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Though corporations have been lobbying the government and making campaign donations for a long time now, in recent years a dramatic new trend has emerged in U.S. politics: CEOs are taking very public stands on thorny political issues that have nothing to do with their firms' bottom lines. Business leaders like Tim Cook of Apple, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce--among many others--are passionately advocating for a range of causes, including LGBTQ rights, immigration, the environment, and racial equality. Not only are CEOs speaking out, but they're flexing their firms' economic muscles by threatening to move business activities out of states that pass controversial laws. But does CEO activism actually change public opinion and policies? What are its risks and rewards? And what is the playbook for leaders considering speaking out? The authors of this article examine those questions and explain the takeaways of their own research. One finding: Consumers tend to view CEO activism through the lens of their own political affiliations, so it can provoke both negative and positive responses. Nevertheless, in the age of Twitter, silence on an issue can be conspicuous--and consequential.

Most companies approach hiring with faulty assumptions and poor practices. They believe talent is fixed rather than contextual. They fail to create real partnerships between internal recruiters and hiring managers. And they rely too much on salary surveys and rigid compensation formulas. The author shares what she learned about making and keeping great hires during her 14 years as the chief talent officer at Netflix. The process requires probing beneath the surface of people and their resumes; engaging managers in every aspect of hiring; ensuring that recruiters deeply understand the business and are not viewed as support staff; adopting a mindset in which you're always recruiting; and coming up with compensation that suits the performance you need and the future you aspire to. These lessons may be especially relevant to fast-growing tech-based firms, whose rapid innovation means a continual need for new talent. But organizations of all types can benefit from taking a fresh look at their hiring and compensation practices.

Accelerating technological improvements have changed the speed with which new innovations penetrate markets. Graphed over time, the market adoption of innovations now resembles a dramatic shark fin--a dangerously deformed version of the classic bell-curve model of diffusion. Two forces have compressed the bell curve: near-instant market saturation by new products and the rapid obsolescence of digital components. As a result, many companies struggle to find new sources of revenue after a big-bang success. The authors describe seven mistakes that make enterprises--incumbent businesses as well as start-ups--highly vulnerable to such flameouts: (1) The company is too lean. (2) Its capital structure is built to fail. (3) It has lost its founder. (4) It's overserving investors. (5) It "won the lottery" by getting lucky with a big-bang disrupter. (6) It's held captive by regulators. (7) It anticipates customers who don't exist. They offer some tactics for ensuring that your business is a second-act survivor: Abandon the successful product before it runs out of steam. Build a platform, not a product. Turn your initial product into a service. Invest in or acquire nascent disrupters.

Cognitive technologies are increasingly being used to solve business problems; indeed, many executives believe that AI will substantially transform their companies within three years. But many of the most ambitious AI projects encounter setbacks or fail. A survey of 250 executives familiar with their companies' use of cognitive technology and a study of 152 projects show that companies do better by taking an incremental rather than a transformative approach to developing and implementing AI, and by focusing on augmenting rather than replacing human capabilities. Broadly speaking, AI can support three important business needs: automating business processes (typically back-office administrative and financial activities), gaining insight through data analysis, and engaging with customers and employees. To get the most out of AI, firms must understand which technologies perform what types of tasks, create a prioritized portfolio of projects based on business needs, and develop plans to scale up across the company.

Fifty years ago a good blue-collar job was with a large manufacturer such as General Motors or Goodyear. Often unionized, it paid well, offered benefits, and was secure. But manufacturing employment has steadily declined, from about 25% of the U.S. labor force in 1970 to less than 10% today. Now a decent living entails more than a generous wage; it involves sharing the company's success with employees. Some companies offer a direct stake in the company's performance through stock, a share in profits, or both. Companies with employee stock ownership plans report significantly higher sales growth and higher revenue per employee than do conventionally owned companies in the same industry. However, virtually all the gains to be had go to those that create an ownership culture, by building in participative management and helping employees learn to think and act like owners.

