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Companies worry about employee attrition, but it's especially costly in one function: sales. Estimates of annual turnover among U.S. salespeople run as high as 27%. A new study can help managers identify good salespeople who are at risk of quitting and take steps to retain them. Researchers examined more than two years' worth of data from a telecommunications company and created a quantitative model--the first of its kind--to predict which salespeople were likely to quit. They found, as expected, that those with high ratings in historical performance and customer satisfaction were less likely to leave than average and low performers. But when it came to quota attainment, both high and low performers were less likely than average performers to quit. And the biggest surprise concerned peer effects, which proved the strongest predictor of quitting. Employees at companies with little variation in performance had a greater tendency to leave (they had little incentive to work harder or smarter, the researchers theorized). Also at risk: salespeople in settings with high turnover, whether voluntary or not, suggesting that turnover can be contagious. Drawing on these results, the researchers say, managers can use big data to identify variables that predict turnover in their own ranks and decide which members of the high-risk group warrant interventions to help them stay put.

When a team of researchers compared population-density figures against data on people's willingness to invest in education, save for retirement, and otherwise plan for the future, they found that the residents of more-populated states and countries had a decidedly longer-term outlook.

After hearing from friends that SoulCycle's very first studio was different from other cycling studios, Whelan decided to give it a try. One visit was all it took for her to appreciate the full sensory experience, the charismatic instructor, and the passion of the client community. A few years later she joined the company, which today operates 74 studios. SoulCycle doesn't view itself as a fitness company--it's a "player in the broader experiential economy." That's why it takes a different approach to recruiting and training instructors, with the aim of making them inspirational coaches who empower riders in their lives as well as on their bikes. It doesn't charge monthly fees, but each class costs $30 to $35, and riders must book bikes in advance, on the theory that the pay-per-class model elicits greater energy and commitment. Choosing the location for a new studio involves a year of research to understand the lifestyle of future customers. Amenities such as iPhone chargers in the lockers have improved studio design. Next-generation bikes are coming in 2017, and the company's apparel line is expanding. Because SoulCycle has friendships and community at its core, Whelan writes, the brand will endure.

Many executives feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no wonder: On average, they spend nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What's more, the meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, or both. We can all joke about how painful they are, say the authors, but that pain has real consequences for teams and organizations. Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into solo work that's essential for creativity and efficiency. Chopped-up schedules interrupt deep thinking, so people come to work early, stay late, or use weekends for quiet time to concentrate. And dysfunctional meeting behaviors are associated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability. The authors have found that real improvement requires systemic change, not discrete fixes. They describe a five-step process for that--along with the diagnostic work you'll need to do in advance.

When misunderstandings arise among members of global teams, it's often because managers conflate attitudes toward authority and attitudes toward decision making. However, the two are different dimensions of leadership culture, says the author, who has extensive research and consulting experience with global companies. Attitudes toward authority range from strongly hierarchical to strongly egalitarian. Approaches to decision making vary from top-down to consensual. The author explores both dimensions and classifies selected countries according to their position on both scales. The Japanese, for example, are hierarchical in their views toward authority--deferential to the boss and accustomed to waiting for instructions rather than taking the initiative--but they are consensual decision makers who get buy-in before they set a course of action. The author describes the four cultural types--consensual and egalitarian; consensual and hierarchical; top-down and hierarchical; and top-down and egalitarian--and the corresponding expectations about leadership in each environment. If you keep those in mind, you'll be more successful in your cross-cultural interactions.

Each year most public companies issue reports describing the pay packages of their CEOs. In them compensation committees attempt to explain the rationale behind the pay figures to the shareholders, who often must vote to approve them. The issue is, in their reports many committees adjust performance numbers in obscure and inappropriate ways that lead to overly generous CEO pay. And they do so using nonstandard criteria that are difficult for even sophisticated institutional investors to decode. In this article, the former executive chairman of MFS Investment Management and an MIT professor of accounting and finance sort through the reports' fine print and expose practices that stack the deck in CEOs' favor: Adjusting earnings to be 100% higher than GAAP income. Paying out 80% of an incentive award for bottom-quartile performance. Choosing "peer companies" that are not comparable in size or in industry. And more. Shareholders should be more skeptical, say the authors, and comp reports must start providing much clearer explanations. But what's needed most are new standards for compensation design and reporting.

