Discuss key strategic issues raised in the 2019 MIT SMR-BCG Artificial Intelligence Global Executive Study and Research Report during a live Twitter chat.

AI promises rewards but also comes with risks ― namely, that competitors figure out how to successfully use it before you do. This year’s 2019 MIT SMR-BCG Artificial Intelligence Global Executive Study and Research Report shows early AI winners are focused on organization-wide alignment, investment, and integration.

Every team has a data-based strategy for regular season play — but the playoffs are a completely different story. In this episode of Counterpoints, we talk with Mike Trudell, a reporter who covers the Los Angeles Lakers for ESPN and other sports news outlets, about the mysterious intangibles that come to the foreground during the playoffs.

Few organizations have the resources necessary to transform operations, business models, and customer experience all at the same time. They need to prioritize. Focusing on the transformation of the customer experience should be first. This is not because it’s necessarily the easiest, but because doing so is far more likely to keep a company viable than changing other aspects of business.

On Oct. 8-10, MIT SMR is dropping its paywall — all of the content is freely available to visitors. Readers will have immediate access to ideas, research, benchmarks and tools, all grounded in the reality of our technologically driven economy and society. We’re offering some recommendations based on what readers tell us are some of the most pressing problems they’re facing right now.

This week’s must-reads for managing in a digital age: just because companies recognize re-skilling and upskilling is critical doesn’t mean they’re doing it right. Also, how to choose charts everyone understands, where blockchain is headed in the enterprise, and words of wisdom for managing your career in an age of uncertainty.

Blockchain is emerging as a foundational technology, but there is still groundwork to be done on standards development and the governance of change — and doing that work is critical to enterprise strategy.

This week’s must-reads for managing in a digital age: How not to frame a public offering, when humans don’t trust robots, the dark side of agile, and the most important skill an effective leader can have.

This month’s MIT SMR Strategy Forum poll looks at the recent Business Roundtable Statement, which proposed a view of corporate purpose that includes the interests of employees, communities, suppliers, and customers in addition to shareholders. We ask our panel of strategy experts whether this shift may have an impact for American workers.

Too many companies mistakenly view digital disruption as a technology threat, so they undertake digital transformation by focusing primarily on the need to upgrade their systems. That is a costly error — one that could even be fatal if taken to the extreme. Above all else, digital transformation is about people: the right people inspired by the right culture prepared to adapt to a very new landscape. Driving that culture is a leader’s most important responsibility today.

KPIs should be central organizing principles for leadership investment in data and decision-making.

In football, the passing game is dominant, and putting the ball on the ground has less and less relevance to a team’s ability to score. So the question has arisen: Does the running game still matter? How do coaches and managers know when a formerly winning tactic has become obsolete? Counterpoints looks at the data.

Automation can go far beyond cars. Self-driving company capabilities are closer than many leaders realize. And just as automobile manufacturers are rethinking the meaning of driving within the context of self-driving technology, business leaders are being forced to rethink an equivalent question: What does it mean to manage an enterprise once some of the work can be done autonomously?

Despite companies’ efforts to invest in leadership development, studies show that managerial skills gaps are increasingly common. The downstream effects of these gaps negatively affect not only businesses but extend to the global economy as well. To address this critical problem, leaders must place increased focus on their own development as managers in order to facilitate an increase in productivity across the board.

How can companies decide which new digital offerings to pursue? Successful digital offerings are created at the intersection of what technologies can deliver and what customers want and will pay for. That point of intersection, however, has proved to be elusive. To find it, companies must experiment repeatedly, cocreate with customers, and assemble cross-functional development teams — and the insights gleaned along the way must be shared internally.

What are the biggest challenges to AI implementation? MIT SMR readers share their thoughts in a recent online discussion.

As AI finds its way into more and more facets of modern life, we need clear systems for keeping it in check. Leaders should consider how it will affect the ways people think and interact with each other — and, more worrisome, how it will affect civilization.

The combined power of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud technologies has now become part of the technology foundation for organizations. In the looming “post-digital” era, adopting these technologies isn’t going to offer a competitive advantage — it will be a necessity for doing business.

Forming a partnership between brands can help companies reap rewards — but what happens when there are more than two partners? The answer depends on the goals and the industry; each must find its own “sweet spot” of how many collaborators is just enough, but not too much, to match consumer expectations.

How should organizations organize for and implement artificial intelligence?