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In today's world, CEOs are frequently dismissed following corporate misconduct or poor performance. Yet, it is often difficult to predict when boards will dismiss the CEOs, as the same behavior often results in different decisions across firms. Taking a socio-cognitive perspective, this article explores the factors that lead a CEO to become tarnished. It then uses expectancy violation theory combined with attribution theory as well as stakeholder theory, concepts of legitimacy, and motivational theory to understand how the board evaluates the tarnished CEO.

Dealmakers tend to neglect uncertainty when making acquisition decisions, rushing into deals that eventually fail to deliver the anticipated synergies. Cause for this uncertainty neglect can be found in behavioral biases that cloud executive decision making. Acquirers should more often use minority stakes as a toehold to test full acquisitions and to guard themselves against the negative effects of uncertainty. An extended valuation toolkit that requires more managerial attention to uncertainty and behavioral pitfalls can help executives to better identify and value the benefits of minority stake strategies as an alternative to controlling acquisitions in uncertain situations.

It is often said that being a good strategist requires keeping a cool head. However, eradicating emotional influences from the strategy process is not only infeasible, it is also undesirable. Drawing on the latest advances in the science of emotion, this article explains how emotion regulation is an essential skill that executives must cultivate to ensure that their enterprises are able to adapt effectively in these turbulent times. The authors offer practical steps to help executives manage better the emotional dynamics of strategizing, which left unchecked can derail even the most carefully orchestrated of strategy processes

Researchers in behavioral strategy are producing new insights on strategic decision making. At the same time, a few pioneering companies are discovering ways to put behavioral strategy into practice. This article draws on behavioral research and strategy practice to present an approach called diligence-based strategy. In markets comprised of people rather than rational economic agents, the analysis of competitive advantages matters less than the diligent execution of fundamental activities. Diligence-based strategy offers an applied method for formulating and executing strategy in organizations, showing how managers can leverage technology and management discipline to drive business success in the twenty-first century.

Despite the consensus that climate change will have huge consequences not just for the planet but also on corporate operations, businesses continue to fail to adjust their strategic decision-making processes to become more sustainable. One of the silent culprits behind climate change inertia lies in the cognitive biases at play in corporate decision making. This article builds on existing strategic decision-making models to explain how biases prevent managers from accurately identifying the moral dimensions of climate change. It also presents a broad range of practical interventions for how this constraint can be overcome.

This article introduces strategists to the Mindspace framework and explores its applications in strategic contexts. This framework consists of nine effective behavioral interventions that are grounded in public policy applications, and it focuses on how changing the context can be more effective than attempts to de-bias decision makers. Behavioral changes are likely when we follow rather than fight human nature. Better decisions can be achieved by engineering choice contexts to "engage a bias" to overcome a more damaging bias. This article illustrates how to engineer strategic contexts through two case studies and outlines directions and challenges when applying Mindspace to strategic decisions.

Having worked for two VC firms before entering academia, Lakshmi Balachandra was mystified: Why did a proposal that looked so promising on paper become a nonstarter when it was actually pitched? She spent almost 10 years capturing what happens in pitch meetings and quantifying the results, and drew four broad conclusions: (1) Passion is overrated--VCs prefer a calm demeanor, which they equate with leadership strength. (2) Trust beats competence. (3) Coachability matters--most angel investors want to be hands-on mentors. (4) Gender stereotypes play a role--VCs respond poorly to high levels of stereotypically feminine behavior. Entrepreneurs should approach the pitching process less as a formal presentation and more as a give-and-take conversation in which attitude and mindset matter more than business fundamentals, she says.

If your industry is in turmoil, your instinct might be to double down on innovation so that your firm can get ahead of all the change. But new research from a team led by a professor from City University of London suggests you might want to hold off. Its study of innovation in Formula 1 racing showed that when car technologies were undergoing rapid shifts, the teams that produced very basic vehicles outperformed the rest.

Strategically important projects involve high stakes, uncertainty, and stakeholder complexity, with contingencies and risks typically surfacing repeatedly as the project evolves. This is challenging not only for the project team (PT) but also in particular for the steering committee (SC), the top management oversight structure typically used to align a project with the organization's strategic goals. This article explores how senior executives on SCs can exercise leadership and effective oversight of strategic projects, although they have only limited time and often incomplete expertise. The SC can keep a project aligned, even with limited time, through focused understanding of the key logic and drivers of the project. The SC needs to manage the surprises and crises that inevitably arise in a difficult project through proactive analysis that goes to the bottom of the problem and by working with the PT to generate solutions.

