As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings—the body, emotions, mind, and spirit—and in each, it can be systematical...| Harvard Business Review
When people are stressed out and focus on the negative, they are more likely to treat their colleagues poorly. And many managers are at a loss when it comes to preventing uncivil and toxic behavior on their teams. New research on gratitude practices shows that encouraging colleagues to express thanks and focus on what they are grateful for can decrease mistreatment on a team. The authors’ recent study found that gratitude journaling decreased workplace rudeness by enhancing research partici...| 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
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
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
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
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
A shadow board is a group of nonexecutive employees who work with senior executives on strategic initiatives. It is designed to leverage insights from younger generations and to diversify the perspectives that executives are exposed to. These boards can be used to test and pilot novel initiatives that are important to younger employees, bridge generational gaps between workers, and create respect and understanding across the organizational hierarchy.| Harvard Business Review
Shadow boards can help companies with two pressing issues: Millennial workers’ dis-engagement and executive teams’ inability to keep up with changing market conditions. They can help with business model reinvention, cultural transformation, and process redesign. Best practices include not leaving these programs up to HR and not limiting them to previously identified “high potentials.”| Harvard Business Review
When tariffs are levied against a specific country, that country might attempt to circumvent the tariff by rerouting products through a third country to avoid the higher taxes. Research in the aftermath of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war examined this phenomenon, finding that, while tariff circumvention through Vietnam did happen, it wasn’t as widespread as many had initially thought. That said, there still was an increase in tariff circumvention more broadly, and specifically via Chinese-own...| Harvard Business Review
Private equity firms are increasingly recognizing the importance of talent management in driving value creation. The article outlines seven key behaviors that advanced firms are adopting, including integrating human capital into deal planning, improving talent assessments, and fostering leadership development. These practices mark a shift from traditional approaches, emphasizing the strategic role of talent at all organizational levels.| Harvard Business Review
People are among the most prized assets of many startup companies, so when employees leave after an acquisition, it can be a substantial loss for the acquiring company. Why do so many startup employees leave, and how do startup acquisitions impact their careers? Using U.S. Census Bureau data from 1990 to 2011 that encompasses 230,000 acquired startup workers, the author researched these questions and discovered significantly higher turnover rates among acquired workers compared to regular hir...| Harvard Business Review
Historically, the efforts of private equity firms to address leadership challenges have been limited primarily to replacing portfolio-company CEOs. Now, in an era of higher interest rates and more competition for limited acquisition targets, these firms are realizing that they need to make more-systematic investments in leadership development. The author offers a variety of prescriptions for PE firms, portfolio companies, and dealmakers, including hiring and empowering “chief human capital ...| 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
It’s time for leaders to double down on the idea that the employee experience (EX) is now the key driver of the customer experience (CX) and find smarter, strategic ways of connecting the two. According to PwC, companies that invest in and deliver superior experiences to both consumers and employees are able to charge a premium of as much as 16% for their products and services. So how do leaders design EX to better align with CX? First, identify where the biggest gaps exist. Second, find cr...| 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
Despite the fact that 98% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs, only 37% of professionals actually benefit from them. This disconnect is exacerbating retention issues. So, why are mentoring programs failing to deliver on their promise? The issue lies not with mentoring itself but in the underutilization and ineffective reach of many mentoring programs. Programs are frequently confined to a small group of employees or lack the necessary communication and visibility to attract parti...| Harvard Business Review
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea. The author found six...| Harvard Business Review
Today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a small country. This certainly sounds alarming — but the reality is a little more complicated. The author discusses several common misconceptions surrounding the Bitcoin sustainability debate, and ultimately argues that it’s up to the crypto community to acknowledge and address environmental concerns, work in good faith to reduce Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, and ultimately demonstrate that the societal value that Bitcoin provides is worth the re...| Harvard Business Review
Your job may not go away, but it’s certainly going to change.| Harvard Business Review
