New research shows that market leadership is increasingly temporary. Just 17% of companies are able to significantly outperform their industry average for five years. The ones that do continually find new sources of competitive advantage by reinventing their businesses and adapting to evolving market conditions. Their example offers lessons for leadership teams trying to fight the relentless pull to the mean.

A large-scale study in Europe of funding decisions finds that VCs evaluate male and female entrepreneurs by different standards. Savvy entrepreneurs can anticipate potentially biased responses to their pitches and plan accordingly. Certain tactics keep audiences engaged and confident of the idea’s potential, positioning the petitioner to succeed.

Countries facing the greatest risk from automation are those that have labor economies in which many jobs involve manual or routine tasks that can be easily automated. Analyzing occupations in terms of their component parts provides a much richer way of looking at jobs than estimating the effects of automation more broadly.

Technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality show great promise in fields like medicine and manufacturing, but they come with risks to individual and societal well-being that could be incredibly hard to reverse. Now is the time for business leaders to take measures to prevent, or at least mitigate, the potential downsides of such tools.

Though autonomous technology has a large and growing range of potential applications, it also may threaten users’ sense of autonomy and free will, or their belief that they can decide how to pursue their lives freely. But companies can create systems users don’t hate by protecting users’ autonomy, unpredictability, and privacy.

Well-executed international expansions can provide access to new markets, customers, and revenue streams. But many companies underestimate operational complexity and end up with a country portfolio that slowly and subtly erodes profitability. New research offers a framework for managing successful country portfolios and making some key decisions before the next recession hits.

Investing in job redesign without first planning for and investing in redefining work narrows future outcomes and limits opportunities for both growth and long-term value creation. Understanding the relationship between these two approaches to work is essential to any strategic effort to compete over the long term.

The technology that underpins deep learning is becoming increasingly capable of analyzing big databases for patterns and insights. Before long, companies will be able to integrate a wide array of databases to discern what consumers want, and then leverage that information for market advantage. Deep learning might also be used to design products to meet consumers’ personal needs. Different types of organizations will try to harness the powers of deep learning in their own ways.

Employers have learned that their employees’ emotional states contribute to productivity, sales, and culture. But how do you measure emotions when self-reporting is often inaccurate because respondents either aren’t aware of or don’t want to report their emotions? Facial recognition technologies may hold the answer, but there are significant privacy concerns to be addressed.

To effectively implement AI, organizations will need to use human-centered AI processes that motivate and retrain workers, which shifts the focus from automation to collaboration between humans and machines. To test that idea, an experiment was designed to see how human workers might augment an existing AI system and embrace their new roles as AI trainers — resulting in a symbiotic system that enabled humans and AI to each work to their strengths.

Even though frontline employees are committed to advancing the objectives of the business, they sometimes see themselves as caught between representing the views of customers and what they think is reasonable. To preserve morale, businesses must keep employees engaged and confident that management has their backs.

When piracy is rampant, its negative impact makes manufacturers and retailers worse off — but anti-piracy measures are often expensive. Before going full force against piracy, organizations should ponder whether doing so would be a worthwhile investment. One factor to consider: Research shows that a moderate level of piracy — not too much, not too little — can actually benefit the manufacturer, the retailer, and consumers, all at the same time.

It’s tempting to look at high-profile business ecosystems and assume that the model is a reliable formula for success. In fact, many ecosystems never earn a significant market share, and only about 15% dominate their markets over time. An analysis shows that most share a common life cycle, with several critical windows along the way. For management, the key is understanding these windows and adjusting the company’s strategy over time to meet the unique requirements of each.

Striking the right balance between competence and credibility is essential to digital leaders’ success, but it depends on what a company expects its CDO to do. While external candidates can bring critical digital competence and experience to organizations seeking a better digital footing, they may struggle to build the necessary credibility for organizational change.

Digital collaboration platforms can leverage team diversity and expertise, but business must focus on how distributed teams orchestrate their collaboration and how leaders facilitate innovation. The specific collaboration platform you choose is less important.

While M&A deals and turnarounds are individually hard to pull off, combining the two can be even more challenging. Yet an analysis of roughly 1,400 M&A-based turnarounds between 2005 and 2018 shows that six management actions can help acquiring companies improve their odds of success. The rewards can be considerable. Successful buyers generate gains in both revenue growth and profit margins, and — most important — better returns.

Hoping a jack-of-all-trades can lead your organization’s digital transition is unrealistic. We found four distinct types of successful digital executives who can best provide vision and purpose for digital. Crucially, each type has unique strengths and performs best in different contexts.

Mastering technology is not the only criteria for success in the modern marketing era — the right people and processes must also be put in place to properly develop, manage, and nurture the benefits of emerging tools. To be successful in the digital era, marketers should adopt the best new modern practices as well as rethink and refine classic approaches.

High-skilled immigration is dramatically transforming the tech sector in the United States. U.S. tech workers over age 40 have good reasons to be concerned. In addition to competing with greater numbers of skilled foreign workers, older tech workers are now also more likely than younger workers to lose their jobs when technical work moves overseas.

Beliefs and behaviors in today’s virtual world blur the definitions and boundaries of responsibility for data privacy, which is reshaping consumers’ expectations of protection. Organizations seeking to adapt their culture toward better digital trust face many challenges but can benefit from four activities in their journey toward better digital trust.