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Faced with pandemic-related challenges and risks, business leaders are rightly concerned about how their companies will be affected by COVID-19 over the long term and what to do next. The global CEO of Deloitte describes how five fundamental leadership qualities can lessen the impact of the global pandemic - and enable an organization to emerge stronger. They include Put Your Mission First, Design from the Head and the Heart, and Aim for Speed Over Elegance. Going forward, he says clarity of thinking and communication will be at a premium, and leaders who can best exhibit this clarity will inspire their organizations to be prepared for whatever may come.

Conventional wisdom has held that business should keep a low profile on divisive political issues. Why risk drawing the ire of politicians, pundits, customers, shareholders or employees by wading into non-business concerns? And yet 72 per cent of Walmart customers now expect it to 'take a stand on important social issues' and 85 per cent agree that it should 'make it clear what values it stands for.' The paradigm is shifting, and in today's world, business leaders need to have expertise on both 'the gridiron' and 'the pitch'. The authors provide a 'playbook' for navigating this new territory, which includes empowering your team to communicate, adopting a readiness posture and playing the long game.

The world's biggest untapped source of energy isn't the wind, water or sun. According to the authors, who hail from innovation consultancy Innosight and DBS Bank, it is the innovative energy lying dormant inside of organizations. And the time has come to harness it. In an excerpt from their book, Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Activity Inside Your Organization, they describe five behaviors that together define an innovative culture, including customer obsession, comfort with ambiguity and empowering employees.

The authors argue that the corporate world and the world that it serves are ready for the next evolution of corporate virtue: 'virtuous capital'. Annual budgets and sustainability reports provide some hints about a company's true character, they say, but there is something that is far more telling: capital commitments. They show how 'virtuous capital', as indicated on a balance sheet, speaks volumes as to a firm's long-range commitment to making the world a better place. They provide four avenues for leaders to focus on going forward, including risk reallocation, different forms of ownership and government incentives.

Managing uncertainty has always been part of the executive challenge. But the global pandemic upped the ante significantly: Rarely have leaders been forced to tackle volatility in so many areas all at once. The COVID-19 crisis has underscored just how interconnected people, markets and events have become. The authors-consultants at the Boston Consulting Group-argue that to gain uncertainty advantage, companies need to get better at three things: detecting signals, acting on them and building practices that foster resilience. In the end they show that by tracking signals, visualizing what the world might look like three or five years down the line and imagining what it will take to win in that future, organizations can take uncertainty from a scary abstraction to a practice that energizes their workforce and reshapes performance for years to come.

In dynamic environments, understanding when and how to change is the essence of strategy. The most successful businesses today are those that identify when and how to change to improve strategic advantage. Tools that can help business leaders spot the opportunities and challenges that exist or are emerging in their company's specific context are now more relevant than the traditional strategy frameworks of the past.

Data accessibility has emerged as a challenge in taking AI out of the lab and into the business. Although it is often treated as an IT problem, in reality it is a management problem aggravated by misconceptions about the nature and the role of data accessibility in AI.

Leaders must identify the causes of collaborative failure in their organizations and teams before they can mitigate consequences such as poor productivity, stifled innovation, overload, and burnout. This article describes six patterns of dysfunction (revealed through organizational network analysis), a number of the drivers that create them, and a set of remedies for addressing them.

A hidden driver of workplace loneliness is teamwork and it is not just because people are teaming virtually more than ever. Loneliness can be triggered by the structural aspects of teams, even when people work face-to-face. But leaders can address the problem by thinking more systematically about team design.

You might assume that shifting from in-person to remote brainstorming and ideation sessions is taking a large toll on teams creativity, given the loss of face-to-face, spontaneous connections and interactions. But collaborating virtually actually has the potential to improve group creativity and ideation. Here's how you can maximize the upside.

Shared beliefs on digital readiness among management and employees are a precursor to successfully guide and implement organizational change. There is, however, little examination of how digital knowledge and skills are distributed among managers and employees, or whether their perceptions of digital readiness systematically differ. The findings of a survey of the banking industry reveal that, while there are similar perceptions of attitude and empowerment toward change, perceptions of individual readiness, competences, and innovation barriers differ significantly. This research advances the framework of change readiness toward digital readiness with theoretical as well as practical implications for digital transformation management.

Business leaders who intend to address racial equity in their organizations need strategies that are systemic, race-explicit, and outcome-oriented. Using a data-driven racial equity framework can help. This begins with collecting, disaggregating, and analyzing data related to race and ethnicity in order to identify racial disparities in workforce outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains but also drove experiments in local self-sufficiency. Self-sufficient production has proved to be an important source of essential equipment, parts, and supplies, filling the gap between do-it-yourself initiatives and mass manufacturing. As digital fabrication technologies get better, faster, and cheaper, there is the potential for widely distributed access to modern means of production.

While open innovation ecosystems allow a firm to harness external sources of value creation, these external ties can also constrain its ability to adapt its innovation strategy to pursue new opportunities. This article looks at how an incumbent firm approached such constraints, and used cognitive artifacts to transform its value chain into a collaborative ecosystem. It examines the case of a 3D printing-enabled shift to mass customization of orthopedic medical implants. The results demonstrate how firms can use artifacts to build a shared understanding across heterogeneous stakeholders as they explore and develop new open innovation models, and how this process can be managed flexibly to avoid adopting a locally (rather than globally) optimal strategy.

The conditions that exist during a crisis, including a sense of urgency, a focus on fewer priorities, and more latitude for experimentation, make it easier for organizations to innovate. Leaders can build and sustain a more innovative culture by fostering similar conditions even in the absence of a crisis.

Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. This introduction discusses how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges - as well as the trade-offs and tensions that arise as a result. Against this background we introduce the articles published in this Special Section, which were originally presented at the sixth Annual World Open Innovation Conference.

As the technologies behind recommendation engines become more powerful, the advice and choices they produce could transform the customer and employee experience. Companies are already using recommenders to drive revenue, augment work, and develop human capital. But if the technology is to reach its full potential, companies will need to address sensitive issues around trust and privacy.

Virtual reality (VR) technology is predicted to become indispensable in the business world, as it fundamentally reimagines the ways in which firms interact with customers. This technology has sparked a VR ecosystem, with multiple types of firms and other stakeholders interacting to create value. Firms need to define their roles in this ecosystem in order to capitalize on the opportunities and address the challenges they face when navigating its complexities. This article develops a VR value chain that illustrates how the use of VR technologies adds value to key stakeholders. It also provides an understanding of the current state of the VR ecosystem and serves as a source for strategic managerial decision making and future VR research.

Recent advances in digital technology and the shift to digital activity accelerated by COVID-19 make digital mastery more essential than ever. In this article, Didier Bonnet of IMD and George Westerman of MIT's Sloan School reappraise the elements of digital capability and identify where the opportunities lie for gaining competitive advantage in customer experience, internal operations, employee experience, and business model innovation, as well as the digital platforms needed to access them.

New research shows that relatively few employees consistently share their thoughts and opinions on issues outside the scope of their jobs with their managers. This is a problem because employee voice the willingness to speak up to managers about a multitude of issues and opportunities for improvement offers many benefits for both companies and their workers. Here are ways to encourage this behavior.