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Why do some transformative technologies dominate the market quickly, while others take decades to catch on? It's a function not just of the technologies themselves, say the authors, but also of their broader ecosystems (electric cars, for example, need a network of charging stations). The ecosystems of the legacy technologies matter too--they can sometimes be improved enough to prolong the life of the old technology. Analyzing the ecosystem dynamics in your industry can help you predict how quickly technological change will occur. For example, if the new technology is surrounded by viable complements and there's little room to improve the old technology's ecosystem, substitution is rapid ("creative destruction"). When the opposite conditions hold--the new technology's ecosystem needs work and the old technology can capitalize on improvements in the established ecosystem--the pace of substitution is very slow ("robust resilience"). The authors describe two other possible scenarios: "robust coexistence" of the two technologies, and the "illusion of resistance" (the old technology seems competitive for some time but quickly succumbs once the new technology's ecosystem is ready to roll). If you understand which scenario applies to you, you can better assess the threat of disruptive change--and use the authors' insights to respond effectively.

In the digital age, software has enabled innovators like Uber and Tesla to gather crucial data about customers and create revolutionary offerings to serve them. Meanwhile, many well-resourced incumbents struggle to develop extended digital relationships with customers. That's partly because it's hard for companies to change their established business models. But the authors point out another inhibitor--there are repercussions up and down the value chain. The authors explain that successful upstarts do not just capture and use new data effectively; they also break from traditional reliance on outside partners for sourcing inputs and distributing and servicing products. They keep more functions in-house--a necessary part of launching an innovation. But if incumbents do likewise in their own efforts to take advantage of digital technology, they risk upsetting longtime relationships with suppliers, distributors, and other collaborators. To navigate this new world, the authors advise managers in traditional companies to think about the macro trends that will shape their industry in the future, agree on a digital strategy to address customers' needs in the long term, and develop better metrics to monitor progress. Incumbents must also create new business opportunities for partners so that everyone benefits from the new ecosystem.

In an increasingly digital and connected environment, leaders of established companies frequently find themselves facing opportunities that they--or even their industries--cannot seize alone. Instead of relying on start-ups to create innovations and then buying in to them, organizations are taking part in a process that the authors call "ecosystem innovation," collaborating to develop and then commercialize new concepts. Cisco Hyperinnovation Living Labs (CHILL) differs from seemingly similar approaches, such as R&D alliances, because it focuses on the fast and agile commercialization of ideas without a complicated intellectual property agreement. It also differs from traditional partnership efforts, because it brings multiple partners together at a very early stage all at once. In this article the authors discuss how large companies can develop their own ecosystem innovation capabilities, using Cisco's process as an example. They describe the basic principles and the process, identify the most common traps, and explain how leaders can capture valuable opportunities. The process allows companies to bring extremely diverse ideas, skills, and resources together to solve ecosystem-level problems at an astonishing speed.

Chances are you've experienced at least one company reorganization. Reorgs can be a great way to unlock value: Two-thirds of them deliver at least some performance improvement, and with change accelerating in the business environment, they are becoming more and more common, the authors say. But most reorgs aren't entirely successful: According to a survey conducted at McKinsey, more than 80% fail to deliver the value they are supposed to in the time planned, while 10% cause real damage to the company involved. More important, they can be miserable experiences for employees. Research suggests that reorgs--and the accompanying uncertainty about what the future holds--may cause greater stress and anxiety than layoffs, leading to noticeably reduced productivity in about 60% of cases. That's because the leaders of reorgs don't specify their objectives clearly enough, miss some of the key actions (for example, focusing on reporting lines and forgetting processes and people), or do things in the wrong order (such as deciding on the way forward before assessing the strengths and weaknesses of what they have already). To help maximize the value and minimize the misery of reorgs, the authors have developed a simple five-step process for running them.

