The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded
First 90 Days, by Michael Watkins, a proven guide for leaders in career transition, offers strategies for getting up to speed quickly in your new role.| Harvard Business Review
In corporate strategy projects, executive leadership teams work through a series of questions to determine how their businesses can succeed. Individuals can use a similar process to figure out how to live a meaningful life. It starts with defining what makes a great life for you and then outlining your purpose and vision. You must also look at your current “portfolio” — the areas in which you spend your time and energy — to see if you’re investing the best of yourself in the activit...| Harvard Business Review
From a vision to your people, the foundation for shaping — or changing — your organization.| Harvard Business Review
Extensive research has found the psychology of perfectionism to be rather complex. Yes, perfectionists strive to produce flawless work, and they also have higher levels of motivation and conscientiousness than non-perfectionists. However, they are also more likely to set inflexible and excessively high standards, to evaluate their behavior overly critically, to hold an all-or-nothing mindset about their performance. So while certain aspects of perfectionism might be beneficial in the workplac...| Harvard Business Review
A new study should make marketing departments everywhere rethink their strategies.| Harvard Business Review
Think you’re ready to take the leap and start your own business? If you haven’t yet nailed down your business idea but know that entrepreneurship is the path for you, you will need to determine where your true passions lie. This may require some exploring, in the form of hobbies, side hustles, and DIY classes. Once you’ve solidified your business idea, it’s critical to pursue learning experiences to expand your knowledge base. Start by researching the industry you want to break into, ...| Harvard Business Review
Why do some products, companies, and social programs thrive as they grow while others peter out? According to the author, there are five causes: 1) False positives, or inaccurately interpreting a piece of evidence or data; 2) Biased representativeness of population, or not making sure your samples reflect the larger population at scale; 3) Non-negotiables that can’t grow or be replicated; 4) Negative spillovers, or unintended outcomes; and 5) Cost traps. Here, he explains and offers examp...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1107M Traditional approaches to strategy assume that the world is relatively stable and predictable. But globalization, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment. In this period of risk and uncertainty, more and more managers are finding competitive advantage in organizational capabilities that foster rapid adaptation. Instead of being really good at doing some particular thing, companies must be really good at learning how to do new ...| Harvard Business Review
There is ample evidence that giving someone else a boost, whether giving compliments or expressing gratitude, has a mood-lifting effect and contributes to well-being. But we often hold back, unnecessarily, because we aren’t well calibrated to the actual effects our positive messages have on others. When it comes to deciding whether to express praise or appreciation to another person, doubt often creeps in. We are overly concerned about our ability to convey praise skillfully (“What if m...| Harvard Business Review
In the face of rapid, disruptive change, companies are realizing that managers can’t be expected to have all the answers and that command-and-control leadership is no longer viable. As a result, many firms are moving toward a coaching model in which managers facilitate problem-solving and encourage employees’ development by asking questions and offering support and guidance rather than giving orders and making judgments. The authors explain the merits of different types of coaching—dire...| Harvard Business Review
When Netflix executives wrote a PowerPoint deck about the organization’s talent management strategies, the document went viral—it’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. Now one of those executives, the company’s longtime chief talent officer, goes beyond the bullet points to paint a detailed picture of how Netflix attracts, retains, and manages stellar employees. The firm draws on five key tenets: Hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults. Ask workers to rely o...| Harvard Business Review
It’s common knowledge that helping employees set and reach goals is a critical part of every manager’s job. Employees want to see how their work contributes to larger corporate objectives, and setting the right targets makes this connection explicit for them, and for you, as their manager. Goal-setting is particularly important as a mechanism for […]| Harvard Business Review
Consistently making good decisions is arguably the most important habit we can develop, especially at work. But some things are detrimental to good decision-making. When you have to make an important decision, be on the lookout for decision fatigue. Our ability to perform mental tasks and make decisions wears thin when it’s repeatedly exerted. Decision-making effectiveness suffers by up to 40% when we focus on two cognitive tasks at the same time. So when you need to make important decision...| Harvard Business Review
