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...

When Executive Presence Backfires

Senior leaders often rely on the very behaviors that got them promoted-having the answers, projecting confidence, and jumping in to improve ideas-but at the top, those instincts can backfire. As your role gets bigger, those habits can shut people down,...

Don't Let AI Destroy the Skills That Make Your Company Competitive

Artificial intelligence is often promoted as a force multiplier for organizations, but used carelessly it can erode the very capabilities that make firms competitive. As AI tools become embedded in everyday workflows, employees may rely on them instead...

Boards Need to Rethink How They Advise CEOs

Most CEOs say their boards and investor groups have the right people and knowledge to help them cope with disruptive forces. At the same time, almost three-quarters of CEOs say they find it increasingly difficult to set priorities. Why the disconnect?...

A Better Strategy for Location-Based Advertising

Location-based advertising has become a huge marketplace, but its dominant strategy is blunt: Most advertisers still draw a simple radius around each store and target everyone inside it. But a new study-which analyzed millions of store visits and ad...

Employees Are Relying on AI for Personal Support. That's Risky.

Employees are increasingly turning to AI for career advice, emotional support, and even friendship. However, researchers Constance Noonan Hadley of the Institute for Life at Work and Sarah Wright of the University of Canterbury found that despite these...

Are You Overburdening Your Most Engaged Employees?

Senior leaders invest heavily in building engaged organizations. Yet new research, involving more than 4,300 managers and employees, found a hidden cost eroding those returns. When unexpected work arises (the kind that wasn't on anyone's radar but needs...

How Leaders Can Get Strategic About Energy Costs

Energy volatility is often framed as a threat. For many firms, it is. But it also creates competitive opportunities. Companies that develop superior visibility, flexibility, and contracting discipline can lower costs, monetize optionality, and improve...

What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans

Despite decades of effort by companies to boost engagement and loyalty, employee trust and customer commitment continue to decline. Most organizations try to fix deficiencies or incrementally raise satisfaction levels. But human behavior does not change...

Treat Nonprofits as Strategic Partners, Not Just Philanthropic Recipients

Companies often treat nonprofits as mere recipients of philanthropy, overlooking their strategic potential. Occupying a unique societal position, nonprofits connect governments, communities, and businesses. Operating across institutional boundaries as...

How Successful Retailers Prosper in Tough Times

U.S. retail chains have had a rough decade, with store closures, supply shocks, online growth, and a wave of bankruptcies. Looking at the varying performances of 32 large chains from 2016 to 2024, three clear lessons emerge. First, expand your store base...

How to Use Generative AI for Pricing

Generative AI is transforming retail pricing decisions by providing an accessible and low-cost alternative to traditional pricing algorithms. Unlike traditional approaches, LLM-based pricing relies on natural language prompts, not custom code and...

Can Customers Find Your Brand? Marketing Strategies for AI-Driven Search

Traditional search marketing strategies need a refresh as AI platforms transform how consumers search online. Even market-leading brands risk becoming invisible if they stick with familiar SEO practices. Today, zero-click searches offer fewer consumer...

Build Business Advantage With Real-Time Decision-Making

Real-time businesses are able to make quick, data-driven decisions, enabling them to dramatically outperform competitors. Research points to four key capabilities that the most successful RTBs have: real-time data availability and decision-making,...

The Trouble With Heroic Leadership

The image of a superheroic leader who will carry their organization through major crises is outdated at a time of continuous new threats. Leadership research instead points to two effective practices: sensemaking (interpreting events and deciding how to...

What AI Can Teach Us About Designing Better KPIs

Organizations everywhere fall prey to Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." A corporate fixation on metrics can lead to narrow optimization and gaming behaviors that ultimately harm the business. An...

Learn From Outcomes to Promote Growth

A longitudinal study on how different countries and industries achieve sustainable growth, resilience, and longevity led to the development of Decompose, Interpret, Reward, and Scale (DIRS), a new framework to help managers determine why initiatives...

The CEO's Playbook for Difficult Board Directors

CEOs can't escape dealing with some problematic directors on corporate boards. But they can learn how to address the challenges these characters can create. CEOs must also strive to distinguish people problems from process issues, work with crucial...

