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New technologies arrive at a blistering pace and existing technologies become more ubiquitous by the day. Technology is so deeply embedded in daily lives and routines that people have become blinded by the promises of new technology. We have become fully engrossed in the benefits of technology in the form of automation, convenience, and immediacy. At the same time, we often fail-on a grand scale-to consider the challenges and drawbacks associated with new technologies. These drawbacks can be more profound and widespread than society acknowledges. As a result, we tend to interact with our technologies while being dangerously unaware of the potential repercussions. If we continue to interact with technology in this narrowly framed manner, significant societal problems are likely to result. This Executive Digest renews the call for increased privacy protections in the context of new technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a topic in nearly every boardroom and many dinner tables. Yet, despite this prominence, AI is still a surprisingly fuzzy concept and a lot of questions surrounding it are still open. In this article, we analyze how AI is different from related concepts, such as the Internet of Things and big data, and suggest that AI is not one monolithic term but instead needs to be seen in more a more nuanced way. This can either be achieved by looking at AI through the lens of evolutionary stages (artificial narrow intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and artificial supper intelligence) or by focusing on different types of AI systems (analytical AI, human-inspired AI, and humanized AI). Based on this classification, we show the potential and risk of AI using a series of case studies regarding universities, corporations, and governments. Finally, we present a framework that helps organizations think about the internal and external implications of AI, which we label the Three C Model of Confidence, Change, and Control.

With the soaring value of bitcoin and frenzy over cryptocurrency, the blockchain technology that sparked the bitcoin revolution has received heightened attention from both practitioners and academics. Blockchain technology often causes controversies surrounding its application potential and business ramifications. The blockchain is a peer-to-peer network of information technology that keeps records of digital asset transactions using distributed ledgers that are free from control by intermediaries such as banks and governments. Thus, it can mitigate risks associated with intermediaries' interventions, including hacking, compromised privacy, vulnerability to political turmoil, costly compliance with government rules and regulation, instability of financial institutions, and contractual disputes. This article unlocks the mystique of blockchain technology and discusses ways to leverage blockchain technology to enhance supply chain resilience in times of increased risks and uncertainty.

A sales channel serves two primary functions: delivering information and products to customers. Omnichannel retailing allows for the decoupling of these two functions as consumers can learn about products through channels that differ from those used to purchase them. This separation requires a sophisticated inventory and supply chain operation, as well as integration of all customer touchpoints, in order to match fast-moving supply and demand. The Internet of Things (IoT) can play a fundamental role in channel integration because it allows companies to rebalance supply and demand. We classify IoT initiatives on an opportunity map, presenting a strategic framework that distinguishes initiatives by the value they create and by their major area of impact. We justify the adoption of IoT in terms of its enabling capabilities-those immediately realized by deploying IoT sensor data-but its true potential resides in its enhancing capabilities-unanticipated benefits following IoT adoption-at the intersection of supply and demand.

Over 1.5 million ISO 9001 certificates are in effect worldwide, 30 years after this quality management standard was launched. As the factory of the world, China is by far the leading country for ISO 9001, in terms of both absolute and relative numbers and growth. Nevertheless, practitioners have cast doubts on the reliability of adopting ISO third-party quality certification in this country. In-depth interviews with 40 senior quality managers, consultants, and auditors with broad field experience and other complementary methods paints a disturbing picture. The widespread prevalence of fake ISO 9001 certificates is indicated, together with an eroded credibility of the process of third-party certification. We discuss the profound implications of the study-including whether or not the phenomenon is restricted to China-and introduce suggestions for managers and other stakeholders, as well as avenues for further research.

Innovation-the implementation of creative ideas-is one of the most important factors of competitive advantage in 21st century organizations. Yet, leaders do not always encourage employee behaviors that are critical for innovation. We integrate existing literature on the critical factors that serve as antecedents of innovation, including employee voice and knowledge sharing, which in turn lead to creativity and innovation. Based on existing empirical research, we offer evidence-based recommendations for managers to become innovation leaders by: (1) developing the right group norms, (2) designing teams strategically, (3) managing interactions with those outside the team, (4) showing support as a leader, (5) displaying organizational support, and (6) using performance management effectively.