Performance reviews are awkward and biased. They stick people in boxes and leave them waiting far too long for feedback. It's no wonder that by the end of 2015, at least 30 of the Fortune 500 companies had ditched them altogether. But even when companies get rid of performance evaluations, ratings still exist--employees just can't see them. Ratings are done subjectively, behind the scenes, and without input from the people being evaluated. Employees' contributions to the organization over time need to be assessed in some way. Decisions about pay and promotions have to be made. In the absence of formal evaluations, those decisions are made in a black box. Facebook has chosen to hang on to evaluations despite their costs to help ensure fairness, transparency, and talent development. When the company analyzed its performance management system a few years ago, it conducted focus groups and a follow-up survey with more than 300 people. The feedback was clear: 87% of people wanted to keep performance ratings. They wanted to know where they stood. Evaluations were put into place for good reasons; getting rid of them might be an overreaction to poor execution. Leaders at Facebook think it's more constructive to mitigate the risks by building a culture that recognizes and rewards growth.

Stress is a fact of professional life, but extreme and unrelenting pressures can lead to the debilitating state we call burnout. Three symptoms characterize burnout: exhaustion; cynicism, or distancing oneself from work; and inefficacy, or feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement. Research has linked burnout to many health problems, including hypertension, sleep disturbances, depression, and substance abuse. Moreover, it can ruin relationships and jeopardize career prospects. Resolving burnout often requires changes at the job, team, or organizational level. But you can also take steps toward recovery and prevention on your own: Prioritize your health, shift your perspective to determine which aspects of your situation are fixed and which can be changed, reduce exposure to the most stressful activities and relationships, and seek out helpful interpersonal connections. It's important to ward off burnout on your team as well: Insist on time for rest and renewal, set realistic work limits, boost your team's sense of control, provide meaningful recognition, and ask people what help or training they need to succeed.

Marina Abramovic has for decades pushed the boundaries of performance art--hurling herself against walls, cutting herself with razor blades, sitting motionless for 750 hours. Although she started with fringe shows, she eventually worked her way up to performances and exhibitions at premier venues, such as the Venice Biennale and New York's Museum of Modern Art.

In the traditional approach to venture capital, an investment firm parcels out funds to a portfolio of start-ups, knowing that most will fail but that with luck, the returns from the few winners will make the exercise profitable. For more than 40 years, another model has also existed: corporate venture capital, in which a very large company invests in start-ups, often in adjacent industries. Corporate VCs have historically been motivated by strategic payoffs: insight into new products that could affect their competitive position--and perhaps the inside track on acquiring the start-up if its innovation pans out. But a study by MIT researchers shows a recent shift in goals, with corporate VCs increasingly concerned about financial returns. The researchers explored this mission drift through in-depth interviews with the leaders of 16 corporate VC units, learning that the units often aren't pursuing opportunities that could help them maximize their role as strategic investors. Firms need better ways to measure the nonfinancial value derived from investments in start-ups, the researchers say; and by voicing support for the corporate VC's role as a strategic investor, the CEO can reduce the emphasis on financial returns.

A new study shows that during the Cold War, corporate spying generated significant economic returns for East German companies. It was so successful, in fact, that it crowded out traditional research initiatives.

In a world awash in digital connectivity, disruptive innovations, political instability, cultural fragility, and continuous interactive feedback loops, linear thinking isn’t effective for building even moderately effective mid-range strategies. This article explains why linear logic has never been more dangerous in terms of related opportunity costs, and then offers tips on how to break the habit. Based on linear projection, we tend to conflate the immediate, inferable extensions of current conditions with the future. This is dangerous due to five fatal flaws in the linear model that can negatively impact the way most businesses think about their past, present, and — most importantly — their future: 1) Linear thinking leads to wrong assumptions. 2) Linear thinking assumes past is prologue. 3) Linear thinking marginalizes the concept of discontinuities. 4) Linear thinking imposes old patterns rather than discovering new ones. 5) Linear thinking minimizes the role of feedback in an increasingly interconnected world.

