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In early January 2022, as speculation about an impending Russian attack on Ukraine swirled, the leaders of Ralabs, a Lviv-based software-development company, started working on a business continuity plan, or BCP. They outlined various scenarios, each representing a different level of Russian action and Ukrainian response. They monitored the news to better understand the challenges the company and its employees might confront and talked nonstop to customers to gauge their nervousness about doing business in Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, Russia did invade Ukraine, and the company's advance planning paid off. Its leaders had already relocated some employees, allocated budget for BCP-related activities, developed HR policies for a range of emergency situations, and conducted a number of educational programs to help employees feel prepared, on topics ranging from managing in a crisis to being drafted into the army. As a result, just a few weeks after the invasion Ralabs was back to 90% of typical performance, which has more or less continued if not improved over the past year. The lessons it learned-around the importance of scenario planning, flexibility, decisive decision-making, and managing customers and employees through uncertainty-may be helpful both to other Ukrainian organizations during this war and to leaders around the world faced with navigating any crisis.

There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI-technologies that can create new content such as text, images, and video-to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation. In the past two decades, companies have used crowdsourcing and idea competitions to involve outsiders in the innovation process. But many businesses have struggled to capitalize on these contributions. They've lacked an efficient way to evaluate the ideas, for instance, or to synthesize different ideas. Generative AI can help over­come those challenges, the authors say. It can supplement the creativity of employees and customers and help them produce and identify novel ideas-and improve the quality of raw ideas. Specifically, companies can use generative AI to promote divergent thinking, challenge expertise bias, assist in idea evaluation, support idea refinement, and facilitate collaboration among users.

For much of the past century, U.S. companies feared that unions would hurt shareholder value and innovation, so they responded to organized labor with one strategy: Fight, at all costs. This was brutally effective. Companies perfected the skill of union busting-so much so that most business leaders now have little experience with organized labor. But owing to an array of forces, including the pandemic and inflation, the landscape is shifting. Workers today feel less secure in their jobs and more uncertain about the future, and not surprisingly, a growing number of them are organizing. In fact, worker interest in joining a union, and public support of organized labor, is at its highest in decades. If business leaders stick to their old playbook, they risk permanently disenchanting their workforce and harming their brands. Instead, they must begin to reinvent corporate America's relationship with organized labor, working with, rather than against, unions and other formal and informal structures. Indeed, in the next 20 years, the skill of leading an organized-or organizing-workforce may well become the critical leadership skill.

The role of the CSO is undergoing a rapid and dramatic transformation. Historically CSOs have acted like stealth PR executives-their primary task was to tell an appealing story about corporate sustainability initiatives to the company's many stakeholders. Now, however, some CSOs have moved away from a role centered on messaging and instead are spearheading the true integration of material ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues into corporate strategy. This pivotal change requires close collaboration with other members of the senior leadership team and active engagement with investors. This article argues for four major changes to the CSO role. The CSO should be involved in strategy and capital allocation; be more focused on and realistic about stakeholder interactions; be more fully engaged with investors; and be supported with sufficient resources and exper­tise throughout the entire organization, including on the board and senior leadership team. In an ideal world, the authors say, a stand-alone CSO role would become obsolete once companies fully integrate ESG considerations into their corporate strategy and operations. Until that day arrives, however, it is crucial to adapt and evolve the CSO role.

Over the past few years the European Union has fined companies more than 1,400 times for a total of nearly €3 billion for violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Almost every week stories appear about how AI-driven decisions result in discrimination against women or minority members in job recruitment, credit approvals, medical diagnoses, or criminal sentencing. These stories are stoking feelings of unease about how data is collected, used, and analyzed. According to the authors, managers who are examining projects that involve gathering human-provided data or leveraging existing databases need to focus on five critical issues: the provenance of the data, the purpose for which it will be used, how it is to be protected, how the privacy of the data providers can be ensured, and how the data is prepared for use. They begin with a brief overview of the organizational requirements for a robust ethical-review process.

The disruptive potential of artificial intelligence (AI) has been on the minds of many professionals since the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. AI is seen as a potential disruptor in areas such as law, science, education, and training—and of decision making at the middle to upper levels of organizations. This article explores how AI (in this case, ChatGPT) might affect the challenges faced by strategists in leading management teams through a key part of strategic planning exercises: scenario planning. Scenario planning is an essential part of any strategic planning exercise. After all, most strategic plans aim to give a roadmap for success in three to five years’ time. As a “case study,” the author used ChatGPT to help him move quickly through the scenario-planning process in order to explore how environmental issues affecting the Canadian mining industry might change in the near future. He started by asking ChatGPT to identify the 20 forces that would shape the environmental issues of the mining industry in Canada in the next three to five years. From this experience, the author learned various lessons. First, ChatGPT can contribute enhanced data and new ideas and can serve as a powerful reality check and challenge to groupthink. Second, ChatGPT can allow us to do things previously unthinkable, but it can also become “the centre of gravity” as opposed to simply a powerful tool used for specific activities. Finally, the value of having teams work together to generate scenarios in messy, sometimes tense conversations cannot be overstated.

