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The astrophysicist on balancing his TV career with his day job and why no one could dissuade him from a career in science.

Few CEOs of large companies leverage the power of Twitter to the fullest extent. As of September 2014, only 42 Fortune 500 CEOs had Twitter accounts. The authors argue that rather than waiting for impressions to be driven by the media or by individuals with ulterior motives, CEOs can use Twitter to help shape their public image and that of their companies. The authors studied the Twitter activity of 25 CEOs of publicly traded companies who were active on Twitter and identified common patterns and themes. Based on the type of content tweeted most often, the authors classified the CEOs they studied into four groups: Generalists, Expressionists, Information Mavens, and Business Mavens. Generalists used Twitter to share a wide range of content. At times they tweeted about personal opinions and interests; other times, they tweeted information closely related to the business (for example, strategy, existing products and services, customer references, etc.). However, on average they had the smallest networks among the groups of CEOs, perhaps because they were not sharing information that was unique. Expressionists used Twitter extensively for non-business content sharing. These CEOs shared their opinions about events and politics and gave their followers an insight into their daily lives. In many ways, they used Twitter as a brand-building platform for themselves as they do for their companies. Information Mavens frequently shared links to information, news, and other happenings. However, they did not generally tweet information specific to their company, acting more like curators of content. As a result, relatively few people retweeted or "favorited"their tweets. Business Mavens used Twitter extensively and primarily shared business-related content. In contrast to the other CEO groups that the authors identified, Business Mavens often shared new product announcements, information about existing products, customer references

Today's rapid technological changes have transformed the role of global IT outsourcing in companies'strategies. Traditionally viewed as a cost-saving measure, IT outsourcing is also increasingly being leveraged as a strategic tool for acquiring cutting-edge innovation. This pursuit of emerging technologies and capabilities, however, has elevated the complexity of managing supplier portfolios. In this article, the authors introduce the "long-tail"strategy, an innovative IT outsourcing model that combines a few key partnerships with a dynamically changing number of smaller contracts with other suppliers that can deliver specific value propositions beyond the capabilities of the key partners. Representing a dynamic, diversified, yet disciplined approach toward outsourcing, the long-tail strategy embraces and even fosters a flow of new suppliers, so companies are continually acquiring new capabilities that enable them to prosper in turbulent business environments. The authors'extensive in-depth interviews with major companies in financial services, business services, technology, manufacturing, and energy suggest that the long-tail strategy can help diverse organizations achieve their business goals. For example, the long-tail strategy helped a major global bank establish and maintain technological leadership in the financial-services industry, and allowed Toyota Motor North America to realize rapid innovation. In order to implement the long-tail strategy successfully, companies should institute five key practices: (1) distributing responsibility within the company for scanning for new technologies; (2) nurturing relationships with new "long-tail"suppliers; (3) encouraging sales pitches from suppliers; (4) governing the entire outsourcing portfolio; and (5) designing for integration. When implementing these practices, organizations should seek to create a more proactive, entrepreneurial, and dynamic culture in IT outsourcing.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. When Martha Payne, a 9-year-old student in Argyll, Scotland, started a blog in April 2012 to photograph and rate her school lunches, she had no idea of the stir she would cause. The blog logged 2 million hits in its first six weeks. When the local area council asked her to stop, an online firestorm ensued and the council reversed its decision. It's a familiar story -every day, images or events with the potential to incite passions get captured digitally, posted to the Web, and "go viral."With social media, people share their experiences with friends or followers, who share with more people. Seemingly insignificant occurrences can strike a nerve with a nascent virtual community, and unsuspecting parties must respond to a dicey new problem. The capacity to generate causes and controversies almost instantly may be the most salient aspect of what authors Robert D. Austin and David M. Upton call the "super-transparent society." Historically, the authors explain, people in a particular community were the only ones who paid attention to the local goings-on. When information moved outside of that environment, it was due to deliberate action: some identifiable person or organization moving it. If you wanted to guard information, you built a barrier. Many things have changed, particularly the volume of information. The article suggests several steps that can help managers meet the new expectations for transparency, including the following: Examine your assumptions about how you can keep information contained. Review your strategy for dealing with vulnerability to unintended transparency. Review operations for issues that might be problematic if revealed. Assume that others will put out information about your organization for their own reasons and that you won't be able to prevent it. Recognize that new information flows change what people consider to be fair.