In recent years, word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has been the subject of considerable interest among managers and academics alike. However, there is very little common knowledge on what drives the value of WOM programs and how they should be designed to optimize value. Firms therefore frequently rely on relatively simple metrics to measure the success of their WOM marketing efforts and mainly use rules of thumb when making crucial program design decisions. This article proposes a new method to measure WOM program value that is based on the impact of WOM on the firm's customer equity. It then provides recommendations for the five main questions managers face when planning a WOM program: Who to target? When to launch the program? Where to launch it? Which incentives to offer? and How many participants to include?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To succeed in the long run, businesses need to create and leverage some kind of sustainable competitive edge. Although the authors say that advantages can still come from sources such as lower cost, intellectual property, motivated employees, and strategic leaders, they argue that in the knowledge economy, strategic advantages will increasingly depend on a capacity to make superior judgments and choices. Intelligent enterprises today are being shaped by two distinct forces. The first is the growing power of computers and big data, which provide the foundation for operations research, forecasting models, and artificial intelligence. The second is our growing understanding of human judgment, reasoning, and choice. Decades of research has yielded deep insights into what humans do well or poorly. In this article, the authors examine how managers can combine human intelligence with technology-enabled insights to make smarter choices in the face of uncertainty and complexity and thus gain a cumulative advantage in business. They note five strategic capabilities that intelligent enterprises can use to develop an advantage over competitors: 1. Find the strategic edge. In assessing past organizational forecasts, home in on areas where improving subjective predictions can really move the needle. 2. Run prediction tournaments. Discover the best forecasting methods by encouraging competition, experimentation, and innovation among teams. 3. Model the experts in your midst. Identify the people internally who have demonstrated superior insights into key business areas, and leverage their wisdom using simple linear models. 4. Experiment with artificial intelligence. Use deep neural nets in limited task domains to outperform human experts. 5. Change the way the organization operates. Promote an exploratory culture that continually looks for better ways to combine the capabilities of humans and machines.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Across the world, people today are living longer. Whether it is in the United States, China, or Rwanda, average human life expectancy has increased over the past few decades. There is growing awareness that increasing longevity will have major implications for how people manage their work lives and careers. Rising life expectancy means the level of savings required to provide a reasonable income for retirement at age 65 is becoming increasingly infeasible for many people. Given the average level of savings, the authors say, many workers in their mid-40s are likely to need to work into their early to mid-70s; many currently in their 20s may work into their late 70s, and even into their 80s. Although people are starting to recognize that they will have to restructure their lives and careers, corporations are unprepared. Few organizations have taken full account of the opportunities and challenges longevity brings to their own workforces. Most companies, especially those operating in the advanced economies, still view life in terms of three stages: full-time education, full-time work, and then a "hard stop"retirement around the age of 65. This is the life structure that emerged in the 20th century and continues to underpin much thinking about the workforce. But in the view of the authors, it cannot be stretched to support a healthy 100-year life and will need to be expanded to include more stages. Without change, the authors argue, employees will struggle to build a working life that has resilience over an extended period of time and that will support a healthy and prosperous longevity. For example, as working lives become longer, the need for lifelong learning will increase.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It is impossible to block negative emotions from the workplace. Whether provoked by bad decisions, misfortune, or employees' personal problems, no organization is immune from trouble, and trouble agitates bad feelings. In many organizations, negative emotions are brushed aside or are altogether taboo. However, discounting or brushing aside negative emotions can be costly to organizations -leading to lost productivity and employee disengagement. For more than two decades, the author has studied workplace circumstances that evoke negative emotions, from exceptional organizational crises to everyday incivility. One fundamental finding is that few executives handle employees' negative feelings well. Many managers report that they do not know how to deal with negative emotions in the workplace. To address this condition, the author details how to improve competence and confidence in responding to negative emotions. She recommends specific actions to prepare for and step up to negative emotions at work -including anger, fear, and sadness, in particular. Promptly stepping up to negative emotions, the author points out, can stem interpersonal turbulence and keep satisfaction, engagement, and productivity intact. What's more, when negative emotions are acknowledged openly, the author argues, employees can learn to anticipate and interpret their colleagues' reactions to difficult circumstances more astutely. They grow to understand their own reactions better, too. With these improvements, appropriate responses to challenging situations can be made earlier, when adjustments are generally easier, more effective, and less expensive.