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You have a great idea--a product tweak that will save your company money, a process change to increase your team's productivity, or a plan for heading off a looming crisis. There's just one snag: You're not sure how to approach your boss about it, or worse, you've tried and failed to get the attention of higher-ups. According to the author's research, two factors are key to a successful pitch: having the confidence to make your suggestion and knowing how to frame it to get the best reception from your boss. The key, the author says, is to understand the psychology of higher-ups--to get inside their heads. Doing so can help you recognize what tips the scales in your favor--and identify the (rare) instances when it's best to try to go around or above them. Here's how.

Four new books on diversity, equity, and inclusion outline how we can move from good intentions to actual change.

The actor, director, and entrepreneur on making choices and taking risks.

We have entered a new era for business in which sustaining competitive advantage requires companies to transform their business models for sustainability. As a result, leaders need a systemic understanding of sustainability challenges-and how their companies can play a part in addressing them. The authors-current and former senior consultants at Boston Consulting Group-introduce the concept of Sustainable Business Model Innovation (SBMI) and the four steps required to achieve it: Expand the business canvas; innovate for resilience; link to drivers of value; and scale the initiative. Many examples of companies large (3M, BASF, PepsiCo) and small (Ajinomoto, Indigo AG, Veolia) that have achieved SBMI are provided throughout. In the end, the authors show that it is not only possible-but increasingly critical-to create social and business value with one business model.

As the world begins to emerge from the global pandemic, a majority of consumers have reimagined their values and purpose. According to research from Accenture, they have made a consequential shift to focusing on what matters most for them in life - and their motivations for buying are, accordingly, meaningfully different. The author, a senior executive at Accenture, shares the firm's findings and shows that these changes reveal an enormous new 'white space' in which brands must differentiate themselves anew in order to survive. He describes four steps to attracting the Reimagined Consumer: eengineer; rethink; reimagine and recalibrate. He makes it clear that evolving their business model is not a choice for organizations, it is an imperative: Consumers will leave brands that don't recognize their new priorities-and will pay more for those that do.

Pre-pandemic, leaders were having lots of conversations about innovation, disruption and digital transformation. But existential challenges over the past two years have forced that conversation to become much broader. In a wide ranging interview, renowned leadership and professional development expert Herminia Ibarra argues that responding to a global pandemic, an environmental crisis and the quest for racial equity demands that leaders shift from being 'know-it-alls' to being 'learn-it-alls'. She describes the five skills requires to thrive in the post-pandemic environment: cross-cutting, collaboration, coaching, culture-shaping and connecting. She also describes how critical it is to foster psychological safety on a team and warns that authenticity-for leaders and their employees-should never be used as an excuse to remain the same over time.

Innovation plays a pivotal role in shaping the economic fabric of nations. In particular, market-creating innovations - which create new markets by democratizing access to previously-exclusive products - have been a vital force for generating prosperity in wealthy countries, and are integral for building a prosperous future for emerging economies. The authors, from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, argue that in order to create new markets for people who have traditionally been unable to purchase certain products due to barriers such as cost and access, organizations not only need to develop a product that meets these customers' needs, they must also develop a way to get it to them. Having researched 100 companies in 30 countries that created markets between 1706 and 2018, they share six key strategies that enable market creation.

All innovation begins with the imagination. But before your imagination can be harnessed, it must be ignited. In an excerpt from their book of the same title, the authors argue that three things spark the imagination: accidents, anomalies and analogies. However, for any of these types of surprises to impact us, our minds must be prepared, and that means improving our abilities in three areas: noticing; comprehending; and interpreting. They describe how to develop and improve upon each skill, along the way explaining the importance of paying attention to our frustrations, how to draw analogies and how to immerse ourselves in new worldviews.

Goal-based mission and vision statements have been around for decades and are widely accepted as a required practice for corporations. But as the post-pandemic economy takes shape, that definition of purpose has expanded significantly. The author argues that duty-based purpose - anchored in explicit values -has become critical for organizations to thrive. She describes the three pillars of duty-based purpose: values, social service and stewardship, providing rich examples. She then explains how to marry the goal and duty-based aspects of an organization's purpose. In a world where viruses can paralyze economies, climate change ravages communities, and the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, she makes it clear that this expanded conception of purpose must become a foundational aspect of every organization.