Science-based industries such as biotechnology offer the potential of high growth, but they are fraught with risk. The payoffs can take many years to materialize or may never come. Even though the traditional venture capital/entrepreneurial model has been shown to stimulate innovation in a wide range of technology settings (software, computers, Internet, electronics, etc.), it wasn't designed to deal with the costs, risks, and slow payout of science-based industries. Although venture capital continues to flow into industries like biotechnology, there has been a significant shift away from funding ventures at the earliest stages. A key concern is that lack of availability of future rounds of financing can shut off the flow of venture capital funding abruptly. In this article, authors Andrew W. Lo and Gary P. Pisano draw on comparisons to projects in the moviemaking industry and propose the project-focused organization (PFO) as an alternative structure for undertaking long-term, high-risk, highly capital-intensive R&D programs in science-based industries such as biotech. PFOs are entities created to conduct a specific R&D project. The authors discuss how they could work in practice, using the example of biopharmaceutical R&D. Researchers innovating in a science-based context must overcome two specific challenges. First, they need to raise sufficient capital to fund a long-term, highly risky, and very expensive project. Second, they must have a governance mechanism for allocating capital (human and financial) and conducting projects. The authors propose that governance centered on the project rather than the company may be a more efficient way to organize innovation in science-based industries. To reduce overhead, they propose contracting out for resources as necessary. As with movie projects, investors could choose projects they want to invest in, with the understanding that they will receive returns only if those projects succeed.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Large companies frequently exploit their vastly superior legal resources and capabilities to the disadvantage of smaller competitors. The mere threat of litigation and the prospect of a prolonged lawsuit are often all that is necessary to persuade a smaller business to acquiesce to the larger competitor's legal demands. The author writes about a defensive strategy he calls "lawsourcing"that turns the tables on large companies by gathering public support, typically through social media and public relations. The idea of lawsourcing -which is a variation of what has become known as "crowdsourcing"-isn't completely new. Back in 1984, when Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. was a six-year-old upstart in the ice cream business, Pillsbury (then the owner of the Häagen-Dazs ice cream brand) attempted to pressure some of its distributors not to handle Ben & Jerry's products. Ben & Jerry's fought back hard, with a scrappy campaign built around the slogan "What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?" Well-executed lawsourcing campaigns can deliver significant benefits to companies, including greater brand awareness and loyalty and increased sales. The author cites a number of examples, including: Hampton Creek Foods Inc., a small San Francisco-based food producer. In the fall of 2014, Unilever, owner of the Hellmann's brand of mayonnaise, filed suit against Hampton Creek for using the word "mayo"to describe its vegan mayonnaise substitute, called Just Mayo. Hampton Creek fought back by commenting about the lawsuit on Twitter and Facebook and engaging with media sympathetic to its plight. Unilever withdrew its lawsuit. Vermont artist Bo Muller-Moore, who sells T-shirts adorned with the slogan "Eat More Kale."Atlanta-based fast-food chain Chik-fil-A Inc. claimed that Muller-Moore's slogan infringed upon its federal trademark rights to the phrase "Eat Mor Chikin."After a spirited social media campaign, Muller-Moore got his own trademark.

