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Soft-spoken as a child, Chung found her voice as a journalist and in 1993 was named coanchor of the CBS Evening News. In this interview she talks about her determination to climb the ladder, how she navigated sexism in the workplace, and more.

Four new books and a podcast discuss the use of perception-altering drugs: Psychedelic Outlaws, by Joanna Kempner; Have a Good Trip, by Eugenia Bone; Trippy, by Ernesto Londoño; More! The Microdose Diet, by Peggy Van de Plassche; and Luminous, from Wisconsin Public Radio.

Today artificial intelligence can be harnessed by nearly anyone, using commands in everyday language instead of code. Soon it will transform more than 40% of all work activity, according to the authors' research. In this new era of collaboration between humans and machines, the ability to leverage AI effectively will be critical to your professional success. This article describes the three kinds of "fusion skills" you need to get the best results from gen AI. Intelligent interrogation involves instructing large language models to perform in ways that generate better outcomes-by, say, breaking processes down into steps or visualizing multiple potential paths to a solution. Judgment integration is about incorporating expert and ethical human discernment to make AI's output more trustworthy, reliable, and accurate. It entails augmenting a model's training sources with authoritative knowledge bases when necessary, keeping biases out of prompts, ensuring the privacy of any data used by the models, and scrutinizing suspect output. With reciprocal apprenticing, you tailor gen AI to your company's specific business context by including rich organizational data and know-how into the commands you give it. As you become better at doing that, you yourself learn how to train the AI to tackle more-sophisticated challenges. The AI revolution is already here. Learning these three skills will prepare you to thrive in it.

Enterprises that own multiple businesses often have a flawed approach to strategy: They focus too much on the makeup of their portfolios and too little on enhancing the businesses in them. Strategies for adding value to a corporation's businesses fall on a continuum. On one end the businesses in the portfolio are completely unrelated; at the other they have many similarities. Each place on the continuum requires a different kind of organizational structure and specific management processes to support it. To succeed at execution, you need to determine where on the spectrum your business falls and then align your portfolio selection, structure, and processes with your vision of how to add value.

The boards of too many publicly traded companies are downright timid when considering matters involving science and technology. More often than not, they focus on security and digitization-a defensive posture that fails to consider the bigger opportunities emerging from new materials, space science, and a better understanding of the genome-to name just a few areas of opportunity. It's easy to be lulled into thinking that science does not matter to a nontech company. But that distinction isn't quite so meaningful when it comes to capitalizing on the opportunities from technological change that is now ubiquitous, rapid, turbulent, and often emanating from increasingly unlikely corners. The authors have observed firsthand an effective way to address this gap: the board technology committee. Drawing on the achievements of tech committees at AES, Johnson & Johnson, and Altria (companies for which the authors are or have been directors), they describe how these entities can advance the interests of organizations and offer advice on how to set one up.

Marketers have begun experimenting with AI to improve their brand-management efforts. But unlike other marketing tasks, brand management involves more than just repeatedly executing one specialized function. Long considered the exclusive domain of creative talent, it encompasses multiple activities designed to build the reputation and image of a business-such as crafting and communicating the brand story, ensuring that the product or service and its price reflect the brand's competitive positioning, and managing customer relationships to forge loyalty to the brand. A brand is a promise to customers about the quality, style, reliability, and aspiration of a purchase. AI can't fulfill that promise on its own (at least not anytime soon). But it can shape customers' impressions of a brand at every interaction. And it can automate expensive creative tasks-including product design. To succeed with it, you must understand how it is perceived by stakeholders and what can be done not only to mitigate their concerns but to make them avid supporters. Using examples from Intuit, Caterpillar, and LOOP, along with in-depth scholarly research, the authors propose a framework for thinking about the key roles that AI plays when it comes to managing brands effectively.

It's been a rough few years for ESG-the popular shorthand for measuring and managing a company's environmental, social, and governance performance. Critics on the political left believe ESG is insufficient for addressing major societal issues such as climate change; critics on the right say ESG pushes a liberal agenda. The barrage of criticism has caused ESG to lose its luster among many executives. Yet the need for a transparent way to connect a company's financial performance with its ESG performance remains. It's time, says Oxford professor Robert G. Eccles, to take stock of ESG and chart a path forward. He acknowledges the complex challenges that still need to be resolved. Chief among them is whether to use single materiality (which focuses on shareholder value) or double materiality (which includes societal impact). In this article Eccles recommends a pragmatic approach for corporate leaders: clearly define corporate purpose, improve transparency in ESG reporting, and engage stakeholders constructively. These strategies will help companies manage ESG pressures by focusing on material issues that affect shareholder value while also acknowledging and addressing broader societal impacts.

