Articles

Building Your Company's Vision

Companies that enjoy enduring success have a core purpose and core values that remain fixed while their strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. The rare ability to balance continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced...

3 Strategies to Help Employees Thrive in the New "Normal"

Theres still uncertainty about what the workplace new normal will be, and its easy for companies to default to old routines and habits. Based on their extensive research on psychological contracts, idiosyncratic deals, and leadership, the authors present...

Level Up Your Crisis Management Skills

Leaders who have successfully managed crises in governments and large organizations aren't innately better at it. Interviews with high-level leaders in a variety of industries found that people with strong crisis management skills have invested time and...

Why Visibility Has Become the New Test of Leadership

In today's consulting firms, experience and results are not enough: High-performing individuals who want to earn organizational trust and advance to higher levels need strong visibility within and outside of their organizations. The challenge for...

Is a Venture Studio Right for Your Company?

Venture studios help businesses deploy talent, ideas, or resources into new ventures that can innovate in key strategic areas, and their popularity is growing despite challenges like high capital requirements and governance complexity. Four conditions...

The Hidden Power of Messy Teams

Conventional wisdom holds that innovation teams should begin their project with a clearly defined problem in order to increase their likelihood of success. However, a study of hundreds of ad hoc teams that formed to participate in a large global...

The Eight Core Principles of Strategic Innovation

Most successful companies start off with a bang - an exciting breakthrough innovation. As time passes, their focus shifts to maintaining and improving existing business lines. To prevent their decline in today's economy, mature companies need to build a...

AI's Impact on SaaS Will Be Uneven. Here's What Leaders Need to Know.

The "SaaSpocalypse," or early-2026 software selloff, has reinforced a tempting through-line for leaders: If AI can build or automate software, most SaaS should be rebuilt internally or shopped to a new vendor with a cost structure that reflects lower...

Bridge the Intergenerational Leadership Gap

The majority of the workforce is made up of millennials and Generation Z employees, but executive teams skew dramatically older. Organizations that lack intergenerational diversity among top leadership may turn to past strategies rather than seeing fresh...

How Lenovo Built an AI-Powered Supply Chain

Most companies pursuing supply chain AI are making a critical mistake: They start with technology before fixing the data foundation that makes AI reliable. Lenovo took the opposite approach, spending years integrating operational data before building an...

Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom

AI has dramatically accelerated the pace of work, allowing employees to execute ideas, produce deliverables, and launch projects far faster than traditional management systems were designed to handle. As a result, many managers are becoming the new...

How People Actually Get to the C-Suite in S&P 500 Companies

For ambitious executives, reaching the C-suite increasingly requires more than functional expertise. Drawing on research into S&P 500 leadership teams, the authors show that most top functional leaders rise internally, that CEO transitions often reshape...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Giving Feedback

Our Management Tip of the Day continues to be one of HBR's most popular newsletters. In this article, we've compiled eight of our favorite tips on giving feedback, from how to use feedback to give employees a sense of purpose to how to choose the right...

What Customer Workarounds Can Reveal About Your Business Model

Customer workarounds (such as customers sharing accounts, or teams stitching together third-party tools) are not merely signs of product friction but early evidence that a company's business model no longer matches how customers want to access, use, and...

Supporting Your Employees' Career Growth When Everyone Is Overwhelmed

As economic pressure, geopolitical instability, and AI-driven disruption intensify, many employees struggle to prioritize career development amid demanding workloads. Leaders can help teams stay adaptable by shifting the focus from rigid career ladders...

How Agentic AI Supercharges Startups and Threatens Incumbents

Agentic AI is reshaping entrepreneurship and raising the stakes for incumbents. Startups are deploying coordinated systems of AI agents that can plan, act, and adapt autonomously. This approach dramatically compresses the time, capital, and head count...

A Kodak Moment to Reconsider the Value of IT

The Keys to Succeeding Under a New Manager

Frequent leadership transitions have become a defining feature of modern organizations, creating both disruption and opportunity for employees. While many executives take a passive "wait-and-see" approach when a new manager arrives, doing so can limit...

A Breakthrough Board Presentation Can Win You the CEO Job

Landing on the CEO succession shortlist is validating, but to win the top job you should think about how to give a breakthrough board presentation that proves you're ready. First, build a crisp "why change, why you" story that pairs an enterprise growth...

PR and Ethics in the Battle for Location-based Data

What's Google's Best Strategy for Fighting Microsoft in the EU?

Gen AI Could Fix Performance Reviews-or Make Them Even Worse

Generative AI can greatly improve the value of performance reviews, but most companies are just using it to produce polished versions of traditional narrative reviews more quickly rather than improve them. A better approach is to use gen AI to surface...

The False Alignment Trap

Most organizational change efforts fail not because of poor execution but because senior leaders fall into a false alignment trap-believing they agree on why, what, and how to change when they actually do not. Drawing on research, behavioral science, and...

What Operating Rooms Can Teach Leaders About Team Design

A study of surgeries at a hospital in Madrid and a subsequent pilot program there offers lessons for any organization that relies on fluid, high-pressure teams. Hospitals have invested heavily in technologies to improve operating-room efficiency, yet...

Are You Meeting the Needs of the People You Lead?

Organizations often assume leadership succeeds or fails because of a leader's style. But research on follower psychology suggests the bigger issue is alignment: Employees judge leaders based on whether they provide what people need most in a given...

It's Hard to Use AI as a Team. These 3 Practices Can Help.

