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Unhappiness is at a record high. According to Gallup, people feel more anger, sadness, worry and stress than ever before. And global misery was rising well before the pandemic hit. After studying the 20 per cent of people who reported having a great life, Gallup found they had five things in common, while the 20 per cent who rated their lives the worst had very little of any of these things. Business leaders who believe their organization has a purpose beyond making money, he argues, should put that purpose in writing and then start collecting data to help build the world's official statistics on that topic. This data will not only help the organization understand if it is achieving its purpose, it will help inform public sector leaders who badly need it to turn the tide on unhappiness.

There can be no arguing that we are in the midst of a leadership crisis. And not just in politics but in the business world, as well. We know this first and foremost because people aren't excited about their work: According to Gallup, two in three are not involved in or enthusiastic about their work, and 50 per cent are actively looking for a new job. The authors present their finding that great leaders possess five core characteristics that help them "connect at an authentic human level with people". Taken together, these characteristics constitute 'leading with heart'. As they demonstrate, leading with heart isn't just about being chummy with your employees or making people feel good. It's about creating an environment of safety and connection versus one of fear and isolation.

With shocking turns of events such as the FTX fiasco, market participants need to be fully aware of the risks and opportunities that Blockchain-based trading presents. The author, who studies financial innovation for a living at the University of Toronto, presents what everyone should know about centralized and decentralized trading platforms. Defining everything from wallets to crypto-wash-trading and tax-loss harvesting, he argues that there are two possible futures: One is that some immensely popular non-financial applications emerge. The other is that, over time, most traditional financial assets - including fiat money and property registries - are either tokenized or directly re-issued as new vehicles on blockchains so that they can be listed, used and transferred without borders. For all of the issues he identifies, he maintains that blockchain-based trading holds enormous promise.

Admired companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash and Alibaba reinvented the rules of strategy by deploying a new model: the business ecosystem. An ecosystem can be defined as 'a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution.' Traditional companies have started to understand the threat, embrace the opportunity and launch their own business ecosystems. For example, John Deere, founded in 1837, is leading the race to building the most comprehensive smart-farming ecosystem. And retailer giant Walmart has become a serious competitor of Amazon with its Walmart Marketplace. The authors present eight major shifts (four in mindset and four in operating model) that traditional companies must embrace to become successful ecosystem players.

Despite an uptick in socially-responsible behaviour by corporations in recent years, irresponsible employment practices remain all too common. Workers have been enslaved (by Nestle's seafood suppliers in Thailand) and subjected to compulsory political and religious indoctrination (by suppliers to Adidas, H&M and Nike in China). The authors share their research findings, which cast doubt on the ability of monitoring alone to compel suppliers in emerging markets to change their practices. What is needed, they argue, is a new brand of entrepreneur: the institutional entrepreneur. Emerging-market manufacturers and the corporations that buy from them must join forces to meet the challenge of eliminating low-road employment practices.

Today, much of what we take for granted in our daily lives stems from machine learning. Every time you use a wayfinding app to get from point A to point B, use dictation to convert speech to text, or unlock your phone using face ID, you're relying on AI. Companies across industries are relying on-and investing in - AI to drive logistics, improve customer service, increase efficiency and much more. The author presents research findings from Accenture, showing that organizations fall under four categories of 'AI maturity': Achievers, Builders, Innovators and Experimentors. He then describes the practices and mindsets of Achievers and presents five success factors for progressing toward AI maturity.

When the author launched what would become Marico as a division within his family's business, Bombay Oil, it was with product innovation: Instead of selling edible oils in bulk to other businesses, it would sell in smaller, branded packages directly to consumers. Eventually the division became a separate entity, which is now one of India's largest homegrown CPG companies. Its growth has depended on constant innovation-around not just products, packaging, and pricing but also supply chain, talent management, and business models. Over the past decade Marico has branched out into services with its Kaya skin-care spas, pioneered the use of premium hair oils, and added savory oats to Indian diets. Through the Marico Innovation Foundation, Mariwala also promotes innovative thinking outside the company, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs in their efforts to scale up new ideas. The key to doing that well, he says, is to be ever curious about customer needs, to create a flat hierarchy that rewards risk-taking, to learn from every failure, and to constantly prototype, experiment, refine, and retest.

