As a senior lecturer and principal research scientist for the MIT Sloan School of Management, Dr. George Westerman is a veritable authority in bridging executive leadership and digital innovation. So when he talks about how generative AI (GenAI) affects business strategy, we would all do well to listen.
In this lecture, Dr. Westerman demystifies GenAI from a management perspective. He also invokes his eponymous philosophy: Westerman’s Law or The First Law of Digital Innovation, which states, “Technology changes quickly, but organizations change much more slowly.”
With how quickly GenAI is evolving, integrating it into your business strategy is equal parts challenging and risky. Watch Dr. Westerman navigate this dilemma.
As 2025 rolls in, we want to give you, our readers, a little treat. We scoured our database and took a good long look at the articles we published in 2024 to come up with a list of what stood out the most and resonated with you each month of last year. Entry into the prestigious list was determined using three criteria: value (how informative and useful the article is to the strategy and performance management community), readability (how easy it is to understand the thesis and concepts presented within), and reach (how widely the article was viewed). Without further ado, here are the top 12 Performance Magazine web articles for 2024.
Beyond Remote Work: Insights and Strategies for Enhancing Employee Productivity and Performance
Promoting diverse work options is important because enabling employees to work in ways that align with their preferences is essential for maintaining and boosting productivity.
Key Safety Considerations for Generative AI Adoption in Business
With the advancement of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), security risks are becoming a growing concern. What precautions should organizations take to protect their data before adopting GenAI?
Leveraging Effective Performance Management Systems for Real Estate Success
A robust performance management system (PMS) is key to cultivating a high-performance culture. How can real estate companies tailor their PMS to align with their goals and secure a competitive advantage?
Establishing a data team from scratch can seem daunting due to its complexity—considering there is no one-size-fits-all solution. What key areas should organizations focus on to truly build a strong data team?
Business Process Reengineering: The Path to Maximum Efficiency
Business process re-engineering is a strategic approach that reshapes and optimizes workflows to boost efficiency and agility in the evolving business landscape.
Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs), according to the State of Strategy Management Practice Global 2023 Report, ranks as the second most significant obstacle in strategy planning.
How Data-Ink Ratio Imposed Minimalism on Data Visualization
Data-ink ratio seeks to maximize the proportion of informative elements in a chart, with a ratio of 1 being the ultimate goal. It only includes data-representing elements, free of decorations or redundancies.
Rethinking Business Ecosystems Part 1: What Systemic Issues Are Undermining Your Holistic Growth?
Leaders must foster innovation within the business ecosystem due to the unpredictable global market and growing societal expectations—allowing them to identify gaps and develop relevant solutions.
The State of Sustainability Reporting: Key Insights for Businesses
The sustainability report, as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) CEO Eelco van der Enden puts it, “is the end of a long journey of transactions and actions that define the company’s approach to sustainability.”
Do ESG Strategies and Performance Measurement Truly Matter to Sectoral Investors?
As environmental awareness grows, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies are gaining more importance in the investment community. Thus, industry-specific KPIs become all the more crucial to implement effective sustainability measures.
How Strategy Management in MENA Is Shaping Up: Key Insights from TKI’s 2024 Report
Organizations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are adapting their strategic approaches to navigate current challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Charting a Course: A Step-by-Step Guide to Deliberate Strategic Planning
Deliberate strategic planning is a methodical approach where organizations set clear objectives and craft strategies to achieve them. It thrives in a stable environment, ensuring alignment between goals and actions.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) have been the north star guiding business strategy for decades. These criteria measure not only sales and revenue but also customer satisfaction as well as employee engagement.However, as the business landscape continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, the need for deeper insights and more agile measurement arises. This is where the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) shines, opening doors to a new era of KPI innovation.
GenAI goes beyond automation to produce entirely novel content. It is a creative catalyst, opening up unprecedented possibilities for KPI innovation. Forget rigid, one-dimensional metrics. Powered by GenAI, KPIs become fluent, adaptive, and poetic, capturing not only the whats but also the whys and what-ifs.
Reimagining KPIs for exponential growth
From static to dynamic: GenAI is capable of integrating dynamic KPIs, meaning they can evolve alongside the company that uses them. KPIs also fit seamlessly into a changing market, with trends and strategies naturally shifting along the way.
Unveiling the unseen: Traditional KPIs often fail to hit the nail on the head by overlooking key, intangible factors that could affect performance. GenAI, however, can delve much deeper. With the help of GenAI, it is possible to determine brand sentiment before a particular campaign is launched, anticipate employee engagement within remote teams, or even predict customer turnover before it happens.
Personalized insights, enhanced action: Data mountains no longer need to be intimidating.GenAI transforms data into personalized narratives, crafting stories tailored to individual stakeholders. Sales teams can access actionable insights, marketing managers can monitor real-time customer sentiment, and CEOs can explore what-if scenarios for strategic foresight. This data-driven storytelling fosters informed decision-making and ignites action across the organization.
A practical guide to unlocking GenAI’s potential for KPI innovation
To effectively utilize GenAI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT for KPI innovation, follow these guidelines:
Define goals and challenges: Clearly articulate objectives, whether uncovering customer sentiment or anticipating market shifts.
Frame specific prompts: Use concise prompts such as “generate potential KPIs for measuring brand sentiment on social media.”
Provide relevant context: Enhance responses by furnishing background information about your industry, business model, and existing KPIs.
Experiment and refine: Iterate prompts, rephrase questions, and provide feedback to improve AI understanding.
Collaborate with experts: Involve human expertise in evaluating and implementing AI-generated insights.
While GenAI’s potential for KPI innovation is undeniable, it thrives on synergy, not substitution. The point is this: human guidance is essential. Act now, invest in your future, and become a master of the new KPI era by enrolling in The KPI Institute’sCertified KPI Professional course.
Do ESG Strategies and Performance Measurement Truly Matter to Sectoral Investors?
