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A new study reveals a silver lining: This syndrome may actually make you more likable.

Ecosystems are the result of a delicate balance between centripetal forces that push economic activities toward integration, and centrifugal forces that pull economic activities out onto the market. Ecosystems evolve when these forces change. For example, technological complementarities - the main source of centripetal force - are dynamic and may be commoditized, generalized, or standardized over time. Management and coordination also change: for example, open innovation practices enable firms to move innovation activities from the in-house R&D lab out into the ecosystem. This article discusses how such dynamics in technologies and management lead to ecosystem evolution.

Dismissing all the hype around the metaverse would be a mistake. Metaverse marketing strategies do not need Mark Zuckerberg to be on track to become the future norm, perhaps a lot sooner than some brand managers might think. After all, when it comes to interacting with consumers, the metaverse experience has already taken things up a notch. This article provides six mistakes to avoid when planning a metaverse strategy. Mistake 1: Assuming the metaverse is far away. Mistake 2: Trying to dominate. Mistake 3: Assuming the metaverse will reflect real-world structure. Mistake 4: Focusing on transactions (in fact, the metaverse is also about creating new consumer connections, cultural relevance, and community clout). Mistake 5: Failing to seize the opportunity to drive stakeholder capitalism. Mistake 6: Equating the metaverse to NFTs. Ultimately, the evolution of the metaverse will bring together today’s disparate and fragmented ecosystems, allowing businesses to connect with consumers and solve problems in revolutionary new ways. We’ll soon see how far things go in 2022. But whatever happen this year, the writing is on the virtual wall—and it says the winning brand strategies for the metaverse will not take a business-as-usual approach.

Despite the hype, metaverse marketing isn't a fad that brand strategists can ignore. Here are 6 mistakes to avoid when entering the emerging virtual world marketplace.

This article initiates a discussion with the guardians of the case method to make teaching cases more "DEI-friendly." It outlines how instructors, case writers, and other case stakeholders can consider the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion in the cases they select, write, review and publish. For instructors, a DEI case teaching toolkit along with other useful resources are provided. For case writers, DEI guidance for writing cases and instructor manuals and suggested exemplar cases are offered. The article concludes with a compiled list of contemporary resources about DEI teaching considerations in business schools.

As industry boundaries dissolve and digitalization grows apace, ecosystems are becoming increasingly important. Yet for all the excitement and Big-Tech envy, there is little guidance for how to create ecosystems. How should a firm best engage? Should it become a partner to someone else's ecosystem, or build its own? Should it focus on a broad range of digitally connected services, or narrow down? How should we think about ecosystem value proposition, governance, and complementor choice? And, what is the case for investment in ecosystems? Drawing on recent research and projects with leading firms, this article offers a framework for understanding, engaging in, and building business ecosystems.

When political discussions enter the workplace, partisan disagreements can lead to a range of issues, including stereotyping, bias, discrimination, and animosity among coworkers. But providing guidelines for civil political discourse is often not enough to prevent uncivil behavior. The author offers five recommendations to help managers avoid the damage to workplace relationships and culture that can result from ideological disagreements.

If successful with its metaverse plans, Meta will dramatically expand its revenue streams by taking a cut of an explosion in sales of new digital goods, services, and software while significantly increasing its ability to study and influence consumers and sell their changed behaviours to advertisers. The latter is the focus of this article because Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of a brave new world is being built by the same people who helped create some of today’s major social problems. Whatever consumers choose to do in the real world and on social media, they can reimagine and do in the world of the metaverse—work, play, shop, date, exercise, bet, trade, learn, influence, travel, create, communicate, follow. While there is potential to improve remote work, the social costs of a virtual wild west could outweigh the benefits. Society stands the risk of being fed a steady, addictive, and customized mix of manipulated content by forces seeking to monetize the three elements that it takes to brainwash people–perceptions of identity, belonging, and injustice. The initial marketing focus will be on attracting users and getting them to spend a lot of time in Horizon Worlds. But the focus will shift to value extraction. This will likely be done by systematically and simultaneously working on users’ perceptions and behaviours while changing context continually. This evolution of marketing would break new and dangerous ground in oppositional marketing. While regulatory oversight of metaverse development is warranted, it isn’t guaranteed to happen or, if attempted, succeed at mitigating the risks.

Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world sounds cool-but regulators need to recognize it is being designed by the Facebook culture responsible for creating major social issues

When the pandemic shifted many people to remote work, long-held attitudes about the practice shifted as well. Now, as many organizations are adopting hybrid work arrangements, it's imperative that leaders end the tendency to overlook remote employees' contributions and aspirations. The authors offer recommendations for both leaders and employees to help them work toward equity and access for both in-person and remote personnel.

Contextually effective leadership comprises three essential tasks drawing the map, establishing the mindset, and communicating the message that drive desired change. Each task will vary according to the type of change that the leader seeks to achieve. The authors describe three main tasks (map, mindset, and message) that are key to leaders' contextual effectiveness and illustrate how the objective of those tasks varies according to the type of change that the leader is trying to achieve.

New research based on MIT SMR's Culture 500 and employees' Glassdoor ratings of their employers identifies the five most common elements of toxic workplace cultures as disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive. The authors discuss how unhealthy work environments negatively affect both employees and their employers and how organizations stand to benefit when they identify and address toxic elements in their cultures.

CEO pay has gone through remarkable changes over the past two decades. The most striking new features have been the increased use of stock options in the early 2000s, and of restricted stock since then. Both forms of stock-based compensation are intended to resolve the agency problem that occurs when CEOs do not act in the best interests of stockholders, but each has its advantages and limitations. In this instalment of Organizational Performance, we discuss the history of their use and similarities and differences between the two, and argue that both are often overused. Bonuses based on strategic goals, on the other hand, may be underused. We conclude with a contextual approach to guide boards of directors in making choices among the forms of CEO compensation--stock options, restricted stock, salary, and bonus--to incentivize CEOs to work toward maximizing organizational performance. Briefly, stock options are most appropriate for growth firms, and restricted stock for stable firms. Both forms of stock-based compensation are more appropriate for new than for long-tenured CEOs.

Humility has attracted increasing attention in discussions of leadership given the positive effects that humble leaders can have on team and firm performance. In spite of what we know about the favorable outcomes of leader humility, we do not know much about how personality influences humble behaviors. How is leader humility related to personality? How can leaders develop humility? In this article, we look at how the personality factors of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness to Experience, and Extraversion lead to specific humble behaviors: self-awareness, appreciation of others, low self-focus, teachability, and self-transcendent pursuits. We find that the personality mix of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience form a substantial base for developing leader humility. At the same time, a humble leader can be an introvert or an extrovert, and can demonstrate different degrees of emotional stability. We offer recommendations and a behavioral inventory of leader humility that can be used by leaders and by organizations to recruit for and promote humility, to engage in behavioral modeling and coaching, and to create interventions to develop leader humility.

Recognizing, enhancing, and appreciating positive experiences in our lives, also known as savoring, has many benefits. Research on savoring suggests that practicing savoring is linked to positive outcomes, such as increased happiness and general well-being. Organizations should be aware of the positive implications of practicing savoring and should seek to develop savoring norms, as this can contribute to organizational success. This article discusses the savoring of positive experiences and its application in the workplace. Specifically, this article will provide an overview of strategies aimed at enhancing savoring, as well as past research findings that highlight the utility of these strategies. Different barriers and solutions to savoring are discussed, in addition to the importance of the context in cultivating savoring norms in the workplace.