Many experts are urging established companies to radically innovate-and disrupt themselves before someone else does. The trouble is, large firms aren't designed for moon shots. Their owners don't like the risks and won't kill the goose that lays the golden egg. As a result, all too often they end up defaulting to incremental innovation. But there is a solution: Incumbents can partner with entrepreneurial start-ups or with intrapreneurs that have ideas for breakthrough products. By doing that, they can leverage their significant resources while increasing the odds that those ideas will take off. This approach does require careful management, however. Drawing on the experiences of more than a dozen large multinationals, including Atlas Copco, Enel, and Epiroc, this article outlines a three-stage innovation process for incumbents to follow: First, set up numerous projects with multiple partners, nurturing them until their chances of success become clear. Next, once a venture has a breakthrough, gradually increase your commitment and help it remove roadblocks. Finally, when its business model is viable and it has a critical mass of customers, rapidly mobilize the resources it needs to scale up quickly.

When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. What leaders need to do instead is conduct rigorous discussions that assess any findings and whether they apply to the situation in question. Such conversations should explore the internal validity of any analysis (whether it accurately answers the question) as well as its external validity (the extent to which results can be generalized from one context to another). To avoid missteps, you need to separate causation from correlation and control for confounding factors. You should examine the sample size and setting of the research and the period over which it was conducted. You must ensure that you're measuring an outcome that really matters instead of one that is simply easy to measure. And you need to look for-or undertake-other research that might confirm or contradict the evidence. By employing a systematic approach to the collection and interpretation of information, you can more effectively reap the benefits of the ever-increasing mountain of external and internal data and make better decisions.

Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) has the potential to radically alter how business is conducted, and there's no doubt that it will create a lot of value. Companies have used it to identify entirely new product opportunities and business models; to automate routine decisions, freeing humans to focus on decisions that involve ethical trade-offs, empathy, or imagination; to deliver customized professional services formerly available only to the wealthy; and to develop and communicate product and other recommendations to customers faster, more cheaply, and more informatively than was possible with human-driven processes. But, the authors ask, will companies be able to leverage gen AI to build a competitive advantage? The answer, they argue in this article, is no-unless you already have a competitive advantage that rivals cannot replicate using AI. Then the technology may serve to amplify the value you derive from that advantage.

In 2008 Abbott introduced a revolutionary new device, FreeStyle Navigator, designed to improve the lives of the world's more than 500 million diabetes patients by offering continuous glucose monitoring with technology that could translate an electrochemical signal from the body into precise, real-time data. Doctors and patients who tried the device appreciated it-but it was bulky, hard to manufacture, and expensive. And without widespread adoption, it wouldn't have the hoped-for impact. Abbott's leaders soon realized that they needed to go back to the drawing board. Four years later they launched FreeStyle Libre, a reimagined continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system in which an even smaller sensor applied to a patient's arm sends data directly to a smartphone app every minute. It is now used by millions globally, and by the end of 2024 it will have generated more than $6 billion in revenue, making it one of the most successful medical devices-as measured by usage and sales-in history. The pivot from the Navigator to the Libre was a deeply consequential decision for Abbott, and others can learn from the principles the company's leaders followed to arrive at and then execute on that choice.

MIT Sloan School of Management's Juanjuan Zhang and three coresearchers explored the relationship between genetics and sales performance. They studied 117 salespeople at an Asian telemarketing company over the course of 13 months. They cross-referenced employee DNA with performance metrics, such as revenue produced, the ability to identify selling opportunities, and effort. The conclusion: The employees with superior sales performance were genetically different from the rest of the group.

Though celebrity influencers get lots of attention, they often don't produce sales. When Bocconi University's Maximilian Beichert and colleagues looked at the data on close to 2 million purchases and hundreds of paid influencer endorsements, they discovered that influencers with fewer than 10,000 followers delivered far better returns. In this article Beichert shares his findings along with tips on getting the best results from influencer campaigns.

<div style="font-size: 0.94em; line-height: 1.4;"><p align="justify">Most high-tech companies are reinventing themselves. The changes high-tech companies have undertaken have made it easier for them to deliver and scale high-tech services instead of simply selling products. Their sales representatives have an increasing focus on building long-term, meaningful client relationships over large-volume deals. They’re starting to bypass conversations about product upgrades in favour of discussions on innovations, data-driven value comparisons, and as-a-service models. Your company needs to know what it can be getting out of these new strategic contracts to get more value, save time and money, and reduce risks. You need to learn how to work with your high-tech providers as they transform themselves. An opportunity exists to carve out customized product and service packages with your suppliers to meet your company’s needs. This article offers a checklist to help your company reap the benefits of the evolving high-tech industry: <br><br><ul><li>Figure out how a subscription model can help you.</li><li>Get into the weeds and be strategic—look for purpose, scale, and flexibility. </li><li>Calculate a cost-to-innovation balance. </li><li>Zoom in on the fine print and iron out misalignments inherent in new service-level agreements between your business and your suppliers. </li><li>Stay connected and keep asking about the support your supplier might be able to provide.</li></ul>

