個案總覽

In the realm of cybersecurity, an important concept for every leader to understand is that of Digital Crown Jewels ('DCJs'). These are your organization's most precious digital assets, consisting of the data you possess, process, and pass on that allows you to deliver on your strategy. This might include customer records, purchasing histories, employee records, finances and intellectual property information about proprietary products and services. DCJs also include an organization's data processing environment (DPE): how data flows through the organization and the processes by which the firm and its agents access and manipulate data. The challenge is this: the list of actors who pose a threat to the integrity of a firm's DPE is long and growing. The authors provide guidelines for protecting your DCJs in three categories: preventable risks, strategic risks and external risks. They end with a warning: act now, because the potential cost of failing to act is far too great.

Companies that have successfully automated their procurement negotiations are gaining a wide range of benefits, including cost savings, increased supply chain resilience, and access to an expanded pool of qualified suppliers. However, implementing a new procurement model and a different approach to relationships isn't easy. Six key practices are needed to address legitimate concerns and overcome resistance from business unit leaders, buyers, and suppliers.

While the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is pervasive, many companies struggle with AI implementation challenges. This article presents results from a survey of 2,525 decision-makers with AI experience in China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States-as well as interviews with 16 AI implementation experts-in order to understand the challenges companies face when implementing AI. The study covers technological, organizational, and cultural factors and identifies key challenges and solutions for AI implementation. This article develops a diagnostic framework to help executives navigate AI challenges as companies gain momentum, manage organization-wide complexities, and curate a network of partners, algorithms, and data sources to create value through AI.

This article discusses how Chinese multinational enterprises internationalize in an era of increasingly fractured globalization. It introduces new perspectives that identify and describe four strategic pathways these multinationals employ while acquiring strategic assets and building and leveraging capabilities to increase value from their international presence. The pathways-bouncing up, down, sideways, and back-depend on the multinationals' strategies and the evolution of their internationalization. The pathways are distinct yet intertwined and influenced by powerful non-market forces, including geopolitical tensions (U.S.-China rivalry in particular) and Chinese domestic regulatory intervention. These dynamics manifest themselves in globalization, de-globalization, and re-globalization shifts.

Throughout history, the advantages and costs of technological innovations have been unevenly distributed between the powerful and the rest of society, assert economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson in their new book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. In a Q&A, they discuss what's wrong with today's approach to automation, why machine usefulness is more important than machine intelligence, and what techno-optimists and -pessimists both get wrong.

Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have an AI advantage thanks to the vast amounts of data that they collect through their respective platforms. Using federated machine learning (FedML) technology, companies with access to relatively small data sets can join forces in collaborative artificial intelligence projects while keeping proprietary data private. FedML could be a game changer in bridging the digital divide between organizations with and without big data.

One of the most consequential governance questions for platform operators is deciding who sets prices and what discretion other parties in the transaction have to alter them. Putting the locus of control primarily in the hands of the platform provider presents drawbacks but so does allowing other stakeholders to set prices, if prices set too high or too low limit participation on the platform. The authors advocate for a hybrid approach that shares some control.

Rather than building strategy around the people they have, organizations should develop a better understanding of the roles that will be most critical in executing the most promising strategy, and then putting top performers in those positions. The authors demonstrate how this can be accomplished using data analysis and examples from professional soccer and the retail industry.

Recent events show that resistance to civil rights progress for members of marginalized or underrepresented groups remains entrenched, and opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and other steps toward improving equity have been emboldened. Organizations that are committed to diversity must prepare for the cost of defending inclusive organizations and adopt policies that make it difficult to roll back diversity gains.

Leaders seeking to hire across all racioethnic groups in order to foster a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace are likely to find that recruitment will become more challenging in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions. Considering candidates from a wider range of institutions rather than favoring graduates of elite universities is among the tactics the author suggests for surfacing high-potential candidates from disadvantaged racioethnic groups.