More than a billion people in the developing world remain in extreme poverty and outside the formal economy. Traditional CSR programs have done little to alleviate the situation and rarely produce transformative change. Instead of trying to fix local problems, the authors argue, corporations need to reimagine the regional ecosystems in which they participate. They should search for systemic, multisector opportunities; mobilize complementary partners; and obtain seed and scale-up financing from organizations with a mission to alleviate poverty. They should also align the various stakeholders around the new strategy, using proven tools such as a co-created strategy map. These principles are informed by the authors' experience with several successful inclusive-growth projects. An initiative in Uganda is bringing small maize farmers into the mainstream regional economy, while a training program in El Salvador is giving unemployed youths the skills to work in the country's growing service sector.

What do you call a dense, overly lengthy contract that's loaded with legal jargon and virtually impossible for a non-lawyer to understand? The status quo, says Burton, the general counsel for GE Aviation's Business & General Aviation. When Burton was leading the legal team for that division's new digital-services unit, he and his colleagues noticed that customer contract negotiations were dragging on for months, hampering growth. So they set out to replace the unit's seven excruciatingly complicated Contracts with one that even a high schooler could understand. In this article, Burton describes how the team went about achieving that goal and the lessons learned along the way. He also shares the results: Customers were delighted with the new contract, and some even signed it without making a single change. The time it took to negotiate contracts dropped by a whopping 60%. And now plain-language contracts are starting to spread inside GE.

What sets exceptional business leaders apart? One thing, says Sydney Finkelstein, is their ongoing commitment to giving direct reports one-on-one instruction. Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, has studied world-class leaders for more than a decade. He's found that they make a point of personally imparting memorable lessons that fall into three categories: pointers on professionalism, technical knowledge and skills, and broader life lessons. Finkelstein notes that when and where top leaders teach is almost as important as what they teach. Instead of waiting for formal reviews, great managers stay accessible to their employees and share their wisdom as opportune moments arise, whether that's in the office or outside it. They also create teaching moments--often by taking proteges off-site. How do they make lessons stick? Their techniques include (1) customizing instruction to the needs, personality, and development path of each individual, (2) asking pertinent questions to deepen learning, and (3) modeling the behavior they want others to practice. Finkelstein discusses numerous superstar leaders who are revered as great teachers and suggests that if you follow their example, you can strengthen your staff and drive superior business performance.

