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In the early days of the internet, the author was studying electrical engineering at Stanford, excited by the possibilities of the new technology. Later, working in the San Francisco office of the investment bank Alex. Brown & Sons, he gained an in-depth understanding of how to transform an idea into a corporation. Obsessed with the notion of starting a venture in his native Middle East, he moved to Dubai at age 23. There he saw that Arab youths were having a hard time finding work, while business owners were having a hard time finding workers--and he decided to start an online jobs marketplace to connect them. Fewer than 1% of people in the Arab world had internet access at that time, so clients had to be educated in the smallest details of the online universe. That meant installing the first web browser on many of their computers, training HR managers to dial into the internet, and printing and hand-delivering CVs. Today, with tens of thousands of registered companies and more than 36 million job seekers, Bayt has expanded within the Middle East and beyond, offering solutions including applicant tracking systems, video evaluation programs, and virtual event fairs. And in most of the Middle East, the internet culture it helped establish is thriving.

When most organizations strive to increase collaboration, they approach it too narrowly: as a value to cultivate--not a skill to teach. So they create open offices, talk up collaboration as a corporate goal, and try to influence employees through other superficial means that don't yield progress. Companies that excel at collaboration, in contrast, realize it involves instilling the right mindset: widespread respect for colleagues' contributions, openness to experimenting with others' ideas, and sensitivity to how one's actions may affect teammates and outcomes. What's more, these firms have established programs to help employees develop those attitudes. In her research, Gino, an HBS professor, has identified six types of training techniques used by such programs. They teach people to (1) listen, not talk; (2) practice empathy; (3) be comfortable giving and receiving feedback; (4) lead and follow; (5) speak with clarity and avoid abstractions; and (6) have win-win interactions. Drawing from her observations of Pixar, Webasto, and other companies, the author shares specific tools and exercises that show employees how to work well together, learn from one another, and connect more fully.

It's never been easier for workers to collaborate--or so it seems. Open offices, messaging, and virtual-meeting software in theory make people more visible and available. But as the physical and technological structures for omnichannel collaboration have spread, evidence suggests they are producing less interaction--or less meaningful interaction--not more. This happens because individuals, not companies, decide when and how to engage with others. They become adept at shutting people out and reading signs that their coworkers wish to be left alone. Many companies don't understand how to achieve the kinds of collaboration they want. The authors provide guidance on reaching such an understanding. Companies can use new technologies, such as sensors that track people's movements and software that collects their digital "bread crumbs," to learn how members of particular groups are actually interacting. They can then experiment to learn how to achieve the types of exchanges they want: trying various office configurations, testing a pilot floor plan before overhauling the entire space, and exploring the impact of small tweaks. This approach will help them equip employees with the spaces and technologies that best support their needs.

To spur innovation, businesses have spent billions on internal venture capital, incubators, and accelerators. Yet survey after survey indicates these efforts aren't producing results. Why? Because firms fail to address one major obstacle: the day-to-day habits and routines that regularly stifle innovation. These include such things as poorly run meetings, no slack capacity, few opportunities to speak up, and the notion that doing things differently is inefficient and costly. Fortunately, it's possible to hack this problem, using interventions called BEANs, combinations of behavioral enablers, artifacts, and nudges that break down the innovation blockers. Behavior enablers are tools or processes that make it easier for people to do something differently. Artifacts, which you can see or touch, support the new behavior. Nudges promote it through indirect suggestion and reinforcement. In this article the authors describe a variety of BEANs that the bank DBS, the Tata Group, and other companies have devised to unleash innovation. They also explain how any organization can go about creating its own BEANs by identifying the creative behaviors it wants, examining what's getting in the way, and then brainstorming ways to bust those bad habits.

Every year the damage done by cyberbreaches seems to grow bigger. It looks as if hackers just keep getting more effective. But cybersecurity experts Parenty and Domet think there's another reason companies aren't successful at thwarting cyberattacks: They don't truly understand their cyberrisks, because they focus only on their technological vulnerabilities and relegate responsibility for managing threats entirely to security and IT staff. And because of that, they don't muster the right defenses. A better approach involves getting input from a broad range of employees and, especially, board members and company leaders. It starts with identifying the company's critical business activities and the risks to them. Instead of asking how your computer systems could be attacked, for instance, ask how an attack could disrupt your supply chain, expose your trade secrets, or make you fail to meet your key obligations. Next, inventory the systems supporting those activities, examine their vulnerabilities, and identify potential attackers. This information, which should be gathered into a cyberthreat narrative for each activity, will allow you to plan, prioritize, and make more-targeted cybersecurity investments.

