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Formal communication channels, such as protocol-guided meetings, are often eschewed by today's managers and employees, who prefer the ease of email and apps. But informal avenues can lead to oversights and inefficiencies that hurt performance. That's the central finding of research from IE Business School on manufacturers of high-tech machinery. Fortunately, formal communication protocols can be designed to both maximize performance and overcome people's resistance to adopting them.

MIT Sloan Management Review and Google's new cross-industry survey about key performance indicators (KPIs) asked senior executives to explain how they and their organizations are using KPIs in the digital era. The results shed light on the tensions and contradictions companies face when using KPIs, demonstrate the many ways advanced use of KPIs can benefit organizations, and offer steps executives can take to make the most of KPIs going forward.

Lake's experience as a consultant to retailers and restaurants led to a fascination with how untouched those industries were by 21st-century technology. As a lover of both clothes and data, she felt certain that data could create a better experience with apparel--as long as the human element was preserved. From the beginning Lake planned to build a data science operation to make Stitch Fix scalable. The company's revenue is dependent on great recommendations from its algorithm, so its data scientists have a direct line to the CEO. Data science is deeply ingrained in the company culture: In addition to client recommendations of clothing, algorithms keep capital costs low, inventory moving, and deliveries efficient. Product development has adapted algorithms from genetics to find successful "traits" in clothing. Stitch Fix has even used machine learning to design apparel. But, Lake says, shopping is inherently a personal and human activity, which is why human stylists can alter or override the product assortment a styling algorithm delivers before the client receives a shipment.

Asking questions is a uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in organizations: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, it builds rapport and trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards. But few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed-or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive. That's a missed opportunity. The good news is that by asking questions, we naturally improve our emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners-a virtuous cycle. The authors draw on insights from behavioral science research to explore how the way we frame questions and choose to answer our counterparts can influence the outcome of conversations. They offer guidance for choosing the best type, tone, sequence, and framing of questions and for deciding what and how much information to share to reap the most benefit from our interactions, not just for ourselves but for our organizations.

Most leaders view employee freedoms and operational controls as antagonists in a tug-of-war. They tend to focus on regulating workers' behavior, often putting a damper on commitment, innovation, and performance without realizing it. But freedom and control aren't zero-sum, argues the author. By giving people a clear sense of their organization's purpose, priorities, and principles--that is, by providing freedom within a galvanizing framework--leaders can equip employees to make on-the-ground decisions that are in the company's best interests. Gulati uses businesses as diverse as Netflix, Alaska Airlines, and Warby Parker to show how freedom can function in different settings. A coherent framework helps employees develop a deeper understanding of the business, which can lead to improved engagement, creativity, efficiency, and customer service.

Over the next decade, as artificially intelligent assistants like Alexa and Siri become the main channel through which people get information, goods, and services, the way companies acquire, serve, and retain customers will radically change. Because the bots will have deep knowledge about individuals' habits and preferences, they'll be able to anticipate a consumer's needs even better than the consumer herself can. They'll ensure that routine purchases flow uninterrupted to homes and constantly scan and analyze complex offerings like insurance and data plans for the best deals. And the more AI assistants satisfy consumers, the more trust in them will replace trust in brands. Marketing will soon become a battle for AI assistants' attention, says Dawar. Brands will focus on influencing AI algorithms and will compete for placement on the assistants' platforms. In return, brands will be able to get data on consumers from the platforms. That's something companies will need in this new world, because AI assistants' never-ending reassessment of purchases will force them to keep producing new tailored offers and innovations to keep their customers on board.

When implemented correctly, agile innovation teams almost always result in higher team productivity and morale, faster time to market, better quality, and lower risk than traditional approaches can achieve. What if a company were to launch dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of agile teams? Could whole segments of the business learn to operate in this manner? As enticing as such a prospect is, turning it into a reality can be challenging. Companies often struggle to know which functions should be reorganized into multidisciplinary agile teams and which should not. And it's not unusual to launch dozens of new agile teams only to see them bottlenecked by slow-moving bureaucracies. The authors, who have studied the scaling of agile at hundreds of companies, share what they've learned about how to do it effectively. Leaders should use agile methodologies themselves and create a taxonomy of opportunities to set priorities and break the journey into small steps. Workstreams should be modularized and then seamlessly integrated. Functions not reorganized into agile teams should learn to operate with agile values. And the annual budgeting process should be complemented with a VC-like approach to funding.

Every leader knows the importance of the first hundred days or the first year in office--the period during which one must assess and diagnose, formulate a vision and a strategy, and achieve early wins. And guidance abounds for how CEOs in their final months on the job should approach their main responsibility: helping develop and select a successor and then smoothly handing over power. But little attention has been paid to the time between those stages. How can CEOs make the most of the middle years of their tenure? The authors conducted detailed interviews with high-performing former CEOs, asking, among other things, how their priorities, mindsets, and approaches evolved in their second act. Five themes emerged as essential to success. Leaders should keep raising the company's level of ambition, attack silos and broken processes, rejuvenate talent, build mechanisms for dissent and disruptive ideas, and spend their accumulated leadership capital on bold long-term moves. Beyond these specifics, the authors say, CEOs often benefit from viewing their tenure as a series of chapters rather than an undivided span.

Companies invest heavily in grooming star talent for leadership--but most of them haven't figured out how to manage the growing population of employees who care deeply about their partners' or spouses' careers at the same time that they want to advance their own. As a result, many high potentials are heading for the nearest exit. The author has seen this happen again and again in her research on dual-career couples in tech, health care, professional services, and other industries. She says the crux of the problem is that companies tend to have fixed paths to leadership roles, with set tours of duty and rigid ideas about what ambition looks like. That creates flexibility and mobility challenges for employees--and recruitment and retention headaches for employers. Organizations must adopt new strategies for managing and developing talent. They can remove barriers to advancement by allowing people to develop skills and networks in more-creative ways--through brief "job swaps," for example, or commuter-leader roles. But often a culture change is needed. Instead of stigmatizing flexibility, companies must learn to embrace it.