Many start-ups experience enormous popularity and runaway growth, but only a few go on to become stable giants. What separates them from the pack? They all go through a developmental stage called extrapolation, say three business school professors. This stage isn't part of traditional organizational theory, which holds that businesses begin in exploration mode (testing out hypotheses about how they'll solve problems and learning whether people will pay for their solutions) and then move into exploitation mode (as growth slows and they fine-tune their business models to sharpen their advantage). But between those two well-known stages is the crucial extrapolation stage. During it, a company both explores and exploits. And most significantly, it works to ensure that each new customer brings in additional revenue while incurring only marginal cost-the secret to lasting, profitable growth. A new enterprise needs multiple strengths to navigate this phase-such as a proven monetization approach, a strong go-to-market strategy, network and density effects, and capital. It also must systematically identify and remove internal business-model constraints on growth that could prevent it from achieving scale.

With inflation high, a global recession possible, and consumers spending carefully, many companies are concerned about preserving profit margins. In this article, pricing consultant Rafi Mohammed argues that instead of simply adjusting prices, firms should consider adding new ways to charge customers. He outlines 18 different pricing tactics that can be used for various purposes: to accommodate buyers with different usage needs, to appeal to people on a tight budget, to spur purchases by customers who love a good deal, to achieve favorable prices when the value of an offering is uncertain, and to increase business efficiency. Mohammed urges companies to think creatively about whether a pricing convention commonly used in other industries might work for their own product or service. For example, Allstate has borrowed the metering model and introduced auto insurance premiums based on actual miles driven. Mammoth Holdings, which owns more than 100 car washes, offers monthly subscriptions for unlimited washes. Some hotels sell day passes to their pools and fitness facilities. By creating a mix of pricing options, companies are likely to please existing customers and attract new ones.

Covid-19 exposed wide inequities in health in the United States and around the world. But health disparities persisted long before the pandemic. In this article the authors explain why businesses should help find solutions to health inequities and showcase companies innovating in this space. The article outlines four opportunities for companies. They can optimize benefits and health plan offerings, address social determinants of health, expand primary care and mental health access through virtual care and community partnerships, and make benefits and health care easy to navigate. To improve health equity among their employees and communities, businesses will need to invest in a multiyear effort and equip themselves with the right leadership, resources, and processes. Key steps for getting started include building a business case for investments, collecting data to understand specific problems, identifying an initial population to focus on, engaging a broad group of stakeholders to design solutions, and measuring progress.

Digital technologies are pushing decision-making ability to the edges of the organization, allowing businesses to adopt structures that are flatter and more reconfigurable than those they have traditionally used. When AI and other software make information transparent to all authorized decision-makers on the front lines, directly and without managerial filters, it unleashes their creative and collaborative potential instead of trapping them in endless reporting and coordination loops. It can help to create, in other words, a "permissionless corporation." The authors contend that companies with three or four layers, faster problem-solving, and a permissionless mindset will outcompete traditional players. But making the transformation to such a structure will require companies to completely rethink how people work; it's not enough to streamline a process here or there or take out one layer of traditional structure. Using real-world examples, the authors detail how companies need to pay painstaking attention to performance metrics, ensure that information gets to the front line, communicate the context in which decisions are made, and leverage multifunctional teams.

Almost every leader in every sector is now dealing with angry stakeholders. Even a revered company like Apple can find itself suddenly managing outrage flashpoints, both with employees and with external groups. Such encounters are nothing new; what sets this time apart is a perfect storm of three forces: (1) Many people feel unhopeful about the future. (2) Many feel, rightly or wrongly, that the game has been rigged against them. (3) Many are being drawn toward ideologies that legitimize an us-versus-them approach. The author offers a five-step framework for dealing with outrage that draws on analytical insights from disciplines as wide-ranging as the science of aggression, managerial economics, organizational behavior, and political philosophy. It forms the basis of a course he teaches at Oxford and has been built inductively through a series of deep-dive case studies on a variety of organizations, including IKEA, the London Metropolitan Police, Nestlé, and Oxford University Hospitals.

