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The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can enjoy geographic flexibility. At the same time, concerns include how to communicate across time zones, share knowledge that isn't yet codified, socialize virtually and prevent professional isolation, protect client data, and avoid slacking. Research into work-from-anywhere (WFA) organizations and groups that include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Tata Consultancy Services, and GitLab (the world's largest all-remote company) highlights best practices and can help leaders decide whether remote work is right for their organizations.

Bosses often sense that something is missing in an employee's tool kit but can't put a finger on what it is. They say something like "You need certain important intangibles" or "You don't have enough gravitas," but they fail to provide advice or guidance. What they're talking about is leadership style. In every interaction, we send signals to others that fall into two categories: power and attractiveness. Powerful markers are associated with confidence, competence, charisma, and influence but also arrogance, abrasiveness, and intimidation. Attractiveness markers are related to agreeableness, approachability, and likability but also diffidence, lack of confidence, and submissiveness. The more consistent our signals, the more distinctive our style. This practical guide offers concrete advice for developing a dynamic and effective leadership style that draws from both types of markers for maximum impact.

The U.S. Army has long struggled with toxic and inept leaders, and no wonder: It has historically chosen battalion commanders, a linchpin position, on the basis of 90-second file reviews. Last year it undertook an ambitious revamping of that selection process, which now involves four full days of physical, cognitive, and psychological assessments and interviews. The author, a lieutenant colonel who served as an adviser to the task force that designed and implemented the new process, describes it in granular detail, including a variety of rigorous measures for reducing interviewer bias and ensuring diversity and inclusion. Although specifically aimed at improving the validity, reliability, and developmental impact of the army's executive-leader selections, the redesigned process offers important lessons for any organization seeking to bolster its talent assessment and promotion practices.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple-remarkably-retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple's distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments.

As companies struggle with chronic skills shortages and changing labor demographics, a new generation of talent platforms, offering on-demand access to highly trained workers, has begun to help. These platforms include marketplaces for premium expertise (such as Toptal and Catalant), for freelance workers (Upwork and 99designs), and for crowd­sourcing innovation (Kaggle and InnoCentive). Almost all Fortune 500 firms use such platforms. But most do so in an ad hoc, inefficient way, according to a Harvard Business School/BCG study. Companies need to get much more strategic about their engagement with talent platforms and fully embrace their ability to increase labor force flexibility, speed time to market, and facilitate business model innovation. That will require rewiring policies and processes and redefining working norms. Most important, leaders must inspire the cultural shift needed to realize the platforms' transformative potential.

Sweeping technological change has revolutionized marketing, while societal challenges have raised expectations about marketers' social performance. This has altered customer needs, accelerated the entry of new types of competitors, and generated novel opportunities for value creation. It has also transformed how the function must work, requiring that it become more agile, interdependent, and accountable for driving firm growth. The authors provide a framework to help leaders identify the organizational design and capabilities needed to build a competitive, next-generation marketing function. Their framework has been used to guide marketing transformations at companies across industries, including consumer packaged goods, transportation, financial services, and retail.

Leaders may mean well when they tout the economic payoffs of hiring more women and people of color, but there is no research support for the notion that diversifying the workforce automatically improves a company's performance. This article critiques the popular rhetoric about diversity and revisits an argument the authors made 25 years ago: To fully benefit from increased racial and gender diversity, organizations must adopt a learning orientation and be willing to change the corporate culture and power structure. Four actions are key for leaders: building trust and creating a workplace where people feel free to express themselves; actively combating bias and systems of oppression; embracing a variety of styles and voices inside the organization; and using employees' identity-related knowledge and experiences to learn how best to accomplish the firm's core work.

When he was the CEO of SRI International, Curtis Carlson presided over the conception and development of Siri, HDTV, and other groundbreaking innovations. Since then he has shared his approach with more than 500 corporate, university, and government groups. His methodology is based on the principles of active learning, which emphasize concise mental models, the continual iteration of ideas, real-time feedback, teamwork, and frequent comparison of alternatives. Those elements are woven into a process that focuses on customers' needs, a compelling approach, valuable benefits relative to costs, and superiority to the competition.