The recent wave of retail bankruptcies as well as poor sales performance has resulted in a large number of store closings. Low sales in store-based retailers can also be attributed to the rapid growth of web-based retailers (largely, Amazon) as well as an excess of store space per capita in the U.S. as compared to other developed nations. Strategies to stem the decline of retail stores include: (1) utilizing omnichannel-based synergies among channels and devices to increase store sales; (2) making stores more attractive and engaging through personalization, interactivity, and a constantly changing environment; and (3) improving productivity through introducing small-size store formats and downsizing existing stores.

Digital technologies are revolutionizing traditional interdependencies among businesses. As a result, managers have begun to recognize their business environments as digital ecosystems. For firms accustomed to framing their business environments as industries, this represents a significant shift in perspective-one that requires an understanding of fresh strategic initiatives necessary to compete in the digital era. In this article, we highlight what is new and different about digital ecosystems for firm strategy. We offer frameworks that explain how digital ecosystems provide firms with new sources of value and new avenues for growth. Two sets of underlying concepts govern these frameworks: (1) production and consumption ecosystems and (2) digital envelopes and product-in-use information. We introduce and elaborate upon these foundational concepts and highlight new strategic options for firms to compete in digital ecosystems.

Despite tremendous interest in how online communities create value, existing research tends to focus on limited means through which such value is generated. In this article, we develop a conceptual model of customer value formation. This model rests on two dimensions, namely whether value is formed in the customer or provider domain and whether the value is individual or collective in nature. This enables value formation to be characterized in four ways and enables a more nuanced view of value formation to emerge. Firms are encouraged to reflect on their efforts to support each of the four value formation types. In particular, our conceptualization challenges companies to consider customer contexts outside of customer-firm interaction as important sources of value creation for customers. Such reflection enables practitioners to develop strategies for supporting individual and collective value creation across both the customer and provider domains.

The most successful and longest-enduring family firms are progressively encouraging the active presence of women on their corporate boards. Why is the presence of women on boards so important for family firms? And how can policy makers and controlling owners encourage the active presence of women on family business corporate boards? By integrating the literature on women in governance and the goals of family businesses, we take a step toward increasing shareholder awareness of the economic and noneconomic benefits that women can bring to the family business boardroom. Using theory and empirical evidence, we show that the presence of women on corporate boards can be instrumental for the controlling owners of a family business to achieve prosperity and success, to preserve family cohesion, and to improve the reputation of the family and business simultaneously. Furthermore, we discuss the socioemotional and economic ramifications of excluding women from the family business board of directors. We conclude with four practical recommendations for encouraging the active presence of women on family business boards.

In the face of rising business complexity and competitive pressure, many firms succumb to price pressures and enter pricing wars. Others focus on creating, quantifying, and capturing pricing power from their market. Since 2011, with help from Warren Buffet and Jim Cramer, Wall Street financial analysts have begun paying close attention to firms with great pricing power. But what is pricing power? How do firms know whether they have it? And how does it affect profit? This research, based on a survey of 128 organizations, identifies and validates the drivers of pricing power and its impact on firm performance. In this article, I create and validate a pricing power assessment instrument that firms can use to get started. This article offers practical recommendations for go-to-market functions on how to start the pricing power discussion, how to measure it, and how to operationalize it.

Most board meetings don’t start with a chairperson screaming, “Let’s get ready to rumble.” But it’s not a bad idea. After all, proxy advisory firms and executive development experts say managers and directors need to be ready to defend themselves like never before as the Age of Disruption threatens to stretch shareholder patience to the limits. Thanks to regulatory advantages, Canada has long been considered the land of milk and honey for activist investors. As a result, the annual number of proxy contests has jumped significantly since the turn of the century. However, existing securities laws do not adequately address the fact that control of public companies, along with their cash and assets, can be won by storytellers willing to mislead shareholders and foster discontent. Today’s boards must understand the power of gossip and myth in order to prepare for the kind of populist revolutions they can ignite. The go-to source of information for mom and pop investors is online opinion—not court rulings, corporate documents, balanced media reports, or independent expert advice. Thus, getting the retail crowd onside and prepared to defend you requires a comprehensive retail investor relations program that actively counters misinformation while effectively helping all shareholders understand how the company is working to serve their interests. Communicating the firm’s story needs to be a priority year-round, not just an initiative tied to annual meetings.

