Articles

Building Your Company's Vision

Companies that enjoy enduring success have a core purpose and core values that remain fixed while their strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. The rare ability to balance...

3 Strategies to Help Employees Thrive in the New "Normal"

Theres still uncertainty about what the workplace new normal will be, and its easy for companies to default to old routines and habits. Based on their extensive research on psychological contracts,...

When a Team Member Underperforms-but Has Organizational Capital

Leaders sometimes inherit an underperforming employee they cannot remove, leaving them responsible for results without the authority to address the problem. They can limit the damage by testing...

What Leaders Need to Know About AI and Psychological Safety

AIs perceived neutrality plays a role in reshaping how psychological safety is experienced in organizations. When employees use AI to surface concerns they dont feel safe raising directly, they are...

Case Study: How Hard Should You Push Diversity?

The Hidden Costs of Monitoring Employees with AI

AI is making employee monitoring cheaper, more granular, and continuous-but lower costs can encourage companies to overuse controls without considering their broader consequences. Research shows that...

Research: Work Stress Isn't Always About Workload

When employees seem stressed, leaders typically blame workload and respond with the usual remedies: task redistribution, time off, time management training. But a meta-analysis of 515 studies reveals...

When There's More Work Than Your Team Can Handle

When demands increase while resources shrink, leaders cant simply absorb the extra work or push an already-overextended team harder. Both approaches carry costs: burnout for you, and eroded trust and...

Research: Gen AI Is Collapsing Creative Processes

Generative AI is transforming creative work by making it faster and easier to brainstorm and visualize ideas. But a new, yearlong study following senior creatives in charge of television and...

Will Your Organization Stand By Its Values-Even When It's Hard?

Organizational values often emphasize what companies stand for, but their real power may lie in defining what they refuse to do, especially when doing so carries a cost. The "Refusal Framework of...

You Think You're a Good Collaborator. Do the People You Manage Agree?

Senior leaders often pride themselves on listening and empowering others-but the people around them may experience something quite different. Research with more than 10,000 professionals and 400...

The Human Side of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Business Model Innovation

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is growing in popularity, yet insights on its application to business model innovation (BMI) are scarce. Drawing on a qualitative, multiphase study...

How to Achieve Large-Scale Social Impact

The authors combine scholarship from social entrepreneurship and systems literature to identify two dominant pathways used by mission-driven organizations to achieve large-scale social impact. The...

Identifying and Overcoming Challenges in Intelligent Process Automation

The global services industry increasingly adopts software for intelligent process automation, including robotic process automation, low-code and no-code development solutions that are enhanced by...

BYOC: Strategic Choices Along the AI Compute Ownership Spectrum

For almost two decades, digital leaders grew as asset-light firms, scaling on software, data, and talent. The arrival of generative AI changed that logic. Compute and energy are now production...

Bringing Back Intuition into Scenario Planning

Intuitive logics is a prominent scenario planning method of strategic foresight that organizations use to plan in the context of uncertain future operating environments. Designed to counter linear...

Challenges in Navigating Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is often promoted as a way to challenge assumptions and prepare organizations for uncertainty. Yet little is known about what happens when scenarios confront leadership bias and...

Scenario Planning for Strategic Decision-Making, Learning, and Managing Uncertainty

In times of radical uncertainty marked by geopolitical conflict, technological disruptions, societal transformations, and climate risk, scenario planning is critical for strategists. In this...

Silver Economy Influencers: Unlocking the Untapped Potential of Mature Content Creators

While older consumers are among the fastest-growing and most affluent demographic segments, they remain largely neglected in marketing practice and research, and firms often struggle to determine the...

The Dynamic Capabilities of Chinese Companies: Leadership In An Age Of Disruptive Innovation

Leading Chinese and US companies are building the dynamic capabilities needed to compete and innovate in fast-changing global markets. The most resilient companies are blending strategic vision with...

Weaving Urban Circularity: The Role of Fashion Startups

London's circular fashion start-ups are reshaping the industry while struggling to integrate with the city's broader sustainability goals. Through three innovative businesses - a clothing swap...

Advancing Circularity: The Dynamic Capabilities to Drive Transformative Change

Most corporate sustainability efforts remain incremental, focusing on reducing harm rather than transforming systems. That's insufficient to address escalating environmental challenges...

Food Supply Chain Orchestration for Circularity: The Lost Food Project

Supply chains are vital units of analysis of the circular economy (CE), and network orchestrators are central to fostering the CE's essential interorganizational collaboration. However, orchestration...

Tensions in Data Sharing Governance for Circular Cities: The Case of the Digital Product Passport

Data sharing across organizational boundaries has become increasingly important for advancing the transition to circular cities. To establish a structured data-sharing effort among different actors,...

Circular Cities: Transforming Systems Through Organizational Innovation

This special issue focuses on cities as accelerators of circular, regenerative innovation. Cities, which account for over 70% of global energy use, serve as living labs where experiments across...

Speak and Spend: When Voice AI Pays Off in E-Commerce

Are voice assistants a gimmick or a growth engine? When shopping behavior was compared between customers who adopted a Tmall Genie smart speaker into their homes and those who didn't, the study...

Shaping the Path Toward Net Zero Through Supplier Engagement

In response to the climate crisis, companies are committing to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Yet decarbonization remains challenging in globally dispersed supply chains, where upstream...

