Bill Fox, founder of LeaderONE.org and Forward Thinking Workplaces, emphasizes that true leadership transcends titles and is rooted in authenticity and conscious awareness. The inner leadership journey shifts from ego-driven action to being, unlocking profound personal and organizational transformation essential for today’s leaders.

Healthcare and pharma are embracing a data revolution, powered by wearables, AI, and genomics/precision medicine. These technologies drive efficiency, precision, and innovation, but their true value depends on aligning outcomes with stakeholder needs. This Advisor explores how data-driven decision-making, value-based metrics, and emerging technologies are transforming healthcare services.

In Part I of this three-part Advisor series on change management, we lay out the challenges associated with change in digital transformations and explore an innovative CMO solution to those challenges that leverages data analytics and GenAI.

This Advisor explores the Digital Trust Transformative Market (DTTM) model, which offers a robust solution to the challenges faced by traditional agri-food supply chains. DTTM leverages blockchain technology to foster trust among supply chain actors and enables the creation of dynamic, efficient, sustainable supply chains.

In this Advisor, bestselling author Philippa White stresses that business is at an inflection point: the power is shifting into the hands of customers and employees, and there is a competitive urgency to create spaces and cultures where people want to work. The leaders who can do this will win; these leaders put human values like kindness, empathy, vulnerability, imagination, creativity, and courage first.

Pieter Waller, cofounder and previous chief commercial officer of Chargetrip, a leading start-up in the smart electric vehicle routing space, takes us on a journey to scale e-mobility through digital solutions. Focusing on the electrification of commercial fleets, he unpacks the multitude of constraints that complicate e-mobility scaling. Waller then provides clear managerial guidance on how to manage these constraints. Similar to the challenge in the general electricity system, the task of matching supply and demand through data must be the guiding mantra. Furthermore, companies must design a technology stack that is open to integration and allows for the coordination of multiple actors through APIs. Finally, Waller explains that given the differences in regulations and local conditions across countries and locations, a flexible and bottom-up approach to piloting and scaling smart-charging and routing applications is the key to success.

In a thought-provoking article on the butterfly effect of AI, Jonatan Pinkse, professor of sustainable business and director of the Centre for Sustainable Business at King’s College London, teamed up with René Bohnsack, professor at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, Portugal, where he also heads the Digital+Sustainable Innovation Lab. Since “seemingly harmless” AI applications can have adverse effects on the environment and society at large, they present a comprehensive framework for wisely managing AI for sustainability. Managers must control AI’s training data, the optimization drivers and parameters in AI algorithms, and the decisions taken based on training data and algorithms with potential biases. The authors demonstrate that successfully managing unintended consequences requires continually monitoring, measuring, modeling, and managing AI applications for sustainability.

Jannis Jehmlich, a senior product manager from 1KOMMA5, the German unicorn that set out to digitally transform the energy industry, provides a deep dive into the load management problem that comes with the integration of renewable energy sources into our energy systems. Because large-scale integration of renewables is probably the most important challenge for emission reductions, digital innovation can play a huge role. Jehmlich walks us through the complex supply and demand dynamics in Germany’s energy systems and introduces the idea of a digital power economy driven by real-time data and a dynamic electricity tariff that can solve the load management problem. However, this envisioned digital power economy depends on comprehensive data gathering through smart meters, enhanced data processing capabilities, and synchronous regulation and process changes in a heavily regulated industry.

Christina Bidmon, Laura Piscicelli, and Iryna Susha, along with Devin Diran, Francesca Ciulli, and Albert Meijer provide four core messages. First, that a successful twin transition requires rigorous conceptual and empirical research that provides us with the tools and insights to help navigate the complexities of the transition. Remarkably, the second core message entails a warning to stay clear of tech optimism, which speaks directly to issues related to unintended consequences. Digital innovation can be the key to sustainability but will not solve all our problems — often, other approaches and nature-based solutions should be prioritized. Third, Bidmon et al. highlight the need to understand the factors that facilitate or prevent collaboration for digital sustainability. Finally, the authors point out that neither policies nor businesses can achieve the twin transition alone; rather, comprehensive policies are needed to provide smart incentives for businesses to engage responsibly.

Aspen Institute Fellow Alessia Falsarone sheds light on an often-overlooked aspect of digital sustainability: the digital talent needed to manage digital sustainability solutions. Unlocking the benefits of digital sustainability and managing its unintended consequences requires the right digital talent. Falsarone’s best practices for growing the talent pool for digital climate transformations include: (1) identifying climate-resilience skills and capabilities, (2) leveraging collaborative tools and research for learning, and (3) embracing AI and feedback for advancement. Finally, going beyond the perspective of a single firm, she presents best practices for building and leveraging stakeholder networks for digital talent: leveraging living laboratories, fostering diverse networks, and championing collaborative initiatives.

Damla Diriker and Amanda J. Porter team up with Ilse Hellemans from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to show how we can use digital innovation for mission-oriented innovation policies. Based on several years of research and practice, they present crowdsourcing as a vehicle for mission-oriented policies. The ability of digital innovation to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” facilitates policy agenda-setting because it allows initial broad exploration and refinement into sub-challenges. It also promotes solution development through targeted experimentation and broadens the scope of experimentation. Finally, it facilitates policy implementation by collecting local insights on planned interventions and testing and gathering feedback on implementing interventions.

