Identifying the next big thing is often treated as an exercise in analyzing trends. But that''s misleading. By the time a trend is established, any opportunities it presents have probably been captured by competitors. And although a company may need to reflect trends in its business plans, that may mean catching up with rivals rather than gaining a competitive edge. To take advantage of emerging trends, companies must identify them when they .....more

uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital firms and recruited prominent biotech executives and scientists as board members and advisors. In April 2019, the FBI raided uBiome''s offices to investigate claims that the .....more

with Intel''s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to review plans for the future. Mobileye had been acquired by California-based Intel in 2017, but still operated independently. Mobileye was the global leader in vision technology for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) with a 70% market share and $1 billion in revenue. However, for Shashua, ADAS was just the first step towards his dream of leading the autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution. It was this .....more

Since the pandemic, companies have adopted the technologies of virtual work remarkably quickly--and employees are seeing the advantages of more flexibility in where and when they work. As leaders recognize what is possible, they are embracing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset work using a hybrid model. To make this transition successfully, they''ll need to design hybrid work arrangements with individual human concerns in mind, not .....more

Many large companies fail to pay enough attention to their leadership pipelines and succession practices. That leads to excessive turnover at the top and destroys a significant amount of value--close to $1 trillion a year among the S&P 1500 alone, say the authors of this article. The biggest costs are underperformance at companies that hire ill-suited external CEOs, the loss of intellectual capital in the C-suites of organizations that executives .....more

Most companies say they''re committed to advancing women into leadership roles. What they may fail to recognize, though, is that systemic barriers are holding women back. As a result, women remain disadvantaged at every stage of their employment and underrepresented in positions of power. Drawing on their own research and the scholarship of others, the authors describe common forms of gender discrimination in seven key areas of talent management: .....more

Four recent books help readers smartly channel an increasingly common condition: "Trust Yourself," by Melody Wilding; "Chatter," by Ethan Kross; "Anxiety at Work," by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton; and "The Anxiety Toolkit," by Alice Boyes.

Exercise for Revlon: Surviving Covid-19 (9-221-084).

Vivian Yuan seeks to bolster the Tsinghua University Education Foundation''s fundraising efforts and investment goals in a new era of Chinese higher education. Competing with elite members of China''s C9 League of top universities, she must develop a set of incentives and deliverables for alumni and non-affiliated donors which can bridge the gaps in their own investment and philanthropic prospects. To do so, she must specify what makes .....more

Ilene Lang started her career in technology at a time when the tech sector was new and women had only recently entered the workplace in large numbers. Over the next thirty years, she built a career spanning large and small tech companies, leading global teams and overseeing products such as AltaVista, an early search engine. After leading three dot-coms in the late 1990s, she was ready for a new chapter and joined Catalyst, a global nonprofit focused .....more