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The authors' research into leader character demonstrates its effect on judgment and finds that fostering a culture where character is valued equally alongside competence can result in better decisions and outcomes. Furthermore, they find that, as with competence, character can be developed through education and practice.

Only 10% of job opportunities are filled with internal lateral hires which represents a missed opportunity for employers and employees alike. Existing workers' institutional knowledge can help them quickly contribute in their new roles. Workers can also gain new skills that align with their career goals, leading to increased retention. Based on their research, the authors offer four practical insights to help companies that are currently underutilizing internal talent.

Mentors seldom use their roles to engage in identity work that celebrates the unique characteristics of their mentees. But research shows that mentors have a critical opportunity to redefine the often-gendered rhetoric of success that rewards ideal working at the cost of well-being. Drawing from a recent study, the authors offer tips for mentors and mentees on challenging toxic behaviors and unreasonable expectations and instead prioritizing health, well-being, and equity.

The authors present a framework for assessing a company's social and environmental performance based on four levers businesses can use to create impact: (1) the products and services the company develops or sells, (2) the customer segments it targets, (3) changes in operations, and (4) how profits are used. They explain the levers in detail, highlight links to the legacy concepts of ESG and impact investing, and identify tools for assessing a company's performance in each area.

There is no impending threat of large-scale automation and displacement of human labor on the horizon. That's the conclusion reached by the authors after reviewing the research around smart machines in workplaces, and speaking with leaders in hundreds of organizations. In an adaption of their book Working With AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration, they lay out where they see limitations of AI in the workplace and where practitioners can expect job continuity for the immediate future.

Two strategic factors of any business are customer interaction (how close you are to your customers) and customer participation (how involved customers are in producing the offering). In recent years, we have seen companies increase interaction through servitization and increase customer participation through self-service technologies. Yet, more is not necessarily better. Too much customer interaction can destroy operating efficiencies. Too much customer participation can compromise quality and depersonalize service relationships. This article provides a framework for analyzing customer interaction and participation, including an outline of decision factors, with the goal of identifying optimal and sustainable positioning for any given offering.

This article is a compilation of what the author considers sound advice presented to new and aspiring CEOs by a retired one with more than two decades in the role across three organizations. Keith Collins shares key learnings from a career related to governance, financial stewardship, strategy, culture, structure, team building, and leadership: 1) good governance makes things work (ensure there is clear agreement on this layer of the governance model while being recruited for the role); 2) strong financial stewardship improves your sleep; 3) laser focus on strategy gets you where you want to go; 4) strategy and culture must be aligned; 5) structure must follow strategy; 6) build your leadership team with leaders; and 7) how you lead and what you say matters. Additionally, as a young manager, Collins learned a couple important lessons about leadership and communication that were reinforced during his time as an executive and a CEO. First, the leadership style of a manager, executive, or CEO will inevitably shape the leadership style of their direct reports. Second, what leaders say—and how they say it—matters a great deal to those receiving the messages.

The transition to a green economy is expected to create plenty of new employment opportunities. Unfortunately, filling them will be far more challenging than most employers think. Accenture’s research on the future of the green economy in the Asia Pacific region shows strong employment growth potential. But the research also identified a significant disconnect between youthful demand for “green” employment and where most green job growth is taking place. The sectors not known for sustainability are driving most green job creation. Training and salary expectations also don’t match the emerging opportunities, since the majority of green jobs will not require advanced qualifications, nor command relatively higher salaries. To understand the green jobs landscape in the region the authors targeted, they identified four pathways to reducing greenhouse gas emissions: transitioning transport, supplying low-carbon electricity, decarbonizing the built environment, and greening agriculture and land use. The results showed that transitioning transport had the greatest jobs potential. By breaking down the jobs created across the four pathways into specific industries, the authors found that up to 76 per cent of the 32.6 million new jobs would be in construction (18.1 million) and manufacturing (6.7 million). Tech-intensive roles requiring a highly trained workforce will undoubtedly be part of the equation. However, relatively better paying jobs will be the minority, accounting for less than 8 per cent of the total jobs potential in the Asia Pacific region.

Many leaders recognize that their organization's corporate culture needs improvement but don't know where to start. Research on unhealthy corporate cultures points to toxic leadership, toxic social norms, and work design as the three most powerful predictors of toxic workplace behavior. The authors explore evidence-based interventions, organized around these key drivers of toxic culture, that leaders and companies can use to retain employees and create a more positive workplace culture.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in late June is affecting some employees' decisions about where they want to live and work. As some states pass laws to ban or restrict access to abortion services, employers' responses may affect their ability to attract and retain top talent. The authors offer five actions organizational leaders can take to support and protect employees' reproductive freedom in light of some states' changing reproductive health care policies.

In this installment of MIT Sloan Management Review's Leading With Impact series, CEO Rich Kesrchner and chief operating officer Yvonne Wang discuss DirectBooks' approach to innovation with coach and consultant Chris Clearfield. They also talk about the impetus for establishing a communications platform for underwriters and institutional investors, prioritizing ongoing workflow refinements, and their approach to managing multiple stakeholders.

Materiality assessments play an important role in helping firms to select the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics to include in their sustainability report. This article presents the six main steps of materiality assessments, the methods used, and how the complexity, uncertainty, and evaluative nature of sustainability issues complicate them. This article draws two conclusions: the selected materiality perspective influences how the other steps are conducted, and assessment results should not only focus on selecting win-win scenarios, but also on "tensioned topics," which indicate material societal impact but lack a business case.

Drawing on her new book, The Innovation Mindset, IBM Watson Health's Lorraine Marchand discusses common mistakes leaders make in managing innovation. One of her key pieces of advice for managers: Ask, "What problem are we solving for the customer?" and then follow a disciplined process to design a customer-focused solution, rather than first developing a new technology and then figuring out where it could be applied.