America’s Business Roundtable (BRT)—currently comprised of nearly 200 CEOs, ranging from General Motors’ Mary Barra to Apple’s Tim Cook—recently issued a statement that says making money for shareholders is not the only responsibility of management. For decades, a shareholders-first model was widely considered corporate orthodoxy in the United States, where boardroom focus has long been influenced by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1970 essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” In August 2019, the group of CEOs updated its thinking on the matter in a 300-word statement that doesn’t mention shareholders until the end of a list of commitments that starts with “delivering value to our customers” and “investing in our employees,” then moves on to “dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers” and “supporting the communities in which we work,” before finishing with “generating long-term value for shareholders.” The BRT’s shift in thinking comes at a time when corporate America faces distress due to global discontent over income inequality, harmful products, and poor working conditions. The BRT has diplomatically signaled that corporations should be more careful than they were in the past when the short-term financial interests of shareholders conflict with the interests of other stakeholders. This could have significant implications for dividend and share-buyback programs.

The continued spread of AI has stoked fears of catastrophic job losses in which machines and algorithms run the world, but research by Accenture paints a more encouraging picture. Many old jobs are changing and new ones are emerging in the “missing middle,” where humans and machines work together. The authors see evidence of at least eight novel skills that draw on the fusion of human and machine talent within a business process to create better outcomes than could be achieved when working independently: 1) taking back your time and doing something positive with it (with AI systems taking over many rote tasks, workers must redirect their time to more distinctly human tasks like interpersonal interactions, creativity, and decision-making; 2) anticipating unintended consequences and normalizing the use of technology and AI; 3) utilizing human judgment (AI can get many things right, but it still doesn’t know how to read situations and people well enough); 4) asking the right questions of AI; 5) helping bots help workers extend their human capabilities, business processes, and even careers; 6) understanding how machines work and learn and adapting accordingly (i.e., melding); 7) being a willing learner from AI and teacher to AI; and 8) reimagining just about everything. For years, the dream was to create an AI that could rival the intelligence of people. Today, we’re seeing that practical AI is becoming a tool to extend our own human capabilities at work.

Future annual growth prospects for the Canadian economy remain under two per cent, which is a far cry from the over three per cent growth during much of Canada’s history. But it doesn’t have to be this way. All roads to productivity growth go through workers having the best, most innovative facilities and tools—that is, business investment. In Canada, consumer spending, at about 60 per cent of GDP, swamps business investment, at about 12 per cent. But it is business investment that shapes the economy for the longer term. Unfortunately, Canada’s record on business investment borders on serious neglect. The lamentable business investment situation has multiple causes. First, the economy has struggled since the 2008 financial crisis. Second, household credit is near a record 175 per cent of disposable income. Third, Canadian business investment is biased towards resource sectors like oil and gas. Fourth, when the Trump Administration cut the U.S. corporate tax rate, this ended a significant Canadian economic advantage. Fifth, Trump has gotten rid of many government regulations. Finally, Canada’s federal deficit is unfavourable to business investment. Government rhetoric on business investment must be backed up by monetary and non-financial incentives that will significantly change corporate behavior, such as a much bigger tax package. Unfortunately, business investment isn’t a headline story, which is why executives need to press the business investment agenda with the government at every opportunity.