Customers often need time to evaluate a product or think about their experience with it before they decide to post a review. If they’re asked to provide a review too early, they can feel pressured and rushed. But when is the right time to do it? The authors conducted experiments in an attempt to answer this question — and found, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that immediate review reminders (sent the next day) lower the likelihood that customers will post reviews, whereas delayed re...| Harvard Business Review
Getting an MBA (Master of Business Administration) takes a lot of time, money, and effort. So it’s important to really think about whether or not it is worth your while to pursue one. Here are some things to consider. The right reasons: To hone skills like influence, empathy, and building business strategies; to help you make a career pivot; to accelerate the pace of your professional development; to expand and diversify your professional network. The wrong reasons: You’re looking for a...| Harvard Business Review
Why do so many organizations get engagement wrong?| Harvard Business Review
No researcher has explored the earliest period of a business’s development in detail—until now.| Harvard Business Review
If you’re asked to take over as manager after your boss moves on from the organization, start by reflecting on what you actually want. Do you want the position permanently or temporarily? Once you know that, be open and honest about that from the start. Take some time to assess the state of the team so you can determine what you need to accomplish. Is the team operating well, or are there issues that need to be resolved? In any case, stick with modest-sized decisions to keep from overplayin...| Harvard Business Review
While leaders have always performed emotional labor, this demand has increased dramatically over the last few years. Organizations need to stop dismissing this substantial emotional burden. In this piece, the authors explain why organizations need to start offering more support and outline practical strategies to try: 1) Recognize emotional labor as labor. 2) Promote self-compassion from the top down. 3) Provide training on handling others’ emotions. 4) Create peer support groups. As the ad...| Harvard Business Review
Despite the increase in organizations adopting DEI initiatives and the proliferation of DEI firms and practitioners, the big, poorly kept secret is that the majority of these initiatives are less effective than many make them out to be. On the one hand, there is a lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners. And on the other, organizations keep asking for, and funding, interventions that don’t work. This phenomenon that purports to end inequity but instead sus...| Harvard Business Review
Investing in sustainable funds that prioritize ESG goals is supposed to help improve the environmental and social sustainability of business practices. Unfortunately, close analysis suggests that it’s not only not making much difference to companies’ actual ESG performance, it may actually be directing capital into poor business performers.| Harvard Business Review
As a first-time manager, you may have been given the advice “You are as good as your team.” Team members play a significant role in your success and that of the organization’s, so you want to choose the right people. Though you’ll have a limited time with each candidate during the interview process, you can maximize that time by asking strategic questions to gain insights into their strengths and weaknesses. Here are five things to look for: Entrepreneurial mindset: Employees who are ...| Harvard Business Review
In 2014, Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, one of the world’s top experts on leadership, co-wrote an influential book called “Collective Genius.” In it she and her co-authors identified the leadership styles that are necessary to create and sustain cultures that perpetually innovate. They even also offered guidance on how to introduce those approaches at any institution. At a pivotal moment for many companies, we wanted to see how her thoughts on leadership and innovation ha...| 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
B2B sellers often think of customers as rational decision-makers who seek to maximize value, reduce costs, and save time. But a study of 2,128 office workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy found that B2B customers prefer interactions that fuel their psychological needs — even if they require more time or cost more money. Viewing customer service through the prism of the three core psychological needs — autonomy, relatedness, and mastery —...| Harvard Business Review
Intuition is frequently dismissed as mystical or unreliable — but there’s a deep neurological basis for it. When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. The author offers strategies to learn how to leverage your intuition as a helpful decision-making tool in your career: 1) discern gut feeling from fear, 2) start b...| Harvard Business Review
Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions—is “the core of exemplary leadership,” according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls ). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Likierman believes that a more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible f...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1205F Many CEOs don’t seem to care about organic growth. They either give up on it, in the belief that their companies will inevitably become low growth, or they cede responsibility for it to the operating units. Those are big mistakes. In an uncertain business environment, all corporate leaders need to be actively engaged in organic growth. Four rules can help them support the operating units in the quest for the best opportunities: Keep an eye on the big picture by setting stand...| Harvard Business Review