The composer and conductor on responding to the world through music and the struggle to always produce genuinely new, original works.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In this article, the author examines agile as a management practice through a case study of ING bank in the Netherlands, which has adopted agile across its headquarters in Amsterdam. The research is based on in-depth interviews with 15 ING executives and many front-line employees. The article highlights key learnings at ING, largely from the point of view of the senior executives of the bank, and explores the challenges of implementing agile in an established organization, focusing on five lessons: 1. Decide how much power you are willing to give up. Agile shifts power away from those at the top and puts ownership in the hands of those closest to the action. Unless top executives are willing to accept that they are surrendering some status and power, agile will not be a good fit. 2. Prepare stakeholders for the leap. ING executives had to sell agile to nervous stakeholders, including board members, employees, and bank regulators. For example, executives assured regulators that finance, compliance, and legal functions would continue to be managed in the traditional way. 3. Build the structure around customers -and keep it fluid. Like other approaches to management, agile is focused on customers. ING in the Netherlands has tried to keep its organizational structure fluid so that it can evolve to do what's best for customers. 4. Give employees the right balance of oversight and autonomy. A quarterly goal-setting process is part of the agile structure at ING in the Netherlands. This has been a learning process. Initially, groups defined goals that were comfortably achievable, and executives had to urge them toward more ambitious targets. 5. Provide employees with development and growth opportunities. The team-based structures used in agile can be scary for employees used to having their personal development and career progression mapped out by HR departments or the mainstream career trajectories of a given industry.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For decades, companies have used custom metrics that don't conform to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) or international financial reporting standards (IFRS) as supplements to their official financial statements. Some common non-GAAP measures include adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (known as adjusted EBITDA), free cash flow, funds from operations, adjusted revenues, adjusted earnings, adjusted earnings per share, and net debt. However, as the authors point out, it's not unusual for these alternative measures to lead to problems. Since companies devise their own methods of calculation, it's difficult to compare the metrics from company to company -or, in many cases, from year to year within the same company. According to the authors, alternative measures, once used fairly sparingly and shared mostly with a small group of professional investors, have become more ubiquitous and further and further disconnected from reality. In 2013, McKinsey & Co. found that all of the 25 largest U.S.-based nonfinancial companies reported some form of non-GAAP earnings. Press releases and earnings-call summaries often present non-GAAP measures that are increasingly detached from their GAAP-based equivalents. In addition to creating potential problems for investors, the authors argue, alternative metrics can harm companies themselves by obscuring their financial health, overstating their growth prospects beyond what standard GAAP measures would support, and rewarding executives beyond what is justified. Board members, top executives, compliance officers, and corporate strategists need to make sure that whatever alternative measures companies use improve transparency and reduce bias in financial reports. Although no standard is perfect, the authors note that GAAP and IFRS standards provide a foundation for consistent measurement of corporate performance over time and across businesses.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. How can managers reduce the number of "unknown unknowns" a project faces? Even projects that employ sophisticated techniques for risk management can encounter surprising derailments. But new research shows that modeling a project's subsystems helps expose risk areas. So, too, can scenario analysis, the use of checklists and data mining. "Directed recognition, which can entail both project design and behavioral approaches, can convert knowable unk-unks [unknown unknowns] to known unknowns,"write the authors.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Collaborations between companies and universities are critical drivers of the innovation economy. These relationships have long been a mainstay of corporate R&D -from creating the knowledge foundations for the next generation of solutions, to serving as an extended "workbench" to solve short-term, incremental problems, to providing a flow of newly minted talent. As corporations look to open innovation to augment their internal R&D efforts, many of them are turning to universities to anchor an increasingly broad set of activities, especially those grounded in engaging with regional innovation ecosystems such as Silicon Valley, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Block 71 in Singapore. Universities are essential stakeholders in innovation communities that also include corporations, government entities, venture investors, and entrepreneurs. In addition to being sources of people and ideas for corporations, university collaborations assist corporations in opening up new avenues of engagement with a broader innovation ecosystem. While the aspirations of university-industry partnerships can be easily described, many companies are finding that establishing and running partnerships effectively can be difficult, even when key financial resources and human capital are available. A core reason for the difficulty, the authors write, "is that university culture -characterized by high autonomy and distributed governance -maps poorly to corporate culture." The authors provide a set of six questions for managers, which make up the basis of a form they call the "university partnership canvas."They designed a form (which is downloadable from the digital version of the article) to help corporations assess and develop strategic approaches to their university partnerships. By working through the six questions, companies can develop a strategic perspective on what types of partnerships are best suited to their needs.