The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have forced people in positions of power--namely, the white men who dominate institutional leadership roles--to realize they must personally step up to make organizations more fair and inclusive. That means playing a truly active role in helping marginalized colleagues advance (instead of just delegating diversity efforts to human resources). How can white men be effective allies to those employees? First, by taking responsibility for their own behaviors, educating themselves about racism and privilege, and getting and accepting feedback from people in underrepresented groups. They can also become confidants to and sponsors of women and people of color and insist on diverse hiring pools and practices. They can vigilantly watch out for bias at work, intervening decisively if they discover it. Last, they can work to build a community of other allies against racism and sexism.

A new wave of brain science is upending our understanding of the mind.

The inventor of the Rubik's Cube on creativity and innovation.

Employer-sponsored fintech products can enhance financial resilience and inclusion. PLUS the benefits of a morning routine, the recruitment problem on all-white boards, and more.

A team of researchers found that people who were optimistic about their abilities scored no better than people who doubted themselves on a wide range of tests. And overconfidence, it seems, may even impair performance, especially if it leads to a lack of preparation.

Recent research provides clear evidence that some people do indeed make better interviewers than others. Using a simple methodology, you can identify your best interviewers to help decrease hiring expenses, increase the quality of new hires, and reduce employee turnover.

Many companies have failed at reskilling because they didn't know the specific capabilities their employees needed to develop to fill the talent gap. This article presents research that highlights four competencies IT professionals will need in order to sustain their careers in the digital age. These qualities transcend technical proficiency and embrace interpersonal skills and a drive for continuous learning.

Whether organizations build or buy AI tools, their use of the technology exposes them to new risks as well as benefits. Boards must be prepared to provide adequate oversight of how AI is developed and deployed.

To achieve faster organic growth, firms need to change their prevailing narrative about innovation from growth denying to growth enabling. This requires changing the system through which the work of innovation gets done. This article describes the work systems model of organizational change and shows how a leadership team can select the most influential elements of the system to make a desired narrative a reality. Four elements of the work system are especially effective at encouraging a growth-affirming narrative: leadership commitment to innovation talent, prudent risk-taking, customer-centric innovation, and aligning metrics and incentives.

Influencer marketing represents a $10 billion industry in 2020 and is becoming of increasing relevance for many firms, especially those operating in a business-to-consumer environment. Few firms in the fashion, beauty, travel, food, or beverage industries are running marketing campaigns these days that do not include, at least to some share, a collaboration with popular users on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. However, many marketing managers still have a less than adequate understanding of those platforms compared with their knowledge of more traditional media channels and often find it hard to make the right decision in this fast-moving environment. To provide some guidance in this respect, this article aims to give an introduction to the most critical platforms for influencer marketing. It then presents advice to firms who want to engage in influencer marketing as well as specific questions on identifying the right influencers to collaborate with.

The learning objective for this article is to present the reader with some basic and intermediate strategies for teaching case studies in an online classroom environment. The authors draw upon their considerable experience to describe a number of classroom situations and provide tips, tools and techniques that the reader will immediately be able to bring back to their online classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urgency to quickly develop skills for the online higher education classroom. The general outline of this paper is as follows: The authors begin with some preliminary considerations regarding how to set the stage for online case instruction. The authors then discuss some practical and pedagogical issues to consider as an instructor designs their online course. Next, the authors present a brief overview of some synchronous, asynchronous and hybrid online case teaching approaches. Academic integrity issues are discussed, as well as a brief debate regarding the future of online higher education.

A new analysis of the pandemic's effect on in-person shopping behaviors has resulted in an actionable framework to help brand owners and retailers understand and address the consumer needs and preferences of five retail customer segments. The authors suggest actions that retailers can take to better target each segment, whether the goal is to recapture former customers or retain new ones gained during the pandemic.