It appeared to be a routine day at the cookie factory in Mar del Plata, Argentina — a facility operated by PepsiCo Central and South America (CASA). Freshly baked treats were continually transferred from an enormous industrial oven onto an assembly l

Do all cows’ faces look the same to you? They don’t to systems powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Bovine facial recognition technology, developed through a strategic partnership between Cargill and an Irish technology company called Cainthus, e

What does a movie about a team of superheroes — scientists, soldiers, magicians, monsters, androids, and aliens — who collaborate to try to stop the destruction of half of all life in the universe have to do with business? I didn’t expect to see a co

As a business strategist and writer, R. Gopalakrishnan has devoted his work to studying ethics, leadership, and human capital. He began his 31-year-long career at Unilever’s massive, idealistic India business, and then became a board director at the

Close to US$3.8 trillion was expected to be invested by businesses in digital transformations in 2019, up 3.2 percent on the previous year, as companies try to transform the way they work in the face of technological change, market disruption, and un

Having grown up in India, I remember how monsoons brought relief from scorching heat and produced lush greenery and lots of bugs. But as a visitor to India last August, I saw water scarcity woven into the fabric of day-to-day life and puzzled over th

Whatever you’re going to do, do it well. Sounds obvious. But deciding precisely what to do — or whether to keep doing it — is often hard for leaders as they look to distinguish their companies, stay competitive, and adapt to changing market forces. N

At one of the world’s most respected manufacturers — a company known for innovation and employee engagement — the CEO was asked recently about his greatest concerns about the enterprise. “We lack leadership capacity,” he said. The company was enterin

Jakarta, Indonesia, is a sprawling city of more than 30 million people. Like many other burgeoning capitals, it has a housing problem. Rents downtown are high, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of properties are unoccupied. This forces peop

It would be difficult to imagine someone more wired into the culture at the nexus of technology and higher education than John Hennessy. A computer scientist who joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1977, he started a highly successful compan

If you’re in business, perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself is, “What’s your story?” Stories are how we make sense of the world and understand one another, and asking questions is how we begin to construct our stories. It’s hard t

The most popular topic in business writing is leadership. Perhaps that’s because wisdom on the subject is so elusive. To be a great (or even good) leader, there is no easy formula to follow, and much of the guidance you’ll find is clichéd or, worse,

The list of qualities and habits of mind required to succeed in the role of CEO is long; it includes resilience, stamina, high IQ and EQ, confidence, ambition, humility, vision, trustworthiness, and presence. It would be easy to come up with a hundre

There’s a big mistake that a lot of companies make. It’s one that until a few years ago was common in my own organization, and it stems from the worthy goal of boosting innovation. The mistake is adopting what I call the “science fair” mentality: enc

William Knoedelseder, Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit (HarperBusiness, 2018) A TOP SHELF PICK Lawrence D. Burns, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car —and How It Will Reshape Our World (with Chr

The maverick needs a rebrand. The term, usually defined as someone who is independent or unorthodox, can carry negative connotations that imply complication, contrariness, and chaos. In a society in which echo chambers create siloed workforces, where

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It) (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019) A TOP SHELF PICK Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learnin

Air conditioning, a necessity of modern life, is unique because it perpetuates the very problem it solves. As the planet warms and as it prospers, more people demand air conditioning. Traditional systems consume a lot of energy, which requires burnin

Raghuram Rajan, The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind (Penguin Press, 2019) Victoria Bateman, The Sex Factor: How Women Made the West Rich (Polity, 2019) Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free

Siemens has been in the industrial technology business since it was founded as a telegraph company in Berlin in 1847. Its U.S. businesses began soon afterward, and evolved over years of cross-Atlantic collaboration into a US$90 billion industrial con

Gary P. Pisano, Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation (PublicAffairs, 2019) Rita McGrath, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) A TOP SHELF PICK Nicolaj

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019) A TOP SHELF PICK Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks, Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why (P

Imagine someone invented a new kind of fabric that never gets dirty and lasts forever. It’s so durable that you have to cut it with a blowtorch and so stain-resistant that you can’t even dye it. Would that represent a giant leap forward for humankind

Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) Kartik Hosanagar, A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can S

In 21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges, Charles Handy, 87, is talking to his four grandchildren. His goal is to help them as they are “contemplating life’s rich choices.” In a life that he acknowledges has seen technology transform lives in unpredi