A surefire way to shoot yourself in the foot when you're leading a large-scale change effort is to ignore what's on the minds of your employees. In research we conducted for our recently published book, Beyond Performance 2.0 (John Wiley & Sons, July 2019), we found that executives at exactly zero companies that disregarded an analysis of employee mind-sets during a change program rated the transformation as "extremely successful." Conversely, executives at companies that took the time and trouble to address mind-sets were four times more likely than those that didn't to rate their change programs as at least "successful." Executives at companies that took the time and trouble to address mind-sets were four times more likely than those that didn't to rate their change programs as at least "successful." Those numbers reflect the power of mind-set shifts. In human systems, they help to achieve the same effect as the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or a tadpole into a frog: when employees become open to new ways of looking at what's possible for them and their organization, they can never return to a state of not having that broader perspective, just as butterflies and frogs can't revert to their previous physical forms.

It was a year ago when we at Microsoft claimed that 2018 would be the year of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, 2018 was a remarkable year for AI where we witnessed this game-changing technology dominating the agendas of leading organizations and even nations. How is AI shaping up in 2019? How will the organizations that have deployed AI reap its benefits? To help answer these questions, we partnered with leading research analyst firm IDC to conduct a study involving 109 business leaders and 100 workers in the Philippines.

Artificial intelligence is poised to disrupt the workplace. What will the company of the future look like--and how will people keep up? Digital communications have made remote work commonplace. The gig economy is growing. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, at least 30 percent of the activities associated with the majority of occupations in the United States could be automated--including knowledge tasks previously thought immune.

I have a theory that much recent tech development and inno-vation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction. This tendency is, I suspect, not a bug--it's a feature. We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn't find locally--and it was, and what a brilliant idea--but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact. The consumer technology I am talking about doesn't claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases.

How do you sell your products and services? Do you talk about them – what they can do, or how much they cost? Or do you talk about the needs they fulfill or how affordable they are. But is it a story worth listening to? Start by learning about what your audience is interested in, and your story is guaranteed to be better received by your audience.