The shift to remote work ended the traditional 9–5 workday: employees work in bursts, at night, between caregiving tasks, and whenever they can find time between the endless distractions of messages, calls, and emails. New research, however, shows that for many teams, this means people are quite literally working at all hours of the day, which also means that they’re almost never all working at the same time. Is this bad though? Researchers found that it depends on the task. For some task...| Harvard Business Review
Decarbonization efforts across various sectors have affected the car industry tremendously — especially sports car manufacturers. At Porsche, efforts such as the development of the electric Taycan in 2019 have begun to change a culture enamored with the Porsche’s traditional, distinctive flat-six engine. The company itself has endeavored to encourage “employee sustainable behaviors,” such as the voluntary adoption of electric vehicles for leasing by authorized employees eligible for c...| Harvard Business Review
For decades in the United States, the name Hershey has been synonymous with chocolate. From the iconic foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss to the chocolate syrup for milk or ice cream, the company’s offerings have been enjoyed by generations of consumers. Over its long history Hershey has found dozens of ways to keep innovating with chocolate and other sweet treats—different brands, flavors, sizes, packaging, and products—and taken them to other geographic regions. In the past few years, howe...| Harvard Business Review
Delivering superior customer experience (CX) is a mandate that now extends well beyond the bounds of customer service, support, sales, or IT departments. It requires a cultural shift that emphasizes pervasive information sharing and intent analysis across the enterprise. Executives not fully immersed in CX leave their organizations open to churn and reduced market presence. Executives across all domains need to step up and lead their organizations’ CX efforts in order to survive.| Harvard Business Review
Psychological safety—a shared belief among team members that it’s OK to speak up with candor—has become a popular concept. However, as its popularity has grown, so too have misconceptions about it. Such misunderstandings can lead to frustration among leaders and employees, stymie constructive debates, and ultimately harm organizational performance. In this article the authors identify the following six common misperceptions: Psychological safety means being nice; it means getting your w...| Harvard Business Review
Email has become the bane of the 21 st century workers’ existence, but by making a few changes to how we process e-mail, we can take back time in our workday. For starters, move every email out of your inbox the first time you read it, so you don’t run the risk of re-reading it later, thus wasting time. Turn off distracting notifications and instead check your email hourly, setting aside 5 to 8 minutes per hour to do so. Instead of filing e-mails you want to keep in multiple folders, use ...| Harvard Business Review
Many companies chase customers for online reviews by sending them solicitation emails. These emails aren’t always a good idea, according to new research. Solicitation will push your ratings from the extremes to the average. This could be good or bad. Email prompts disproportionally triggers moderate reviews as the passionate reviewers are more likely to leave reviews of their own accord. Thus, for those products with generally-high average ratings, reminders will lower the average rating. I...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Salesforce.| Harvard Business Review
In the past few years, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been rolled back in both private and public organizations. For champions of workforce diversity, who feel as if their work is being undone, this is a difficult time. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that many management innovations designed to improve performance actually boost workforce diversity as well. And they don’t invite the backlash that formal DEI programs do. Executives across many industries have be...| Harvard Business Review
While backlash to DEI has challenged how many companies and practitioners approach creating more equitable workplaces, fewer have considered whether DEI work itself has room to improve. A new framework, built around the core outcomes of fairness, access, inclusion, and representation (FAIR) that DEI was supposed to achieve for all, offers a new direction. Instead of the performative, individual-centered, isolated, and zero-sum methods of the current mainstream approach, DEI work must evolve t...| Harvard Business Review
Health insurance, flexible hours, and vacation time.| Harvard Business Review
Too many leaders avoid making tough calls. The delay often does far more damage than whatever fallout they were trying to avoid. In fact, hard decisions often get more complicated when they’re deferred. In a ten-year longitudinal study of more than 2,700 leaders, 57% percent of newly appointed executives said that decisions were more complicated and difficult than they expected. In particular, three challenges stood out. First, a desire to be kind often encouraged leaders to put off maki...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Salesforce.| Harvard Business Review
Seven elements can help create exceptional results.| Harvard Business Review
In the near future, gen AI is likely to affect some 50 million jobs, automating away elements of some jobs and augmenting workers’ abilities in others. The extent of those changes will compel companies to reshape their organizational structures and rethink their talent management strategies in profound ways, with implications that will affect not only for industries but also individuals and society. Critically, traditional learning curves for jobs will be redrawn, creating new paradigms for...| Harvard Business Review
