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After United Airlines baggage handlers damaged Dave Carroll's guitar, he spent months fruitlessly seeking compensation. Then he created a music video about the experience and posted it on YouTube. Within three days "United Breaks Guitars" had been viewed by 1.5 million people, many of whom chimed in with their own grievances. United's stock plunged, with many observers attributing the drop in part to the PR debacle.This incident and others like it prompted researchers led by KEDGE Business School's Dennis Herhausen to analyze nearly half a million negative comments posted in the public Facebook communities of 89 companies, along with the firms' responses. As a result of that work, they developed recommendations for detecting and preventing potential online firestorms and limiting the damage if one erupts. Among the findings: Posts containing intense emotions were more likely than others to spread. Strong ties between a post's author and the community drove contagion, as did linguistic similarities. Companies should respond to negative posts, and fast; the worst thing a firm can do is ignore an unhappy customer. Apologies and requests to switch to a private channel lowered virality, as long as they were communicated right away. But offering compensation early on had the opposite effect; it sometimes prompted other customers to post complaints in the hope of being rewarded themselves.

The conventional wisdom tells us that we learn from failure, but new research suggests it often has the opposite effect: When things go wrong, people feel threatened and tune out.

With businesses struggling and with marketing efforts toned down for the foreseeable future during the COVID-19 crisis, it’s hard to build a brand. But you can still support your brand’s reputation through thoughtful leadership and treating people right. And since the reputation of your brand—not to mention your personal leadership and the culture of your company—hinges on how you operate during difficult times, best practices in corporate communications have never been more important. Make sure you let all concerned know how deeply you empathize with their personal challenges and show genuine gratitude for their contributions. If you’re forced to cut salaries or break other employee commitments, a sincere apology can go a long way. However, being an inspirational leader is about more than grand gestures or rousing speeches. Think way outside the box to find creative ways to join your team in their day-to-day efforts. Encourage your people to stay connected, stay healthy, and have fun. The need for open and transparent communication, of course, is just as vital with customers and partners as it is with employees. Be honest in every interaction. If products are going to be delayed, let customers know right away. The business world needs leaders who work side by side with their people, who share tough news with compassion and empathy, and who make transparency their top priority.

Transformational leaders challenge the status quo, provide a vision of a promising future, and motivate and inspire their followers to join in the pursuit of a better world. But many of these leaders also fit the American Psychiatric Association classification for narcissistic personality disorder. They are grandiose, entitled, self-confident, risk seeking, manipulative, and hostile. This article reviews the literature on narcissism and shows how what we think of as transformational leadership overlaps substantially with grandiose narcissism. As grandiose narcissists can appear as transformational leaders, it is important to distinguish between what leadership scholars have characterized as "transformational" and these "pseudo-transformational" candidates.

Design thinking has made huge inroads in organizations today and has been widely popularized as one of the most effective approaches to complex problem solving. However, the prescriptive models to design thinking that are now widely used by "nondesigners" in the business world are criticized for their detachment from users, poor execution, and tendency to converge on safe solutions. This article examines the efficacy of using crowdsourcing as an underpinning technology for executing design thinking by nondesigners to alleviate these issues. It advances a generative model of complex problem solving with theoretical as well as practical implications.

Employee overload is costly for organizations and individuals alike. But dual-agenda work redesign - which helps people work more effectively and in ways they can sustain - can reduce burnout, deterioration in performance, employee turnover, and other problems associated with overload, delivering benefits to both companies and their workers.

Collaborations between established firms and startups are increasingly considered an ingredient of corporate strategy. This article describes a startup collaboration model that has emerged in practice, a model that complements today's predominantly used engagement vehicles of corporate accelerators and corporate venture capital. Startup supplier programs are outside-in programs that enable firms to get access to innovations that increase competitiveness of products or productivity of processes by engaging with startups based upon supplier relationships. This article presents empirical data from companies that have run successful startup supplier programs, and it explores the firms' reasons for implementing these programs, identifies key elements of startup supplier programs, and determines how firms can run them effectively.

