This week’s must-reads for managers: why more employees would trust a robot over their manager; which U.S. city is a tech powerhouse with diverse talent; and how to make digital transformation succeed.

For companies across industries, every major technology choice now represents a vital business decision, and “good enough” decisions are anything but. Recent research shows that in order to move from average to exceptional, CEOs and IT executives will need to begin matching their technology investments to their ambitions.

This week’s must-reads for managers: designing AI systems with customer privacy in mind, reshaping the role of CEO, what employees are saying about job automation, and how not to hate the holidays.

The belief that automation is an all-or-nothing proposition is preventing some companies from incorporating technology into their workflows. But holding on to that (mistaken) belief means companies are missing out on opportunities to streamline their processes and free employees for more important and less repetitive tasks. Three key steps can help these companies overcome legacy approaches and apply technology solutions where they can do the most good.

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.

What makes a company an innovation leader? To a great extent, it’s a matter of mindset. Executives whose technology-led transformation projects aren’t delivering the expected value must make strategic shifts in terms of their companies’ technology adoption, technology penetration, and organizational change.

The must-reads MIT SMR editors are reading this week, including: potential pitfalls of the agile workspace, influencers’ influence on marketing, and gender bias in unlikely places.

The must-reads MIT SMR editors are reading this week, including: How working couples are hacking inequality at home, the future of work won’t be utopian, and why you should kill your favorite meeting.

The must-reads MIT SMR editors are most excited about this week, including: Why emotion is a key ingredient for getting customer experiences to stick, what we can learn from Germany’s platform economy, the best leader for your digital transformation effort might not be the obvious candidate, and more.

China is shaking off its reputation for “copycatting” and establishing itself as a digital leader. One of the key areas where it’s moving ahead of the U.S. and Europe is transportation. China has made strides in electronic and autonomous vehicles as well as high-speed rail in recent years — and its most important development has been to transform itself into an innovation-focused, entrepreneurial hub of technical prowess.

All bubbles are different. Bubbles occur when the market value of assets decouple from their intrinsic value and expectations of rising valuations generate investor demand. Many ambitious infrastructure projects that produced canals, railways, and telecom networks were fueled by bubbles. Unlike the housing bubble, the effects of a bursting AI bubble wouldn’t cause great harm.

The most valuable companies in the world have harnessed platforms’ power to achieve rapid growth and market dominance. But as these platforms have grown in size and scale, the opportunity for abuse has become very real — while profitability isn’t coming easily even for successful platforms. In an interview with MIT SMR, the authors of The Business of Platforms bust the myths and outline the pitfalls of platform strategy.

Each month, the MIT SMR Strategy Forum poses a single question to our panel of experts in the fields of business, economics, and management. This month’s question asks our panel whether, in the next five years, blockchain technology will have a transformative effect on emerging markets in the global economy.

As AI develops better decision-making skills, leaders may feel threatened and push back, resisting the imperative to leave their biggest and most critical decisions to mechanical minds. And that might be a mistake, says psychologist Daniel Kahneman, given AI’s potential to reduce the bias in human thought processes.

While KPIs are widely used to track performance across most enterprises today, not all organizations are using those metrics effectively. New research finds greater KPI transparency and better alignment drive maximum business value.

Digital efforts may begin within a particular functional area, but they can also drive change across the entire organization.

AI provides access to unstructured information and enables organizations to learn faster and offer new services.

AI’s largest and most enduring contributions will be in non-technology sectors, and many of them will come from China. Buoyed by the country’s latest five-year plan and enabled by centralized data, Chinese companies are investing aggressively in AI and adapting their business models to make the most of AI’s potential, but unclear business cases and bottlenecks due to lacking technical capabilities hinder adoption.

Software continues to “eat the world,” but often at the cost of user privacy and trust. In order to grow responsibly, companies must move from a “can we” to a “should we” framework when bringing products to market.

The art of bian lian — or “face changing” — is integral to Sichuan opera: A main character changes masks to avoid capture by foes. The transformation is quick and surprising, the new face clearly different. In the theater of business, Chinese performers are undergoing a rapid transformation of their own as they seek to evolve from backroom producers to the world’s leading face of innovation.