Narrow-mindedness holds back many organizations in their efforts to turn global presence into a real source of competitive advantage. In this article, the authors explore the manifestations and costs associated with what they call the "headquarters knows best"syndrome, as well as ways companies can address the problem. Many of the things companies have done are fairly predictable, such as decentralizing global responsibilities, changing the reporting relationships, internationalizing senior management, and creating cross-national teams. At Irdeto B.V., a Dutch developer of security software for digital media, the remedy was more extreme: It elected to create two headquarters, one in the Netherlands and the other in China. While this was expensive -and something the CEO's successor ultimately did away with in 2015 -the decision to operate out of dual headquarters helped the company realign its focus, and it had significant positive effects on Irdeto's performance. The authors argue that many corporate executives aren't aware that the "headquarters knows best"syndrome exists. Typically, top executives interact with executives from the subsidiaries that are closest to headquarters (in terms of geography, economic development, and culture); the executives'frame of reference is based on subsidiary managers who benefit from ample attention, autonomy, or influence. Executives from peripheral subsidiaries are the ones who are most likely to be affected and least likely to be heard. In addition, the value of missed opportunities and lost talent is hard to assess, and headquarters executives can easily invoke contextual factors (such as competition for labor) to explain problems. They can also try to pin blame on the local entities. After establishing its dual headquarters in 2007, the authors note, Irdeto saw measurable improvements on four fronts: increased top management attention, greater subsidiary contributions, richer lateral exchanges,

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The Chinese technology company Xiaomi cultivates a close connection with its customers through a product development process that invites user participation -as well as through social media and fan clubs.

While global supply chains are expected to be lean, agile, and sustainable, they have also become the focus of growing attention from a variety of external stakeholders seeking information that includes and frequently exceeds what the company is legally obliged to disclose. In this article, the authors discuss the pressures on companies to disclose supply chain information, the drivers and impediments to such disclosure, and the types of supply chain information typically made available to the public. The article identifies the broad disclosure strategies companies can use to release supply chain information and offers managers guidance on designing the optimal disclosure strategy for their company. In addition to exploring the topic with examples from companies including Nike Inc., WD-40, and Patagonia Inc., the authors take a detailed look at how Apple's approach to supply chain disclosure has evolved since 2009. In considering how to manage supply chain information disclosure, the authors argue that managers must appreciate the diverse forces and actors driving and enabling this trend. Aside from internal governance and risk concerns, external pressure has come from government regulations, best practices of peers, changing expectations from salient stakeholder groups, and, of course, external events (such as the 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh). The authors note that improving transparency can be expensive. The lack of standardized reporting systems, the absence of a common technology platform, ill-defined standards, and a lack of supplier education can also pose serious hindrances to companies wishing to improve their supply chain transparency. The authors identify four common types of supply chain information that tends to be publicly disclosed: supply chain membership, provenance of materials, environmental information, and information on social impacts such as working conditions.

Peter Drucker once said that healthcare organizations "are the most complex form of organization that we have ever attempted to manage." In this wide-ranging interview, an American health-sector strategy expert working in Canada explains why Drucker's statement is true. He goes on to describe the need for patient-centric care and the importance of focusing on the social determinants of health. He also compares the Canadian and U.S. systems, the pros and cons of each, and what a truly sustainable healthcare system would look like. In the end, he shows the power of markets in the quest for population health.

'Fit' companies don't get that way by accident: they intentionally pursue a course of action that makes them stronger and more agile over time. The author, a long-time consultant to Toyota and an expert on its lean system, presents nine steps to creating a culture of continuous improvement. In the end, he argues, the biggest benefit of embracing this approach is not just improved processes and better-quality outputs: it is the growth and development of your employees-the ones who will make continuous improvement a reality.

One of the iconic developments of the 21st century is the growth of cities: by 2050, the number of citizens living in urban areas is expected to exceed 75 per cent-up from 53 per cent today. The implications are varied, and the authors look at them through a health lens. They describe five key aspects of urban life that must be carefully considered if people are to thrive in the world's cities. These include 'the primary education of girls' and 'commercial innovation capacity'. They then describe the ISO-approved framework developed by the World Council on City Data, which one of the authors heads up, which ranks the world's cities on a number of key elements of overall population health-including issues around water and sanitation and environmental safety. Going forward, they argue, this framework will allow for comparisons between the world's cities-and targeted responses.

The author describes how forward-looking employers are developing new initiatives that promote employee health and well-being, everything from on-site health screenings to exercise equipment and meditation classes. The results: fewer absences, higher productivity and greater worker retention. After describing the importance of deciding who your program is for and which health issues to address, she provides a six-ingredient recipe for leaders to design and implement a program that suits their organizational culture. In the end, she shows that you don't have to turn all your employees into super-athletes addicted to blueberry smoothies for your investment to pay off: even a small reduction in workforce health risks will enable you to and reap the rewards of a healthier workforce.