When most organizations strive to increase collaboration, they approach it too narrowly: as a value to cultivate—not a skill to teach. So they create open offices, talk up collaboration as a corporate goal, and try to influence employees through other superficial means that don’t yield progress. Companies that excel at collaboration, in contrast, realize it involves instilling the right mindset: widespread respect for colleagues’ contributions, openness to experimenting with others’ i...| Harvard Business Review
When we attempt to motivate people, we try to elicit an anticipation of pleasure by promising rewards (a bonus, a promotion, positive feedback, public recognition), or we try to warn of the pain of punishment (a demotion, negative feedback, public humiliation). But what’s not always clear is: Which should we be using — the promise of carrots or the threat of sticks? And when? Neuroscience suggests that when it comes to motivating action, rewards may be more effective than punishments. A...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1204H If senior executives are feeling ever more pressed for time, why would they add more to their plates? It might sound counterintuitive, but research by Booz & Company’s Gary L. Neilson and Harvard Business School professor Julie Wulf shows that over the past 20 years the CEO’s average span of control, measured by the number of direct reports, has doubled. It stands at almost 10 today. This gives fresh relevance to a perennial question for senior leaders: Just how much shoul...| Harvard Business Review
Picking the right type of music, at the right time, and for the right task, can be a powerful productivity booster. At the same time, the specific types and aspects of music that influence our performance are variable. Here are a few things anyone interested in using music to improve their performance should consider: Your personality determines whether and how much you benefit from background music while you work. If you’re extroverted, your performance will likely increase with backgro...| Harvard Business Review
Why you should answer all your emails at 3PM.| Harvard Business Review
Transformational leaders are exceptional communicators. In this piece, the author outlines four communication strategies to help motivate and inspire your team: 1) Use short words to talk about hard things. 2) Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts. 3) Humanize data to create value. 4). Make mission your mantra to align teams.| Harvard Business Review
As a professional, you are being judged not only on your performance but also on your presence. People form an impression of others within seconds of meeting them. The real question, then, is not whether you’ll create an impression, but rather, will you create the one that you want? Rely on feedback: Actively solicit feedback on your presence from your manager, direct reports, colleagues, and mentors. Tune into how you communicate: Everything you say and do sends a message. Beyond the words...| Harvard Business Review
Relationships with our coworkers are incredibly important, but we tend to think about them in the wrong way: We categorize them as either good or bad, and we think they will always stay the same. As a result, we don’t try to fix the ones that have soured, and we take those that seem healthy for granted. In reality, most relationships are a mixed bag, and they ebb and flow. And if you look closely, you’ll see that they’re made up of a series of “micromoves” — small actions that se...| Harvard Business Review
By aligning executives’ financial incentives with company strategy, a firm can inspire its management to deliver superior results. But it can be hard to get pay packages right. In this article four experts break down the key elements of compensation and explain how to put them together effectively. When designing packages, boards must make decisions about the proportion of fixed versus variable pay, short-term versus long-term incentives, cash versus equity, and group versus individual rewa...| Harvard Business Review
Leaders need to focus on three basic psychological needs.| Harvard Business Review
Take this research-based assessment.| Harvard Business Review
First 90 Days, by Michael Watkins, a proven guide for leaders in career transition, offers strategies for getting up to speed quickly in your new role.| Harvard Business Review
Ben Bradlee wrote his first newspaper article at age 15, while working as a summer copy boy at the Beverly Evening Times in Massachusetts. He went on to become one of the world’s most famous newspaper editors, steering the Washington Post through Watergate coverage and into the 1990s. During his tenure, the newsroom staff doubled […]| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0904D Because no two recessions are exactly alike, marketers find themselves in poorly charted waters every time one occurs. But guidance is available, say Quelch and Jocz, who have studied marketing successes (by Smucker, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch, and others) as well as failures throughout past recessions and identified patterns in consumer and company behavior that strongly affect performance. Understanding consumers’ changing psychology and habits, the authors argue, wi...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0809E A decade ago in these pages, Goleman published his highly influential article on emotional intelligence and leadership. Now he, a cochair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, and Boyatzis, a professor at Case Western, extend Goleman’s original concept using emerging research about what happens in the brain when people interact. Social intelligence , they say, is a set of interpersonal competencies, built on specific neural circuits, that...| Harvard Business Review
They spend too much time fighting for status.| Harvard Business Review