Making strategy behind closed doors results in copycat, unimaginative, and biased strategies that often fail. Opening up your strategy-making process to participants from outside the C-suite and outside your company offers leadership teams access to diverse sources of external knowledge, exposes cognitive biases, and builds the buy-in needed to speed execution. The authors describe the steps leaders must take to successfully implement open strategy at their companies.

In this Q&A, Tamara Mendelsohn, chief marketing officer of Eventbrite, discusses how deepening customer connections has reshaped her team's marketing efforts throughout the pandemic, and what opportunities might lie ahead when it comes to changing customer attitudes and behavior.

Insurance companies typically secure themselves under force majeure exclusions against the unpredictability brought about by acts of war. If a company were to be attacked by a nation-state in physical space - hit with a missile or by aerial bombing - there would be fairly clear carve-outs so their insurance company could exclude such an incident from coverage. But the same is not always true in cyberspace. This article examines an extreme outlier case in the world of cyberattacks and insurance - that is, the losses suffered by the U.S.-based food and beverage company Mondelez as a result of the NotPetya cyberattack - and scrutinizes just how far force majeure exclusions can be applied in cyberspace. The article attempts to reveal the significance of the legal qualification of a cyberattack and its attribution to a state for insurance coverage in both general insurance policies, like the one the Mondelez case stemmed from, as well as in insurance policies targeted to cover cyber risk.

Most novel ideas either stall out at some point in product development or lose their originality before they make it to the marketplace. How do you defy those odds? By helping your organization's innovators adapt their collaborative behavior to support ideas wherever they are in their journey. Each stage of that journey idea generation, concept elaboration, internal promotion, and implementation has its own set of collaborative needs. Here's how to meet them.

Relying on expert panels to judge which innovation projects should get the go-ahead for funding produces mixed results. The authors' study of how R&D projects are green-lighted reveals multiple flaws in the process that can result in biased and poor decisions. The article details potential problems and suggests alternative ways that companies can review and decide on new projects. These newer approaches are aimed at mitigating bias and often involve engaging a wider variety of perspectives.

Mercedes-Benz's Startup Autobahn is an open corporate accelerator built on an open innovation platform that enabled the automaker to screen thousands of startups, execute more than 150 pilot projects, and implement 17 innovative solutions between 2016 and 2021. Mercedes's experience demonstrates how companies can leverage the open corporate accelerator model to more effectively integrate startups into the corporate R&D processes and accelerate their innovation efforts.

As leaders develop strategy for a future that has been reshaped by the pandemic, they need to rethink their fundamental assumptions about what customers want. The truth is, people still want personal service but it doesn't have to come from a person. The author identifies five assumptions companies often make about what their customers want and offers questions to consider to help prepare for the post-pandemic era.

Companies need a plan of action if they are to meet their moral and business obligations in the event that their operations intersect with labor abuses or other human rights violations. The article explains different types of abuses and provides a framework for understanding a company's exposure to reputational risk. The authors also map out a decision tree that can help managers work out potential courses of action and their implications.

Employers rely heavily on self-report surveys and interviews to assess organizational culture. But on their own, such tools provide a flawed view. By combining them with analysis of informal networks, leaders can gain a richer understanding of how new values take root locally. This allows them to see more precisely where desired behaviors are communicated, modeled, observed, and adopted on the ground. With that level of insight, leaders can more effectively target their change efforts in five key ways.

For manufacturers, remaining competitive depends on their ability to digitalize their business models (i.e., offer digital and digitally enhanced products and services). To achieve this, they must engage with new digital partners and help their existing suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders to digitalize. Orchestrating this growing ecosystem is challenging. Manufacturers struggle with this endeavor because of specific barriers associated with their existing legacy business model and related to their lack of digital vision, product-centric value chains, and a bias toward firm-centered profit formulas. To overcome these barriers, leading manufacturers have developed new approaches to ecosystem orchestration.

Business leaders are turning their attention toward building prosperity at home, in the communities where they live and work to tackle complex local issues, including health care, early childhood development, and housing. Initiatives that produce results demonstrate five tenets: They tell a clear, purposeful story; combine community priorities with institutional goals; are led inclusively; typically influence the member organizations' own internal policies; and impel company leaders to acknowledge difficult truths.