Whether you make cars or mattresses, operate a hospital or a grocery store, or are in some other business, successful innovation depends on understanding what's driving the technological changes in your industry and anticipating what product and service features consumers will value in the future. In this article, the author describes her proven system for gaining those vital insights. The first step is to look back at the evolution of your business's technology and identify three to six dimensions where advances have significantly furthered its development--"big picture" dimensions such as cost, comfort, and safety. Next, plot the utility curve for each dimension (to see how progress on that dimension correlates with customer appreciation) and pinpoint the technology's current position on the curve. Third, decide where to focus your innovation efforts--a task made easier by using the author's matrix for scoring each dimension according to its importance to customers, its potential for improvement, and the ease with which improvements can be made. By following this three-step approach, a host of diverse companies are already creating promising new products.

Five of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today--Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft--derive much of their worth from their multisided platforms, which facilitate interactions or transactions between parties. Many MSPs are more valuable than companies in the same industries that provide only products or services: For instance, Airbnb is now worth more than Marriott, the world's largest hotel chain. However, companies that weren't born as platform businesses rarely realize that they can--at least partially--turn their offerings into one, say the authors. And even if they do realize it, they often wander in the dark searching for a strategy to achieve this transformation. In this article, Hagiu and Altman provide a framework for doing so. They lay out four specific ways in which products and services can be turned into platforms and examine the strategic advantages and pitfalls of each: (1) opening the door to third parties; (2) connecting customers; (3) connecting products to connect customers; and (4) becoming a supplier to a multisided platform. These ideas can be used by physical as well as online businesses.

The U.S. Navy operates on the front lines of climate change. It manages tens of billions of dollars of assets on every continent and on every ocean, which take many years to design and build and then have decades of useful life. This means that it needs to understand now what sorts of missions it may be required to perform in 10, 20, or 30 years and what assets and infrastructure it will need to carry them out. Put another way, it needs to plan for the world that will exist at that time. The navy is clear-eyed about the challenges climate change poses. It knows that the effects of a warmer world will expand the geographic scope of its mission and increase demand for its military and humanitarian services. Climate change will also decrease its capacity to deliver those services, as the risk of damage to its bases and ports increases. This article examines the navy's approach to climate change and reflects on the implications for business.

Business leaders are scrambling to adjust to a world few imagined possible just a year ago. The myth of a borderless world has come crashing down. Traditional pillars of open markets--the United States and the UK--are wobbling, and China is positioning itself as globalization's staunchest defender. Countries throughout North America and Europe have experienced waves of anti-globalization sentiment. In the face of such uncertainty, leaders of multinationals wonder whether they should retreat, change strategy, or stay the course. In making that decision, they need to understand two things. First, the world is less globalized than even experienced executives realize. Second, history tells us that even in the face of a trade war, international trade and investment would still be too large for strategists to ignore. Today's turmoil calls not for a mass retreat from globalization but for a more subtle reworking of multinationals' strategies. This article examines common misperceptions about what is--and isn't--changing about globalization and offers guidelines to help leaders decide where and how to compete in a complex world.

Ginni Rometty has spent 36 years at IBM, where she now serves as president, CEO, and chairman of the board. She is on a protracted mission to reinvent the company as a cloud-based "solutions" business. That transformation involves moving into areas that have higher value and shedding ones that don't. IBM's new businesses around cloud, data, and security account for almost $34 billion in revenue. They're growing by more than 13% a year and constitute 42% of the company. In this interview Rometty says that IBM is trying to "unlock" the 80% of data behind the firewalls of client companies so that those organizations can use it to make better decisions, adding, "There's a $2 trillion market around better decision making." She talks about why IBM's earnings have declined for 20 consecutive quarters, what kinds of employees the company's new course demands, gender-related challenges in her career, and more.

The ability to deliver an energizing pep talk is a prerequisite for any business leader. But few managers receive formal training in how to give one. Instead, they learn mostly by emulating inspirational bosses, coaches, or even fictional characters. However, research shows there is a science to psyching people up for better performance. According to motivating language theory, most winning formulas include three key elements: direction giving, or describing precisely how to do the task at hand; expressions of empathy, or concern for the performer; and meaning-making language, which explains why the task is important. All the evidence suggests that, once leaders understand these three elements, they can learn to use them more skillfully.

Best known for playing Hawkeye Pierce on the TV series "M*A*S*H," actor Alan Alda is also a director, scriptwriter, book author, science-show host, and founder of two organizations that help people improve their communications skills. In this interview, he shares his insights on the value of the imperfect and explains how improvisation can help teams gel.

Frustrated by some of his experience with public/private partnerships, the author began daydreaming about how State Street, which has a large charitable foundation, could attack the problem of workforce development. The foundation was already spending millions of dollars a year in the areas of education and job training, and State Street is one of Boston's largest employers: It could provide a job and a career at the end of a young person's education, which nonprofits could not. Furthermore, the company is full of Millennials who want to volunteer as mentors. In 2015 Hooley and his team launched Boston WINs ("workforce investment networks"). They committed to investing $20 million and hiring 1,000 graduates of urban schools over the next four years.