Find new ideas and classic advice on strategy, innovation and leadership, for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
Find new ideas and classic advice on strategy, innovation and leadership, for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
In early 2020, the switch to remote or hybrid work was abrupt for many companies. While employees were willing to give one another some latitude earlier in the pandemic, now, almost a year in, their trust is wearing thin, and some find themselves wondering whether their remote employees are actually working at home. Companies that fail to address this crisis are likely to see lower morale, increased attrition, lower productivity, and stalled innovation. Leaders need to address the underlying ...| Harvard Business Review
There are better ways to be creative.| Harvard Business Review
A recent research study found that when it comes to money, optimists are more likely to make smart moves and reap the benefits. For example, 90% of optimists have put money aside for a major purchase, compared to 70% of pessimists. Nearly two thirds of optimists have started an emergency fund, while less than half of pessimists have. Optimists reported that they stressed about finances 145 fewer days each year as compared to pessimists. They also make more money and are more likely to be prom...| Harvard Business Review
What you measure is what you get. Senior executives understand that their organization’s measurement system strongly affects the behavior of managers and employees. Executives also understand that traditional financial accounting measures like return-on-investment and earnings-per-share can give misleading signals for continuous improvement and innovation—activities today’s competitive environment demands. The traditional financial performance measures worked well […]| Harvard Business Review
There are a lot of methods out there for staying organized. But which method prevails? Over four days, I tried four ways of organizing my to-do list. I tracked my overall productivity and stress levels to see which worked best. Monday: Get rid of your to-do list and instead schedule out your tasks in your digital calendar. This method is good for people who like structure, aren’t afraid of a crowded calendar, and love planning ahead. Tuesday: Keep a running list but do just “one thing” ...| Harvard Business Review
In a recent analysis, analysts at Glassdoor asked: Can companies achieve great customer satisfaction without also investing in employees, assuring that workers who deliver service to customers are themselves satisfied with their jobs? Their answer was clear: There’s a strong statistical link between employee well-being reported on Glassdoor and customer satisfaction among a large sample of some of the biggest brands today. A more satisfied workforce is clearly associated with companies’ a...| Harvard Business Review
When faced with a high-stress situation, one that even feels threatening, it can feel like we don’t have control over our response. Research has shown that our bodies can instinctively go into a “fight-or-flight” reaction. As a leader, the more effectively you can self-regulate these reactions the better you can lead and help others. Recent research in the field of neuroscience offers insights into this process of self-regulation and how you can move from the fight-or-flight response t...| Harvard Business Review
Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale explain how the business world is being taken apart and put back together.| Harvard Business Review
In a recent survey of 100 productivity hacks, timeboxing — migrating to-do lists into calendars — was ranked the most useful. Timeboxing can give you a much greater sense of control over your workday. You decide what to do and when to do it, block out all distractions for that timeboxed period, and get it done. The benefits of calendarized timeboxing are many, varied, and highly impactful. The practice improves how we feel (control), how much we achieve as individuals (personal productivi...| Harvard Business Review
Information overload is the inevitable result of the modern organization’s always-on, more-is-better approach to communication. Unfortunately, it is also a driver of employees’ disengagement and poor decision making. While we are all, as employees and leaders, affected by this reality, the onus is on the company communicators themselves to craft a low-burden culture. It will require energy, expertise and coordination to architect and reinforce more human-centric communication practices.| Harvard Business Review
Few managers understand the extent of their data quality issues. A simple exercise can be illuminating: assemble 100 data records completed by your department and work through each record, marking obvious errors. They then count up the total of error-free records. This number represents the percent of data created correctly — a Data Quality (DQ) Score. When 75 executives completed this exercise, they were horrified to realize how bad their data was. On average, 47% of newly-created dat...| Harvard Business Review
Many organizations are dropping degree requirements when hiring, and emphasizing experience and skills instead. As a job candidate, you can use this shift to your advantage. Here’s what you need to know. As the emphasis on skill acquisition grows, so do more accessible and affordable learning methods. Among others, methods include online learning platforms that offer industry-specific and skills-based courses, massive open online courses (MOOCs ) , apprenticeships, microcredentials, simulat...| Harvard Business Review
Following on the first article on defining customer experience, this second installment looks at the first essential step of improving the experience you deliver, which is mapping out your customer journey. A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, […]| Harvard Business Review