<div style="font-size: 0.94em; line-height: 1.4;"><p align="justify">How can business school educators most effectively teach diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)? In 2023, a working group devoted to the subject held a professional development workshop on teaching DEI. This article summarizes key takeaways from the event. As the first teaching demonstration showed, when developing diversity initiatives, it’s important to create interventions and messages that aren’t one-size-fits-all. In the second teaching demonstration, the instructor set conversation guidelines that included “active and empathetic listening,” “challenge the idea, not the person,” and “take space and make space.” She challenged students to embrace discomfort, trust intent, and acknowledge assumptions, and sought to reframe conversations about DEI not as difficult but as transformational. In the third demonstration, the instructor encouraged students to think about the conditions that allowed them to grow their emotional intelligence or leadership skills. The article ends with some expert advice from DEI instructors: bring your authentic self; orient yourself to learn; and invite reflection.

<div style="font-size: 0.94em; line-height: 1.4;"><p align="justify">Ivey Business School Professor Emeritus Glenn Rowe has learned a lot about leadership by studying decision-making in the private sector, but his most valuable leadership lesson was learned as the officer-in-charge of Patrol Boat Standoff in the mid-1980s, when Rowe was a staff officer at a Canadian naval reserve division. On his first day as officer-in-charge, Rowe made an error that led to his ship’s grounding—a cardinal sin in any navy. This article—which Rowe co-authored with Ken Nason, another former Canadian naval officer with a second career in business—examines how failure can drive leadership development by highlighting how it positively affected Rowe’s career. Although we often hear that failure is not an option, this is a costly perspective. After all, failure shapes our character, restores focus, renews motivation, and teaches us about accountability, transparency, responsibility, adaptability, and ownership. Learning from failure, however, can’t happen unless one embraces failure as a teacher. When Rowe grounded his patrol boat, he learned the value of staying calm during a crisis and discovered that he had command ability. Earlier in his career, when approaching HMCS Preserver’s commanding officer to discuss issues tied to his performance, he didn’t save his job, but by admitting to himself and navy authorities that his performance was less than ideal, he avoided the “ostrich effect.”

George Mason University's Lei Gao and his co-researchers-Macquarie University's Jianlei Han, Zheyao Pan, and Huixuan Zhang-collected birthplace data on 1,777 U.S.-born CEOs and determined how many decades each leader's hometown had spent on or near the frontier during the country's westward expansion. Examining accounting and patent databases, they found that firms led by CEOs from longtime frontier counties were awarded more patents than other firms-and those patents were cited more frequently and had greater value in the marketplace.

In a recent study of European start-ups, one technique consistently boosted performance: the scientific method, a centuries-old discipline of formulating, testing, and tweaking hypotheses. Ventures employing it generated more revenues than those that didn't and were also more likely to pivot away from unviable ideas, a necessity for early-stage firms. The key to pivoting is focusing not on your ideas but on the answers to your experiments, which should provide insight into customer demand and industry pain points. That approach helped Osense, a start-up focused on technology for tracking carbon emissions, find its successful model. Its first idea was for peer-to-peer product rentals, and its second was for a platform for renting e-vehicles. If it hadn't applied the scientific method, "we would have ended up with a product that wasn't viable," says cofounder Cosimo Cecchini.

There's a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that molds employee behavior as intended. All too often a culture is described as a set of anodyne norms, principles, or values, which do not offer decision-makers guidance on how to make difficult choices when faced with conflicting but equally defensible courses of action. The trick to making a desired culture come alive is to debate and articulate it using dilemmas. If you identify the tough dilemmas your employees routinely face and clearly state how they should be resolved-"In this company, when we come across this dilemma, we turn left"-then your desired culture will take root and influence the behavior of the team. To develop a culture that works, follow six rules: Ground your culture in the dilemmas you are likely to confront, dilemma-test your values, communicate your values in colorful terms, hire people who fit, let culture drive strategy, and know when to pull back from a value statement.

Over the several weeks that Paris will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer, Sodexo will prepare and serve up to 40,000 meals a day to 15,000 athletes, their fans, and organizing committee staffers at 22 venues in and around the city. Catering an event on that level is quite a challenge. But so is the one the company has set for itself around sustainability. As one of the world's largest food-services companies-managing dining options at hospitals, schools, office buildings, and much more in 45 countries around the world-Sodexo has been spearheading a push toward more-sustainable consumption, and it intends to take that ethos to the Olympics. Ingredients will be sourced from eco-friendly suppliers and, where possible, local ones. Waste will be kept to a minimum. And as part of an ongoing effort to shift eating habits away from resource-intensive choices, menus will emphasize delicious plant-based dishes. The company has become a market maker in sustainability-not just to improve the efficiency and productivity of its value chain and ensure financial success, but also for the benefit of society at large.