Advisors provide a continuous flow of information on the topics covered by each practice, including consultant insights and reports from the front lines, analyses of trends, and breaking new ideas. Advisors are delivered directly to your email inbox, and are also available in the resource library.
The Ingredients of Good Decision Making — and How They Can Go Wrong
Paul Clermont
Complex times require leaders with more than just knowledge, insight, and skills; they need the temperament to remain calm and collected as they apply analysis and judgment to high-stakes decisions. This Advisor reviews the ingredients of good decisions and explores how decision making can go wrong.
Surviving the EV Market Flood Tide
Robert Charette
Winning in the complex risk ecology of the maturing EV market will require automakers to survive the flood tide of EV introductions over the next three years and stay alive until the market becomes more predictable.
Fighting Cyber Threats with Security Tech Solutions
San Murugesan
This Advisor explains how security technology solutions can be used to address the continuing threat of cyberattacks.
The Importance of Attending to Value Streams
Alan Shalloway
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.
Strengthening Supply Chains with Blockchain-Based IoT
Cigdem Gurgur
Blockchain-based IoT's ability to provide end-to-end supply chain information in real time supports the circular economy paradigm. It allows businesses and consumers to shift from a linear take-make-dispose model (which relies on large quantities of easily accessible resources) toward an industrial model where effective flows of materials, energy, labor, and detailed information interact with each other in a restorative, regenerative, more sustainable system.
Cybersecurity: The Need for Perpetual Awareness & Action
San Murugesan
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.
Making Better Business Decisions with Knowledge Graphs
Lila Rajabion
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.
Controlling Muri for More Sustainable Processes
Kevin Brennan
If we want to incorporate sustainability into process improvement, we must develop a toolkit and integrate it with existing Lean processes and methods, such that they work together to produce the results we’re seeking. Importantly, many practitioners believe muri is the true root cause of many other forms of waste. If we follow that line of logic, we should find a great deal of opportunity for improvement by actively controlling it.
VR Applications in Healthcare & Medicine: Education & Training
Curt Hall
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.
Future Ready: An Essential Playbook for Successful Digital Transformation
Myles Suer
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.
Traditional Corporate Innovation Models: Where They Went Wrong
Tima Bansal, Ju Young Lee, Alice Mascena Barbosa
This Advisor looks at two traditional approaches to corporate innovation (the stage-gate model and design thinking) and where they went wrong.
Making AI Systems Explainable with Natural Intelligence
Bhuvan Unhelkar
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.
Meeting Current & Future Challenges with Innovative Leadership
Erin Barry, Neil Grunberg, Maureen Metcalf, Carla Morelli, Michael MorrowFox
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.
Using 4 Lenses to Address Micro & Macro Climate Goals
Himanshu Shekhar
Businesses are being forced to respond simultaneously to climate change at the macro (external) level and the micro (internal) level. This Advisor looks at four main lenses through which businesses should view their macro and micro climate-related goals: climate science, climate governance, business stakeholders, and community stakeholders.
Exploring the Amazing World of AI-Powered Art Generators
Curt Hall
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.
Taking a Deeper Look at the DEI Issue
Benjamin Duke
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.
How Companies Are Building & Leveraging Ecological Knowledge
Saeed Rahman, Natalie Slawinski, Monika Winn
This Advisor presents two examples that illustrate how a new breed of business organizations is pushing beyond traditional boundaries by explicitly incorporating their understanding of nature into their strategies. These stories also demonstrate that a large-scale, system-level change toward more ecologically sustainable production systems is an evolutionary process, one that requires organizations to access as many sources of ecological knowledge as possible.
Finding the Sweet Spots Between Growth & Sustainability with Tech-Led Transformation
Pradipta Chakraborty
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?
Exploring the Benefits & Challenges of VoC Solutions
Scott Stribrny
Incorporating your customers’ reality into your product development processes via rigorous voice of the customer (VoC) solutions can help your company grow with significant and sustainable margins. In this Advisor, we explore various benefits and challenges of VoC solutions.
Connecting Biodiversity to Business
PJ Stephenson, Judith Walls
Businesses have strong reasons to focus on biodiversity. However, several fundamental issues need to be resolved to connect biodiversity to business, as we explore in this Advisor.
A New Enterprise Cybersecurity Threat: Deep Fakes
Curt Hall
Examples of deep fakes range from videos of politicians or celebrities saying or doing things they never actually said or did and so-called “revenge porn” to fake photos of soldiers appearing to commit atrocities they didn't commit. However, as we explore in this Advisor, this trend is changing: hackers now use deep fake techniques to target commercial enterprises and government agencies for nefarious purposes.
Reducing Business Complexity
Myles Suer
Without question, complexity is a business inhibitor and slows down the wheels of business. But to be fair, not all business complexity is on IT’s shoulders. However, reducing the complexity instantiated by IT can dramatically improve business agility. And with agility, businesses can create the foundation to win in the digital world. In this Advisor, Myles Suer shares some CIO insights on reducing this business complexity.
Piloting Sustainability with Drones: A Q&A
Helen Pukszta
In a recent webinar, Cutter Expert Helen Pukszta revealed how drone technology is being adopted and applied to contribute to the achievement of environmental sustainability goals, while also creating economic value. In this Advisor, we share the Q&A session that followed.
Reducing AI’s Carbon Footprint with the 3R Framework
Rohit Nishant, Thompson S.H. Teo
Effectively managing AI’s carbon footprint requires a shift to a system like regenerative capitalism or doughnut economics that does not emphasize continuous growth or increased consumption. However, the novel opportunities AI offers society make it difficult for many to accept the idea that data consumption related to AI must be managed. The 3Rs framework presents an alternate system grounded in regenerative capitalism and doughnut economics as a way to reduce the carbon footprint of data.
Post-Pandemic Teamwork: Hybrid Work and Team Effectiveness
Torgeir Dingsøyr
In a recent issue of Amplify, Torgeir Dingsøyr and his coauthors presented a teamwork effectiveness model aimed at co-located Agile development teams working on a single product. Since the publication of that issue, Dingsøyr has been asked to present the team effectiveness model to a number of organizations. In this Advisor, he addresses a recurring question from those experiences: how does the team effectiveness model adapt to post-pandemic work?