In a data-rich world, company stakeholders know more than ever about the organization and possess unprecedented power to spread the word when something goes wrong. Leaders must realize that the damage to the business and its reputation will be revealed more quickly and spread faster and wider than ever before — so it’s vital that they look carefully at potentially risky decisions and practices.

Culture plays a critical role in company success — but many business leaders don’t really understand what culture means. It helps to think of corporate culture as a management system that guides the assumptions, values, and beliefs at the heart of the organization.

With so many digital tools in the workplace, collaboration has gone omnichannel. Given how hyperconnected people are, the authors set out to explore the implications for organizations and teams. In their research, they discovered that always-on connectivity was good for fact finding and information sharing but not for problem-solving, as we tend to assume. For tasks that require imagination, it’s better to alternate between connectivity and quiet focus. Leaders must help establish a good rhythm.

When leadership teams struggle with undiscussables, symptoms range from unresolved conflicts and uneven participation in meetings to destructive groupthink and employee disengagement. The more undiscussables there are, the more difficult it is for the team to function. Ignoring them results in strained relationships and bad decisions. Here’s how leaders can bring the four types of undiscussables to light, improving team learning, problem-solving, and performance.

The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development. The 2019 award goes to “Building an Ethically Strong Organization,” by Catherine Bailey and Amanda Shantz.

A secret, pre-CIA field manual for sabotaging enemy organizations identified two ways of undermining an organization: physical damage to equipment, facilities, transportation, and means of production; and human obstruction of processes. On the human side, we’re as vulnerable today as we were back then.

Good corporate culture can turbocharge performance, while a bad culture can wreak havoc on a company’s reputation and results. When companies strike the right balance on culture, they can align behavior with corporate strategy while allowing employees flexibility to exercise judgment and initiative.

Leaders can help employees manage immediate problems by harnessing the human capacity to think beyond the moment and recognize that “this too shall pass.” Psychological tools such as temporal distancing help ease the sting of current troubles. And the tool of “failure premortems” can help people identify dangerous risks and delusions in new projects by imagining they’re in the future looking back at why a project failed.

Renowned social psychologist Edgar Schein and his colleagues defined how we thought about organizations and leadership in the 1950s. But in the digital era, Schein — working with his son, Silicon Valley executive Peter Schein — has developed a new perspective, one that advocates combining culture, change, and leadership into an integrated process, rather than viewing them as three separate topics of importance.

Many leaders lack the skills and mindset to thrive in the digital economy, and mindset gaps create blind spots. It’s difficult to be a great leader when you don’t know what you don’t know.

Until recently, IBM’s performance management system followed a traditional approach that revolved around yearlong cycles, ratings, and annual reviews. This case study explores how, after recognizing that the model was holding back the organization, IBM reimagined its performance management system with a model that favors speed and innovation and cultivates a high-performance culture.

Findings don’t have to be earth-shattering to be useful. In fact, obvious insights can help you overcome three barriers to change in your organization: resistance to new data (“But that’s not what my experience has shown”), resistance to change itself (“But that’s the way we’ve always done it”), and organizational uniqueness bias (“That will never work here”). You can also gain trust by confirming what people already believe.

Organizational change is difficult. Some 70% of change efforts fail, and awareness hasn’t improved the odds of success. But there are exceptional companies, making strides with everything from digital transformation to employee engagement to diversity and inclusion. And they have one thing in common: They are customer-obsessed. When customers are truly at the center of your business, change proceeds from one organizing principle: What’s best for them?

Examining skill sets and mind-sets will help leaders understand what it means to be a leader in the digital economy. This will include requirements such as changing mastery, executing excellence, nurturing relationships, and, notably, building a culture of radical trust.

Leaders and managers must inevitably consult the analysis, advice, and research of people whose expertise exceeds their own in a variety of domains. Getting the most from that perspective means understanding precisely how to question the experts’ wisdom, no matter what form it takes. Eight specific lessons can help leaders and managers use others’ expertise to the greatest possible advantage in everyday business decisions.

What if, instead of perpetuating harmful biases, AI helped us overcome them? What if our systems were taught to ignore data about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other characteristics that aren’t relevant to the decisions at hand? They can do all that — with guidance from the human experts who create, train, and refine them.

Leaders trying to get their organizations to adopt new technologies or ways of thinking tend to kick things off with inspirational speeches, but then communication grinds to a halt. The lack of information leads to doubt, cynicism, and anxiety — emotions that quickly become obstacles to change. To fix this problem, leaders should model the behaviors they want to see, using digital tools to deliver a steady stream of messages to employees and gathering and responding to feedback.

As our world and the nature of work fundamentally changes, leaders must consider necessary new skills and accompanying mindset shifts.

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.

In both practice and research, we are doing a better job at bringing attention to the problem of gender bias. But we haven’t established enough tangible suggestions for how to challenge it. New research has begun to investigate the efficacy of ‘scripts’ — a set of words or phrases, such as, “Can you repeat what you just said?” that would signal to a peer that he has crossed a line, whether knowingly or unknowingly.