The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded annually to the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development. The 2018 award goes to “The Corporate Implications of Longer Lives,” by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, both professors at London Business School.

None of us know how our technological future will unfold. But whether there will be a net increase or decrease in jobs overall, it’s clear that these will be different jobs, requiring different skill sets. We need to act now to enable current employers and employees to gain the skills they are going to need in the brave world of AI technology.

Some leaders have failed to realize that the daily lives of those who work in their organizations will inevitably be transformed over the coming decades. But it’s the responsibility of leaders to create clarity about the future of work. That means being engaged with creating a narrative about the future of jobs, actively championing the learning agenda, and role modeling work flexibility — for instance, by taking paternity leave or working from home.

The “intangible assets” people bring to their jobs are valuable — but challenging to quantify. Understanding the complexities of assets such as a person’s capacity to continue to learn new skills and ability to manage the stress of work and home life can help organizations get a better handle on alternate ways of sustaining employees. Understanding the notion of intangible assets can also help individuals think more concretely about how they allocate their time and energy.

With digital skills in short supply, companies must reimagine both where and when work gets done and who is going to do it. New research identifies four distinct approaches companies are taking to manage their digital talent — and why they aren’t all equally effective.

As many experts have noted, the annual performance review is rife with faults. It emphasizes what has already happened rather than shaping what is yet to come. It can feel punitive or at least judgmental. It is reductive and, in some cases, forces ridiculous formulaic comparisons between employees. It fails to emphasize the kind of timely feedback that can make a real difference in performance. And yet I have just scheduled year-end performance conversations with each of my direct reports.

It was 20 years ago that the movie “Jerry Maguire” created a mantra for our time: “Show me the money!” Today’s young professionals most definitely absorbed that message, but money’s not the only way to stop them from packing. A 2015 article from MIT Sloan Management Review explores strategies for retaining talented young managers who always have an eye on the job market and one foot creeping toward the door.

People are living longer and working longer — but few organizations have come to grips with the opportunities and challenges that greater longevity brings. Across the world, people are becoming more conscious of their lengthening working lives — but frustrated by their working context. The authors’ research suggests that while people know they will have to restructure their lives and careers, corporations are unprepared.

In the quest for digital talent, many employers are falling prey to common misconceptions. One assumption is that advanced technical skills are the most valuable asset, but “soft” skills such as communication and collaboration are just as (if not more) important. And many of the skills, technical or otherwise, that companies seek may be better obtained in current staff by fostering collaborative learning — which may also improve employee retention.

Competition for digitally savvy talent has never been higher, but companies’ methods for acquiring and keeping the skilled employees they need are outmoded. Whether they want to develop capabilities in employees or tap on-demand talent markets — or some mix of both — human resources directors need to experiment with new talent management models.

Managers should be skeptical consumers of external strategy advice. External strategy advice can be costly — and wrong. The best sources of insight about strategy tailored for your company can lie dormant within the company itself, in its employees. Ironically, companies often expend significant resources on obtaining flawed external advice while the employees with the best strategy ideas are ignored — and thus may walk out the door.

The looming ubiquity of IoT; policy making in the Second Machine Age; emoji-based employee retention.

By addressing the less-recognized causes of gender and racial pay inequality in the workplace, companies can attract a more diverse workforce and better leverage it in the quest to attain sustained competitive advantage.

Managers have an opportunity to interrupt a sometimes vicious cycle between trust and commitment. The relationship between workers’ trust in decision-making authorities and their commitment toward the organization is a self-perpetuating one, and organizations can achieve a higher level of workforce engagement by proactively building and maintaining trust-based relationships. The key, research finds, appears to be the continuous anticipation and management of the so-called “expectation-experience gap.”

Today’s talented young professionals have a different approach to their careers — and a very different attitude toward organizational loyalty — than earlier generations. Although they may seem engaged and committed in their jobs, they nevertheless job hunt routinely and are not averse to job hopping. Those whose companies offer development practices such as training and mentoring job hunt less, and those who are given a high-stakes job show a higher commitment to the organization as well.

In MIT Sloan Management Review‘s 2015 Digital Business Report, we found that lack of digital maturity has profound implications for talent acquisition and retention. The vast majority of employees (80%) say they prefer to work for digitally mature companies — which means that if your company isn’t there yet, it may soon cost you valuable talent.

A study of two industry clusters in Denmark shows that the factors that can make clusters attractive — easy people movement and knowledge spillovers — can also make it harder for individual companies to retain proprietary knowledge. The authors present two case studies that present starkly different experiences. They conclude, in part, that clusters with core platform strengths that span noncompeting sectors are exceptionally attractive and that healthy clusters have core institutions with scale and scope in relevant fields.

Digital success isn’t all about technology: The 2015 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte identifies strategy as the key driver in the digital arena. Companies that avoid risk-taking are unlikely to thrive and likely to lose talent, as employees across all age groups want to work for businesses committed to digital progress. The report is online and in PDF form, with a Digital Business Interactive Tool to explore the data set.

Successfully incorporating today’s digital technologies requires companies to operate in new ways. However, research by MIT SMR shows that being able to effectively incorporate digital strategy is strongly associated with a company’s overall digital maturity. There’s also an important HR component to digital strategy: Respondents expressed a strong preference for working for a digitally mature company, but many were dissatisfied with how their own companies were reacting to digital trends overall.

It’s well known that employees’ attitudes toward the organization have a significant effect on how they approach their jobs and how they treat customers. But recent research suggests that high levels of employee engagement are also associated with higher rates of profitability growth. While the products and services many companies offer can appear quite similar on the surface, exceptional service can be a competitive advantage. “Although we recognize that the ultimate focus of most organizations is on customers,” write the authors, “companies can benefit from adding employee engagement to their list of priorities.”