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. Many projects are launched with great promise but lose traction and momentum during project delivery, when the real work of the initiative is underway. Shifting organizational priorities, changes in leadership, and distrust of information about the project's progress can scuttle a project's reputation and, ultimately, its chance for success. This self-perpetuating downward spiral can cause contributors to distance themselves from an effort that is losing support, cannot overcome inertia, or worse, is derailed. Even the most technically sound and strategically important projects can fall into this "cycle of doubt"and fail to meet their objectives. Building on previous work on project branding, the authors conducted a multisource, practice-based field investigation to seek insights on how to help organizations and project leaders understand, avoid, and recover from the cycle of doubt. Analyses revealed practical insight on three related issues: how to recognize when a project is vulnerable to the cycle of doubt; how to ensure that a project does not fall into a downward spiral of skepticism; and how to reverse negative momentum if a project begins to stall. The research found four main categories of doubt triggers that can sap support and lead a project into a negative tailspin. These warning signs are when strategic priorities change, sponsors appear equivocal, delivery hiccups occur, or communication missteps raise doubts. The authors offer eight action steps providing possible avenues by which vulnerable projects can successfully overcome or avoid a momentum slide. An additional checklist helps project leaders get a sense of how well (or poorly) their projects are positioned to forestall or recover from escalating doubts.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Companies can monetize their data by improving internal business processes and decisions, wrapping information around core products and services, and selling information offerings to new and existing markets. Adopting any of these approaches, however, requires management commitment to specific organizational changes and targeted technology and data management upgrades.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand how advances in artificial intelligence are likely to change the workplace - and the work of managers - in coming years, you need to know where AI delivers the most value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In the past several years, the list of companies whose internal systems have been hacked has grown rapidly. It now includes such high-profile businesses as Target, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, Sony Pictures, Ashley Madison, and Yahoo. No industry appears to be safe from attacks. Unfortunately, the authors say, investment in security measures is only part of the answer; traditional methodologies can only do so much. To be effective, managers in charge of cybersecurity need to adjust their mindsets and become as open and adaptive as possible. In this article, the authors present a framework drawn from the knowledge and opinions of experts, including interviews with more than 20 experienced hackers. As the authors explain, hackers have two different mindsets depending on the stage of the attack: explorative and exploitative. An exploration mindset used in the early stages of an attack combines deliberate and intuitive thinking and relies on intensive experimentation. Once access to a system is gained, hackers adopt an exploitation mindset. An attack typically involves four steps: Step 1: Identifying Vulnerabilities If hackers think your company is worth attacking, they will examine it thoroughly for weaknesses, surveying the network information, organizational information, and security policies. Companies can protect themselves by adopting an iterative and adaptive process and making a point of conducting a high-level "footprint"of their systems on a regular basis. They should also make sure that employees are well informed on policies regarding sharing of information. Step 2: Scanning and Testing After a hacker has broken into your network, weaknesses in the applications running on those systems could become avenues for further unauthorized access. To protect your company, examine your network and identify potential weaknesses.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For Volvo Cars, pursuing digital innovation required fundamentally rethinking the organization, while also keeping the core business functioning efficiently. The company did so by balancing four interrelated competing concerns: (1) new and established innovation capabilities; (2) process and product focus; (3) external and internal collaboration; and (4) flexibility and control in relationships with external partners.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. If you want to lead your organization's technology transition, the first step is grasping the realities of digital transformation -rather than getting seduced by the hype.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Although additive manufacturing -also known as 3-D printing -was developed back in the 1980s, lately it has become increasingly talked about as managers look for ways to improve efficiency and reduce production costs. The appeal of additive manufacturing is its potential to reduce the need for expensive materials and energy, cut lead times, and make supply chains more efficient. Despite the promise of additive manufacturing, the authors argue, near-term expectations are overblown. Based on dozens of interviews, study of the literature on the history of materials and process technologies, industry meetings, and factory visits, they have identified three myths that need to be dispelled. The first myth is that additive manufacturing will allow producers to make parts of any complexity as easily and economically as parts that are manufactured in traditional ways (in other words, that it will make complexity "free"). The second myth is that additive manufacturing will prod manufacturing to become local. And the third myth is that additive manufacturing will allow producers to replace mass manufacturing with mass customization. In the authors'view, none of these expectations is likely to be realized in the next few decades. Although the authors say that additive manufacturing will make it easier to design lighter parts with complex geometries and internal cavities, they point to important drawbacks and restrictions. Knowing the parameters of what's possible to produce requires skills that are currently scarce. There are also safety and technical issues. Some of the safety concerns stem from the fact that the technology is new. Although many people are looking for additive manufacturing to bring manufacturing closer to markets and consumers, the authors believe that this scenario has been exaggerated, largely due to economies of scale.