Research conducted during Covid-19 shows that a large number of managers are struggling with the effective management of people working from home, with this translating into many workers feeling untrusted and micromanaged by their bosses. The consequences of poor management at this time — for workers, families, and the economy — suggest the urgent need to help develop managers’ skills in this area. However, simply telling managers to trust their employees is unlikely to be sufficient. R...| Harvard Business Review
B2B customers are deeply uncertain and stressed. With virtually infinite information available on any solution, a swelling raft of stakeholders involved in each purchase, and an ever-expanding array of options, customers are increasingly overwhelmed and often more paralyzed than empowered. The authors’ solution, developed through work with hundreds of sales organizations globally, is a proactive, take-charge prescriptive approach that sweeps away obstacles and guides customers through decis...| Harvard Business Review
The purpose of performance reviews is two-fold: an accurate and actionable evaluation of performance, and then development of that person’s skills in line with job tasks. For recipients, feedback has intrinsic and extrinsic value. Across fields, research shows that people become high performers by identifying specific areas where they need to improve and then practicing those skills with performance feedback.| Harvard Business Review
Workers with flexibility are more satisfied, innovative, and productive.| Harvard Business Review
Four tech companies top the list.| Harvard Business Review
A lot of leaders believe that the formula for attracting and keeping talent is simple: Just ask people what they want and give it to them. The problem is, that approach tends to address only the material aspects of jobs that are top of employees’ minds at the moment, like pay or flexibility. And those offerings are easy for rivals to imitate and have the least enduring impact on retention. Companies instead should focus on what workers need to thrive over the long term, balancing material o...| Harvard Business Review
Researcher and author Marcus Buckingham says we’ve overly complicated what it means to lead. Leading people means checking in with an employee every week for 52 weeks out of the year. Asking about their successes and failures–big and small. Asking what they loved last week and what they hated. And then what they are focused on this week and how you can help. “Short-term past, short-term future. Because love lives in the detail,” he says. If you think to yourself, “Well, I’d love t...| Harvard Business Review
Despite recent backlash against and cuts to organizational DEI initiatives, researchers from the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab argue that DEI isn’t dead in the U.S. Instead, they say it’s experiencing a period of what social movement scholars call “closed doors,” where the obvious route for change is no longer easily accessible. They recently convened a gathering of 14 chief diversity officers (CDOs) to unpack what’s happening in their world. The group represen...| Harvard Business Review
As humans, we tend to interpret information in a way that confirms our existing beliefs and serves our own self-interest. In situations that lack clarity, we often make assumptions that serve to bolster our egos and self-esteem. We selectively interpret information to support our own position, and overlook or dismiss information that contradicts our views. This is known as the self-serving bias, and it can lead to suboptimal decision-making or even contribute to conflict, as we become more en...| Harvard Business Review
Twenty years ago, consultants at Bain & Company published a book that explored a dispiriting reality: Although companies spent billions of dollars a year pursuing deals, 70% of mergers and acquisitions wound up as failures. But today those odds have inverted. According to new research by Bain, over the past 20 years firms have done more than 660,000 acquisitions, worth a total of $56 trillion, with deals reaching a peak in 2021. And close to 70% of them have succeeded. Even among the roughly ...| Harvard Business Review
The world’s strongest brands share ten attributes. How does your brand measure up?| Harvard Business Review
We are at an early stage in the AI era, and the technology is evolving extremely quickly. Providers are rapidly introducing AI “copilots,” “bots,” and “assistants” into applications to augment employees’ workflows. Examples include GitHub Copilot for coding, ServiceNow Now Assist to improve productivity and efficiency, and Salesforce’s Agentforce for everyday business tasks. These tools have been trained on a wide range of data sources and possess expansive expertise in many...| Harvard Business Review
On average, companies with short, simple names attract more shareholders, generate greater amounts of stock trading, and perform better on certain financial measures than companies with hard-to-process names such as National Oilwell Varco and Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, say T. Clifton Green of Emory University and Russell E. Jame of the University of Kentucky. A […]| Harvard Business Review
Millennials only want to communicate with coworkers via text — and Baby Boomers don’t text, right? And you need to attract those techy Millennials with promises of flexible work schedules, but their older counterparts all want a traditional workday, correct? Actually, wrong. There’s very little evidence that people of different generations behave markedly differently at work, or want markedly different things. And yet because we have stereotypes about people of different ages — and b...| Harvard Business Review
