A Greek restaurant, I’ll call it “Athens,” has been struggling to survive. This family-owned business has been around for many years, with the same menu, midrange price point, decor, and location. George, the owner and manager, had run out of ideas to lift sales. He asked me if I could help with suggestions for the restaurant’s resurgence. Not being in the restaurant business I warned George that I could only take a customer’s point of view in exploring options. “That’s exactly what I need,” he said. “Combinatorics is the branch of mathematics involved with the combination of things. Say I wish to manufacture small plastic figures involving three different head types, four different body types and three different leg types. I only need to manufacture 10 different products (3 + 4 + 3). Right? But if these parts are interchangeable, I can produce 36 different toys (3 x 4 x 3) – 36 products from 10 inputs. Neat. Add colors to those shapes – you get the picture. This is how modular toy manufacturing works.”...

As uncertainty is increasing and competition is becoming more fierce, executives need to have a broader understanding of competition itself in order to sustain an edge. Executives should be thinking about four different types of competition to maintain relevance in a changing environment, which originate from our work on competitiveness, strategy, and strategic change....

“I’m sure the other candidate checks all the boxes,” a veteran of the U.S. Navy SEALs told his final-round interviewer at a financial services company. “But here’s one thing I can tell you about me: There’s not a single situation that will occur at this business that will make me feel uncomfortable.” With that answer, the SEAL won himself a job, beating out a traditionally better-qualified candidate with an MBA from a leading business school....

In times of great uncertainty, it’s difficult to formulate strategies. Leaders can’t draw on experience to address developments no one has ever seen before. Yet the decisions they make now could have ramifications for decades. The practice of strategic foresight offers a solution. Its aim is not to predict the future but to help organizations envision multiple futures in ways that enable them to sense and adapt to change. Its most recognizable tool is scenario planning. To use it well, organizations must imagine a variety of futures, identify strategies that are needed across them, and begin implementing those strategies now. But one-off exercises are not enough: Leaders must institutionalize that process, building a dynamic link between thinking about the future and taking action in the present....

Many executives and investors assume that it’s possible to use customer-data capabilities to gain an unbeatable competitive edge. The more customers you have, the more data you can gather, and that data, when analyzed with machine-learning tools, allows you to offer a better product that attracts more customers. You can then collect even more data and eventually marginalize your competitors in the same way that businesses with sizable network effects do. Or so the thinking goes. More often than not, this assumption is wrong. In most instances people grossly overestimate the advantage that data confers....

We’ve seen a precipitous decline in participation in civic organizations in recent years; membership numbers are down for religious groups, labor organizations and non-profits. A cynic could interpret these trends as a sign that we have all become digital hermits, with our noses buried in our highly personalized screens. The reality is that powerful communities are not just alive and well but also booming. They just look different than they did 50—even 20—years ago. They are organized around businesses and brands and providing profound opportunities for companies around the world....

Most companies fear competition from a rival’s product innovations and the risk of falling behind their industry’s technological frontier. Firms affected by such competitive pressure usually react by trying to strengthen their R&D capabilities and close the gap between their and their rival’s technologies as quickly as possible. But how exactly can firms catch up? Our research shows that rather than innovating from scratch in house or partnering with others in strategic alliances, the most effective solution may be to buy access to an already existing technology and incorporate it into your R&D....

Black Lives Matter. Trade policy. Immigration. Over the last four years, companies have been under pressure from their constituencies — employees, customers, investors, and the communities in which they operate — to take a public stand on high-profile political and social movements. According to research from the Edelman Trust Barometer, 54% of employees globally believe that CEOs should speak publicly on controversial political and social issues they care about. Similarly, 53% of consumers agree that every brand has a responsibility to get involved in at least one social issue that does not directly impact its business....