Lessons Learned From Outside Innovators
Simone Ferriani and Gino Cattani
Key Insight: When creative thinkers bring fresh ideas to an organization, it can spark innovation — if they can find supportive allies.
Top Takeaways: People from outside an organization can offer a unique perspective that challenges established norms and catalyzes innovation. But that won’t happen if these unconventional thinkers find themselves in an environment where insiders don’t value or support their input. Leaders can learn how to spot and advocate for these disrupters by understanding outsider advantages and disadvantages, the need for allies, and the power of diverse views in combating groupthink.
How Remote Work Changes Design Thinking
Daniel Wentzel, Alice Minet, Stefan Raff-Heinen, and Janina Garbas
Key Insight: Design-thinking teams can benefit from both in-person and virtual collaboration by choosing the best option at each stage of the innovation process.
Top Takeaways: Digital tools have enabled new-product development activities that have historically happened in person to move to online environments. When researchers examined how that shift is affecting design teams, they found that the quality of the results and how team members experience the design-thinking process are affected both positively and negatively. The researchers offer advice for leaders on structuring the process to exploit the best features of both physical and virtual environments for more effective ideation, customer experience research, and other design-thinking steps.
The Hidden Battle for IP Protection in Alliances
Jens-Christian Friedmann, Dovev Lavie, Linda Rademaker, and Andrew Shipilov
Key Insight: Companies can apply a multilayered strategy to defend themselves from predatory partners that may target their intellectual property.
Top Takeaways: Strategic alliances are crucial for accessing specialized resources and knowledge. But there’s a risk that a partner may exploit or try to access the other company’s proprietary knowledge or technologies through covert observation or other means of intelligence-gathering, leading to intellectual property loss. To protect their IP and maintain competitive advantage over the long term, companies must implement a multilayered defense that incorporates gatekeepers, digital safeguards, physical barriers, process fragmentation, obfuscation, and employee controls.
What Leaders Get Wrong About Employee Motivation
Marylène Gagné and Rebecca Hewett
Key Insight: To increase worker engagement, focus on autonomy, competence, and relatedness rather than rules, monitoring, and rewards.
Top Takeaways: Research shows that top performance comes from intrinsically motivated, highly engaged employees, but many managers, influenced by economists’ simplistic models of human behavior, assume that only carrots and sticks will ensure that people do their jobs, and their motivational toolbox overrelies on rules, monitoring, and rewards. The authors share advice on how organizations can build a more engaged workforce by rooting their performance management approach in the human drive for self-determination and embracing democratized management principles.
Who’s Making Your Talent Decisions?
Sharna Wiblen
Key Insight: Leaders may blunt their ability to manage talent strategically if they overrely on third-party talent management software to identify their most promising performers.
Top Takeaways: Digital talent management (DTM) systems promise to apply best practices and objective criteria to decisions about which employees should be prioritized for development opportunities. But relying on DTM entirely can mean effectively ceding decisions about a strategic resource to an automated system that doesn’t account for the company’s specific needs or the nuances of talent identification. The author shares advice for leaders on maintaining human control over the talent management process when DTM is involved.
The Way to Net Zero: Reducing Industrial Emissions Takes Teamwork
Martin Glaum, Alexander Gerybadze, Thomas Müller-Kirschbaum, and Ralph Schweens
Key Insight: Companies can make real progress in reducing Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions through collaborative efforts with strong value chain partners.
Top Takeaways: Reducing industrial greenhouse gas emissions to meet climate targets is a difficult challenge, but business transformations by chemical sector giants BASF and Henkel show that progress is possible. While both companies have separately made numerous internal changes to lower their environmental impacts, an innovative partnership between the two also illustrates a cooperative approach to tackling Scope 3 emissions — those generated externally by upstream suppliers, downstream customers, and consumers of products and services.
How to Embed Purpose at Every Level
Stuart L. Hart
Key Insight: A new framework can help organizations integrate and align their societal purpose with their goals, strategies, and metrics.
Top Takeaways: An excerpt from the new book *Beyond Shareholder Primacy: Remaking Capitalism for a Sustainable Future* describes how leaders can make their organization’s core values a meaningful part of the business strategy. The author shares a framework modeled on the approach companies like S.C. Johnson, Ben & Jerry’s, and Griffith Foods took in developing their purpose statements. Leaders can apply the framework to align their own organization’s transformational purpose — the positive societal impact it aims to achieve — with its values, metrics, and sustainability goals.
A New Machine Learning Approach Answers What-If Questions
Stefan Feuerriegel, Yash Raj Shrestha, and Georg von Krogh
Key Insight: Causal ML can help managers make more informed decisions by enabling them to compare different choices’ possible outcomes.
Top Takeaways: Insights delivered by traditional machine learning models are of limited help when managers need to decide which option to pursue to achieve a business objective. Causal ML, an emerging form of machine learning, can help answer such what-if questions by shedding light on cause-and-effect relationships among key factors. Five years of research on companies in several different industries surfaced best practices for implementing causal ML for better-informed decision-making.
Building One KPI to Rule Them All
Omri Morgenshtern and Tarik Fadil
Key Insight: Leaders share lessons from Agoda’s efforts to develop a KPI that will help the travel site better align strategy with decision-making.
Top Takeaways: Agoda set out to create a new key performance indicator that could help it monitor and align progress on its strategic goals. To help the business development team make better decisions, the KPI also needed to better account for external factors beyond the organization’s control and a large number of complex variables. Agoda executives explain how the company worked through its KPI development challenge and what other companies can learn from its experience.
Leaders’ Critical Role in Building a Learning Culture
Henrik Saabye and Thomas Borup Kristensen
Key Insight: Organizations reap long-term benefits when leaders take the time to help employees develop their learning and problem-solving skills.
Top Takeaways: Leaders often delegate teaching and coaching to learning and development specialists — but that’s not ideal when the skill to be developed is better problem-solving. Research at two large organizations indicates that, though it may take more time, having leaders take on the role of teacher and coach themselves can lead to more robust problem-solving skills among team members and increase workers’ satisfaction, motivation, and competencies. The authors provide a five-part strategy to help leaders become effective learning facilitators and build an organizational learning culture.
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