In the face of rapid, disruptive change, companies are realizing that managers can't be expected to have all the answers and that command-and-control leadership is no longer viable. As a result, many firms are moving toward a coaching model in which managers facilitate problem-solving and encourage employees' development by asking questions and offering support and guidance rather than giving orders and making judgments. The authors explain the merits of different types of coaching-directive, nondirective, and situational-and note that sometimes no coaching at all is appropriate. They describe how managers can use the four-step GROW model to become more skilled at listening, questioning, and drawing insights out of the people they supervise. The article concludes with recommendations for making coaching an organizational capacity-effecting a cultural transformation by articulating why coaching is valuable for the firm as well as individuals, ensuring that leaders embrace and model it, building coaching capabilities throughout the ranks, and removing barriers to change.

Online reviews are transforming the way consumers choose products and services of all sorts. We turn to TripAdvisor to plan a vacation, Zocdoc to find a doctor, and Yelp to choose a new restaurant. Reviews can create value for buyers and sellers alike, but only if they attain a critical level of quantity and quality. The authors describe principles for setting the incentives, design choices, and rules that help review platforms thrive. To address a shortage of reviews, companies can seed them by hiring reviewers or drawing reviews from other platforms; offer incentives; or pool products. To address selection bias, they can require reviews, allow private comments, and design prompts carefully. To combat fraudulent and strategic reviews, they can set rules for reviewers and call in moderators--whether employees, the community, or algorithms.

For many employees, the key motivator is a sense of purpose--and yet more than half of those surveyed say they're not even "somewhat" passionate about their jobs. If organizations want to inspire their workers, they must clearly communicate why they're in business and what value they provide. When employees understand and embrace those things, their companies thrive: Survey results show that more than 90% of companies with a well-defined purpose deliver growth and profits at or above the industry average. An effective purpose statement, the authors say, answers several questions: Why does our organization exist? Who are we serving? What value do we offer, and why are we uniquely capable of providing it? But a powerful statement is not enough; firms must also deliver on their promises to customers. That requires putting the right people in the right roles, breaking down silos to facilitate cross-functional collaboration, investing in the areas that matter most, and ensuring that leaders demonstrate every day, through their words and actions, their commitment to the firm's articulated goals.

Digital media consumes a large and growing share of our waking lives, but these goods and services go largely uncounted in GDP. That's because the measure is based on what people pay for goods and services. If something has a price of zero, then it typically contributes zero to GDP. Policy makers use GDP data to make decisions about how to invest in everything from infrastructure and R&D to education and cyberdefense, and regulators use economic data to set policy. Because the benefits of digitization are dramatically underestimated, those decisions and policies are being made with a poor understanding of reality. GDP-B is an alternate metric that supplements the traditional GDP framework by quantifying contributions to consumer well-being from new and free goods.

Companies spend millions on antibias training each year in hopes of creating more-inclusive--and thereby innovative and effective--workforces. Studies show that well-managed diverse groups perform better and are more committed, have higher collective intelligence, and excel at making decisions and solving problems. But research also shows that bias-prevention programs rarely deliver. So what can you, as an individual leader, do to ensure that your team is including and making the most of diverse voices? How can one person fix what an entire organization can't? Although bias itself is devilishly hard to change, it is not as difficult to interrupt. The authors have identified several practices that managers can use to counter bias (and avoid its negative effects) without spending a lot of time or political capital. In hiring, leaders should insist on a diverse pool, precommit to objective criteria, limit referral hiring, and structure interviews around skills-based questions. Day to day, they should ensure that high- and low-value work is assigned evenly and run meetings in a way that guarantees all voices are heard. In evaluating and developing people, they should clarify criteria for positive reviews and promotions, stick to those rules, and separate potential from performance and personality from skill sets.

Australia's former prime minister talks about discipline, resilience, and misogyny.

Why do large, successful public companies and their CEOs suddenly weaken? To find out, we studied 45 large European and U.S. stumbles. Our case studies point to some common mistakes, such as undertaking unnecessarily risky growth strategies, treating compliance issues lightly, or poor cost control. These simple mistakes often had complex origins, such as attempts to meet conflicting objectives, weak board governance, or even executives being misled by positive experiences with ambitioius growth investments. We develop a checklist of "Emperor's Clothes" failings to help executives and boards lessen the risk of the worst stumbles.

