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

Volatility in an industry should concern not only the companies within it but also the people who work for them. To stay ahead of developments that may disrupt your professional life, you must make two evidence-based diagnoses: How volatile is your industry? And what explains the volatility? The answers will equip you to disrupt your own career preemptively.

A good psychometric test can easily outperform a résumé scan and interview at predicting job performance and retention. Yet personality testing and other ways of analyzing potential present some significant challenges: For instance, not all assessments pass the sniff test, and people’s personalities vary from moment to moment, often depending on the challenge at hand. We need a finer-grained understanding of human potential.

A webinar featuring ADP chief behavioral economist Jordan Birnbaum describes how data-driven performance management can be used to improve the organization.

At the 2019 gathering of the World Economic Forum, much of the conversation was about the need for re-skilling and inclusive education, and the ongoing gender gap in the world of technology. Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at London Business School, attended the Davos conference as a steward of the World Economic Forum Council on Work, Education and Gender, and shares her insights from the meeting.

Baseball teams routinely use analytics to shift fielders’ positions so they can be placed where a hitter is most likely to hit the ball. This works well for preventing the opposing team from hitting and scoring — but it’s not so great for the game, which relies on base hits and scored runs to keep fans excited and engaged. Should “shifting” be banned for the sake of the fans?

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.

Football players who seem mediocre in college suddenly flourish as top pro performers, while hot prospects flounder when they reach the NFL. Can teams’ recruiters and coaches accurately identify the key players that will help their team win games based on the players’ past performance? In this episode of Counterpoints, Wharton professor Cade Massey, host of “Wharton Moneyball,” argues that they can’t.

Corporate wellness programs are a lot like resolutions. While announced with the best of intentions, they don’t lead to enough real action — let alone the kinds of transformations they’re designed to bring.

The workforce is changing, with more and more skilled workers electing to work for themselves or become entrepreneurs. In this environment, organizations must significantly reconsider how they managed talent. As the competition for talent heightens, intuition is no longer adequate to identify and attract — not to mention keep — the best potential employees. In this webinar, ManpowerGroup’s chief talent scientist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic discusses the current workplace dynamic and the innovative methods to solve the talent problem, including new digital tools for talent assessment and retention.

This episode of Counterpoints examines the strategic value of data analytics — and more to the point, whether the data scientists creating the analysis are being rewarded appropriately for their contribution to strategy.

Many workers value the flexibility and income that gig work provides; customers like being able to find people to do things they want done. However, the extent to which gig workers, typically self-employed individuals, should be afforded the legal rights of employees has yet to be fully resolved in many jurisdictions.

While most organizations still rely on traditional methods such as résumé screenings, job interviews, and psychometric tests to find the right people and match them with the right roles, three new approaches to talent identification are quickly gaining traction. Gamified assessments, digital interviews, and candidate data mining have the potential to make hiring more precise and less biased, as long as they’re used responsibly.

In this episode of the Counterpoints podcast, we look at how sports analytics measures “basketball IQ” — and how this metric explains the improbable success of 8-time NBA All Star point guard Steve Nash.

CEOs worry about ensuring that their companies have the right skills mix to thrive in the age of AI and automation, and they’re smart to be thinking about talent at a strategic level. But the external labor market can do only so much to address the anticipated shifts in demand. So companies should double down on retraining the people they have, with an emphasis on lifelong learning and adaptability.

While anonymous feedback in teams can sometimes be less than constructive, when used the right way, digital chat tools that provide anonymity can help managers gauge employee morale and drive change.

We understand a lot about how to develop the “hard skills” of analysis, decision-making, and analytical judgment, but we know a great deal less about the genesis of “soft skills” like empathy, context sensing, collaboration, and creative thinking, which are becoming increasingly valuable in the workplace. Understanding the obstacles to developing these soft skills and then addressing those barriers is crucial for our schools, homes, and workplaces.

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.

In the 2018 Digital Business Report, MIT SMR and Deloitte find that digitally maturing organizations encourage distributed leadership and a healthy appetite for experimentation.

Explore interactive charts from the 2018 MIT SMR/Deloitte Digital Business Study and find out learning and leadership models are evolving in today’s digital business environment. Personalize the data to see how your organization measures up.