CFOs Must Change to Unlock the Future of Autonomous Finance  
Autonomous finance should not be a pipe dream. After all, the necessary tools are operational and evolving quickly. But few CFOs are making headway and they recognize the biggest problem is their own mindset — ahead of both talent and cost issues. They should make three shifts.

Marketing Needs Human Superpowers for the Digital Era
While the digital marketing function is now a reality, the expected era of innovation has not followed. Marketing executives find themselves chasing one last data point or complying with cookie rules. But they can get strategic again if they unleash people skills in a new way, helping everyone in the enterprise who uses customer information.

The Right Role for Sales Reps in Digital Commerce 
Executive leaders in sales, IT, marketing and customer experience should stop designing online aids for buyers to use on their own and build them instead for real-time collaboration between customers and sellers. This is where sales reps add value now and in the future.

A New Tech Strategy to Energize the Front Line in Financial Services
Well-intentioned financial services executives invest in technology to boost efficiency, assuming tools free up time for tasks that matter most to frontline performance metrics. But this emphasis hurts as much as it helps: more than 4 in 10 customer-facing employees say tech adds new tasks and requires more skills. The solution: redesign jobs and offer tech that supports a new focus.

In a Hybrid World, Leaders Need Help Being Human
The digital business environment hasn’t dehumanized employees, as many leaders once feared. On the contrary, employees expect a more human experience at work. And it must start at the top, with the people who design jobs and manage teams. Yet only 29% of staff consider their skip-level leaders effective at being authentic, adapting to individual needs while achieving goals and cutting red tape. Here are some training tips.

How to Fortify the Board’s Expertise
Corporate boards frequently lack the knowledge to help enterprises navigate new challenges. Although the general counsel often evaluates director skills, nearly half of companies take no follow-up action. And that’s a missed opportunity.

The Skills of Tomorrow: How Critical Roles Are Evolving
Even the most sophisticated predictive analytics will not be able to anticipate your organization’s future skills needs — too much is changing too fast. A better way to stay ahead: position the enterprise to flex as new job requirements arise. To do that, develop sensing mechanisms, including an external market perspective. Enter the “skills life cycle,” which leverages nearly eight million job postings from S&P 100 companies to visualize how the most competitive positions for information security, supply chain, finance and HR are changing — which skills are increasingly sought, and which are waning in listings.

Smash 3 Cybersecurity Myths to Improve Employee Behavior
Employees flouting cybersecurity rules is an intractable problem in the workplace — and it’s an issue that’s not going away. And executive leaders who try to enforce more secure behavior by shining the spotlight on security awareness, or through good “tone at the top,” are likely doing little to improve the situation. A rethink is required: lighten the burden of compliance, hold people accountable and put risks into context.

Collaboration Hot Spots: What’s Frustrating (and What Works) for 5 Enterprise Activities Where Functions Pull Together

At least three functions — and at times, seven or more — get involved when organizations tackle these important challenges: resilience, customer experience, ESG, information governance and innovation. Hundreds of responses from surveys of executives working on these activities provide a glimpse into the state of play — who’s involved, what’s not going so well and, in conclusion, what might separate the good results from the bad.

The Whiteboard: Big Questions About Strengthening Objectivity in Business Processes
Have you heard about the hot hand, anchoring, overconfidence, groupthink, recency or the halo effect? These are just six of the dozens of mental shortcuts that create human-reasoning errors everywhere, including, of course, in business activities. Different cognitive biases may crop up depending on whether you’re conducting an audit, investing in cryptocurrency, or deciding on a performance management system. Can we help decision-makers fight fallacies and minimize the problems they cause?