This year’s bestselling articles examine perennial challenges for leaders and organizations. From predicting how technology will impact markets and outcomes to creating successful frameworks for strategic decision-making, this collection of articles gives managers practical insights for leading in an age of uncertainty and disruption.

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.

Just a few years back, IBM was betting the farm on artificial intelligence with Watson. But with its recent acquisition of Red Hat, IBM has now turned its attention to cloud computing and infrastructure in a strategic move that may have long-term impact in the software industry.

Innovation is transforming the health care industry, with unlikely collaborators teaming up to provide higher-quality, lower-cost services. In this interview with MIT SMR, Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses recent collaborations between retailers and insurers, such as CVS’s partnership with Aetna and Walmart’s with Humana, and explains why hospitals and other providers must be more innovative, too.

Innovation and disruption are transforming the health care industry, with unlikely partners like Walmart and Humana teaming up to deliver high-quality, low-cost care to customers. Regina Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses the lessons such collaborations between health care retailers and insurers offer for managers.

Disruption can be averted, and many businesses manage through it by beating the new competition, joining them, or waiting them out. “To be sure, facing disruption is no picnic,” writes Joshua S. Gans, author of The Disruption Dilemma. “But it also isn’t the existential threat that so many see it as.” Many businesses are finding ways to weaken disruptive events, sometimes by investing aggressively in the new innovation after entrants had brought it to market or by acquiring the entrants and the actual disruption.

Steve Zaffron, CEO of the Vanto Group, has worked with diverse organizations — from rocket-scientist NASA to labor-intensive mining — to achieve a culture where sustainability focus runs deep. His experience shows that leaps in human performance come less from tangible investments in automation, equipment or compensation schemes, and more through intangible transformations in the way people in organizations see themselves and others. “It’s not an easy thing to change the way in which people see the world and themselves,” says Zaffron “It takes time to develop.”

How do you develop strategy in a business environment characterized by rapid change and considerable uncertainty about the future? That’s a question that many executives in fast-changing industries face. The Fall 2014 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review features a special report on strategy in changing markets, with articles on creating new strategic narratives, capturing new opportunities and finding the right strategic role for a board.

Deal markets can be “hot” or “cold,” and the state of the economy can bias executives’ evaluation of potential acquisitions. For instance, relying on discounted cash flow scenarios can bolster managers’ sense of confidence and create unrealistically low perceptions of uncertainty. Executives can mitigate valuation biases by having a checklist — the list tempers natural inclinations to focus on the value of growth options in “hot” markets and risk of investment in “cold” markets.

This year’s winning article on planned change and organizational development is “Making Mergers Work,” by Hamid Bouchikhi and John R. Kimberly. The authors examine why mergers and acquisitions so often fail to achieve the results and synergies they promise. “Our work in this field has convinced us that there is no ‘one best way’ but rather four distinct paths that can be followed to achieve identity integration: assimilation, federation, confederation and metamorphosis,” they write.

For organizations to achieve the psychological synergies required to realize economic synergies from mergers and acquisitions, executives need to attend to a more complex set of identity issues. These issues define the essence of the entity and give employees a clear answer to the question “Who are we?” and external stakeholders a clear answer to the question “Who are they?” Left unattended, these identity issues will diminish engagement and will affect the performance of the merged entity.

Senior executives weighing strategies appropriate for today’s global economy will hear contradictory advice. Some say you need to move quickly, before competitors, to establish a worldwide presence; others cite data showing that this approach is often less profitable. The reality is that neither approach is appropriate for every circumstance. Therefore, executives need to understand when to pursue one route and when to pursue the other.

When one company acquires another, executives have 10 distinct options for the corporate rebranding. Selecting the right strategy can set forth a compelling vision for the combined entity and send important signals to employees and the outside world.

Although most companies undertake acquisitions with an eye toward fueling growth, the resulting infusion of new ideas, perspectives and processes can produce lasting benefits that are broader and deeper.

Many deals will fail to generate real value for shareholders of the acquiring company, and a good number will ultimately become wealth-destroying propositions. The fundamental problem lies in two inherent features of many M&As: the acquiring company’s struggle to value the target’s resources and the need for the parties involved to agree on a price. Research identifies three ways to help: selecting an alternative ownership structure, crafting a contractual agreement and utilizing information generated by other markets.

Many companies’ brand portfolios have become bloated and obscured. A five-step approach can illuminate which brands should be supported, retired, repositioned or otherwise honed to bring greater clarity to the portfolio.

A global survey reveals that focusing explicitly on value is a catalyst that both instigates and manages change.

A review of research that explores the link between valuation, activity and performance. Christa H.S. Bouwman, Kathleen Fuller and Amrita S. Nain