3 According to Zheng: ‘Digital leaders no longer manage: rather, they enable workers to innovate and facilitate the core feedback loop of user responses to firm decisions and execution.’ How is ‘smart business’ changing the way employee performance is defined and measured? How might it change the way that workers are rewarded via (i) base pay, (ii) benefits and (iii) incentive pay? As this article by Alibaba’s Ming Zeng indicates, Chinese online retail giants like Alibaba and Taobao are leading the way globally in the application of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence to e-commerce.

Zeng, M. (2018), ‘Alibaba and the future of business’, Harvard Business Review, September–October, https://hbr.org/2018/09/alibaba-and-the-future-of-business