Managing in the Digital Economy

When seemingly ridiculous rumors become talking points, it’s time to focus on brand-building.

By requiring us to determine what we count as “fair,” machine learning puts the burden on us to choose which values we deem relevant.

Sad but true: most companies’ digital transformation efforts fail due to “internal resistance to change.”

Machine learning trades exactness for flexibility, but there are consequences for being ‘probably approximately correct.’

Times have changed. Our online experiences have reshaped our expectations of real life. For instance, consider your last online shopping experience. Ecommerce provides consumers the opportunity to leverage detailed reviews and recommendations and also enables a level of pricing transparency, all of which helps make wise purchasing decisions. Long lines don’t exist online and products […]

The past seven years have witnessed the resurgence and perfection of neural networks, the present-day king of prediction machines. It wasn’t always clear that these highly parameterized, flexible methods of machine learning could actually work. While many of the pioneering ideas date back to the 1990s and even 1980s, including those contributed by researchers recognized […]

No longer just “cool tech” or an innovative way of doing business, artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from a novelty to a necessity. In their upcoming book Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani illustrate how the […]

Many managers want to be more inclusive, but they don’t know how to get there. They are often not given the right tools to overcome the challenges posed by implicit biases. Research shows there are two, small—but more powerful—ways managers can block bias: first, by closely examining and broadening their definitions of success, and second, […]

The argument that the education pipeline does not produce enough qualified women to take up positions in science and technology-related industries does not hold water. In the US, labour force data show that the number of women working in computing and other digital technology jobs is disproportionately lower than the number of women graduating from […]

This article originally appeared in The Harvard Gazette. It is the best of times. Nearly equal numbers of American women and men now go into medicine and law. More women than men graduate from college and graduate school. The gap between men’s and women’s pay has shrunk in recent decades. It is the worst of […]