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.

Embedding Leader Character to Achieve Competitive Advantage

Corey Crossan, Mary Crossan, Bill Furlong
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.

Increasing Carbon-Capture Capacity in Europe

Martin Dix, Oliver Golly
Europe has an urgent need to decarbonize, but its progress lags other regions, including the US, Australia, and Japan. This Advisor examines the current state of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies in Europe and explains how some countries are increasing their carbon-capture capacities.

Maximizing AI by “Thinking Like a Data Scientist”

Bill Schmarzo
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.

How Does Humility & Narcissism Influence CEO Behavior?

William Spangler
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.

Benefits of a Dynamic Pricing Approach for Car-Sharing Systems

Christian Müller, Jochen Gönsch, Louisa Albrecht, Max Staskiewicz
To illustrate the benefits of our dynamic pricing approach over other benchmarks, we carried out several computational studies and a case study using Share Now data from the city of Vienna, Austria. As this Advisor explores, that approach outperforms all benchmarks, saves providers operational costs, and improves sustainability via clear decarbonization benefits.

Addressing Tech Debt from Mission-Critical Systems

Myles Suer
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.

Case Study: Strategic Portfolio Management in Action

Brian Cameron, Whynde Kuehn
Organizations that are highly effective at strategic portfolio management are twice as likely to achieve better business outcomes as those that aren’t. This case study from a Fortune 500 organization reflects strategic portfolio management concepts in action and illustrates the value that a capability perspective can bring to project portfolio decision-making.

The Problem with Plastic: Intelligent Plastic Recycling Solutions

Curt Hall
Companies are applying AI, computer vision, machine learning, and robotics to develop intelligent recycling platforms that enhance the efficiency and profitability of the recycling process. This Advisor examines some of these emerging technologies.

Digital Twins Power Mining Insights: A Case Study

Carl Faulkner
Digital twins have been widely adopted by the aerospace and manufacturing industries, but their potential benefits in the mining industry are only starting to be realized. This Advisor presents a mining industry case study with a focus on data collection, integration, and storage challenges.

What Constitutes Good Nonprofit Organization Governance?

Trevor Hunter
There are many perspectives on what constitutes “good” nonprofit organization (NPO) governance. Even so, most agree that, given the behavioral expectations faced by NPO board members, strong judgment (informed by the dimensions of leader character) must combine with instrumental skills to underpin all decisions made by the board.

Smart Farming & Sustainable Agriculture

Antoine Harfouche
This Advisor takes a closer look at a new concept called “smart farming.” This concept refers to the use of advanced technologies and data-driven approaches to improve agricultural productivity, efficiency, and sustainability. Specifically, it involves integrating modern technologies into traditional farming practices to monitor, automate, and optimize agricultural operations

Determining AI Hallucination Tolerance: Context Is Crucial

Maria Diaz Campo, Arman Ghafoori, Manjul Gupta
Competing factors come into play to determine our tolerance to AI hallucination. This Advisor stresses that understanding context is crucial to making informed decisions about strategically adopting and implementing emerging technologies and provides key takeaways that can help us balance the potential value of the opportunity with our risk tolerance.

What Can Business Leaders Learn from the CrowdStrike Fiasco?

Myles Suer
Cutter contributor and data business leader Myles Suer recently spoke to a group of CIOs to discuss lessons learned from last month’s CrowdStrike debacle. This Advisor shares their insights and provides key takeaways for business leaders about crisis management and resilience.

Improving Environmental Innovation with “Green-Highlighting” Strategies

Punit Arora
This Advisor examines the relationship between corporate environmental disclosure and environmental innovation (known as “ecovation”). It suggests that firms avoid “greenwashing” and “brownwashing,” as both are associated with lower innovation than “green-highlighting” strategies.