This article explores solutions-driven innovation within an emerging market context, specifically in Africa, and how it can be utilized as a strategy by multinational enterprises to address institutional voids in these markets. Through a qualitative case study of Uber and their expansion into Africa, it demonstrates how solutions-driven innovation can create markets and mitigate distance and institutional voids in emerging market contexts. Uber created markets in Africa by developing a solution to consumers' unmet needs. Such solutions-driven innovation can create opportunities not only at the bottom but also in the middle of the economic pyramid. But to be successful in African markets requires being mindful of how institutional voids necessitate innovative solutions and potentially different value propositions.

This article provides guidance to social entrepreneurs and their funders as they seek to advance the enterprise from startup to scale. It focuses on the evolution of four social entrepreneurs and their decision-making paths as they attempt to scale their respective organizations. It then develops a framework to understand how social entrepreneurs alternate between pursuing activities to increase the scale of their work and delivering social impact in a "zig-zagging" process.

The paradox of openness is inherent to all platform ecosystems-the tension in enabling maximum openness to create joint innovation while guaranteeing value capturing for all actors. Governance mechanisms to solve this paradox are embedded into the technical architecture of the platform, addressing the dimensions of access, control, and incentives. Blockchain technology offers unique ways to design novel governance mechanisms through the standardization of interactions. However, the design of such an architecture requires careful consideration of the cost associated with it.

Open innovation has become well established as a new imperative for organizing innovation. In line with the increased use in industry, it has also attracted a lot of attention in academia. However, understanding the full benefits and possible limits of open innovation still remains a challenge. We draw on strategic management theory to describe some of these benefits and limits. More specifically, we develop a dynamic capabilities framework as a way to better understand the strategic management of open innovation, which can then help to better explain both success and failure in open innovation. With this background, as guest editors we introduce select papers published in this Special Section of California Management Review that were originally presented at the fifth annual World Open Innovation Conference, held in San Francisco, California, in December of 2018.

While collaborating with several competitors on coupled innovation projects requires smooth knowledge sharing to ensure the project's success, protecting knowledge is also essential due to the prevailing risks of coalition formation, opportunism, and knowledge leakage. Intense tensions between knowledge sharing and protection may arise and must be managed to avoid project failure. This article explores the formal and informal mechanisms used to manage these tensions. The case studied (Galileo) reveals the limited role of informal mechanisms to manage such tensions and shows how a centralized project structure encouraged the formal sharing of knowledge by protecting firms from unwanted knowledge transfers between competitors.

This article investigates how project expertise and complexity jointly impact the decision to adopt open or closed innovation. It identifies four different types of open innovation models-crowdsourcing, coopetition, science-based, and network-and explores the varying conditions of project expertise and complexity under which firms tend to adopt a particular type. Using large data analysis from pharmaceutical drug development projects, the authors find that complexity moderates the relationship between project expertise and the choice of open or closed innovation and that levels of complexity and project expertise vary between different open innovation models.

Firms use flexible work arrangements (FWAs) to attract, retain, and satisfy human resource capital, while workers use them to manage work and nonwork demands and to reduce stress and conflict. Yet, even when firms have such policies on the books, employees often do not use them because they perceive a lack of support from their organization or their supervisor. Employees may even feel that they will be stigmatized for using such policies. Using an ecological framework, we examine factors that influence support for FWAs at multiple levels: the organization or business unit, the supervisor or work group, and the individual. We offer recommendations to address the mechanisms that affect FWA support at these levels of analyses and present ways organizational leaders may positively influence a work environment by supporting workplace flexibility.

Females represent just 6% of Fortune 500 CEOs in the U.S. Which competencies, traits, motivations, and experiences drive female CEOs to the corner office? Our study includes interviews with 57 women, all current and former CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, in an effort to explore the common characteristics of female CEOs and record their experiences as well as actions organizations took that supported-and hindered-their leadership ascents. We found common themes of female CEOs' courage, risk taking, resilience, and ability to manage ambiguity. Women need not shy away from tough and unpredictable job assignments that will build these characteristics. To this end, we suggest steps organizations should take to cultivate a robust pipeline of female talent in the workplace.