The Scaling of a Marketplace Unicorn: Sensing, Seizing, and Transforming Acquisition Opportunities

Once considered rare, unicorn start-ups are now a global phenomenon. This article identifies the key motives for acquisition in unicorns and extends David Teece's dynamic capabilities framework to...

Managing the Emotional Challenges of Structural Ambidexterity

Incumbent firms struggle to renew themselves. Structural ambidexterity balances the exploitation of existing business with the exploration of new opportunities. But these inconsistent strategic...

A Playbook for Brand Collaborations: Insights from Omega and Swatch

When Omega and Swatch launched the MoonSwatch, it became a global phenomenon, defying expectations and reshaping the playbook for brand collaborations. On the surface, the partnership seemed...

Is Short-termism Undermining Your Brand Equity?

Short-termism in marketing has resurfaced, fueled by big data, analytics, digital, AI, and labels such as demand marketing. Looking back at the 1980s, a short-termism decade, that era provided...

Beyond Box-Ticking: Improving Climate Scenario Planning

This paper critically examines the use of climate-related scenario planning in organizations. Scenario planning is a crucial tool for managing climate risk, strategic development, and organizational...

Data Breaches: Fight AI with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data breaches have emerged as one of the biggest challenges for corporations. New threats emerge daily in the form of personalized spear phishing messages,...

Pathways to Successful Startup-Corporate Partnerships

Startup-corporate partnerships provide mutual benefits by combining startups' innovation with established firms' resources and processes. However, despite these clear advantages, initiating and...

Boards of Directors and the Governance of Large IT Investments: They Don't Know What They Don't Know

Information technology (IT) is central to most organizations' success. As IT systems age, organizations replace them, yet many of those replacement projects fail to achieve expected outcomes. This...

Organizing Open Social Innovation for Grand Challenges: Unlocking the Potential of Open Spaces

Open Social Innovation (OSI) is gaining increasing attention in discourses among scholars and practitioners as a new approach to addressing grand challenges. However, little is known about how to...

Technical Debt Is Killing Digital Transformation, But There Is a Way Out

Digital transformation is important for organizations to stay competitive. Yet, incumbents face challenges from technical debt accrued from legacy information systems. The big bang approach - aiming...

How Companies Navigate the (Un)Charted Waters of Digital Transformation

Digital technologies' transformative impact continues to disrupt businesses. Despite digital transformation's crucial role in shaping organizations' future competitiveness, many companies still...

Post-Error Adjustments: Strategic Agility and Organizational Zemblanity

Errors pose critical tests for firms, challenging their ability to recover or else face decline. This article frames strategic agility as a response mechanism to overcome errors. Conversely, when...

Value Pathways in Emergent Programs: Tackling Grand Challenges in the Swedish Transportation Industry

Grand challenges call for innovation and collaboration across sectors. Yet, many cross-sector and multi-stakeholder initiatives often fall short of achieving their intended goals, and creating the...

Escaping the Governance Trap: Insights from New Infrastructure Development "Megaprojects"

Mega infrastructure projects in liberal democracies often encounter significant cost overruns and delays. These challenges arise from tensions between mandated stakeholder engagement and...

When Should Incumbent Consumer Goods Producers Ally with Digital Platforms?

Physical goods producers routinely collaborate with digital platforms to extend their distribution capabilities. They usually realize that digital platform firms differ from them in their strategies...

Extending Design in Organizations: A Meshwork of Organizing, Aligning, and Displaying Action

Organizations increasingly seek benefits from design and design thinking beyond product and service creation. Building on a case study of OP Financial Group, this article showcases interconnected...

How to Implement Bottom-Up Organizing: Lessons from Agile Piloting and Scaling

Novel bottom-up forms of organizing, such as agile, have become increasingly prevalent in companies. While such organizing forms emphasize bottom-up employee involvement, they also require commitment...

Platform Governance for Established Companies

This article explores platform governance in established companies that face unique challenges when adopting platform strategies because of their complex organizational structures, diverse product...

Corporate Responsibility Meets the Digital Economy

Digital transformation has been changing and will continue to change nearly every aspect of business. As a result, the foundations of entire fields are now being revisited and updated to align with...

Profiting from AI: Evidence from Ericsson's Pursuit to Capture Value

This article explores the challenges faced by companies in profiting from artificial intelligence (AI). The case of Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company Ericsson highlights...

Supporting Intellectual Property Protection: Blockchain Technology as a Catalyst for Open Innovation

As the access, sharing, and transfer of intellectual property (IP) are central to open innovation (OI) projects, preventing the leakage of IP is critical. The emergence of blockchain has prompted...

Why Individuals Commit Professional Misconduct and What Leaders Can Do to Prevent It

Drawing on data from white-collar inmates in a United States Federal Prison, this article explains what causes individuals to commit misconduct. Flawed intuition captures the consistent pattern of...

Chipping Away at a Grand Challenge: Aligning Goal and Governance to Reduce Homelessness

When many of today's deepest problems are intractable, how can public, private, and nonprofit actors collaborate to mitigate negative local effects? Given the open-endedness of any collective effort...

Leveraging Livestreaming to Enrich Influencer Marketing

This article investigates how livestreaming content can be integrated into influencer marketing to effectively engage Generation Z - a demographic increasingly wary of traditional marketing...