The Best of This Week

A Four-Factor Approach for Aspiring Leaders

Professor Deborah Ancona of the MIT Sloan School of Management helped create a model that offers four capabilities that leaders must consider to build on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses or flaws.

Appointing Women to Boards Delivers Innovation Wins

Recruiting women directors can create positive feedback loops that pave the way for future diversity and strengthen a board’s role in supporting long-term innovation and creativity.

Hey, Tech Community: Take Notes From Atlanta

The city of Atlanta is a tech powerhouse with a growing focus on AI, a robust private sector, and a community of outstanding institutions of higher education. It’s also a rare hotbed of diverse innovation, providing clues to how the technology field can diversify and welcome contributors from underrepresented groups.

Why Evolving Your Technology Systems Is Worth the Challenge

For companies across industries, every major technology choice now represents a vital business decision, and “good enough” decisions are anything but. Recent research conducted by Accenture found that in order to move from average to exceptional, CEOs and IT executives will need to begin matching their technology investments to their ambitions.

AI Is Winning

Although employees want empathy, coaching, and career advice from their managers — things that machines can’t provide — nearly two-thirds of employees surveyed would trust a robot more than their human manager, according to a recent study conducted by Oracle and Future Workplace.

What Else We’re Reading:

• The world’s most talent competitive countries in 2020
• IBM’s Mark Foster discusses what makes digital transformations succeed
• It’s time to set goals — here’s some help

Quote of the Week:

“AI is one of the most profound things we are working on as humanity; it’s more profound than fire or electricity or any of the bigger things we have worked on. It has tremendous positive sides to it, but it has real negative consequences. … As democratic countries with a shared set of values, we need to build on those values and make sure when we approach AI, we are doing it in a way that serves society.”

— Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, interviewed at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

The Best of This Week