Why ChatGPT can be a strategic planning consultant's new best friend-if they are willing to adjust their value proposition.

Remote work can present unique challenges for individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But managers can implement simple strategies to tailor remote work to the needs of employees with ADHD. The authors provide a primer on ADHD and, based on their research, share five evidence-backed ways to make virtual work practices more inclusive of neurodivergent team members.

The emergence of new technologies and the threat of economic challenges are just two of the factors affecting the future prospects of businesses and employees alike. In such an environment, a skills-first strategy to hiring and retaining workers can benefit both companies and workers, according to data from LinkedIn. The authors explain how investing in a skills-first approach to bringing in new talent and helping employees upskill and reskill can set their workforce up for long-term resilience.

This article explores the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) journey to strategic agility through successively shifting to three different strategic alignments over the last six decades and suggests that logical incrementalism may be an unappreciated driver of this process. Three successive alignment models exhibit important shifts in technology strategy, competencies, and values of the organization. The three phases of incremental changes in shifting from one alignment model to the next are the emergence of new approaches, the embeddedness of these approaches in particular contexts, and their expansion to other organizational contexts.

While agile represents a crucial element of digital transformation, there is limited empirical evidence on how agile is actually implemented. This article presents a longitudinal case study of the agile implementation journey of a large product manufacturer over two years. It shows how the firm was able to achieve a large-scale agile implementation through a mix of top-down and bottom-up approaches. This process entailed continuous adaptations of agile to the firm's circumstances and needs, including ongoing articulations and re-articulations of agile to incorporate local ideas and address emerging challenges. This article also presents a framework for guiding managers undertaking an organization-wide agile implementation.

Agile management prescribes a set of structures and processes to help teams respond to change. This article presents an in-depth case study examining how high- and low- agility nursing teams differed in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizational restructuring, and floods. It unveils the crucial role of "affective leaders" in high-agility teams during those crises. These leaders constructed positive emotional experiences for their teams to successfully respond to adversity. The findings remind scholars and practitioners that agile management's founding tenet of "valuing individuals and interactions" implies understanding, working with, and actively recalibrating emotions.

Based on an in-depth analysis of a successful large-scale agile transformation, this article sheds light on the evolving role of line managers during the transformation. At the beginning of the transformation, line managers act like "missionaries" and leverage influencing mechanisms in their attempts to foster the adoption of agile values. At maturity, the role of line managers evolves into a role similar to "priests" where discipline mechanisms are enacted to maintain and sustain the newly adopted agile values. The social contracts and the organizational conditions that underpin such evolution have implications for selecting suitable line managers.

One of the players in the 2008 financial crisis was a phenomenon the authors call algorithmic inertia: when organizations use algorithmic models that are meant to account for a dynamic environment but fail to keep pace with critical changes. In this article, the authors explain algorithmic inertia, identify its sources, and suggest practices that organizations can implement to overcome it.

Risk intelligence supports organizational resilience by helping leaders identify and manage a broad array of potential threats to their company's value exchange system over time and across changing business contexts. To strengthen their organization's risk intelligence, leaders should systematically categorize and interpret risk events, compartmentalize uncertainty and reduce its impact, and construct and contextualize an enterprise risk network.

Big professional services firms appeared to be in the crosshairs of new, technology-fueled competitors a decade ago but many have maintained or even bolstered their positions. How they did so holds lessons for other incumbents aiming to counter threats that are disruptive to their businesses.

Leaders increasingly characterize the workforce as being broader than an organization's employees, encompassing all of the people and groups that contribute to achieving the company's business objectives. The shift is challenging leaders to redefine who and what constitutes their workforce and to develop new management practices and organizational structures.

New research shows that factors unrelated to employees' knowledge, capabilities, and behavior such as who they report to, their access to accelerator roles, and whether they take advantage of flexible working arrangements play a leading role in who gets promoted. When managers understand the circumstances that contribute to or block paths to promotion for women and people of color, they can apply proactive career management to help position employees for advancement more equitably.

When budgets are tight, learning and development is often one of the first programs to be cut but that's shortsighted, the authors contend. In this article, they explain how prioritizing ongoing employee training and upskilling benefit not just individuals but their teams and the company as a whole. They also discuss three strategies to help managers effectively allocate L&D resources and suggest approaches to help employees secure professional development funding.

Strategic corporate philanthropy voluntary giving that builds on a company's core competencies to both effect social impact and improve its competitive position can be difficult for leaders to navigate. Based on their research, the authors have developed a framework to help business leaders determine whether a philanthropic project is a good fit for their organization. By asking the right questions, leaders can best decide what, how, and where to engage in corporate philanthropy.