Workers spend a lot of time toggling between apps and websites to do their jobs. But how often do they really do this, and how much times does it really take up? The authors studied 20 teams, totaling 137 users, across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. They found workers toggled roughly 1,200 times each day, which adds up to just under four hours each week reorienting themselves after toggling — roughly 9% of their time at work. While many companies may write this off as the...| Harvard Business Review
Feedback — both positive and negative — is essential to helping managers enhance their best qualities and address their worst so they can excel at leading. Strengths-based development can, unfortunately, lull people into believing there are no areas in which they need to improve. So instead of encouraging people to avoid negative feedback, we should focus on how to deliver it in ways that minimize the fight-or-flight response. One approach is called Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI). Fee...| Harvard Business Review
AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by providing personalized treatment plans, streamlining clinical trials, and aiding in the development of novel therapeutics. However, AI alone cannot fix the flaws in the U.S. healthcare system; it will require serious structural reforms. There are three priorities: accelerate the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, and integrate AI in the next generation of value-based care strategies; embed AI into medical education and training;...| Harvard Business Review
SMEs do not have the same regulatory pressures that can lead larger companies to measure and mitigate their risks, but they also have fewer buffer resources to resist unexpected shocks. They are one large potential incident away from bankruptcy. That’s why SMEs can benefit from taking three actions: designing controls proportionate to the risks at stake, analyzing the lessons from success (not only from failures), and using risk management to boost and protect business performance.| Harvard Business Review
Twenty years ago, the authors started studying job crafting — the act of altering your job to make it more meaningful. Since then, they’ve identified different forms this concept can take. They include: task crafting , which involves changing the type, scope, sequence, and number of tasks that make up your job; relational crafting, where you alter who you interact with in your work; and cognitive crafting , where you modify the way you interpret the tasks and/or work you’re doing. The a...| Harvard Business Review
To successfully integrate generative AI (gen AI) in marketing, companies need to balance automation, customization, and human oversight. As such, they should follow a few steps. First, determine whether a task requires gen AI for content creation or analytical AI for data-driven predictions—often, a combination of both is ideal. Next, assess whether to rely on general AI models or invest in proprietary training data to enhance accuracy and reduce risks. Finally, establish the appropriate le...| Harvard Business Review
The second you receive the rejection phone call or email from your dream company, you immediately try to figure out why. But the answer may be elusive, especially if the person on the other end doesn’t give you much information to go on. The author presents several possible reasons you didn’t get the job, plus five ways to learn from the rejection to position yourself for success in future interviews. First, take time in advance to think through deep questions that will give you a more re...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from upGrad.| Harvard Business Review
Effective leadership today relies more than ever on influencing others — impacting their ideas, opinions, and actions. While influence has always been a valuable managerial skill, today’s highly collaborative organizations make it essential. Consider how often you have to influence people who don’t even report to you in order to accomplish your objectives. Success depends […]| Harvard Business Review
While it might sound contradictory, the U.S. is experiencing higher unemployment numbers and a labor shortage. So how to attract talent in such a labor marketplace? For hourly workers and lower-salaried positions, accessibility is one of the biggest – and often underestimated – drivers of effective recruiting. Research has shown that minor geographic differences in available talent and open jobs, even in the same city, can lead to higher unemployment. look at ways of improving accessibi...| Harvard Business Review
Many executives assume that customer data can give you an unbeatable edge. The more customers you have, the more data you can gather, and that data, when analyzed, allows you to offer a better product that attracts more customers. You can then collect even more data, repeating the cycle until you eventually marginalize your competitors. But this thinking is usually wrong. Though the virtuous cycles of data-enabled learning may look similar to those of network effects—wherein an offering inc...| Harvard Business Review
If there’s one thing that’s certain about the future, it’s that change is here to stay. The ability to constantly transform has become a top priority for organizations. Therefore, change management is now an essential business priority that can’t be overlooked or set aside. Leaders need to urgently develop change and project management competencies across all levels of an organization, from employees and managers to senior executives. This article covers the two most important things ...| Harvard Business Review
Research has long shown that using friendly nicknames can be a great way to solidify personal relationships between peers or romantic partners. But what’s the impact of using nicknames in professional environments, in which power disparities are common? Through a series of studies with more than 1,100 U.S.-based adults, research finds that using nicknames in workplace relationships between supervisors and subordinates can sometimes have positive effects — but not always. Specifically, res...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: F0405E A study of more than 600 retail outlets finds that stock-outs are far more costly than most companies imagine.| Harvard Business Review