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Business model innovation has become a hot topic in management circles, and understandably so. No management activity is more important than having clarity about how the organization creates, delivers, and captures value. It requires, among other things, knowing what customers want, how value can be best delivered, and how to enlist strategic partners to achieve maximum benefit. Although the ability to develop strong value propositions can enable companies to "get by, "the authors argue that many of today's most successful businesses are those that can place themselves in the "sweet spot" of business model scalability. If managers are incapable of factoring scalability attributes into their business model design, they risk being left behind, much the way bookstores owned by Borders Group Inc. were eclipsed by Amazon.com Inc. In the course of their research, the authors identified five patterns by which companies can achieve scalability. The first pattern involves adding new distribution channels. The second entails freeing the business from traditional capacity constraints. The third involves outsourcing capital investments to partners that, in effect, became participants in the business model. The fourth is having customers and other partners assume multiple roles in the business model. And the fifth pattern is to establish platform models in which even competitors may become customers. Based on these patterns, the authors developed a framework for identifying potential levers for business model scalability along with a road map that managers can use to improve their business models. Over and above the need to create value propositions that are difficult for competitors to replicate, managers need to develop business models that are capable of achieving positive returns and accelerating returns on the investments made.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Businesses develop strategies to address complex, multi-layered business environments and challenges -but to execute a strategy in a meaningful way, it must produce a set of specific priorities focused on achieving clear goals. Rather than trying to boil the strategy down to a pithy statement, executives will get better results if they develop a small set of actions that everyone gets behind.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The successful use of analytics in sports, both on the field and off, comes down to integrating analytics within an organization. Three strategies -collaborative analytics, a common language, and accessible technology -are key.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most of us view our jobs as specialized or somehow differentiated, but the world of business and management increasingly feels otherwise. For many organizations today, the next big driver of job commoditization is automation driven by smart machines. Simply put, if a job is viewed as a commodity, it won't be long before it's automated. The key for workers whose jobs have traditionally seemed safe: Highlight the tasks that require a human touch.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Executives often look at the network effects of digital platforms as a key source of competitive advantage -without understanding that platforms need to also leverage other factors at play in the local markets and among preferred customers. Network effects can help, but on their own, they offer very limited competitive value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Research on social species shows that hierarchies are important for group functioning. Human beings also have a tendency to think and act hierarchically. In fact, hierarchies -distinct differences in group members' power and status -can be found in virtually every human group, from children on the playground to executives in the boardroom. Although many people have argued that flat organizations promote innovative thinking, the authors maintain that a properly deployed hierarchy can help teams engage in and get the most out of their efforts to learn and innovate. Specifically, the authors observe that hierarchies help teams generate, identify, and select new ideas by performing three critical functions: bounding solutions, converging ideas, and structuring processes. "A paradox of creativity, "the authors write, "is that people are more innovative when they have clear constraints (such as time, budget, customer requirements, etc.) within which their solutions must fit." Early on, teams tend to come up with an array of ideas and possibilities. Hierarchies, the authors explain, can help sort through which ideas should be pursued and which ones are less promising. The authors provide three recommendations for leaders seeking to leverage the power of hierarchy on teams and avoid its pitfalls. First, organizations should have a clear chain of command. In one study, teams with a clear chain of command were less likely to get bogged down in conflicts and stalemates than other teams. Second, organizations need to create performance-based cultures in which performance gets measured, publicized, and celebrated. Hierarchies in performance-based cultures are more likely to be based on expertise, and that can counteract unconscious biases against women and minorities. Third, people at the top of the organization should act in ways that support group goals as opposed to promoting their own interests.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most research on open innovation has focused on the use of ideas and knowledge from outside the organization in the development of products and services. But openness can be useful for process innovation, too. The authors' research shows that manufacturers can benefit substantially when they look for ideas beyond the factory gates, especially when their operations are already advanced. In this article, the authors analyzed nine years of survey responses from 1,000 Swiss manufacturers, as well as 200 interviews with personnel at the Volvo Group (AB Volvo), a manufacturer of trucks, buses, construction equipment, and marine and industrial engines that is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Although the authors concede that some companies have good reasons for keeping process innovations concealed, they found that for many manufacturers, such defensiveness deprives companies of a valuable source of ideas for productivity improvement. The authors present six ideas to help manufacturing companies open up their innovation process. The first idea is to encourage factories within a large company to share innovative practices and success stories with one another. Companies that already do this informally, the authors say, can extend their activities with a systematic effort inside their factory networks and lay the groundwork for other open information sharing about processes. The second idea is to focus on the pace of process improvement. The third idea is to recognize that increased use of data access systems leads to greater production cost reductions. Customer relationship management, supply chain management, and enterprise resource planning software systems all require codification of tacit knowledge, which enhances a company's capacity to spread external process ideas and technology to the people who need it. As a fourth step, the authors recommend improving the organization's ability to absorb and implement ideas from