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People with higher rates of reported mental illness are entering the workforce and discovering that it has less accommodation for mental health issues than their high school or college did. As a result, a complex issue has become even more difficult because many people struggling with mental illness believe they have to hide it from their employer. Consider some findings from a recent Accenture study of almost 4,000 workers in Britain. Nearly half of the younger participants reported that they had experienced suicidal thoughts or feelings. They were twice as likely as older workers to be experiencing a mental health challenge. Yet they were also more hesitant than their older peers to tell employers what was going on. Employers shouldn’t underestimate the difference they can make, even by making a fairly modest (and low- or no-cost) effort to create a more supportive workplace. Numerous characteristics differentiate more supportive cultures from their opposite. But three stand out as being particularly significant—and they aren’t difficult to replicate. First, in more supportive cultures, 53 per cent of all workers note that senior leaders visibly support mental health at work. Second, in more supportive cultures, 87 per cent of workers can identify a senior leader they can approach for help with a mental health challenge. Third, it’s important that workers know about the supports that are already in place.

Smoking was once considered as American as apple pie, but times change. Cigarette sales in the United States dropped to 216.9 billion in 2018, marking the industry’s lowest level in demand since the tracking of cigarette sales began in 1967. But today’s smokers are not just being banned from lighting up at work—they are being banned from employment by companies like U-Haul, at least in the United States. (In Canada, the Human Rights Act theoretically protects nicotine users from this sort of selective hiring policy.) There is no question that well-designed wellness programs can benefit employers and society alike. But on the other hand, besides having the potential to negatively impact employee morale, aggressive wellness initiatives can spawn a culture of deceit, fostering unhealthy attempts to beat the system. In the case of weight-loss programs with financial incentives, studies have found that employees often attempt to manipulate results by binge eating and crash dieting. As a result, wellness programs must be well designed. Providing employees with knowledge, risk management tools, and positive incentives has a role to play in today’s workplace. But refusing to hire people who, for better or worse, use any legal product can do more harm than good.

In January 2020, a U.S. hunter-killer drone killed Iran’s second most powerful person, without congressional approval. During the fog of Iran’s response, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot out of the sky over Tehran by jittery Iranian military defense personnel. Michael McCain, CEO of Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods, blamed Trump for the accident, which claimed the lives of 176 people, including the wife and 11-year-old son of a Maple Leaf Foods employee. Without mentioning the president’s name, McCain used his company’s official Twitter account to express what he said were “personal reflections” about the tragedy. The corporate world was divided by McCain’s blunt assessment of Trump’s leadership, with critics insisting he had crossed a clear line by using the official Maple Leaf Foods Twitter account to spread personal opinions without any regard for the corporate bottom line. There is no question that CEOs are accountable to company stakeholders via corporate boards, but the guiding principles of corporate leadership and governance are constantly evolving. While fans of the shareholder primacy model are free to resist change, there is no universally accepted line that separates the duties of corporate leaders and the personal views they hold, especially not on matters of interest to the stakeholders they serve.

People can no longer always trust their eyes or ears thanks to generative adversarial networks (GANs), a special subset of artificial intelligence technology. This technology makes it relatively easy to create deepfakes—convincing clips of people doing or saying things that they never did or said. Deepfakes present a serious threat to Western civilization because they create an opportunity for bad actors to supercharge disinformation. National security experts worry about foreign actors deploying deepfakes to manipulate public opinion. The potential for an assault on reality has put a serious regulatory target on GANs. But the technology behind deepfakes might just be what democratic nations need to keep up in the AI race. The objective of this article is to highlight how GAN technology enables AI developers to augment or complete data sets where data is unavailable, incomplete, or otherwise lacking. GAN technology has plenty of other positive things to offer, including for medical research, automotive safety, and security and military applications. Instead of having a conversation based on fear and misunderstanding, Western nations need to explore deploying laws, policies, and regulations grounded in age-old legal concepts like defamation and slander to counter the threat posed by deepfakes. After all, knee-jerk calls for regulatory action risk putting unnecessary restrictions on the development of a technology that could hold the key to democracy’s survival.

New research links leaders' actions in their personal lives with outcomes for their firms. The researchers used crime databases, private investigators, tax and property records, and other sources to identify executives with personal legal records and ones with unusually materialistic lifestyles. They then looked for correlations between those traits and certain on-the-job behaviors. Across four studies, they found that leaders with legal records were more likely than their law-abiding counterparts to engage in stock trades made on the basis of insider information and that their companies were more likely than others to have submitted fraudulent financial statements to the SEC. Materialistic leaders, for their part, tended to helm firms in which other executives made intentional and unintentional reporting errors. They were more likely than frugal leaders to take risks, and they got lower scores on CSR measures. Simply having governance structures in place across a firm is not enough, the researchers conclude, because individuals have very different appetites for taking chances and breaking rules.