Digital technologies are increasingly changing the nature of competition and generating externalities that impact society. On the one hand, digitalization allows organizations to create substantial economic value in shorter periods of time through improved economies of scale, scope, and learning, resulting is increasing returns on capital and competitive concentration. On the other hand, ensuing societal concerns with inequities, regulatory lapses, and lack of transparency and truthfulness represent significant challenges for effective corporate governance. This article addresses the consequences to stakeholders that emerge from the digital economy, discussing how traditional governance mechanisms are ill-equipped to subvert negative externalities. We offer a stewardship-based model of corporate governance as a solution to the pressing problems plaguing consumers, employees, and other salient stakeholders of digital business excesses, with an emphasis on truthful disclosures, enhanced transparency, improvements in equitable allocation of organizational resources, and heightened trust relationships. The focus is on the positive role that organizational leaders can play as exemplars of virtuous stewardship in a highly networked society. The article redefines a modern view of stewardship in a digital economy and applies its principles to the four Ts of virtuous stewardship, a practical corporate governance model that encompasses truthfulness, transparency, trust, and technological equity.

The legal and compliance departments in organizations have more influence than ever before. Why then are companies so vulnerable to legal liability? The problem may not be with talented legal professionals, but with the lack of legal knowledge held by MBAs and other business school graduates that make day-to-day decisions in modern organizations. Firms can close this knowledge gap and minimize legal liability by training their managers in legal astuteness--the ability of a manager to address legal issues successfully--by instilling four essential traits: respecting the rule of law, recognizing legal issues, resolving problems proactively, and reporting complex legal issues to experts. Job candidates should also be screened for traits of legal astuteness. A legally astute candidate, especially a graduate of a business school that requires legal education for all its students, can be a cultural ambassador for legal astuteness and a valuable liaison between legal and compliance departments and the candidate's functional area. A legally ignorant candidate will require significant training and a frank assessment of the legal risk they bring to the organization. Modern firms in today's legal environment face two choices: hire a legally astute manager now or deal with a compliance headache later.

The use of influencers in marketing is not new. However, the advent of the internet and, more recently, various forms of social media have both accelerated the use of influencers in marketing and also democratized its use considerably. In this article, we explore the nature of influence and power. We describe a study directed at understanding the promises and perils of influencer marketing from both the firm- and influencer perspectives to identify three key tensions that exist for marketers in the management of influencer relationships. We outline and explain these tensions and the lessons that can be learned from them, and then illustrate the lessons with a series of positive and negative cases. We close by speculating on the further evolution of influencer marketing.

Many organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors have begun to take action to address the systemic racism entrenched in their processes, systems, and structures. This has included commitments to elevate initiatives for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Data indicate that such good-faith efforts are often not as successful as leaders and organizations had envisioned. Our assertion is that if we really want to address systemic racism in organizations, we must first attend to the people who work there. This is because their individual and collective character, revealed through behavior, drives and determines organizational processes, systems, structures, and culture. The purpose of this article is to connect character to the creation and sustainment of organizational cultures of equity, diversity, and inclusion with a specific focus on anti-Black racism. Character is not a subjective, amorphous entity but manifests as a set of observable behaviors. We explain that character equips people with consciousness and the conduct to embrace and cultivate equity, diversity, and inclusion in their organizations and in their lives. We provide concrete examples of the dimensions of character in action using brief illustrations.

Managing risk effectively is essential for business success, and thus understanding risk is vital for business executives. Effective risk management increases firm value, whereas poor risk management will damage shareholder wealth. In this article, we examine the risk literacy of business executives and find significant variation among the leaders we sample. Our findings suggest that business executives would be well served to evaluate their own risk literacy, and remediate, if necessary; to work to increase risk literacy in the company's employees; and to include risk literacy as an important and routine part of the firm's overall culture. Because the importance of risk literacy increases with business complexity, we believe that risk literacy will only become more important in the future.

Leadership is a prominent function within organizations and social entities, and research suggests leadership that is more active tends to be more effective. However, emerging research contends that more active leadership can place stressful demands on leaders, which can jeopardize their well-being and eventual effectiveness. In this article, we draw from research on job demands, job resources, and stress coping to outline an applied framework of leader strain management. The model explains how leadership demands (i.e., the challenges/hindrances leaders face) can influence leader strains (i.e., negative implications of the demands) and how leader resources (i.e., tangible/intangible assets) can be leveraged through coping activities to resolve demands or reduce strains. We propose five guidelines for leaders seeking to balance engaging their leadership responsibilities with maintaining their well-being and sustaining their effectiveness over time.

Prepandemic, small business exits were expected to increase dramatically owing to pent-up supply and the aging business owner population. COVID-19 may have dampened those expectations because of increasing information asymmetries that limited selling options for the small business owner (SBO). SBOs exit for many reasons (e.g., illness, family, retirement), so postponing a sale may not be a viable option. Alternately, SBOs can absorb crisis uncertainty by accepting different deal terms. We propose that one such strategy is to include seller financing as part of the deal terms, thereby signaling to the acquirer the SBOs' confidence that the purchase is sound. We examine the results of 1,909 exit transactions from both before and after the financial crisis of 2007--2009 and over a 10-year postcrisis horizon. We find that sellers accept a lower price and less favorable terms with increased seller financing in the 24 months postcrisis, and that waiting longer to sell after the crisis improves deal terms for sellers, as this affords SBOs time to exit. Additionally, reduced information asymmetry improves deal terms. Finally, we provide strategies for SBOs to lower information asymmetry in small business exits.