This case study is based on an interview with Elliott Waxman about his co-founding of ClimateDAO, an organization that invited private investors to collaborate on decarbonizing efforts. ClimateDAO was born from a crowdsourcing campaign that generated $80,000 worth of cryptocurrency. However, challenges associated with the DAO structure led to complications that soon required a substantial restructuring.

Diego Alvarez, Pietro Cortellini, and Emily Munchak invite readers to look at DAOs through the lens of the music industry. The authors investigated three DAOs: Audius, BitSong, and MODA DAO, which aim to disrupt their market. The study differentiates between DAOs driven primarily by economic incentives from those focused on social incentives and highlights five dimensions that characterize all DAOs: purpose, community, technology, tokens, and governance. The study focuses on DAOs from the music industry, but the authors offer generalized insights for other industries.

Based on broad domain knowledge and first-hand experiences with launching DAOs, Thomas Belkowski and Lukas Falcke share their insights into holistic DAO governance. They provide five guidelines for prospective DAO founders on how to develop governance mechanisms that can enable thriving DAOs. Although these general guidelines apply to a range of DAOs, the authors warn against applying a one-size-fits-all approach to DAO governance.

Lucy Frew highlights the current predicaments of DAOs from a legal and regulatory perspective. The article explores the challenges that DAOs present to the legal structures of organizations as we know them. Overall, DAOs aim at decentralization, but the degree of decentralization varies over time and has critical implications for the accountability of its members: the token holders. Frew discusses the existing regulatory landscape of DAOs and looks at the circumstances under which a DAO might benefit from seeking legal status.

Henrik Axelsen and Omri Ross provide an understanding of the challenges associated with regulating DAOs and the opportunity (if not necessity) of a transformational shift in the existing regulatory paradigm. The characteristics of DAOs, including fluid membership and locational independence as well as the financial resources implicated, raise the question of who, what, and where to regulate. The precedent of a DAO sanctioned for enabling money laundering highlights the urgency of initiating this discourse. With traditional finance as a reference, the authors discuss whether activity- or entity-based regulation is more appropriate and what current regulatory decisions mean for the DAOs landscape future.

This issue of Amplify explores the trends, innovations, technologies, applications, opportunities, challenges, and novel research reshaping token-driven organizations. Understanding how digital tokens govern work and organizing in virtual organizations can unravel important questions for leaders and managers of traditional organizations.

This Advisor explains how security technology solutions can be used to address the continuing threat of cyberattacks.

If we think about hierarchies, we will see their effects and try to improve them. If we instead think about value streams, we will see the effects of value streams and try to improve them. Hierarchies are a structure we use to organize our people; value streams represent the actual work we’re doing. Let’s explore the difference that shifting our focus creates.

Dig into business cases to gain clarity and a new depth of understanding of the nuanced issues the C-Suite faces as they navigate the business opportunities and threats of blockchain-based innovations.

Dig into business cases to gain clarity and a new depth of understanding of the nuanced issues the C-Suite faces as they navigate the business opportunities and threats of blockchain-based innovations.

 

 

High Risk, High Stakes Decision Making in Turbulent Times

November 15, 2022 | 4pm-5pm EST | 1pm-2pm PST (see your local time)

Cutter Expert Paul Clermont helps us understand how and why capable, experienced people often make poor choices. He describes familiar pathologies like confirmation bias, groupthink, and the tendency to double down on failing courses of action in which we have invested heavily. Clermont argues that challenging market conditions sometimes exacerbate our tendency to make these types of mistakes, rather than bringing out the best in us. He provides four guidelines for enhanced critical thinking, arguing that leaders need to be more inquisitive, humble, diligent, and skeptical.

Dave Martin, Tony Ponton, and Kim Ballestrin explain that humans crave certainty, and we desperately want to be right the first time. They argue that trying to be “right” can lead us astray in highly complex environments. Thus, we must become comfortable with ambiguity, especially with the notion of arriving at a partially correct decision. Next, we need to select the appropriate measures to track our progress. Are we on the right track or not? Once we have additional information, we can adapt our decision and refine our course of action. This iterative process serves us well in complex situations for which our predictive powers are simply far too limited.

Cutter Fellow Noah Barsky outlines 10 unconventional rules for helping us identify critical risks. He argues that we should not relegate risk management to our compliance or legal departments. On the contrary, we need to transform the mindset that says risk management and mitigation are the responsibility of specialists within specific functional areas. Instead, it must become everyone’s responsibility. Many risks remain stubbornly hidden in organizations. Barsky closes his article by suggesting, quite astutely, that we need to “listen to the kids” in our enterprises.

October is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month.” To create better cybersecurity awareness, this Advisor series examines the evolving cybersecurity landscape. Here in Part I we explore why cybersecurity remains a perpetual concern and challenge and what we can do about it.

The best leaders recognize that they don’t have all the answers. They acknowledge the limits of their expertise and understand the need to marshal the collective intellect of their teams. As Peter Drucker once said, “The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.” So what can leaders do to gather input from a diverse array of sources? How can they generate and critically evaluate options? What does it take to uncover and assess hidden risks? In this issue of Amplify, we explore these questions in depth.

Lori Silverman says we need to rethink our focus on data analytics. She points out that many enterprises are not achieving the ROI that they would like from their data science and analytics efforts. Silverman argues that we need to think more broadly about optimizing the decision-making processes throughout our organizations, rather than continuing to pour resources into hardware, software, and human resources in hopes of better data-driven insights. She explains how to design an end-to-end process that helps people throughout the enterprise define key questions, mine data for crucial insights, and develop recommendations based on those insights. Finally, she describes how we can communicate our conclusions to others much more effectively through narrative storytelling.

One of the most important knowledge graph (KG) functions is creating linkages across multiple data sets. By providing a visual representation of the underlying connections between data nodes, KGs help leaders advance their understanding of their environment so they can make intelligent business choices.

In Part I of this Advisor series on virtual reality (VR) in healthcare and medicine, we examine how companies are using VR technologies to develop applications for healthcare educational and training purposes.

This Advisor reviews the book Future Ready, which should be in every leader's library because it lays forth the issues and risks of each path forward for successful digital transformation.

Biases in AI models can crop up due to data bias, and biases in algorithms can result from a developer’s viewpoints. Natural intelligence (NI) provides a countermeasure to these biases, challenging the data and algorithm biases with its understanding of the context in which decisions are made.

Innovative Leadership originates from the idea that we must regularly innovate how we lead as our organizations change in a continually more complex and faster-paced world. As with contin­uous improvement, leaders who follow Innovative Leadership regularly elevate their leadership to meet current and anticipated conditions, challenges, and opportunities. 

AI art generators combine machine learning (ML) and natural language processing to generate images from natural language text prompts input by users. These tools offer exciting possibilities for novices and professionals to create incredible art for many uses. They also raise several issues for business and society as their use becomes more mainstream.

This Advisor offers two “mini-starters” to explore the DEI issue in more depth: (1) a critique of leadership programs for Black executives with suggestions for improvement and (2) the threat that “me over we” poses to both DEI programs and the business sector at large.

Companies can’t choose between growth and sustainability — they must have both. But what kind of technology-led business model transformations will ensure “sweet spots” between the pursuit of growth and sustainability?