Artificial intelligence has made the way we live and work more efficient, but this efficiency has eliminated the need for human workers in roles across many industries. College graduates and experienced professionals alike should be developing skills that robots will never have; skills that will make them employable no matter what the future holds. Those wishing to become un-automatable should be able to communicate a deep understanding of their domain effectively and understand the context o...| Harvard Business Review
Putting in a bit of extra legwork when asking for help can make a big difference in your productivity, not to mention your reputation. To make the best impression possible, first confirm that your question is worth asking. Once you have a question that makes sense to ask, the next step is to identify the least disruptive — and therefore most effective — way to approach other people. When it comes to asking your question, style can be as important as substance. Don’t just ask your quest...| Harvard Business Review
The percentage of firms identifying themselves as being data-driven has declined in each of the past 3 years — from 37.1% in 2017 to 32.4% in 2018 to 31.0% this year. These sobering results and declines come in spite of increasing investment in big data and AI initiatives. Whatever the reasons for the failure to achieve transformational results from data initiatives, the amount of data continues to rise in business and society. Analytical decisions and actions continue to be generally supe...| Harvard Business Review
Planning can be hard for everyone. But even if you feel like planning just doesn’t come to you naturally, there are steps you can take to get better at it. Based on new research, the author offers several strategies to improve your approach to planning. Specifically, she suggests starting by recognizing your own strengths and weaknesses and accepting that planning is hard for you. Next, let go of absolutist thinking, and explore different systems until you find one that works well for you. ...| Harvard Business Review
As the pandemic intensifies and disruptions to business-as-usual continue, managers are grappling with the unknown. Even though the situation is fast-moving and you don’t have perfect information, you must be transparent and honest with your team about the facts on the ground. Say: Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, and this is what we’re doing to close that gap. It’s important to make a special effort to understand your team members’ individual worries and stresses...| Harvard Business Review
In a recent publication in the Journal of Product Innovation, researchers undertook a systematic review of 40 years of innovation research. Using a natural language processing approach, they analyzed and organized 1,078 articles published on the topics of disruptive, architectural, breakthrough, competence-destroying, discontinuous, and radical innovation. Two topics stood out: disruptive innovation and radical innovation. Disruptive innovation research describes a process in which new en...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1007M Virtually all managers in consumer businesses recognize major social, economic, and technological trends. But many do not consider the profound ways in which trends—especially those that seem unrelated to their core markets—influence consumers’ aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors. As a result, companies may be ceding to rivals an opportunity to transform the industry. For instance, the impact of the digital revolution on consumers’ daily lives is hardly a revelation....| Harvard Business Review
What a behavioral scientist learned from 10 weeks of comedy classes.| Harvard Business Review
Seeking and giving advice are central to effective leadership and decision making, and they require emotional intelligence, self-awareness, restraint, diplomacy, and patience on both sides. But managers tend to view these competencies as “gifts” that one either has or lacks. The authors argue instead that they are practical skills you can learn and apply to great effect. They draw on a large body of research to identify the most common obstacles to effectively seeking and giving advice—...| Harvard Business Review
Personality research provides valuable lessons in predicting an individual’s ability to negotiate effectively. Some traits are clearly indicative of good negotiation potential, while others are more of a handicap. Among the traits that improve individuals’ negotiation abilities, emotional intelligence (EQ) is in a league of its own. People with higher EQ are more likely to induce positive mood states in their negotiation counterparts and leave them more satisfied with the outcome of the ...| Harvard Business Review
Talent management is one of the things CEOs worry about most, and yet companies often spend very little time onboarding their new employees. The most effective organizations onboard new hires for the duration of their first year — their most vulnerable period — and focus on three key dimensions: the organizational, the technical, and the social. By using this integrated approach, they enable their employees to stay, and to thrive.| Harvard Business Review
Every company faces a learning dilemma: the smartest people find it the hardest to learn.| Harvard Business Review