Facing a crisis or an opportunity, leaders often fall back on the leadership style that has worked for them in the past. But to be effective, they need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to respond in real time. In this article two leadership coaches offer an approach, called the "four stances," to help leaders improve their interpersonal communication: Lean In. Take an active stance on resolving an issue. Actions in this stance include deciding, directing, guiding, challenging, and confronting. Lean Back. Take an analytical stance to observe, collect, and understand data. Actions include analyzing, asking questions, and possibly delaying decisions. Lean With. Take a collaborative stance, focusing on caring and connecting. Actions include empathizing, encouraging, and coaching. Don't Lean. Be still and create space for a new solution to bubble up from the subconscious. This stance also serves to calm emotions if they have been triggered. Actions include contemplating, visualizing, and breathing. Leaders should identify which stance is their default, make a plan for using alternative ones in various situations, and be ready to pivot if an approach is not working.

AI initiatives at many organizations are too small and too tentative. They never get to the only step that can add economic value-being deployed on a large scale. Testing the waters may deliver valuable insights, but it probably won't be enough to achieve true transformation. A pilot program or experiment can take you only so far. The authors have identified 30 companies that have gone all in on AI-and achieved success-as well as 10 actions those companies took to become successful AI adopters: (1) Know what you want to accomplish. (2) Work with an ecosystem of partners. (3) Master analytics. (4) Create a modular, flexible IT architecture. (5) Integrate AI into existing workflows. (6) Build solutions across the organization. (7) Create an AI governance and leadership structure. (8) Develop and staff centers of excellence. (9) Invest continually. (10) Always seek new sources of data. In other words, you need to be aggressive enough with AI that the technology eventually transforms every aspect of your business.

A study of some 16,000 major projects-from large buildings to bridges, dams, power stations, rockets, railroads, information technology systems, and even the Olympic Games-reveals a massive project-management problem. Only 8.5% of those projects were delivered on time and on budget, while a mere 0.5% were completed on time and on budget and produced the expected benefits. In other words, 99.5% of large projects failed to deliver as promised. Master architect Frank Gehry consistently defies those odds, producing projects of staggering beauty while meeting time and budget targets. This article reveals four lessons, gleaned from interviews with Gehry and his colleagues, for successfully managing big projects.

In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are more usefully divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now. Most of us tend to think in just one of those four ways. But we can hone our ability to be creative in other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to successfully execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to optimize innovation across the workforce.

In times of tumult, we need comfort, healing, and inspiration. A good way to find them is by appreciating the vast and wondrous things that transcend us, say several new books.

Ron Howard achieved early fame as a child actor on The Andy Griffith Show. Then came a long stint as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. But from an early age he wanted to direct, and now he has a number of award-winning movies to his credit. He talks about the role of his parents, the arc of his career, and how he gets the most out of his actors.

When an established consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) company introduces a new product, it faces a potentially make-or-break decision: how to brand it. Tying it to an existing brand (as was the case for Cherry Coke and Avon Hand Lotion) is tempting. Customers are more likely to try a new product with a familiar association, and companies have to expend fewer marketing resources to launch it. But the strategy has risks, too: Weak or failed brand extensions can harm the parent company. When the maker of Coors beer introduced a nonalcoholic beverage, Coors Rocky Mountain Spring Water, customers were confused, with some wondering about the alcohol content of the beverage. Sales of both water and beer suffered, and the new product was ultimately discontinued. A new study can help companies make the right branding decision-and shows that those who do will be rewarded with higher returns.

The stock market isn't always rational; often it's swayed by superstitions. A case in point is the bump the market gets when Punxsutawney Phil doesn't see his shadow.