through our four-step model how organizations can incorporate ambidexterity building as a leadership succession planning practice.

Doing business on the dominant digital platforms makes it difficult for companies to differentiate their products and services and pursue competitive strategy. Platform-dependent businesses must understand the risks and how to navigate them.

Business ecosystems provide valuable access to external capabilities, scale fast, and can be very flexible and resilient. But only 1 in 7 ecosystems achieves sustainable success. The metrics and red flags described in this article can help you track the key drivers of ecosystem health and ensure that your company beats the odds.

Rapid scaling is a key element of platform strategy, but it is not the best move for all platforms in all markets. Sometimes a more careful, incremental, and slower approach to scaling is better. In studying platform businesses like Airbnb and Uber, the authors found that regulatory complexity and regulatory risk are two significant but often neglected factors in the success of platform growth strategies.

In September 2019, the newly appointed manager of the procurement department at Jiangxi Hengda High-Tech Company Ltd., located in China, was wondering how to make his department more efficient. He took some time to understand the working relationships of his department with other internal departments and with external suppliers. During his research, he uncovered sources of conflict between the procurement department and other functional departments, including the marketing, manufacturing, warehousing, and finance departments, as well as the company's suppliers. The manager took his findings to the company's chairman and reported that the low efficiency of the procurement department was caused by the company's lack of synergy across departments. The chairman acknowledged the issue and agreed that some reform of the company's departments was necessary. However, he also pointed out that this would be a complex, costly, and difficult task. The manager of the procurement department was adamant that the company would have to resolve this systemic issue at some point and decided to prepare a proposal for his next meeting with the chairman.

Companies whose executives are digitally savvy outperform other companies on growth and valuation by large margins. But less than 10% of companies have digitally savvy top teams in place. Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Information Systems Research describes the level of digital savviness found in top teams, the business value it delivers, and the actions you can take to increase the digital savviness of your company's executives.