Although leaders might say they value inquisitive minds, in reality most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino elaborates on the benefits of and common barriers to curiosity in the workplace and offers five strategies for bolstering it. Leaders should hire for curiosity, model inquisitiveness, emphasize learning goals, let workers explore and broaden their interests, and have “Why?” “What if…?” and “How might w...| Harvard Business Review
Just because a strategy is formulated, doesn’t mean it’s ready for hand-off to the front-line for execution. Instead of reactively addressing failures during implementation, leaders need to examine whether the strategy was on solid footing in the first place. This requires stripping away assumptions to avoid four core errors, which often plague a strategy’s feasibility for being put in practice: 1) not understanding the problem; 2) not understanding the organization’s capabilities; 3)...| Harvard Business Review
When Andy Jassy succeeded Jeff Bezos as the CEO of Amazon, in 2021, he stepped into one of the most scrutinized leadership roles in business. But under Jassy’s leadership, Amazon has not only sustained its momentum but accelerated. In this wide-ranging conversation with HBR’s editor at large, Jassy reflects on what it takes to get a behemoth like Amazon to operate like a startup and how he pushes his team to take chances. “If you aren’t failing,” he says, “you’re either not inve...| Harvard Business Review
Effective Learning and Development (L&D) programs are critical for the success of both employees and their employers. But what does it take to develop initiatives that actually achieve substantial positive outcomes? Research suggests that an approach known as “learning in the flow of work” can help ensure that learners retain and apply new skills and concepts in their day-to-day workflows. In this piece, the author offers five tactical, research-backed strategies to help companies build p...| Harvard Business Review
An analysis of over 1,000 occupations and hundreds of skills—capturing 70 million job transitions—examined the importance of foundational skills (like reading comprehension, basic math, and the ability to work well in teams) to career progression. Those who had a broad base of foundational skills (as opposed to a few highly specialized skills, like coding) learned new things faster, earned more money, moved into more advanced positions, and proved more resilient amid market changes throug...| Harvard Business Review
More and more companies today are facing adaptive challenges: Changes in societies, markets, and technologies around the globe constantly force businesses to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways to operate. The most important task for leaders in the face of such challenges is mobilizing people throughout their organizations to do adaptive work. In this HBR article from 1997, the authors suggest that the prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision ...| Harvard Business Review
When business conditions change, the most successful companies are often the slowest to adapt. To avoid being left behind, executives must understand the true sources of corporate inertia.| Harvard Business Review
Continuous learning is the key to having lasting influence in your career, yet a heavy workload makes it hard to find the time. To ensure you’re creating opportunities even when you’re feeling depleted or overwhelmed, try these five strategies: 1) Challenge your beliefs about your capacity; 2) Start with topics that solve urgent problems; 3) Don’t limit yourself to formal programs; 4) Make an emotional connection to learning; and 5) Work with your brain, not against it.| Harvard Business Review
As remote work continues to grow in the U.S., employers are increasingly adopting new technologies to monitor how their employees spend their time. The research on the utility of these monitoring tools has been mixed: Some studies show that they boost performance whereas others suggest they increase deviant behavior and erode trust. In a new study, researchers explored the impact that different kinds of monitoring have on employees’ willingness to share new ideas. They found that “interac...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0311C Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Stu...| Harvard Business Review
More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like. Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2...| Harvard Business Review
And they fear giving feedback.| Harvard Business Review
Marketers often worry that performance marketing and its focus on short-term sales is crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer perceptions of their brand—and is sometimes working against brand strategy. Brand-building activities are typically measured using metrics that have no predictive or retrospective connection to financial returns. And performance marketing typically lacks measures that account for its impact on brand building, focusing only on sales, leads, ...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1301L The more uncertain your environment, the greater the opportunity—if you have the leadership skills to capitalize on it. Research at the Wharton School and at the authors’ consulting firm, involving more than 20,000 executives to date, has identified six skills that, when mastered and used in concert, allow leaders to think strategically and navigate the unknown effectively. They are the abilities to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align, and learn. This article d...| Harvard Business Review
E-mail and voice mail are efficient, but face-to-face contact is still essential to true communication.| Harvard Business Review
Strategies for dealing with their weaknesses.| Harvard Business Review