Why have women failed to achieve parity with men in the workplace? Contrary to popular belief, it's not because women prioritize their families over their careers, negotiate poorly, lack confidence, or are too risk-averse. Meta-analyses of published studies show that those ideas are myths--men and women actually have similar inclinations, attitudes, and skills. What does differ is the way they are treated on the job: Women have less access to vital information, get less feedback from supervisors, and face other obstacles to advancement. To ensure gender equity, the authors recommend that managers: (1) Question the stereotypes behind their practices; (2) Consider other factors that might explain the achievement gap; (3) Change workplace conditions accordingly; (4) Keep challenging assumptions and sharing learning so as to create a culture in which all employees can reach their full potential.

Today layoffs have become companies' default response to the challenges created by advances in technology and global competition. Yet research shows that job cuts rarely help senior leaders achieve their goals. Too often, they're done for short-term gain, but the cost savings are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation, which hurt profits in the long run. This article looks at better ways to handle changing workforce needs that make sparing use of staff reductions and ensure that if they do happen, the process feels fair and the affected parties have a soft landing. Most successful approaches begin with a philosophy that spells out a firm's commitments and priorities, establish methods for exploring layoff alternatives (such as furloughs, retraining, and reassignments), and determine options for three scenarios: a healthy present, short-term volatility, and an uncertain future. As firms like AT&T, Michelin, Honeywell, and Nokia have learned, thoughtful planning helps organizations address workforce transitions and cope with a shifting economic landscape far better than layoffs do.

Political risk was once relatively easy to define--more often than not, it involved dictators seizing foreign assets. Today it comes from a wide array of actors: citizens making videos on cell phones, city officials issuing ordinances, terrorists with truck bombs, cybercriminals, and more. Supply chains are longer--and more vulnerable--and the geopolitical landscape is more crowded and uncertain. But just because you don't know exactly where political risk will come from, that doesn't mean you can't prepare for it, say Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state, and Zegart, the codirector for the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. Effective risk management is still fairly straightforward. Companies that excel at it are strong in four core competencies: understanding, analyzing, and mitigating risk, and responding to crises. In this article, Rice and Zegart outline what each competency entails, providing questions that every organization can ask to identify gaps, along with case studies that illustrate how companies have successfully addressed real-world political threats.

We're often reluctant to ask for help because of the social threats involved--uncertainty, risk of rejection, potential for diminished status, relinquishment of authority. But without support from others, it's virtually impossible to advance in your career. And studies show that most people are surprisingly willing to lend a hand--if you ask in the right way. The author provides three reinforcements that can be incorporated in requests: (1) "In-group." Assure the potential helper that you are on the same team and that the team is important. (2) "Positive identity." Create or enhance people's recognition that they are uniquely placed to provide assistance and that they routinely come to others' aid. (3) "Effectiveness." Be clear about what you need and about what impact the help will have.

Lessons on leadership.

Widely considered the founder of the modern strategy field, Michael Porter discusses his current work on the Social Progress Imperative and its accompanying Social Progress Index. He explains why social progress must be on the radar of every business executive. He also describes why Denmark (among countries) and America's largest bank, J.P. Morgan Chase (among corporations) lead the world in terms of their commitment to social progress. In the end, he makes it clear that the most powerful way for any company to affect society is through its business model.

Re-framing a technological advance as a shift from scarce to abundant or from expensive to cheap is invaluable for thinking about how it will affect your business. Computers made arithmetic cheap, with vast implications for industries whose products could be digitized, such as photography and music. Artificial Intelligence, the authors argue, will be economically significant because it will make something very important a lot cheaper: prediction. The challenge will be to identify situations in which prediction will be valuable, and then figure out how to benefit as much as possible from that prediction.

The amount of value in any given product will always lie in the eye of the beholder. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist. Two senior Bain & Company experts describe the 'elements of value' for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business products. They explain how they have organized these elements (30 for B2C and 40 for B2B) into a hierarchical pyramid inspired by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs-with basic value offerings at the bottom and aspirational offerings at the top. Apple's iPhone, for instance, covers 11 of the 30 possible elements of value for consumers. The challenge for leaders today, they argue, is to compare their value offerings to their competitors; seek to close value gaps; and come up with innovative new combinations of value.

As consumer touchpoints increasingly migrate online, it is important to understand how human nature manifests itself in a digital environment. The authors-including the head of the University of Toronto's Behavioural Economics in Action research institute-describe five behavioural biases brought on by a digital environment and present their research findings on three characteristics of digital behaviour: the 'screen effect'; the choice-engine effect; and the connectivity effect. They make it clear that online decision making is not merely the digitization of decision making in a brick-and-mortar world: It is a playing field with completely different rules.

The authors argue that innovation is a social process tied to human emotions and reliant on inexact methodologies in which humans collaborate and solutions emerge over time. The authors argue that Design Thinking is a key part of 'innovation 2.0'-a new approach to innovation that involves a different set of participants in the process and uses a different approach. For example, in Innovation 2.0, the focus is on developing previously-unseen possibilities rather than starting out with existing options. They provide examples of organizations that are embracing innovation 2.0 and show what it looks like in practice.

Impact investments-those that seek a specific social or environmental impact alongside financial returns-continue to grow rapidly. As investor interest grows, many investment firms are building capacity in this area. The author argues that in a world of low interest rates and a desire to increase returns and decrease uncertainty, real assets-investments in real estate or infrastructure projects such as low-cost rental housing and seniors' facilities-are a great starting place to try out impact investing.