Ads tell us about attractive new offerings we might want to try. But it could be they also make us feel discontent with what we currently have--and diminish our sense of well-being in the process. When researchers looked at survey data on the life satisfaction of nearly a million people in 27 European countries and compared it with the annual ad spending in those nations, they found an inverse relationship between the two. When ad spending went up, national happiness went down.

Recently booming academic interest in digital transformation aims to provide continuous support to managers in dealing with this important issue. However, as with all new fields, the scholarly literature is characterized by increased variability and diversity of topics covered, constructs used and relationships between them, resulting in an unclear and blurry understanding of the whole of digital transformation. Our article closes this gap by identifying distinctive digital transformation strategies in terms of two critical dimensions: usage of digital technologies and readiness of a business model for digital operation. The result is a typology of four generic digital transformation strategies that essentially differ in the primary motivation and target of transformation, leadership style, importance of skills like creativity and entrepreneurial spirit among employees, risks and challenges faced in the process, consequences of potential failure and available tactics for improvement. By providing heuristics and a systematic basis for comparison of different strategies, it is our belief that the proposed framework will be useful to researchers and managers responsible for and interested in digital transformation.

With digital technologies shaping competition in many industries, predicting the future of potentially disruptive technologies becomes an essential task of business leaders concerned with the survival and success of their organizations. Looking into the future of disruptive technologies requires a philosophical stance and a practical method that accommodates the inherent uncertainty and nonlinearity of the path of disruptive innovations. Unfortunately, much of the current thinking in relation to adoption and diffusion of innovations is rather linear and deterministic. This article proposes a set of philosophical principles, together with a practical brainstorming method, for glimpsing into the future of disruptive technologies. The method of alternative histories is based on the traditional brainstorming techniques and the philosophical ideas of Imre Lakatos, Roy Bhaskar, Bruno Latour, and Nassim Taleb.

With the rapid development of digital technologies, many supply chain professionals are wondering how to move forward. Three technologies are poised to change supply chain business processes: robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and blockchain. Based on interviews with supply chain professionals in 14 large, mature manufacturing and service organizations, we outline the promise of each process and forecast their broad-scale adoption potential. Organizations should take the following measures to ensure their readiness to adopt and effectively use one or more of these technologies: (1) identify a supply chain technology visionary who can lead through the maze of technologies and the changing digital landscape, (2) develop a digital technology roadmap for their supply chain processes, and (3) update foundational information systems.

Digital transformation encompasses an organization's ability to adapt, respond, and position itself for success in the face of rapid technology evolution. A critical structure in achieving successful digital transformation is the digital project team, yet there is little research to study how they are created and developed. Much of the focus has been on agile methodologies and processes but there is less research to inform organizations on digital team dynamics such as roles, empowerment, learning, and leadership development. This article describes our findings from a multi-level study of the IT function of 60 companies, including fieldwork at 5 company sites involving more than 130 semistructured interviews with senior level IT professionals. We identify four essential team-based levers that enable digital transformation: (1) diverse and targeted team composition, (2) iterative goal setting, (3) continuous learning, and (4) talent management. Using company examples and practices, we describe how digital leaders are using these levers to propel their organizations forward in the journey toward digital transformation.

Recruiting talent has moved from a tactical HR activity to a strategic business priority. This has been driven by shifts in the source of firm value and competitive advantage and the critical role of human capital in those shifts. Technological advances have moved digital, AI-enabled recruiting from a peripheral curiosity to a critical capability. However, we know little about candidates'reactions to AI-enabled recruiting. Consequently, in this study, we examine the role of social media use, intrinsic rewards, fair treatment, and perceived trendiness on the intentions of prospective employees to engage with and complete digital, AI-enabled recruiting processes. The positive relationships between these factors and candidates'engagement with AI-enabled recruiting have several important practical implications for managers. We also examine the larger implications and make general recommendations to firms about using AI-enabled recruiting technology and tools.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a potential growth area for facilitating the improvement and development of teams in the workplace. AI, as used in the team context, is currently underdeveloped and limited, thus reducing the wide-scale adoption and implementation of AI to improve team effectiveness. The use of AI to provide team diagnostics and improvements represents a significant shift in the approach organizations currently use to facilitate and strengthen effective teamwork. We describe the challenges involved in developing team effectiveness in organizations and the potential application of AI to improve teamwork. Further, we report on our experiences using AI in business school student project teams, the important advantages and disadvantages that emerged from this, and insights for future consideration when adopting and implementing AI in the workplace. Based on our use of AI and our experience training high-performing teams, we propose a multistep process for analyzing and improving teams in organizations.