As AI becomes more powerful, it faces a major trust problem. Consider 12 leading concerns: disinformation, safety and security, the black box problem, ethical concerns, bias, instability, hallucinations in LLMs, unknown unknowns, potential job losses and social inequalities, environmental impact, industry concentration, and state overreach. Each of these issues is complex — and not easy to solve. But there is one consistent approach to addressing the trust gap: training, empowering, and inc...| Harvard Business Review
Thanks to the benefits for both employers and employees, hybrid work arrangements will likely persist beyond the pandemic. In order for them to work, though, leaders must understand the power differentials they create within teams and take steps to level the playing field. Where individuals (including the manager) on a team are located relative to others matters, as does each individual’s skills in relationship building. The authors offer four strategies managers can take to manage the stru...| Harvard Business Review
In the twenty-first century, human capital is the most valuable resource in our economy. And though much has been done (rightly) to promote diversity at work, there’s a giant hole when it comes to understanding how temperament and sentiment play into the trajectory of success. Mental illness is a challenge, but it is not a weakness. Understanding your psyche can be the key to unleashing your strengths — whether it’s using your sensitivity to empathize with clients, your anxiety to be a ...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor Content from Deloitte Digital.| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Enboarder.| Harvard Business Review
Which ones are hurting your company?| 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
The promise of staffing a team with diverse members is that the different perspectives, ideas, and opinions will result in greater performance. The reality is that diverse teams often underperform because people from dissimilar backgrounds often clash. A study of 62 drug-development teams suggests that the key to getting them to work better together and tap the potential of diversity is to create a psychologically safe environment. This article discusses ways to do that.| Harvard Business Review
Find people who disagree with you and cherish them.| Harvard Business Review
The field of neuromarketing, sometimes known as consumer neuroscience, studies the brain to predict and potentially even manipulate consumer behavior and decision making. Over the past five years several groundbreaking studies have demonstrated its potential to create value for marketers. But those interested in using its tools must still determine whether that’s worth the investment and how to do it well. “Neuromarketing” loosely refers to the measurement of physiological and neural si...| Harvard Business Review
Research shows you need to tap into deep, unspoken needs.| Harvard Business Review
Strategic thinking is an essential component of leadership — and yet for many leaders, it can be nearly impossible to find time for. In this piece, the author argues that there are two main barriers that keep leaders from devoting more time to strategic thinking: First, companies often incentivize long hours, and tethering yourself to your desk is rarely a recipe for innovative, strategic thinking. Second, many leaders want people to think they’re busy, so they lean into the frenzy. To fi...| Harvard Business Review
From the early days of mechanical automatons to more recent conversational bots, scientists and engineers have dreamed of a future where AI systems can work and act intelligently and independently. Recent advances in agentic AI bring that autonomous future a step closer to reality. With their supercharged reasoning and execution capabilities, agentic AI systems promise to transform many aspects of human-machine collaboration. The agentic AI prize could be great, with the promise of greater pr...| Harvard Business Review
The burdens of subordinates always seem to end up on the manager’s back. Here’s how to get rid of them.| Harvard Business Review
Sorting out hybrid work arrangements will require managers to rethink and expand one of strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness: psychological safety. When it comes to psychological safety, managers have traditionally focused on enabling candor and dissent with respect to work content. The problem is, as the boundary between work and life becomes increasingly blurry, managers must make staffing, scheduling, and coordination decisions that take into account employees’ personal circ...| Harvard Business Review
Although most people believe that they are self-aware, true self-awareness is a rare quality. In this piece, the author describes a recent large-scale investigation that shed light on some of the biggest roadblocks, myths, and truths about what self-awareness really is — and what it takes to cultivate it. Specifically, the study found that there are actually two distinct types of self-awareness, that experience and power can hinder self-awareness, and that introspection doesn’t always mak...| Harvard Business Review
Last year, HBR published a piece on how people are using gen AI. Much has happened over the past 12 months. We now have Custom GPTs—AI tailored for narrower sets of requirements. New kids are on the block, such as DeepSeek and Grok, providing more competition and choice. Millions of ears pricked up as Google debuted their podcast generator, NotebookLM. OpenAI launched many new models (now along with the promise to consolidate them all into one unified interface). Chain-of-thought reasonin...| Harvard Business Review
