It’s August, and you know what that means. Leadership teams are launching annual business planning and budgeting processes, all too aware that the current year’s plans went kaput sometime around March thanks to the pandemic....

It’s 7:00 in the morning, and the nurse struggles to find Sarah’s vein to take her blood. Sarah’s arms are bruised; she’s been coming to the clinic for nine days in a row for morning bloodwork. She’s in the fourth year of her treatment and has no idea when it will end....

“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....

The rich get richer; the rest play catchup. That describes the innovation achievement gap between companies that have massive resources in AI, data, automation, and state-of-the-art enterprise systems and those that don’t. But for companies struggling to keep up, the real problem may not be the disparities between them and their competitors. Rather, it’s the hidden technological disparities within their own organizations that increase inequalities in talent’s access to automation tools and AI reskilling initiatives that ultimately hinder competitiveness....