This issue of Amplify offers a set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. They share a common message: digital innovation can be the key to accelerated climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

Farmers, commodities suppliers, investors, and governments are well aware of the need for innovation to support more sustainable practices and protect scarce agricultural resources. However, due to the complexity and individuality of farming systems, knowing what tech to invest in and under what circumstances is a significant challenge. As this Advisor explores, recent advances in AI can support these innovation decisions and provide information on the broader direction of relevant emerging technologies.

People understand what character is and why it matters but not what it takes to cultivate the habits associated with character. Without this understanding, efforts to elevate character to achieve competitive advantage at either the individual or organizational level will be compromised. As this Advisor explores, character must be embedded and institutionalized across the organization to reach its full strategic impact.

In this Advisor, data and AI innovation strategist Bill Schmarzo introduces a collaborative, design-centric, human-empowered framework that can help organizations leverage AI to create new sources of customer, product, service, and operational value.

This Advisor presents results from a recent study that investigates how humility and narcissism affect CEO behavior. With a sample of 190 CEOs and data collected from interviews and public sources, the author introduces a set of diverse CEO archetypes by measuring humility, narcissism, and entrepreneurial status.

Ananthi Al Ramiah, Gretchen Reydams-Schils, and Matthew Phillips focus on the crisis of purpose within professions. Premised on purpose to begin with, many professions are struggling with inner distress and outer distrust. Instead of taking purpose for granted, the authors invite professionals to work on it by employing four Stoic virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance). Quoting philosopher Christopher Gill, who describes virtue as “expertise in leading a happy life,” the authors encourage purpose-driven professionals to reimagine themselves at the center of circles opening up to progressively widening communities, so they can ask how to take setbacks seriously, defy indifference, and reify the joy of tackling what matters most.

Andriy Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Opatska, and Gerard Seijts (coauthor of Character: What Contemporary Leaders Can Teach Us About Building a More Just, Prosperous, and Sustainable Future) move us to extraordinary purpose, counting up to the 1,000 days of Ukraine’s resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. “How can societal leaders come to terms with the damage inflicted on them and then make the substantive shift of returning to a peacetime leadership approach equipped to rebuild and regenerate the country?” the authors ask. The article features hard-won insights from five resilient Ukrainian leaders (from parliament, the armed forces, church, business, the not-for-profit sector, and academia) who open up about their journey to, and undeniable power of, existential purpose.

Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, and Nele Terveen explain how purpose helps leaders connect the dots between grand challenges and strategic responses. When leaders expect the unexpected, the authors explain, they incent their stakeholders to embrace uncertainty so they can better guide their organizations through adversity and disruption. By leveraging the five practices of Serendipitous Impact (impact mission, impact leadership, impact governance, impact networks, and impact measurement) unexpected events can help leaders come up with solutions that often cannot be seen, let alone fully defined, in advance.

Frank Jan de Graaf invites us to try on deliberative practices. Firmly rooted in pragmatism, deliberation has historically played a significant (some say central) role in democratic societies. It also comes in handy when opposite perspectives invite us to summon new ways to converse about issues that matter — but matter differently to each of us. Rather than bracing against those who don’t share a particular purpose, de Graaf advocates for open dialogue, so we begin to look beyond the current divides and discover integrative ways to develop new rules of engagement, frame new responsibilities, and discover new solutions.

Kanina Blanchard coaches leaders on how to recognize, resist, and redirect deviance from purpose. Her article reminds us that asking questions that matter is more an art than a science. It takes us behind the scenes, where vulnerability often makes otherwise brave leaders shy away (and sometimes stay away) from probing their everyday. Blanchard meets them there, offering the empathy and humility required to get at some of those important, if often unasked, questions: “Why not?”; “What if?”; “Where else?”; “How otherwise?”

How far forward can hardship take purpose-driven leaders? Lara Liboni, Luciana O. Cezarino, Alessandro Goulart, Vera Goulart, and Rafael Petry offer a real-life case of success created from adversity. Before there was a solution, they tell us, there was a problem. This problem was so big, they insist, that it instigated purpose, which then inspired many stakeholders to partner for “Symbiotic Impact.” Unlike serendipity, where chance encounters enabled previously unimagined opportunities, the Symbiosis Project carefully crafted first-of-their-kind collaborations to systematically undo barriers keeping marginalized youth from accessing higher education and being employed in competitive sectors.

Vanessa M. Patrick, author of The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No That Puts You in Charge of Your Life, and Murali Kuppuswamy explain how saying no can be an essential antidote to purpose washing. Leveraging insights on empowered refusal, the authors suggest that by exemplifying no, leaders not only reaffirm their own purpose, they permit everyone else to uphold theirs. Their piece reminds us that at the core of any type of “washing” lies our timidity in spotting and combating deviance from purpose. Purpose can only be washed, it turns out, when leaders like us don’t say no when we ought to.

In Part I of this two-part Amplify series on scaffolding purpose, we likened purpose (as a noun) to property and explored who has it. In this issue, we focus on how leaders who already have purpose hold onto it when times get tough and examine how purpose can be actively reset in the midst of multiple crises. The seven articles bring to light counterintuitive aspects of purposing (as a verb).

As examples from Southwest Airlines and Delta illustrate, there is a critical need for CIOs to address technical debt within mission-critical systems. Frequent Cutter contributor Myles Suer recently spoke with a group of CIOs about this need and the steps leaders can take to protect these systems. This Advisor shares some of those insights, emphasizing enterprise architecture’s role in eliminating tech debt.