Every job involves non-promotable tasks. These are tasks that benefit the organization but likely don’t contribute to an employee’s performance reviews and career advancement. But research suggests that these tasks disproportionately fall on women. Across field and laboratory studies, researchers find that women volunteer for non-promotable tasks more than men; that women are more frequently asked to take such tasks on; and that when asked, women are more likely to say yes. This matter...| Harvard Business Review
The integration of generative AI into corporate workflows is highlighting the critical importance of human skills such as problem framing, collaboration, and creativity. A recent experiment by the BCG Henderson Institute demonstrated that gen AI-powered tutoring can effectively enhance these skills, offering personalized and engaging training at scale. As companies invest in gen AI, they must also focus on developing their employees’ human skills to fully leverage the technology’s potenti...| Harvard Business Review
The physical environment of the workplace has a significant effect on the way that we work. When our space is a mess, so are we. That is certainly true from a simple logistical perspective: we lose precious work minutes every time we go searching for a lost paper on a cluttered desk. The same is true for those of us have succeeded in becoming paperless at work: one international survey showed that information workers lose up to two hours a week fruitlessly searching for lost documents. But c...| Harvard Business Review
Making sure your employees regularly take time off is key to creating a more sustainable workplace. Research shows that taking time off benefits employees in three ways: 1) Mentally. Taking a vacation provides greater opportunity for rest and better sleep (both quantity and quality), which can help unclutter your mind to boost creativity. 2) Body. Relaxing on vacation can reduce the levels of your stress hormones and allow your immune system to recover, making you less prone to get sick. 3) S...| Harvard Business Review
When companies make mistakes, customers often write reviews about it online. Some companies have started responding to customer reviews, but do these responses affect the ratings that customers give them? According to a study of hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, yes: When hotels start responding, they receive 12% more reviews and their ratings increase by an average of 0.12 stars (on a 1-to-5 scale). These gains may seem small, but they can have a significant effect on the hotel’s rating, due...| Harvard Business Review
Eight ways to address the recognition deficit.| Harvard Business Review
This post was written with Karen Sumberg, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy. Erika Karp vividly remembers the secrecy and subterfuge that colored every workday before she told her colleagues that she was a lesbian. “You have to devote a huge amount of psychic energy to being closeted — changing pronouns, […]| Harvard Business Review
What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers’ diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it’s a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. If the pers...| Harvard Business Review
This post is the last in a three-part series. Most marketers think that the best way to hold onto customers is through “engagement” — interacting as much as possible with them and building relationships. It turns out that that’s rarely true. In a study involving more than 7000 consumers, we found that companies often have […]| Harvard Business Review
When you’re working in sales, you need to master the art of persuasion and that involves being able to tell a compelling story that explains why your product or service will meet someone’s needs. It involves listening, making an emotional connection, and thinking from the customer’s point of view. The earlier you can learn how to communicate in this way, the faster you will likely grow in your role. But too often we tell the customer a story we believe sets our product or service apart ...| Harvard Business Review
Companies are pouring millions into “digital transformation” initiatives — but a high percentage of those fail to pay off. That’s because companies put the cart before the horse, focusing on a specific technology (“we need a machine-learning strategy!”) rather than doing the hard work of fitting the change into the overall business strategy first. Not only should they align tech investments with business goals — they should also lean more on insider knowledge than outside consul...| Harvard Business Review
Social belonging is a fundamental human need, hardwired into our DNA. And yet, 40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, and the result has been lower organizational commitment and engagement. U.S. businesses spend nearly $8 billion each year on diversity and inclusion (D&I) trainings that miss the mark because they neglect our need to feel included. Recent research from Betterup shows that if workers feel like they belong, companies reap substantial bottom-line benefits: better job ...| Harvard Business Review
Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. For example, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike have publicly announced that personalized and seamless omnichannel experiences are at the core of their corporate strategy. We are now at the point where competitive advantage will be based on the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and on how a company uses AI to understand, shape, custo...| Harvard Business Review
Your job may not go away, but it’s certainly going to change.| Harvard Business Review
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and col...| Harvard Business Review
