In this article drawn from his new book, How Behavior Spreads, UPenn professor Damon Centola explains how the thinking about social networks is changing. Recent research reveals that depending on long-established concepts such as “weak ties” and “long bridges” to drive the adoption of new innovations and organizational change can be a prescription for failure.

Considering the increasing pace of technological change and volatility in many industries, the need for corporate transformation is rising. Unfortunately, the chance of successfully achieving it is falling.

What happens when a company whose roots go back over a century — a bank, no less — decides to adopt agile management methods developed in the software industry? Though ING bank in the Netherlands is less than three years into the process — and it’s therefore premature to declare the initiative a success — taking a deep dive into the organization’s early experience with agile is nonetheless instructive.

To successfully lead major organizational transformations, executives need to align purpose, performance, and principles within their companies. Doing so isn’t easy — and requires mastery of a wide range of leadership skills.

Many executives don’t understand how to craft a compelling vision for change that will gain widespread commitment within their organization. Leaders should start by asking themselves: What will people see, hear, and feel once the changes have been achieved?

Digital transformation has two key implications for managers: First, it’s fundamentally about how your business responds to digital trends that are occurring regardless of your input. Second, how an organization implements technology is only a small part of digital transformation; strategy, talent management, organizational structure, and leadership are just as important as technology.

Before you adopt any popular new management approach, it pays to analyze the implicit values embedded in it. Then ask yourself: How well will those values fit our existing organizational culture?

In a video panel and Q&A, MIT SMR editors discuss key insights from a recently completed series of in-depth case studies on how prominent organizations are using data and analytics to transform their operations. They review Intermountain Healthcare, GE, Nedbank, and the City of Amsterdam’s efforts to become more data driven. This set of diverse organizations offers a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities associated with becoming a data-driven organization.

South African finance leader Nedbank is using data and analytics as a way to help the bank’s clients better understand their business. And the more data-oriented the bank becomes, the better able it will be to turn its developing prowess on itself. As the bank dives deeper into analytics, the same data it’s using for clients can help Nedbank better understand its own organization, employees, suppliers, and more.

Organizations across the business spectrum are awakening to the transformative power of data and analytics. They are also coming to grips with the daunting difficulty of the task that lies before them. It’s tough enough for many organizations to catalog and categorize the data at their disposal and devise the rules and processes for using it. It’s even tougher to translate that data into tangible value. But it’s not impossible, and many organizations, in both the private and public sectors, are learning how.

As digital technologies evolve, managers and employees will need to learn three important skills: partnering with new digital “colleagues,” creating a mindful relationship with omnipresent digital technologies, and developing empathy for the varying technology preferences of their human coworkers. Organizations, for their part, will need to design processes to support these efforts, and managers will need to be both flexible and thoughtful in how they respond.

More tasks are being done by cognitive technologies, cutting costs, improving efficiencies, and displacing humans. This may lead to less differentiation between organizations, and a shifting composition of activities within the organization.

Exploring new business models may be a good way to stay competitive, but doing so can create tensions internally, in areas such as organizational structure and competition for resources. Companies exploring business model innovation may not recognize the inevitability of these tensions and thus be poorly prepared to manage them. But understanding these issues may lessen some of the organizational challenges associated with business model innovation.

The idea is simple: develop a methodology that ties patient outcomes to provider fees so that clinicians are rewarded when patients’ health improves. Making it happen is a lot more complicated. When WellPoint undertook this task, it discovered that there was more to it than simply the challenge of applying data analytics technology — the company’s innovation processes had to be reinvented.

It’s no secret that the fee-for-service model in U.S. health care is a driving factor in spiraling costs. WellPoint’s innovative plan to shift to a value-based payment plan may prove to be a key innovation that keeps a lid on those costs. But as commentator Sam Ransbotham points out, their effort to change the payment system also highlights a need for process changes at WellPoint itself.

The UN’s Global Compact report identifies auditing the supply chain as the biggest obstacle to putting sustainability principle into practice. Companies simply don’t have enough information about suppliers’ sustainability practices to determine which links on the supply chain will provide the best outcome. But as global data sources become more all-encompassing — and companies’ analytics capabilities grow more sophisticated — that is changing.

This year’s winning story details how, to build more collaborative and innovative organizations, executives should analyze employee collaboration networks to discover how high-performing individuals and teams connect.

The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the author of the most outstanding SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2009 to summer 2010.

In a downturn like this one, every company should — in some sense — think of itself as a new business, according to Harvard Business School’s Lynda Applegate.