Technological progress-including the development of online channels and universal access to the internet via mobile devices-has advanced both the quantity and the quality of data that companies can acquire. Private information such as this may be considered a type of fuel to be processed through the use of technologies, and represents a competitive market advantage. This article describes situations in which consumers tend to disclose personal information to companies and explores factors that encourage them to do so. The empirical studies and examples of market activities described herein illustrate to managers just how rewards work and how important contextual integrity is to customer digital privacy expectations. Companies' success in obtaining client data depends largely on three Ts: transparency, type of data, and trust. These three Ts-which, combined, constitute a main T (i.e., the transfer of personal data)-deserve attention when seeking customer information that can be converted to competitive advantage and market success.

Digital transformation recently converged on organizations as a new paradigm-a must-have exemplar-to enable competitive advantage. While the effects of digital transformation and their analytics, along with platform technologies, are becoming pronounced in companies, there is still a need to examine their implications on higher education. In light of the dynamics of digital transformation, how can higher education better manage the shift toward newer competencies and the need for innovation presented by the emergence of digital technologies? In this article, I examine the issues around the need for this balance-often defined in strategy as ambidexterity, or the need to address both competency with innovation-by outlining the historical trajectories that led to this problem in higher education, identifying three common pitfalls that higher education programs and administrators face, and tying these issues to higher education's absorptive capacity. To resolve these pitfalls, this article builds upon absorptive capacity frameworks for education practitioners and strategies as a prospective change management tool.

As the underlying technology of bitcoin, blockchain is expected to create a new economic system by revolutionizing the way we communicate over the internet. Blockchain seeks to improve information security and transparency by sharing encrypted data among peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Due to its emphasis on security and trust, there is increased demand for blockchain's application in a variety of business sectors. The decentralized nature of blockchain creates the new concept of a token economy in which the community's revenue can be allocated to the actual content producers and service users who create value. This article looks at how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are evolving and interconnected, creating a token economy through different business models. Blockchain is expected to be a key technology that enables new protocols for the establishment of a token economy in the future, leading to a new economic paradigm.

Chatbots are used frequently in business to facilitate various processes, particularly those related to customer service and personalization. In this article, we propose novel methods of tracking human-chatbot interactions and measuring chatbot performance that take into consideration ethical concerns, particularly trust. Our proposed methodology links neuroscientific methods, text mining, and machine learning. We argue that trust is the focal point of successful human-chatbot interaction and assess how trust as a relevant category is being redefined with the advent of deep learning supported chatbots. We propose a novel method of analyzing the content of messages produced in human-chatbot interactions, using the Condor Tribefinder system we developed for text mining that is based on a machine learning classification engine. Our results will help build better social bots for interaction in business or commercial environments.

As companies become increasingly digital, growth hacking emerged as a new way of scaling businesses. While the term is fashionable in business, many executives remain confused about the concept. Even if firms have an idea of what growth hacking is, they may still be puzzled as to how to do it, creating a strategy-execution gap. Our article assists firms by bridging the growth hacking strategy-execution gap. First, we provide a growth hacking framework and deconstruct its building blocks: marketing, data analysis, coding, and the lean startup philosophy. We then present a taxonomy of 34 growth hacking patterns along the customer life cycle of acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral; categorize them on the two dimensions of resource intensity and time lag; and provide an example of how to apply the taxonomy in the case of a fitness application. Finally, we discuss seven opportunities and challenges of growth hacking that firms should keep in mind.

Due to its intrinsic characteristics, artificial intelligence (AI) can be considered a general-purpose technology (GPT) in the digital era. Most studies in the field focus on the ex-post recognition and classification of GPT but in this article, we look at a GPT design ex-ante by reviewing the extreme and inspiring example of IBM's Watson. Our objective is to shed light on how companies can create value through AI. In particular, our longitudinal case study highlights the strategic decisions IBM took to create value in two dimensions: internal development and external collaborations. We offer relevant implications for practitioners and academics eager to know more about AI in the digital world.

One oft-cited reason why more female executives don't advance to top management jobs is their lack of access to informal organizational and industry networks. Some blame unconscious bias; others cite obligations such as office housekeeping and child-rearing that disproportionately fall to women. But some female leaders do establish strong networks, winning greater influence and more-senior positions as a result. A new study sheds light on their strategies and behavior. When shaping their professional networks, top women are efficient, resisting nonessential appointments, deflecting low-priority decisions, and running streamlined meetings. They are nimble, changing up the people in their networks as their needs evolve. They span boundaries, connecting with people in a wide variety of functions, geographies, and business units. And they balance their energy, demonstrating both competence and warmth, both intelligence and emotional intelligence.

Why do people presume that highly attractive female executives are less honest and less trustworthy than their ordinary-looking counterparts?