Conventional international business strategy preaches the need for subsidiaries of multinationals to align themselves with the agenda set by headquarters. But believing corporate parents always know best is a mistake. Although subsidiaries tend to seek approval of initiatives via dialogue with headquarters, there are also “maverick” subsidiaries that pursue independent initiatives covertly. And the author’s qualitative research on factors influencing independent subsidiary initiatives has found that maverick behaviour can deliver superior business results. <br><br>Whenever HQ has a different interpretation of local conditions, subsidiary managers tend to see their own assessment as superior (often rightly so). This situational awareness illustrates one of the pitfalls of the command-and-control approach adopted by most headquarters. Subsidiaries that fail to meet performance metrics established by headquarters tend to be subjected to more oversight than subsidiaries that beat expectations. As a result, rebel managers at these subsidiaries can be driven to covertly pursue independent subsidiary initiatives in a quest to show that they can deliver superior business results through more autonomy. Although sanctioned and unapproved subsidiary initiatives can deliver success, the independent initiatives the author has studied demonstrate that subsidiary managers tend to go rogue because they see it as a path to superior results. Subsidiaries should not, of course, be granted absolute freedom. After all, the trust handed to subsidiaries that beat expectations can transform into complacency. Nonetheless, there is a need for a better mixture of central control and local autonomy so that subsidiaries can be agile as multinationals continue to expand into new markets and monitoring becomes more difficult.

Despite their popularity, pay-for-performance incentives haven't worked as well as proponents had expected. Research by Alexander Pepper, of the London School of Economics, identifies four reasons why: (1) Executives are more risk-adverse than financial theory suggests, so they don't see the at-risk portion of their pay packages as very valuable. (2) They discount heavily for time, so they don't assign much worth to long-term incentives. (3) They care more about relative pay--creating an arms-race mentality that drives packages higher. (4) Pay packages undervalue intrinsic, nonmonetary motivations to work--and many executives would happily take less pay in exchange for a job that was better in other respects. What should companies do in response to these findings? Pepper suggests, among other steps, eliminating long-term incentive pay, raising salaries, and using annual cash bonuses to encourage desired behaviors. "You can pay executives considerably less in total--but do it in a different way," he says.

Researchers who examined data from a longitudinal study of Americans age 50 and older have found that mortality rates for people who retired at 66 were 11% lower than those of people who retired at 65. Could work be the secret to longevity?

During her career, Cheryl Bachelder had been a senior executive at two other food franchising companies, Domino's and KFC, and she'd learned to love the model. But when she took office at Popeyes, in 2007, which was struggling from a lack of strategy and too much short-term thinking, she found that the company's relationship with its franchisees was severely strained. As she and her team worked to turn Popeyes around, they would have to both regain the owners' trust and fire up their enthusiasm for the future. They would also have to create an arsenal of brand-building ideas and a national advertising campaign to build consumer awareness. In talks about how they should lead and which stakeholders should be their primary focus, the team members settled on a model called "servant leadership," in which the people of an enterprise come before self-interest. And they agreed that Popeyes franchisees should be their most important customers: "No one," Bachelder writes, "has more skin in the game." The company conducted its first in a series of franchisee satisfaction surveys and began measuring what matters most to owners, namely restaurant-level profitability. It launched a number of winning new products and acquired sophisticated software to help franchisees choose the best locations for new restaurants. The result has been eight years of steady growth.

Organizations expect to see consistency in the decisions of their employees, but humans are unreliable. Judgments can vary a great deal from one individual to the next, even when people are in the same role and supposedly following the same guidelines. And irrelevant factors, such as mood and the weather, can change one person's decisions from occasion to occasion. This chance variability of decisions is called "noise," and it is surprisingly costly to companies, which are usually completely unaware of it. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, a professor of psychology at Princeton, and Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser of TGG Group explain how organizations can perform a "noise audit" by having members of a professional unit evaluate a common set of cases. The degree to which their assessments vary provides the measure of noise. If the problem is severe, firms can pursue a number of remedies. The most radical is to replace human judgment with algorithms. Unlike people, algorithms always return the same output for any given input, and research shows that their predictions and decisions are often more accurate than those made by experts. Although algorithms may seem daunting to construct, the authors describe how to build them with input data on a small number of cases and some simple commonsense rules. But if applying formulas is politically or operationally infeasible, companies can still set up procedures and practices that will guide employees to make more-consistent decisions.