To stay ahead of the competition, firms must continuously learn from their customers and swiftly adopt those lessons to improve their products. A unit at Ubisoft, a leading game publisher headquartered in Paris, has established a three-pronged approach to drive product innovation based on three practices: data-driven exploration, data-augmented ideation, and data-informed validation. By establishing processes and capabilities for these practices and blending them in a portfolio approach to product design, they maximize the value generation potential of the data at their disposal. Product development in a variety of industries can benefit from the lessons of these data-oriented innovation practices.

Transformative digital technologies are changing leadership standards along with every other aspect of business. To succeed, leaders will need to respond in five key ways: championing inclusivity, learning fast and wide, collaborating more intensely, nurturing creativity, and acting as digital guardians.

Ill-advised social media posts and lax company oversight can cause serious damage to an organization's reputation, trigger regulatory investigations, harm long-term relationships, and introduce cyberthreats. Companies can try to be selective about the disclosures they make on social media, but sitting back and hoping for the best is not enough. Responsible managers and auditors need to make sure they understand the dangers and how to protect themselves.

When a company is looking to expand, it is natural for the managers involved—including the CEO—to have location preferences. Ivey Professors Andreas Schotter and Paul Beamish investigated how location hassles influence foreign investment decisions and sales. They found that these hassles significantly affected individuals or small groups of employees tasked with assessing potential opportunities. Firms must overcome managerial biases and identify champions willing to tackle location hassles in difficult markets that have the potential to generate a high return on investment—especially if the hassle factors of those markets are keeping the competition away. Many characteristics that are perceived hassles for managers of firms from traditional industrialized locations like Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan are not seen as such by managers from rapidly internationalizing emerging-market firms. The authors recommend three actions to take to utilize and build on the hassle factor: 1) raise awareness of managerial biases and on-the-ground location factors, 2) raise global strategic capacity, and 3) leverage a more diverse talent pool. Firms should hire for a global mindset and not just for technical job competencies or single-location knowledge. They should also recognize that some otherwise high-performing managers may be ill-suited for roles involving high-hassle locations.

As consumers watch the global coronavirus pandemic play out in print, across digital media, and on TV, it is clear that not all brand managers are performing equally well—at least not after collectively flooding e-mail inboxes with “We are here for you” messages. The moves made by brand managers in corporate communications have been all over the map. The good moves have been made by those who understand why actions speak louder than words. However, while being creative can pay brand dividends, it also creates risk. The last thing you want is to look like you’re exploiting a crisis. There have been many brand announcements about redirecting media dollars to public services, but timing matters. As with any brand initiative, consumers tend to reward the first mover and ignore the copycats—unless they’re brilliant. A brand, of course, isn’t just influenced by how it supports the community. How a company treats employees also has a significant impact. When disaster strikes, if there is something helpful you can do, then just do it and do it quickly. If there is something helpful you can say, then say it, and feel free to say it creatively if you can do so with compassion. And if you don’t have anything to offer or your message doesn’t come naturally, then don’t waste everybody’s time trying to attract attention.

The COVID-19 pandemic will eventually subside, and many businesses will recover, but in order to rebound, they must survive—which is why adjusting sales tactics to get through the outbreak is critical. This article provides six tips to those in sales on how to grow revenue. 1) Be Helpful: Businesses and service providers that lead with their hearts in this time of extreme need stand a better chance of surviving and thriving. Free consulting is typically touted as a bad thing, but offering discounted products or free resources that can help others maintain operations might be the best “selling” one can do right now. 2) Re-Evaluate Your Context: Think through who needs your help right now, and align your value proposition directly with our new shared reality. 3) Modify Products and Target New Markets: Develop new products or services that clients didn’t need yesterday—but desperately need today. 4) Add Value in New Ways: Consider helping your customers free up cash by offering more generous payment terms or more flexible purchase options. 5) Tweak Your Pitch: Consider adjusting a revenue-focused pitch to a cost-savings pitch. 6) Caring Over Content: Tell clients, “I know that the current environment makes it difficult to consider new purchases today, and I’m not expecting you to, but I wanted to reach out to see if you’d be open to having a discussion about a future solution when this calms down?”

Fifty years ago Milton Friedman famously argued that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, which today are at record highs. And, as public institutions falter, business is now offering to step into the void. We must resist this (further) intrusion of business into the public sphere, as it will further depreciate civic institutions. The business of business is business, and so it should be. Business' track record in public politics has been to engineer the rules of the game to its own advantage.