Debunking three common misconceptions.| Harvard Business Review
For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents. In this article, the architect of disruption theory, Clayton M. Christensen, and his coauthors correct some of the misinfor...| Harvard Business Review
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety — the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for taking moderate risks, speaking your mind, being creative, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs. So how can you increase psychological safety on your own team? First, approach conflict as a collaborator, not an ad...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0909J The value of information in the knowledge economy is indisputable, but so is its capacity to overwhelm consumers of it. HBR contributing editor Hemp reports on practical ways for individuals and organizations to avoid getting too much of a good thing. Ready access to useful information comes at a cost: As the volume increases, the line between the worthwhile and the distracting starts to blur. And ready access to you —via e-mail, social networking, and so on—exacerbates th...| Harvard Business Review
Artificial intelligence seems to be on the brink of a boom. It’s now guiding decisions on everything from crop harvests to bank loans, and uses like totally automated customer service are on the horizon. Indeed, McKinsey estimates that AI will add $13 trillion to the global economy in the next decade. Yet companies are struggling to scale up their AI efforts. Most have run only ad hoc projects or applied AI in just a single business process. In surveys of thousands of executives and work wi...| Harvard Business Review
People’s lives and priorities are changing in dramatic ways before our very eyes. While increasing compensation, promoting from within, offering flexible schedules, and making remote work easier are always good talent strategies, there’s one lever leaders can pull that’s highly accessible, doesn’t have to be expensive, and gives employees something they really want: on-the-job professional development. The author offers three ways for leaders to prioritize learning and development in ...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from AXIOS HQ.| Harvard Business Review
The real problem is not technical change but the human changes that often accompany technical innovations.| Harvard Business Review
A leader’s singular job is to get results. But even with all the leadership training programs and “expert” advice available, effective leadership still eludes many people and organizations. One reason, says Daniel Goleman, is that such experts offer advice based on inference, experience, and instinct, not on quantitative data. Now, drawing on research of more than 3,000 executives, Goleman explores which precise leadership behaviors yield positive results. He outlines six distinct leade...| Harvard Business Review
Back in the 1990s, computer engineer and Wall Street “quant” were the hot occupations in business. Today data scientists are the hires firms are competing to make. As companies wrestle with unprecedented volumes and types of information, demand for these experts has raced well ahead of supply. Indeed, Greylock Partners, the VC firm that backed Facebook and LinkedIn, is so worried about the shortage of data scientists that it has a recruiting team dedicated to channeling them to the busine...| Harvard Business Review
It drives revenue – and we know how much.| Harvard Business Review
As B2B offerings become more commoditized, the subjective, sometimes quite personal considerations of business customers are increasingly important in purchases. To discover what matters most to B2B buyers, the consulting firm Bain analyzed scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. All told, it identified 40 discrete “elements of value,” which fall into five categories: table stakes, functional, ease of doing business, individual, and inspirational. The elements range from ...| Harvard Business Review
Karim Lakhani is a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in workplace technology and particularly AI. He’s done pioneering work in identifying how digital transformation has remade the world of business, and he’s the co-author of the 2020 book Competing in the Age of AI . Customers will expect AI-enhanced experiences with companies, he says, so business leaders must experiment, create sandboxes, run internal bootcamps, and develop AI use cases not just for technology worker...| Harvard Business Review
Managers have tried various strategies and perks to boost employee engagement—all with little impact on long-term retention and performance. But now, neuroscience offers some answers. Through his research on the brain chemical oxytocin—shown to facilitate collaboration and teamwork—Zak has developed a framework for creating a culture of trust and building a happier, more loyal, and more productive workforce. By measuring people’s oxytocin levels in response to various situations—fir...| Harvard Business Review
Find new ideas and classic advice for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
Find new ideas and classic advice for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
Find new ideas and classic advice for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
When customers seek out online deals, it seems like a win for everybody: Brands, retailers, dealers, and distributors sell more goods, and buyers get a bargain. What’s not to like? Here’s the problem: Lured by rock-bottom online prices, customers often end up dealing with disreputable digital resellers that mistreat them, which can erode brand equity and undermine authorized sellers. For brands selling in the United States and Canada, there is a potent countermeasure: crafting and enforci...| Harvard Business Review
Briefing Paper Sponsored by BetterWorks| Harvard Business Review