Many organizations expect AI to automatically improve teamwork, but research shows the opposite can occur. Without intentional integration, AI can reduce engagement, narrow participation in meetings, and shift ownership away from the team. A five-month...

Research: Traditional Marketing Doesn't Work on AI Shopping Agents

AI shopping agents are rapidly becoming a meaningful share of online "shoppers." New research shows that many classic e-commerce persuasion tactics built for human psychology-scarcity, countdown timers, strike-through pricing, vouchers, and bundles-do...

What Are Your Company's AI Nightmares?

The standard approach to responsible AI is fundamentally broken. In the age of generative AI, it's too slow, too vague, and too hard to communicate. Instead of focusing on values and policy, companies would be better served by focusing on their...

3 Ways AI Can Free Organizations from Legacy Workflows

Organizations often assume their biggest constraint is a lack of new capabilities. More often, it's the accumulation of outdated ones. Legacy workflows, entrenched assumptions, and inherited metrics quietly shape decisions long after they've ceased to...

How Fast-Growing Companies Can Make Better Decisions

Fast-growing companies inevitably hit a decision-making breaking point. What begins as founder-led, informal control fractures as organizations scale-typically along predictable fault lines: alignment, operational complexity, financial discipline, and...

Use Your Leadership Presence to Inspire

Is ESG Data Going Mainstream?

The Nature of Obama's Charismatic Leadership

Becoming a Charismatic Leader

Why Effective Leaders Get Branded as Problems

When a leader creates friction, organizations default to a single explanation: the leader needs to change. In reality, that friction usually comes from one or a combination of four different sources-capability, perception, identity, or system. Because...

Research: Why You Shouldn't Treat AI Agents Like Employees

As organizations experiment with placing AI agents on org charts as "employees," new research shows this framing has unintended consequences. In a large-scale experiment, anthropomorphizing AI reduced individual accountability, increased unnecessary...

How Sales Teams Undercut Themselves with Longtime Clients

Sales teams often believe they are negotiating against difficult clients, but many are undermining their own leverage through premature concessions, fragmented account management, and an overreliance on long-standing relationships. In these situations,...

The Best Leaders Embrace the Role of Supporting Character

The rise of "founder mode" and "main-character energy" as approaches to leadership has pushed many executives toward self-centered, top-down styles that research shows are deeply counterproductive-eroding trust, stifling performance, and ultimately...

When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question

There are countless situations where youre put on the spot and questioned by an executive. Maybe its a board member pulling you aside, a skip-level pinging you for a quick assessment on a situation, or a customer catching you at a conference and asking...

Will Insurance Protect Your Company in Times of War?

In many cases, insurance policies include a "war exclusion," which allows insurers to exclude war-related losses. But leaders shouldn't assume that this exclusion means that they're out of luck if conflict harms their business. From the war in Ukraine to...

The Art of Discounting

As inflation reshapes consumer behavior, companies can no longer rely on blunt pricing power to drive growth. Strategic discounting-designed to attract price-sensitive customers while limiting cannibalization-offers a way to unlock incremental demand...

Research: For Women on Boards, Prestige Can Be a Bottleneck

Research on nearly 2,000 FTSE-100 board directors reveals a striking paradox: Women who reach elite board positions are on average more likely than men to receive additional appointments, but that advantage reverses at the most prominent firms, where...

The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI

AI adoption strategies are overwhelmingly framed around productivity and efficiency. But that lens misses a critical constraint: the psychological cost of working with AI. New research shows that "psychological debt"-a cluster of six negative effects...

How to Move from AI Experimentation to AI Transformation

Many companies are investing heavily in AI but failing to translate isolated productivity gains into meaningful business results. The problem is a "micro-productivity trap," where firms optimize tasks without rethinking workflows or value creation,...

Empathetic Leadership Can Make or Break AI Adoption

Research shows a wide gap between how executives perceive AI adoption and how employees actually experience it-most workers feel anxious and far less enthusiastic than their bosses assume. Without psychological safety, employees are less likely to...

A Smarter Approach to Measuring Customer Experience

The proliferation of customer experience measurement tools means that marketers now face the challenge of managing, and deriving value from, an overwhelming number of CX metrics. Research has identified ways for businesses to identify the metrics that...

Validating LLM Output? Prepare to Be 'Persuasion Bombed'

A research study of management consultants who were asked to use a large language model to recommend strategic business decisions found that the AI responded to human validation attempts with persuasive rhetorical strategies. In addition to appealing to...

How to Nail Your Next Media Interview

Public interviews can quickly shape-or damage-a company's reputation. The Leadership Exposure Curve shows how the risks increase as a leader's visibility rises and outlines three common interview types: credibility ("Why you?"), positioning ("Where are...

Six Types of AI Startups, Explained

Understanding a startup's approach to artificial intelligence isn't just a word game: It gives stakeholders a competitive advantage. Use this framework to categorize six types of AI startups: originators, explorers, infrastructure builders, enhancers,...

Ask Sanyin: What Makes a 'Listening Tour' Meaningful?

Leaders in new roles are often advised to get to know the organization and its people by going on a "listening tour." These efforts can build trust and yield valuable information but are most successful if leaders learn to practice deep listening,...

The Case for Making Bold Bets in Uncertain Times

Many leaders say it's wise to hold back from making new investments or acquisitions during tumultuous times. They posit that significant risk-taking works only if you go into an uncertain period with momentum or with a healthy fallback cushion. A new...