Winsupply has created a scholarship program to develop future branch presidents, investing in their future "kind of like a GI bill in reverse," says President John McKenzie. "I keep coming back to sometimes it's a better use of effort and money to build a person than to try to find them from a competitor or from a manufacturer," he says.

Supply chain leaders are dealing with uncertainty moving into the peak shipping season, as new COVID-19 variants threaten more lockdowns and employers struggle to fill positions. A GlobalTranz Enterprises survey reveals leaders expect revenue to be higher this season than last year, most employers are hiring to meet customer demand, and almost half are increasing pay to retain and attract talent.

Application programming interface misconfigurations are responsible for two-thirds of data breaches in the cloud, says IBM Security X-Force. With APIs "silently but rapidly becoming one of the most critical pieces of the software supply chain," enterprises are one setting away from a breach, says Setu Kulkarni of NTT.

Rates for spot container shipping to the West Coast from Asia last week were 400% higher than a year ago and 14 times 2019's rates, according to the Freightos Baltic Index, in part because of higher gasoline prices and a shortage of truck drivers and shipping containers. "If everyone's having to pay more to ship to the next producer down the chain, when you get to the end user, that's a fair chunk of change," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

Mirable's Mira Kopanarov explains how business-to-business marketers can elevate customer experience through extended reality technologies. Kopanarov describes how augmented reality can bring products to life and how virtual, augmented and mixed reality can be incorporated into event experiences.

Business-to-business industry experts discuss how the pandemic has led to a more effective blending of content and event marketing to create engaging experiences. There's "a new frontier where the notion of what's live, virtual, on-demand or other forms of content are coming together in ways that have never been done before," says Jack Morton's Matt Pensinger, while Momentum Worldwide's Donnalyn Smith notes B2B buyers "expect the same quality experience with Microsoft as they do from Nike."

Companies are experimenting with various work models as they move away from a rigid in-office culture. Here are examples of four companies that are trying different ways of working.

Some companies are exploring budget methods besides the traditional model of setting targets, making forecasts and allocating resources, whereas the Beyond Budgeting approach does include those factors but approaches them in more holistic, dynamic and data-driven ways, write Sebastian Stange, Bjarte Bogsnes and Hardik Sheth. This is a change management process that requires persuading executives and the board that, "while having the next year described with accounting precision might sound safe, the only thing we know for sure is that the budget will be wrong," they write.