Full-on CEO engagement is needed for a successful organization redesign but many CEOs have difficulty maintaining that level of involvement. While the most effective CEOs keep their finger on the pulse of the redesign on an almost daily basis, from start to finish, leaders who lose control tend to have weaknesses such as half-heartedness, over-appeasement, indecisiveness, and incapacitation. The authors present a framework to help leaders recognize and overcome these vulnerabilities.

The need for business agility, that is, the capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances (and even to shape them), is high on the agenda of executives around the world, as they face up to increasing levels of uncertainty. But uncertainty still abounds about what business agility is, and most executives still struggle to master this capability. The introduction to this special issue reviews what we know and still do not know about business agility and introduces the six articles and suggests a path for more research.

Many companies lose significant revenue to counterfeiters who sell fake products that look identical to the real thing and unscrupulous supply chain partners who divert legitimate products for unauthorized sale on the black market. To effectively combat illicit trade, leaders need to embrace a multilayered approach that includes keeping tabs on the upstream supply chain, using traceable packaging, and educating consumers.

A Bentley University and Gallup survey on businesses' role in making a positive impact on society and the environment found that despite some differences across demographics, overall consumers feel that companies should take action to minimize their environmental impact but that large companies in particular aren't doing enough. The author suggests several actions companies can take to improve their environmental sustainability performance.

Conventional wisdom suggests that marketers should play it safe in a polarized culture and focus on potential customers who haven't yet made up their minds those in the middle, where the majority of the market is. But brand messaging can be more effective if it targets the subcultures that are strong brand supporters. Using McDonald's successful fan-driven marketing strategy as an example, the author describes how the propagation effect can leverage existing customers to win over new ones.

Despite widespread public commitments to integrate sustainability into business models, less than a third of U.S. employers engage in practices that support that objective, recent research shows. Many employees see a lack of commitment from management and short-term focus as key challenges. The authors share six practices observed at organizations that have made good progress at embedding sustainability into the business.

As robots are increasingly being incorporated into the workforce, one unexpected benefit is the ability to better assess the performance of their human counterparts on an individual level. Based on their research, the authors describe how having humans and robots work side by side can help busy managers more easily measure and improve workers' performance, and identify and reward top contributors.

Critics of stock buybacks allege that the practice is a form of market manipulation that allows insiders to unfairly profit and sacrifices long-term growth. The authors conducted a large-sample study of stock buybacks over the past 30 years in the U.S. and did not find a correlation between share repurchases and price manipulation, return reversals, excess CEO compensation, or underinvestment. A ban could, however, impose costs on U.S. public companies and other stakeholders.

Despite our reliance on entrepreneurs to kindle the fire of capitalism, we still know little about what motivates them and why. That’s concerning, since the data suggest most new job growth depends on the enterprise of entrepreneurs who build new solutions for old (and new) problems. For over 200 years, scholars have sought in vain to clarify the definition of entrepreneurship and reach consensus on its meaning. According to French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who coined the term “entrepreneur” around the dawn of the 19th century, “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” For economist Joseph Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a “wild spirit,” driven to disrupt norms and build new commodities of enduring value. But this leads to more questions: Can this creative wildness be developed? Or are entrepreneurs, as Steve Jobs put it, born primed to put “a dent in” the universe? Starting around 2002, written use of the word “entrepreneur” kept rising, and much public discussion of entrepreneurs now fixates on the fast-falling fortunes of flashy tech founders with dubious business practices. Ultimately, not all founders fit the label “entrepreneur”—it is only the tenacious ones with the skill to manage their wild spirit that dramatically boost productivity and yield and thereby lift up whole industries, sometimes entire economies, from ruin.

In this Executive Focus, the authors follow up with Dr. Brian Kropp, chief of research and group vice president at Gartner Research, Inc., on a previous interview about the work-from-home trend. Dr. Kropp explains where the trend stands currently as well as where managers can expect it to change in their organizations.