With more than half the world’s population living in cities, congestion and pollution are worsening. Technology may hold the solution—but only if city governments and companies collaborate. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London speaks with McKinsey senior partner Stefan Knupfer and associate partner Swarna Ramanathan about what seamless mobility in cities really means, what it will take to get there, and the massive benefit it could bring to people, government, and business alike.

Innovation doesn’t just happen. It requires a team, stakeholder buy-in, a budget, and more. But innovation itself is just the start. Organizing for innovation is just as vital as the innovation itself.

In this article, I will break down five organizational structures you should address to maximize your innovation efforts. By recognizing the questions you should ask yourself, you can unlock the building blocks needed for successful ventures.

I recently finished reading former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara’s new book, Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law. Attorney Bharara does an outstanding job explaining the role of the prosecutor in the criminal justice system and how much of what he has to say about that applies equally to civil society. 

Do we need a new type of leadership for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)? We have heard it many times: the 4IR is not only here to stay, but is moving faster than we thought. The real question is whether leadership is also adapting to this new business environment.

Let’s start with some bad news:

• The latest CEO-to worker pay ratio recorded in the US was (ready?) 321:1. In spite of the devastating recession of 2008, public debate about inequality is growing. To add insult to injury, remarkably, the increase in size of CEOs’ pay-cheques comes without clear correlation to either company performance or sustainability.

Image: Mimi Thian, Unsplash

The case for a shorter workweek usually centers on worker well-being. If you’re working four days a week or six hours a day, you’ll probably be happier, and companies benefit if happy workers are more likely to stick with a job. But there’s also an argument that working fewer hours could help fight climate change.

Waste no time trying to predict the next economic cycle. The running joke is that “experts” correctly anticipated seven out of the last three macroeconomic events. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the hit rate will be any better next time around.

Geopolitics, economic cycles, and many other forces that can have substantial effects on the fortunes of your business are inherently uncertain. Higher volatility in our business environment has become the “new normal” for many. And while scenario analysis is a worthwhile exercise to rationally assess some of the uncertainties you are facing, there is no guarantee for getting it right.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

Maryland Commerce is leading a delegation of 20 biohealth and life sciences companies, educational institutions, federal agencies, and city and county economic development offices to the 2019 BIO International Convention in Philadelphia next month. 

Held June 3-6, BIO brings together a variety of science-sector fields, including genomics, cell therapy, drug discovery, biomanufacturing, and more.  The convention hosts more than 16,000 visitors and 7,000 companies from around the world.

People can get complacent in their jobs. You may like the work and be very good at it but fall into a rut in which you perform well enough but aren't advancing your career.

Sometimes that's a good thing -- if you have young kids or nonwork priorities, having a job you can do well easily can be a blessing. In other scenarios, you can end up with a stalled career when you didn't mean to. That can be fixed if you're willing to put the work in.

A few years ago I spent time in prison with Trevor O’Brien, the founder of Projector. Yes, I always imagined announcing the company that way. We were of course there to work with incarcerated men on developing entrepreneurial skills on behalf of Defy Ventures. We had met previously when Trevor was a product manager at YouTube and Upfront had funded the largest video producer on YouTube, Maker Studios.

Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks along with a range of companies. Stars on Shark Tank. Is a killer salesperson. Hates meetings. Is a really nice guy.

And is worth an estimated $4 billion.

Since no one does anything worthwhile completely on their own, someone that successful has clearly received a lot of great advice along the way.

Image: "Mark Cuban" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 

Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta explores the infiltration of Amazon into dozens of industries including web services, grocery, online video streaming, content creation and, oh, did we mention physical bookstores? What’s the big plan? Is the company spread too thin, or poised for astronomical success? Learn more about this discussion in his case, “Amazon 2019.”

Elodie Dupuy felt she had paid her dues. She had spent nine years at top-tier venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, where she climbed the ranks from receptionist to vice president, followed by a stint at another investment firm. But well into interviews for a new partner role at a VC firm, following the birth of her daughter, Dupuy told me, the male partner asked whether she was serious about returning to work.

I was invited to do a keynote presentation at the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this week in Sausalito. It was an amazing gathering of some of the most ambitious early-stage CEO’s looking to make a dent in fields related to healthcare, biology, AI and other transformative fields. It’s encouraging to know that there are still great VC firms like KV that are looking to make these short of big bets on shaping the future. Hearing views from Bill Gates on how the world deals with issues like climate change, Jack Dorsey talk about the role of social platforms and government and discussions with Kevin Systrom (Instagram), Todd McKinnon (Okta), etc were fascinating.

“Some employees have more potential than others.”

“The best employees are well-rounded individuals.”

“People can reliably rate others’ performance.”

It’s safe to say most HR professionals wouldn’t take issue with these basic tenets. But Marcus Buckingham flat-out calls them “lies.”

In fact, Buckingham defied much of HR’s accepted wisdom in his keynote at the recent Wharton People Analytics Conference. The head of people and performance research at ADP Research Institute and a bestselling author, he drew in part from his new book Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, co-authored with Ashley Goodall, a senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco.

While many artists view crowdfunding as their ticket to music industry success, recent events like the PledgeMusic train wreck may have them second guessing the concept. That said, crowdfunding can still be effective if you know what you're doing. Here, we look at the truth behind five commonly believed crowdfunding myths.

In its quest for new growth engines for Asia's fourth-largest economy, South Korea charted out a set of measures to foster the biohealth industry by utilizing its prowess in information and communication technology with the goal of becoming a global powerhouse in the sector by 2030.

South Korea has been struggling to find next-generation economic growth drivers, with focus on three key promising sectors ― system chips, biohealth and future cars ― as its exports face headwinds.

Image: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr

In the middle of the last century, urban planners and politicians advanced an agenda known as urban renewal, a core tenet of which involved bisecting neighborhoods with highways and high-volume arterial roads. We know how that turned out: Many communities–mainly those of color–found themselves fenced out of the rest of the city. And the stream of cars gave rise to carbon emissions and pollution levels we’re frantically trying to combat now.

A number of writers and commenters on Seeking Alpha frequently predict that the US is about to go the way of Japan. They expect that the US will enter a long period of economic stagnation, marked by low inflation (if not deflation) and low economic growth, despite massive expansion of the monetary base.

This article is my second on Japan, laying out why I disagree with these people. The specific focus of the previous article was on the banking system as an illustration of cultural differences. I concluded that the Japanese culture results in long delays in accepting and responding to negative developments, which will always make them slow to address misallocations of capital.

The term' entrepreneur' is obtained from the French verb' entreprendre,' which implies' to start.' This relates to those who' carry' the threat of new businesses. An entrepreneur creates an enterprise. The creation process is called, 'Entrepreneurship.'

Entrepreneurship is both the analysis of the creation of new companies and the actual practice of commencing a new business – the word is used interchangeably. Entrepreneurship is a method of an entrepreneur's behaviour who is an individual always searching for something fresh and putting such thoughts into gainful possibilities by embracing the company's threat and uncertainty.

UPshow is a consumer engagement platform that focuses on in-venue marketing. In this video with Entrepreneur Network partner BizCast, UPshow CEO and co-founder Adam Hirsen discusses the challenges businesses often face in their early stages and the obstacles they may encounter after they get a foot in the door. One specific challenge Hirsen mentions is delivering a high-quality, valuable product to a large volume of customers while still making improvements upon said product.