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From their research on digital initiatives at 30 organizations, the authors have identified four key practice areas that businesses should focus on to advance their strategic data-sharing capabilities. Using specific examples from Schneider Electric, Elevance Health, and other companies they studied, they describe how strategic data-sharing practices can help businesses better cocreate with customers, engage in novel partnerships, and pursue opportunities in digital ecosystems.

Proponents of the subscription model argue that it offers customers a better user experience and a lower barrier to access, while providers gain predictability and ease of communication with customers. But the risks of supply chain disruption and inflation are calling into question vendors' ability to fulfill their service commitments to customers and retain them over the long term.

Increasing recognition of the economic and social inequities experienced by Black Americans is spurring new investments in Black businesses and entrepreneurs. Making such investments in both the U.S. and in Africa can help increase diversity in entrepreneurship and create economic opportunities for communities of color, to the benefit of local economies. The authors explain why the period known as the golden age of Black business still offers lessons for leaders to help such businesses prosper.

Organizations' corporate social responsibility efforts are facing closer scrutiny today than ever before. In recent years, a new reputation management strategy has emerged: the confession. The authors describe a study in which companies that confessed their inadequacy in confronting racial inequity were rated as more socially responsible than organizations that did not issue such statements. Thus, a proactive approach can be more effective than a reactive strategy for building stakeholder trust.

Because of the way raw materials such as iron ore, copper, and aluminum are produced and sold, most consumer-facing manufacturers don't know much about the provenance of what goes into their products. What's needed is a market for responsibly produced commodities akin to the already robust systems in place for coffee and chocolate. The tools exist to build such a market, which would reward transparency and encourage environmental justice.

One of the biggest obstacles to effective problem-solving is not defining the problem well. Invoking the power of a? narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that you're solving the right problem. The authors suggest that any problem can be articulated as a quest in which the key elements are hero (protagonist), dragon (obstacle), and treasure (the desired outcome). Expressing a challenge in these simple terms can make it easier to see whether a problem has been framed incorrectly.

Weekly check-in meetings between managers and their teams or direct reports can feel like a waste of time without an agenda or a shared set of goals and expectations, but they are key opportunities to build trusting manager-employee relationships. The author shares five science-backed steps to help managers structure their one-on-ones with direct reports and team members, along with five key questions managers can focus on when meeting with a direct report.

The negative effects of bias in artificial intelligence models' underlying data has made headlines, and companies need to find ways to address it. But it's impossible to completely abolish bias in AI data to equitably account for diverse populations so instead, companies should remediate it to deliberately compensate for unfairness. The author describes a three-step process that can yield positive results for leaders looking to reduce the impact of AI bias.

For all the hype around bossless companies, managerial authority and hierarchy are still the best ways to ensure coordination, cooperation, creativity, predictability, and accountability in large organizations. But authority and hierarchy must be aligned to a company's specific needs. To fine-tune them, leaders should consider the need for speed in decision-making, the extent of employee knowledge, what knowledge is truly required, employee feelings of ownership, and procedural justice.

The authors contend that addressing the question "How much do my employees trust me?" is the real key to employee engagement. They discuss a free tool developed at Deloitte "HX TrustID" that companies can use to gauge employee trust and devise strategies for improving it. They then describe how two organizations one large, and one small have used the tool to address leaders' performance in four areas that contribute to employee trust: humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability.

Although corporate venture capital (CVC) has been studied as part of open innovation (OI), assumptions about knowledge flows crossing organizational boundaries between "the inside" and "the outside" have limited those explorations. Drawing on an abductive approach to grounded theorizing, this article introduces an intuitive yet novel framework that traces the sources and applications of knowledge obtained from CVC to derive new conditions for how those investments allow companies to orchestrate knowledge flows to overcome barriers and increase their innovation effectiveness. Besides exploring traditional OI knowledge flows within the CVC context, this article further identifies and examines both outside-out knowledge flows (which help to shape an ecosystem for a corporate innovator) and inside-in knowledge flows (which overcome internal silos to achieve real innovation impact).

In increasingly diverse workplaces, imposter syndrome may inhibit the performance of some of the best and brightest rising stars. Managers can help transform the hold that these fears can have on employees and make that concern a fleeting thought instead of a permanent restraint.

When it comes to valuing projects in highly uncertain business environments, real options valuation (ROV) isn’t popular as a management tool despite having long been touted as a best practice in academic circles. Seeking to understand why industry has failed to adopt this best practice, the authors interviewed valuation specialists in finance, consulting, and the mining industry. This article aims to help more industry players see ROV as, well, a real and valuable option by highlighting the case for using real options in highly uncertain business environments and offering recommendations on how to effectively deploy ROV. The authors found that the poor adoption of ROV occurs for three key reasons. First, it happens due to a lack of managerial expertise and knowledge. Second, the ROV computation process is highly complex. Third, communication issues exist because the outcomes of ROV are not easily understood without strong knowledge of the underlying concepts. To overcome these limitations and promote the use of real options, the authors present three recommendations: improve training and education, practice greater transparency, and communicate clearly. In order to facilitate these three recommendations, the authors have developed a new ROV software tool to value commodity-producing projects such as mines or refineries. Their Monte Carlo simulation method approximates the ROV by determining the optimal exercise strategy, enabling users to model complex real options problems that include multiple stochastic variables, early exercise rights, and operational flexibility.

Gaining the ability to make better investment decisions via ROV analysis isn't as complex as many business managers think

Workplace toxicity leads to a host of negative mental and physical health outcomes, particularly for women of color. Leaders can better support these employees and build a more equitable culture with the guidance offered here, starting with sharing more feedback, shifting organizational processes, and valuing contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Fostering psychological safety isn't enough to succeed at innovation if managers don't pay particular attention to creating conditions for healthy debate. If leaders can balance psychological safety with open, honest debate, they gain the benefits of both. The authors describe the factors most important to establishing this balance and outline what leaders can do to create a high-performance learning and innovation culture.

When the term quiet quitting is applied to employees whose efforts don't exceed what's in their job descriptions, it fails to recognize the current reality of real wages that have significantly decreased over the past 50 years while executive pay has skyrocketed. The author argues that quiet quitting should be replaced with a different label calibrated contributing that reflects an employee's rational choice to do the work they're paid for rather than go above and beyond unrewarded.

Most organizations put more resources toward identification, protection, and detection rather than their ability to respond to and recover from a cyber breach, leaving themselves vulnerable. But because companies can't protect against every new cyberattack, it's critical that they reduce the potential impact by putting more focus on cyber resilience. The authors describe how leaders can apply seven biology-inspired adaptive design principles to become more resilient against cyberattacks.

Research shows that the prevailing assumption that workplace deviance stems from a few bad apples is mistaken. Leaders have as strong, if not a stronger, effect on whether employees engage in deviant behaviors than is usually acknowledged. Thus, when employees act badly, savvy leaders take a step back and consider whether and how they may be complicit in that behavior.

In the midst of the worst inflation seen in 40 years, not all prices are rising. In the 1970s, the cost of taking a kilogram of water to space was $20,000 in today's dollars. Now, it is more like $2,000 - a tenfold reduction, and as SpaceX's Starship has $20/kg in its sights, there is a real possibility of another hundred-fold reduction. If this happens, access to space will open up like never before, creating a flood of new business opportunities. The authors-who include a Canadian astronaut-discuss the pros and cons of SpaceX's monopoly and suggest three key areas of opportunity for innovative companies who want to embrace this new frontier.