Digital initiatives often suffer from poor governance when it comes to providing structure and governance to digital transformation projects, from finding alignment between business processes to assigning ownership for change efforts. Executives need to rethink their governance approach for digital transformation in a way that prioritizes active enablement over control. Seven key governing principles linked to successful digital business transformation can help.

What should businesses be doing during the coronavirus pandemic? That’s a tough question, and few of us imagined the challenges we face while being isolated from friends, family, and colleagues. Any crisis will serve up some market opportunities to help consumers adjust, and business leaders should seize them. While doing this, it is important to note that the role of corporations was already under pressure to change prior to the pandemic. Ensuring your business does its part as a good corporate citizen isn’t just the right thing to do. When the dust settles, consumers will remember how organizations acted. Former Ivey Professor Christine Pearson recommends executives focus on the following actions: hope for the best, prepare for the worst; make your role model proud; create a superb crisis management team; treat your employees right; and model healthy self-care. Ivey Professor Andreas Schotter advises multinationals to ensure they keep track of all vulnerabilities as they scramble to maintain operations because retreating from globalization is not a viable long-term strategy. Ivey instructor Eric Janssen recommends that early-stage ventures try to increase revenue; move to collect receivables; delay payables; cut non-essential spending; and consider temporary layoffs. To maintain morale, Ivey faculty member David Wood suggests end-of-week team parties on Zoom or similar platforms to give employees a virtual meeting that they can enjoy. Finally, Ivey Professor Paul Beamish notes that everyone in business should maintain perspective—the type of setback they experience as a hassle of doing business often manifests in poor countries as a life-or-death situation.

Bringing together the formal rationality of AI and the substantive rationality of humans can help companies meet their goals and optimize the chances of success. However, before designing AI systems, managers need to assess the openness of the decision-making process and the level of risk. These assessments will help managers figure out the right teaming options for implementing their AI systems.

Although manipulations of visual and auditory media are as old as the media themselves, the recent entrance of deepfakes has marked a turning point in the creation of fake content. Powered by the latest technological advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, deepfakes offer automated procedures to create fake content that is harder and harder for human observers to detect. The possibilities to deceive are endless-including manipulated pictures, videos, and audio-and organizations must be prepared as this will undoubtedly have a large societal impact. In this article, we provide a working definition of deepfake together with an overview of its underlying technology. We classify different deepfake types and identify risks and opportunities to help organizations think about the future of deepfakes. Finally, we propose the R.E.A.L. framework to manage deepfake risks: Record original content to assure deniability, expose deepfakes early, advocate for legal protection, and leverage trust to counter credulity. Following these principles, we hope that our society can be more prepared to counter deepfake tricks as we appreciate its treats.

The range of topics and the opinions expressed on artificial intelligence (AI) are so broad that clarity is needed on the the field's central tenets, the opportunities AI presents, and the challenges it poses. To that end, we provide an overview of the six building blocks of artificial intelligence: structured data, unstructured data, preprocesses, main processes, a knowledge base, and value-added information outputs. We then develop a typology to serve as an analytic tool for managers grappling with AI's influence on their industries. The typology considers the effects of AI-enabled innovations on two dimensions: the innovations' boundaries and their effects on organizational competencies. The typology's first dimension distinguishes between product-facing innovations, which influence a firm's offerings, and process-facing innovations, which influence a firm's operations. The typology's second dimension describes innovations as either competence-enhancing or competence-destroying; the former enhances current knowledge and skills, whereas the latter renders existing skills and knowledge obsolete. This framework lets managers evaluate their markets, the opportunities within them, and the threats arising from them, providing valuable background and structure to important strategic decisions.

Machine learning holds great promise for lowering product and service costs, speeding up business processes, and serving customers better. It is recognized as one of the most important application areas in this era of unprecedented technological development, and its adoption is gaining momentum across almost all industries. In view of this, we offer a brief discussion of categories of machine learning and then present three types of machine-learning usage at enterprises. We then discuss the trade-off between the accuracy and interpretability of machine-learning algorithms, a crucial consideration in selecting the right algorithm for the task at hand. We next outline three cases of machine-learning development in financial services. Finally, we discuss challenges all managers must confront in deploying machine-learning applications.