In the business world, the word “debrief” frequently has a negative connotation, probably because it is used only after a mistake or negative outcome. But such a fear-based approach is the opposite of how Blue Angels pilots structure their training, practice, and subsequent success. On the contrary, their goal is to drive fear out of the organization. When the author was a member of the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, they used the debrief tool at the end of each day. Based on the Blue Angels model, a successful debrief consists of two main parts: the general-safe statements (providing a general overview and a safety note) and the specific details that each member contributes. Each day’s debrief was defined by ensuring five specific interpersonal dynamics: providing a safe environment so everyone feels free to share essential information; checking your ego at the door; laying everything on the table and suspending hierarchical thinking in the interest of getting results; owning and fixing problems by assuming responsibility; and adopting a “glad to be here” mindset. Various studies have confirmed a correlation between gratitude and positive results. Gratitude is a social emotion; it binds us together and strengthens our bonds, regardless of the nature of our relationships. With this mindset, teams can more easily process negative feedback and turn it into positive results.

When finalizing M&A transactions, it pays for dealmakers to understand that not all non-compete agreements are created equal—or equally enforceable

Many successful individuals cite fate or luck as significant factors in their success. But is luck at the root of success? Or is luck a second-hand explanation that fulfills other psychological needs? The author argues that success is not primarily a question of the opportunities that present themselves to an individual, but of whether an individual, first, even recognizes them as opportunities and, second, is able to make the most of them. Research shows that extroversion correlates with an increased probability that someone will encounter unexpected opportunities and actively exploit them. The identification and exploitation of chance occurrences is also the result of certain personality traits and attitudes. When successful people point to luck, this often serves as an unconscious defence against envy. Someone who has just enjoyed a particularly sweet (and, for others, envy-inducing) success might shrug their shoulders and say, “So what, I was just lucky.” In doing so, they are seeking to neutralize the envy that may be directed against them by pointing to a random, unpredictable, and uncontrollable power (or combination of powers) that is responsible for favourable or unfavourable outcomes. However, for happenstance, luck, or coincidence to contribute to great success, they must meet an individual with the requisite tacit knowledge—one who is able to recognize the opportunity and seize it.

The incidence of sexual harassment and assault is highest in male-dominated workplaces. And, like sexual harassment and assault, gender discrimination is more prevalent among male-dominated companies. Given the preponderance of mostly male or all-male boards, directors should ask what they can do to pre-empt and prevent #MeToo-type situations in the companies they govern. The author recommends six steps: 1) Diversify: Gender-diverse boards look at sexual harassment and discrimination through a different lens because there are assorted types of people in the room. 2) Examine the culture: Culture can normalize attitudes and behaviours that allow problems to perpetuate and allow silence to prevail. 3) Do a vulnerability analysis: Human-capital risk is part of enterprise risk management and human resources and compensation committees should put gender discrimination and harassment risk on the agenda. 4) Review policies and procedures. 5) Establish when and how the board should be notified: Policies should specify what situation is too small to merit board attention and, conversely, what requires the board’s guidance and how urgently. 6) Build a response plan. Ultimately, there is never a good time to face sexual harassment and discrimination problems; however, boards should have tough and sensitive discussions now. They should be informed, attentive, and realistic about the frequency of these problems, and should advocate a zero-tolerance policy.

In recent decades, observers from across disciplines have begun to apply the principles of natural swarm behaviour to artificial intelligence systems, humans, and business systems. Companies such as Spotify and Daimler are adopting swarm theory as a collective organizing framework. This may be because traditional group facilitation is hampered by prescriptiveness, horizontal growth, and groupthink and group polarization. Swarm facilitation is sustained by six core principles or beliefs: a) belief in collective behaviour and the collective intelligence of the group; b) belief that group work is part of a collaborative and complex adaptive system that is self-organizing and emergent rather than a controlled, prescriptive, and ready-made environment; c) belief that ideas collected in the group can contribute directly to organizational improvement or product development, or promote the wider networked learning organization; d) belief that diverse groups of collaborative stakeholders enhance innovation, decision making, and learning; e) belief that modern technology can support the filtering of information and ideas and enhance decision making; and f) belief that open innovation and collaboration promotes vertical growth. Research involving observing the migratory habits of honeybees offers five powerful lessons about what is needed for swarm facilitation to thrive: focus on real issues; split into teams; exercise collective leadership; embrace diversity; and use mechanisms to filter information. In the end, swarm theory is an organizing framework—inspired by the natural world—that promotes group collaboration and helps us navigate through complex adaptive systems.