At the top of the ladder, the stakes are high and the demands intense. Too many CEOs falter in the job; about a quarter of the Fortune 500 chiefs who leave their firms each year are forced out. Clearly, boards do not always get their hires right. In conducting an analysis of in-depth assessments of 17,000 executives, the authors uncovered a large disconnect between what directors think makes for an ideal CEO and what actually leads to high performance. The findings of their 10-year research project challenge many widely held assumptions. Charisma, confidence, and pedigree all have little bearing on CEO success, it turns out. Instead, top performers demonstrate four specific business behaviors: (1) They're decisive, realizing they can't wait for perfect information and that a wrong decision is often better than no decision. (2) They engage for impact, working to understand the priorities of stakeholders and then aligning them around a goal of value creation. (3) They adapt proactively, keeping an eye on the long term and treating mistakes as learning opportunities. (4) They deliver results in a reliable fashion, steadily following through on commitments.

"Onboarding" is an apt term for the way many companies support new leaders' transitions, because not much more is involved than bringing the executive safely on deck. After that, he or she is expected to sort things out with little or no guidance. "Integration" suggests a more aspirational goal--doing what it takes to make the new person a fully functioning member of the team as quickly and smoothly as possible. That's not common practice, unfortunately. The authors' studies show that well-integrated executives can build momentum early on and reduce the average amount of time to full performance by a third, from six months to four. New leaders need the greatest integration support in five major tasks: assuming operational leadership; taking charge of the team; aligning with stakeholders; engaging with the culture; and defining strategic intent.

High potentials being groomed as future leaders would appear to have it made--but their seemingly good fortune can turn out to be a curse. As they strive to conform to company ideals for leadership, they often bury the qualities that made them special. They become reluctant to take risks, lest they prove themselves unworthy. This "talent curse" can hinder personal growth, performance, and engagement--and even push people out the door. If you are on a high-potential track, watch for three signs of trouble: (1) A shift from using your talent to constantly trying to prove it; (2) A preoccupation with your image, which feels increasingly inauthentic; and (3) The feeling that your present work is empty and only future opportunities will be meaningful. Then take these steps to break the talent curse: (1) Own your talent; don't let it own you. Balance others' expectations with your needs and learn to accept help. (2) Bring your whole self to work. Channel the darker sources of your talent. (3) Value the present. View your current work as a worthy destination, not merely a stepping-stone. The talent curse may be painful, but grappling with it is an important part of learning how to lead.

Many people with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia have extraordinary skills, including in pattern recognition, memory, and mathematics. Yet they often struggle to fit the profiles sought by employers. A growing number of companies, including SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Microsoft, have reformed their HR processes in order to access neurodiverse talent--and are seeing productivity gains, quality improvement, boosts in innovative capabilities, and increased employee engagement as a result. The programs vary but have seven major elements in common. Companies should: (1) Team with governments or nonprofits experienced in working with people with disabilities; (2) Use noninterview assessment processes; (3) Train other workers and managers in what to expect; (4) Set up a support system; (5) Tailor methods for managing careers; (6) Scale the program; (7) Mainstream the program. The work for managers will be harder, but the payoff to companies will be considerable: access to more of their employees' talents along with diverse perspectives that will help them compete.

Innovation is often seen as the engine of growth, but there is a dark side: Unmanaged innovation frequently leads to excessive business complexity--in supply chain, sales and marketing, product development, IT, and administrative processes--leading to higher expenses and difficulties for customers and employees. Every time customers are asked to enter the same data twice, have inconsistent experiences when interacting with different parts of the business, or are forced to contact multiple people to get something done, it hurts the company. Every time employees can't access important information or their decisions get derailed by silos, it hurts the company. Excess innovation can even destroy a business. The authors offer three guidelines to address this problem: (1) Focus on product integration rather than proliferation; (2) Make sure that product developers are in close touch with customer-facing employees; and (3) Define your purpose in a way that will guide decision making.

Although the ability to manage torrents of data has become crucial to companies' success, most organizations remain badly behind the curve. More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not. Data breaches are common, rogue data sets propagate in silos, and companies' data technology often isn't up to the demands put on it. In this article the authors describe a framework for building a robust data strategy that can be applied across industries and levels of data maturity. The framework will help managers clarify the primary purpose of their data, whether "defensive" or "offensive." Data "" is about minimizing downside risk: ensuring compliance with regulations, using analytics to detect and limit fraud, and building systems to prevent theft. Data "offense" focuses on supporting business objectives such as increasing revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Using this approach, managers can design their data-management activities to support their company's overall strategy.