Every team has a data-based strategy for regular season play — but the playoffs are a completely different story. In this episode of Counterpoints, we talk with Mike Trudell, a reporter who covers the Los Angeles Lakers for ESPN and other sports news outlets, about the mysterious intangibles that come to the foreground during the playoffs.

To survive and thrive in today’s market, a healthy corporate culture is more important than ever. The MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 uses machine learning and human expertise to analyze culture using a data set of 1.2 million employee reviews on Glassdoor. This interactive tool offers previously untapped insights about the organizational culture of over 500 of the world’s leading companies and provides leaders with new tools for benchmarking culture in their own organizations.

Which teams make it to the college football playoffs isn’t as random as it sometimes seems, says University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Laura Albert. In this week’s Counterpoints podcast, we look at how Albert uses analytics to predict the brackets and how the football playoff selections compare to that other big college tournament, March Madness.

Digital titans with access to large quantities of data are a challenge to competition. To maintain a competitive business environment, regulation focusing on both market and data dominance needs to be developed. Among the best tools for limiting companies’ influence: data audits.

Leaders today must wean their companies away from three pieces of conventional wisdom about digital strategy: agility, first-mover advantage, and minimum viable product. These ideas have anchored technological decision-making for over a decade but are highly unsuitable for the emerging world. In conditions of environmental uncertainty and interconnected technology, we need more thoughtfulness rather than more speed.

For organizations, there is no shortage of hype about the potential for data and analytics. But the reality is that creating competitive advantage from data is elusive for many organizations. Our 2016 report on data and analytics, “Beyond the Hype: The Hard Work Behind Analytics Success,” outlines just how much resolve companies need to make an analytics strategy work.

If you’re lying awake at night fretting that your competition has mastered analytics when you haven’t, take a breath — many of the stories we hear about analytics success are likely skewed. The transition to analytics-focused business is still far, far from universal, and that, says information systems expert Sam Ransbotham, means you have a chance to catch up.

Business is nearing a tipping point in which the use of data analytics is becoming routinely adopted. While widespread adoption of analytics will mean that it offers less competitive advantage to companies, it also means that the business environment overall will change. Information systems expert Sam Ransbotham identifies four key changes that businesses need to consider now.

Now that social media adoption is widespread, it’s no longer enough to maintain Facebook and Twitter accounts. But businesses who use social media as a tool for business process transformation can still gain competitive advantage from it.

The worldwide Langley Knights Competition starts July 2 at 9:00 EDT. Use social media and Google Maps to track down 5 knights in shining armor — both real and virtual. $16,500 in prizes and anyone can play.

From repositioning an entire organization to rethinking design approaches, supply chains and government collaborations, sustainability-related concerns are prompting many businesses to make major shifts. Here are mini-case glimpses of Nike, Rio Tinto, GE, Better Place and Wal-Mart.

MIT Sloan School professor Arnoldo C. Hax, a well-known strategy expert, thinks companies need a different approach to thinking about strategy.

Strong brands are often seen as an important corporate asset. But what happens when user communities—connected by the Internet—start to create their own brands? That question was explored in an intriguing August 2008 working paper, “Costless Creation of Strong Brands by User Communities: Implications for Producer-Owned Brands.” The paper suggests that companies with traditional brands would be wise to pay attention to this emerging arena.

Under the right circumstances, industry initiatives involving “coopetition” among competitors can reduce customers’ reluctance to adopt an innovation.

The marketing implications of litigation are often not factored into the decision to take legal action — but they should be.

Many companies adopt industry best practices to stay competitive. But high-performing companies do more: They also embrace unique “signature processes” that reflect their values.

Every company lives in fear of competitors that offer seemingly similar products for much lower prices. Dealing with such discounters is no simple matter, as Hewlett-Packard, May Department Stores, Salomon Brothers and others have discovered. Nevertheless, various strategies — ignoring or blocking the competitor, strengthening your value proposition or even strategic retreat — can help slow or even stop the low-end competitor without destroying the industry’s profit margins.

A “postcompany” school of experts says information technology is enabling a new world of seamless collaboration among businesses. They recommend that executives tear down the “walls” and merge their companies into amorphous “enterprise networks.” Nick Carr counters that new technologies will never conquer cutthroat competition and shows why managers need to be wary of alliances that foreclose opportunities for advantage.

Companies are increasingly rethinking the fundamental ways in which they generate ideas and bring them to market — harnessing external ideas while leveraging their in-house R&D outside their current operations.

Dramatic sales growth is spurred, not by drops in price, but by the collective effects of increased competition.