Expenditure on product placement has grown faster (170%) than on advertising (15%) over the past 10 years, but some evidence suggests that the return on investment has been declining. For the well-known, fast-moving consumer goods/consumer-packaged goods (FMCG/CPG) food brands typically placed in local TV programmingd--the context of this article--the management problem of overfocusing on brand exposure hinders gaining brand choice, the ultimate strategic goal of marketing. Managers' preconditioning, ease of measuring, and assumptions about the value of exposure contribute to their subtle placements becoming blatant or in other problems, as when other promotional devices, like a television commercial or program sponsorships billboard, get bundled into the same TV episode as the company's own product placement. The higher brand exposure gained can evoke negative mental outcomes in consumers, weakening influences on brand choice. An experiment with a large sample of grocery shoppers supports such an outcome. More strategic value can also be gained from product placements in general by their use longitudinally, in-between campaigns of TV commercials, as an instructive tool and through normalizing a brand's role in a consumer's life. We provide eight checkpoints for marketers to consider when planning to use product placement to gain value for their brands.

Blockchain technologies are quickly changing the competitive business landscape. Companies need to think strategically about how best to prepare for a future in which they might systematically enhance value and unleash new value using blockchain. In this article, we address how cooperating companies jointly create unique value with blockchain technology, the risks they face along the way, and how they can mitigate those risks. We briefly identify three different reasons a company might adopt blockchain: to enhance value creation, to strengthen existing value ecosystems, or to create new value ecosystems. Then, we identify three strategic risks of blockchain adoption as they relate to business issues, legal issues, and technological issues. Finally, we highlight four different strategic maneuvers for minimizing these risks. The strategic maneuvers include the all-industry approach, the walled-garden approach, the many-gardens approach, and the options approach. We provide prescriptive advice to managers on how to strategically think about blockchain adoptions, how to identify the underlying risks, and how to consider strategic approaches to mitigate their adoption risk.

Trust has long been recognized across cultures, industries, and organizations as a key component of social exchange. Yet in many communities and organizations throughout the world, there is a growing trust deficit. In this article, we explore what leaders can do to generate trust among the individuals within their organizations to help facilitate better relationships and positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. More specifically, we present a qualitative study in which semistructured interviews with employees at an assisted-living care facility highlight two ways that leaders can build trust within their organizations: (1) by demonstrating humility in their communication and (2) by exhibiting compassion in their behavior. We further highlight two characteristics, authenticity and proactivity, that can help leaders increase the effectiveness of these actions. By making these behaviors part of how they lead, leaders and managers can more successfully generate feelings of trust among the individuals within their organizations and help their organizations to maintain and strengthen their competitive advantage.

Enforcement of laws that prevent corrupt international business dealings has recently intensified. Firms have paid record-setting fines of hundreds of millions of dollars, and individuals have been tried and convicted. This escalating situation demands effective action from business leaders. Compliance has become increasingly complicated as more countries have enacted antibribery laws. To address this situation, I identify four root causes of corruption and present innovative real-world examples of solutions. Combinations of these solutions can be crafted to create high-compliance work systems (HCWSs) to avoid corruption. Firms can formulate their own unique, innovative, and dynamic models to achieve high levels of firm success while also avoiding corruption. These models go beyond trade-off thinking, which suggests that compliance must be exchanged for performance. Pivoting away from such trade-off thinking enables innovative solutions to manage corruption risks and offers firms a sustained competitive advantage over their peers.

Companies spend time and money training employees; in the case of a merger or acquisition, they spend resources such as cash, stock, and debt. It makes sense, then, that they do not want an employee to take the expertise the company underwrote to a competitor. Thus, employment contracts will often include noncompete clauses--sometimes known as covenants not to compete--which state that the employee cannot move to a competitor for a certain period of time. Though not all employees have the heightened fiduciary duty of board members and officers, they frequently have signed agreements that, at least on paper, restrict their employment mobility. Not only have officers and board members often signed such agreements as well, but they also have fiduciary duties further restricting their new employment plans. In decades of teaching courses in the legal environment of business as well as in business ethics, no topic flummoxes students more than this one. After all, in a free country, a person should be able to work where they wish, right? How can such restrictions be fair? Legally and ethically, this is a complicated area and one in which the old lawyer's answer--it depends--is true. This article provides some parameters for employees and employers to know when fiduciary duty precludes certain employees from moving to a new company, including when those are legal in what ways they are fair.