U.S. corporations spend enormous amounts of money-some $356 billion globally in 2015 alone-on employee training and education, but they aren't getting a good return on their investment. People soon revert to old ways of doing things, and company performance doesn't improve. To fix these problems, senior executives and their HR departments should change the way they think about learning and development: Because context is crucial, needed fixes in organizational design and managerial processes must come first. The authors have identified six common barriers to change: (1) unclear direction on strategy and values, which often leads to conflicting priorities; (2) senior executives who don't work as a team and haven't committed to a new direction or acknowledged necessary changes in their own behavior; (3) a top-down or laissez-faire style by the leader, which prevents honest conversation about problems; (4) a lack of coordination across businesses, functions, or regions due to poor organizational design; (5) inadequate leadership time and attention given to talent issues; and (6) employees' fears of telling the senior team about obstacles to the organization's effectiveness. They advocate six basic steps to overcoming these barriers and achieving greater success in talent development.

Hated by bosses and subordinates alike, traditional performance appraisals have been abandoned by more than a third of U.S. companies. The annual review's biggest limitation, the authors argue, is its emphasis on holding employees accountable for what they did last year, at the expense of improving performance now and in the future. That's why many organizations are moving to more-frequent, development-focused conversations between managers and employees. The authors explain how performance management has evolved over the decades and why current thinking has shifted: (1) Today's tight labor market creates pressure to keep employees happy and groom them for advancement. (2) The rapidly changing business environment requires agility, which argues for regular check-ins with employees. (3) Prioritizing improvement over accountability promotes teamwork. Some companies worry that going numberless may make it harder to align individual and organizational goals, award merit raises, identify poor performers, and counter claims of discrimination-though traditional appraisals haven't solved those problems, either. Other firms are trying hybrid approaches-for example, giving employees performance ratings on multiple dimensions, coupled with regular development feedback.

AT&T, which built the U.S. communi­cations infrastructure in the past century, could once claim to be the company "where the future was invented." But now its legacy businesses are becoming obsolete. With its industry moving from cables to the cloud, AT&T is in a race to reinvent itself. As part of that transformation, it has initiated a massive effort to help its workers acquire new digital skills. In this article Cathy Benko, vice chairman of Deloitte, and John Donovan, AT&T's chief strategy officer, offer a look inside the company's ambitious program, dubbed Workforce 2020. The challenges are sizable: The firm employs 280,000 workers, and their average tenure is 22 years (not counting people in call centers). At least half the workforce has been assigned a new role and is expected to get the credentials or training to fill it. To manage the talent overhaul, the company has revised its performance metrics, raised performance expectations, and redesigned compensation plans. It is also providing workers with a host of tools for training and development through an online self-service platform, courses in new technologies, tuition reimbursement, and even online master's degrees in computer science, developed with Georgia Tech and Udacity.

When Jeffrey Joerres first joined Manpower, in 1993, the labor market was relatively stable and the company still focused largely on traditional office, clerical, and industrial staffing. But since then globalization and rapid advances in technology have dramatically reshaped the employment landscape. During his 15 years as CEO, Joerres expanded the company's international operations and moved into the increasingly competitive market for IT, finance, and engineering professionals. In this interview with HBR's editor, he describes how micromarket analysis reveals "geolocated pools of skills" that businesses can tap-until competitors muscle in, deplete the skills pool, and drive up wages. So companies must acquire a "nomadic mentality" that will allow them to establish more-temporary, smaller operations as well as large ones. He acknowledges that "when full-scale robotics and artificial intelligence arrive in a broad-based, affordable, easily justifiable way," hordes of workers will be displaced, with little or no preparation for very different jobs. Joerres advises companies that want to develop a workforce strategy to put multiple work models in place-crowdsourcing, distant manufacturing, temporary contractors moving to full-time-and truly practice them. "When are we done with this efficiency thing?" he says. "The answer is never."

Governments, NGOs, companies, and community members must all be involved in programs to create shared value, yet they work more often in opposition than in alignment. A movement known as "collective impact" has facilitated successful collaborations in the social sector, and it can guide businesses in bringing together the various actors in their ecosystems to help remedy some of the world's most urgent problems. In the process, companies will find economic opportunities that their competitors miss. Five elements must be in place for a collective-impact effort to achieve its aims: (1) a common agenda, which helps align the players' efforts and defines their commitment; (2) a shared measurement system; (3) mutually reinforcing activities; (4) constant communication, which builds trust and ensures mutual objectives; and (5) dedicated "backbone" support, delivered by a separate, independently funded staff, which builds public will, advances policy, and mobilizes resources.