LLMs Take Off! GenAI in Space

Curt Hall
As this Advisor explores, GenAI looks promising for providing advanced AI edge computing capabilities in space. Although still in experimental stages, applications from Booz Allen Hamilton and the European Space Agency demonstrate the possibilities of integrating GenAI capabilities directly on spacecraft by facilitating natural language–based data retrieval and analysis, improved data transmission efficiency, and real-time decision-making.

Surviving & Thriving: Strategies for Resilience from an Airport CEO

Ralph Menzano
Airports can be viewed as microcosms of cities and, as such, offer important lessons to public sector entities around the world. Specifically, emulating the strategies used by airports during the pandemic can help municipalities and others become more resilient. In this Advisor, Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington offers a firsthand view into how airports were able to survive, rebound, and move forward after the pandemic-induced downturn.

Reducing Industrial CO2 Emissions with Energy-Efficiency Improvement

Senthil Kumar Sundaramoorthy, Dipti Kamath, Sachin Nimbalkar, Christopher Price, Thomas Wenning, Joe Cresko
In this Advisor, a group from Oak Ridge National Laboratory explores energy-efficiency improvement as a feasible, low-cost approach that can bring immediate industrial CO2 emissions reductions around the globe.

IP Law in an AI World

Ryan Abbott, Elizabeth Rothman
As AI systems advance and produce increasingly sophisticated and innovative output, the question of how to treat this output under IP law becomes more pressing. The characteristics of some AI systems, including the self-improving nature of certain AI models and the difficulties associated with attributing their outputs to human creators, challenge the existing framework and necessitate a thorough rethinking of what rules will result in the greatest social value.

Equitable Opportunities Yield a New ROI for Business

Linda Patterson
Women of color are equipped with tried-by-fire strengths that stem from endurance, perseverance, and survivorship. By utilizing these qualities, businesses can expand and grow to meet the diverse needs of their customer base.

Transitioning to a Circular Space Economy

Moriba Jah
Transitioning from a linear to a circular space economy is not just about sustainability — it’s about preventing orbital ecocide and ensuring the long-term viability of orbital space as a resource and habitat. By embracing resource efficiency, reuse, and innovation, we can safeguard the celestial environment and preserve the final frontier for future generations.

Technologies for Addressing Space Waste

Victor Heaulme
This Advisor explores key technologies for more accurate tracking of space objects of all sizes, monitoring software that automates collision warnings, and technology that remotely removes objects in orbit. These include two systems that cause decaying orbits, one that uses a specialized satellite to push space objects and one that moves objects into a different orbit from Earth.

How Leader Character Impacts ESG Strategy

Oana Branzei, Dusya Vera, Kimberley Young Milani
Through a recent executive leadership roundtable, we learned that top leaders tend to construct their ESG strategies through three lenses (or frames): Games (with referees and rules), Positions (with some being deciders and some doers), or Capitals (with money overpowering other capitals). In short, as this Advisor explains, ESG strategies are neither given nor static. Rather, they evolve depending on the character dimensions of the leaders who envision and enact them.

SUMP: A Methodology for Sustainable Urban Development

Andrea Lorenzini
This Advisor explores the European Commission SUMP, a consolidated methodology to help local and regional authorities improve accessibility of urban areas by providing high-quality, sustainable transport to, through, and within the urban area. Essentially, it contains actionable guidelines for comprehensive and sustainable urban mobility planning.

Improving Tech Security with LLMs

Michael Papadopoulos, Nicholas Johnson, Michael Eiden, Philippe Monnot, Foivos Christoulakis, Greg Smith
With careful design and effective oversight, large language models (LLMs) can be an ally rather than a liability in securing organizations against modern technological threats. This Advisor looks at specific ways responsible LLM adoption can improve security.

Social Intelligence & High-Performance Team Leadership

James Rychard
Building a high-performance team takes significant effort, and it doesn't occur until all members of the team are working together like a well-oiled machine. In this Advisor, we explore a key ingredient of high-performance teams: leaders who display social intelligence when leading and putting the team together.