When Google famously allowed its engineers to spend 20 per cent of their time pursuing a passion, Chade-Meng Tan decided to spend his time on a cause dear to his heart: creating the conditions for world peace within his lifetime. After much research and consultation with scientists, monks, academics and more, he concluded that the road to peace was paved with compassion-the happiest brain state ever recorded by neurologists. His initiative now had a focus, and soon, his Search Inside Yourself program was being delivered at Google and other forward-thinking organizations. He describes his journey and what he believes lies ahead if we are able to scale compassion.

On issues big and small, people often don't make the best possible decisions for the long term. The authors argue that the root cause of this sub-optimal decision-making is that our behaviour is guided by two types of processes: System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking. Whereas System 1 tends to operate effortlessly and automatically, the operations of System 2 are slower, more effortful and deliberate. System 1 judgments are based on perceptions, intuitions and emotions, while System 2 judgments in-depth logical analysis and reasoning. Not surprisingly, on a day-to-day basis, System 1 guides much of our behaviour. They introduce The Hot-Cold Decision Triangle, a framework that can enable better choices by enabling us to avoid the power of visceral urges.

While they appear to have little in common, time and money are frequently interchangeable. Researchers refer to the amount of time that people spend in an unpleasant mood - when feelings of tension, depression or irritation outweigh feelings of happiness - as the 'U-index'. For instance, people are rarely in an unpleasant mood while exercising, reading or praying; but unpleasant moods are common while working, commuting and doing housework. Sadly, over the past 50 years, the overall U-index has barely budged. The authors show that by re-allocating our time in three key areas - commuting, watching television and spending time with loved ones-we can impact our happiness in a more powerful way than money every can.

For most of human history, people over the age of 65 have not exceeded three or four per cent of any country's population. In today's developed world, they comprise roughly 15 per cent-and by 2050, this could reach 25 per cent. The pace of aging is also projected to accelerate in developing countries: by 2050, the global number of people over 60 will reach two billion - three quarters of whom will be from developing countries. The implications for business are many and varied. The authors describe four industries where the impact will be particularly strong. In the end, they provide a starting point for leaders to contemplate - and perhaps, begin to shape - what lies ahead, and show that this long-term discussion will be interdisciplinary in nature and will cut across business, government, and societal levels.

Every so often, a society leaps forward to a fundamentally 'new equilibrium': the status quo is left behind - even if it had held for centuries. The revolutionary thinkers leading the charge powerful new ways to structure our systems, fundamentally altering how they work. This, write the authors, is the realm of the social entrepreneur. In this article they describe how one such duo of intrepid thinkers and actors went about creating transformative change in Africa. They describe the progress made by Riders for Health to bring healthcare to the furthest regions of rural Africa in a dependable, sustainable manner. In the end, they show that for social entrepreneurs, it is not enough to imagine a way to reduce suffering: their vision is for systemic change. It shifts an existing equilibrium to a new one - one that ensures an optimal new condition for those who had been disadvantaged by the prior state.

One in four adults will suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder that impairs their social, interpersonal or occupational functioning, and as a result, mental illness has become a leading global health concern. It is further estimated that the percentage of the population with an undiagnosed mental disorder is almost equivalent to those with diagnosed disorders, and that many of mental illness also have substance abuse problems. Given that these issues are so prevalent in the working population, managing employees with ongoing or episodic mental health conditions is a job demand that most managers are likely to face. The authors examine what is required to equip managers - and ultimately, organizations - to deal with these complex situations. They provide a four-step model that begins with 'Becoming aware of a mental health issue' and ends with 'Reflecting on the experience'

Stryker CEO Kevin Lobo describes the challenges and opportunities of running one of the world's most successful global medical technology companies. In a wide ranging interview, he explains the thinking behind the different types of acquisitions his company has made; the cultural hiccup that one of those acquisitions led to, and how it was handled; and the importance of focusing on the mid-tier market in emerging markets.