Winter 2021 Articles

Vijay Govindarajan, Ashish Sood, Anup Srivastava, Luminita Enache, and Barry Mishra have found that companies must focus relentlessly on building long-term competencies, even if doing so reduces immediate profits. Nonetheless, it is vital to shift focus when your product or idea becomes unexpectedly successful, so that you can milk that opportunity's profits before it vanishes in the face of competition and technological progress.

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is the need to be agile. To achieve this goal, leaders must seek a deeper understanding of the power of social interaction in furthering the flow of ideas, information, and insight. Michael Arena explains how building relational structures that foster 4D connections, discovery, development, diffusion, and disruption, can usher in the new, innovative ideas and concepts necessary to positively disrupt.

Boards of directors can play a critical role in determining how much attention their firms pay to sustainability. Craig Smith and Ron Soonieus explain how boards can turn their aspirations for sustainability into meaningful action, particularly in light of the fundamental questions boards should be asking in the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Consumers choose economic development over serious climate initiatives. Corporations don't invest in meaningful change because consumers won't pay for it. And governments cannot lead if citizens won't follow. The battle to prevent climate change through behavior modification, regulation, or personal deprivation has already been lost. Yossi Sheffi explains why the solution is collaborative investment in developing technologies that can reverse climate change.

By digitizing operations, companies may replace manual work with increased automation, but they may also augment human work through smarter execution. Robert Boute and Jan Van Mieghem present a conceptual framework that distinguishes the different levels of digitization, automation, and intelligence. This framework can serve as an audit, helping companies to assess where they are now and where they could be in the future.

Many firms believe that the way to cope with environmental violations by their contract manufacturers is through greenwashing initiatives which they hope will protect them from collateral damage. Chris Lo, Christopher Tang, Paul Zhou, Andy Yeung, and Di Fan disagree, arguing that turning a blind eye to polluters in their supply chains can cause major problems for firms.

Artificial intelligence is the most important new technology of the age, but it comes in many varieties, and businesses face a range of challenges in effectively deploying it throughout their organizations. Tom Davenport takes a pragmatic but positive approach to AI's long-term potential, describing effective approaches to creating and implementing a strategy for this transformative technology.

George Dantzig introduced the world to the power of optimization, creating trillions of dollars of value and saving countless years of life across the globe. In this laudation, John Birge describes the fascinating life and incredible accomplishments of a scholar whose footprints led the way to almost everything the global economy produces.

Ralph Keeney offers innovative concepts and practical guidelines for making smarter business decisions. They will help you to determine and define the decision you need to make, identify the complete set of objectives which your decision should achieve, and create a range of high-quality alternatives. Learn these skills to obtain the ultimate business advantage: making smarter decisions.

Using an auction informed by analytics, the US Federal Communications Commission reallocated underutilized portions of the television spectrum. The revenue from this auction exceeded its cost by $7.3 billion, which went toward US deficit reduction. Subodha Kumar summarizes the Kiddoo et al. report on this groundbreaking work which won the 2018 INFORMS Franz Edelman Competition.