How to Navigate Rapid Growth

As companies experience growth, the qualities that drove early success - including easy collaboration and even homogeneity among workers - often erode. Breakdowns in unity will emerge when divisions form between early joiners and newcomers. Leaders can...

Turn Customer Complaints Into Innovation Blueprints

At Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, leaders formalized a process to analyze grievances and implement fundamental changes to address them. They did it by partnering with a hospitality school to train health care professionals in customer care...

Build Better Pay-for-Performance (PFP) Compensation Plans

Pay-for-performance compensation plans have a dual nature - increasing both productivity and financial insecurity among employees - so leaders may feel like they're walking a tightrope in trying to get the balance right. While the PFP model can motivate...

From Crisis to Coopetition: What Leaders Can Learn From Anesthesiologists

The playbook from a crisis in credibility for anesthesiologists offers many lessons for business leaders. One key: With coopetition, organizations can sometimes achieve more together than they could on their own. Explore five practices from the...

Rewire Organizational Knowledge With GenAI

What do the companies making tangible progress with generative AI, well beyond the experimentation phase, have in common? They use GenAI to unlock and connect knowledge across the enterprise, according to IMD research. Unlike the knowledge management...

Broadening Future Perspectives at the Bank of England

Leaders at the Bank of England recognized the need to broaden their approach to managing risk in the face of new threats like algorithmic trading and geopolitical instability. But to grow the practice of long-term horizon scanning, they first had to...

A Faster Way to Build Future Scenarios

Scenario planning is an invaluable tool for helping managers navigate uncertain business contexts. But the ways in which large organizations typically develop sets of scenarios are expensive and time-consuming and don't deliver insights quickly enough. A...

Assess What Is Certain in a Sea of Unknowns

Developing strategy in a uncertain environment requires both anticipating what may change and recognizing what will remain constant. When leaders are engaged in scenario-planning activities, identifying the different kinds of constraints that shape the...

How to Make Scenario Planning Stick

Scenario planning is a valuable tool for managing uncertainty in an organization, but its impact can be limited if the insights it generates fail to gain traction. Two experts explain how to better manage scenario planning and help it take root in large...

Ask Sanyin: Why Is It So Hard to Pull the Plug on a Project?

Most organizational initiatives have a life cycle and will eventually either accomplish their goals or cease to align with strategic priorities. However, disbanding committed teams and redeploying resources is not easily done. Leaders should consider how...

Three Steps Toward Fairer Talent Management

Equitable processes in hiring and managing don't come easily to many organizations. Fair talent management starts with asking hard questions about what assumptions leaders are making about talent, and to what consequence. Three actionable strategies can...

How Nesting Changes Platform Strategy

When platform businesses permit other platforms to embed within their own, or offer their own functionality hosted on another platform, they can gain access to new markets and customers, and improve the user experience of current customers. But platform...

How Leaders Can Build a High-Agency Culture

Uncertainty and disruption often push organizations toward passivity, but the most effective leaders do the opposite: They deliberately cultivate "high agency": the capacity to act despite ambiguity by choosing beliefs that expand what people notice,...

Create an Onboarding Plan for AI Agents

Companies are missing out on AI's value because they have not changed the way work is organized around it. Treating AI agents less like new technology and more like employees-with defined roles, clear boundaries, explicit accountability, and regular...

How to Convince Others to Trust Your Instincts

At the executive level, you're facing ambiguity, need to make quick judgments with incomplete information, and have to manage organizational politics that are anything but straightforward. Studies find that pairing intuition with analytical thinking in...

How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better

In periods of rapid change, the teams that outperform everyone else are not those with the best plans or the most talent but those that learn the fastest. Research across thousands of teams reveals a consistent pattern: High-performing...

Leaders Underestimate the Value of Employee Joy

Despite frequent claims that employees are a company's greatest asset, many organizations still treat their workforce as mere operational inputs, leading to disengagement and low motivation. While businesses have excelled at understanding customers...

Is Your Board Too Collegial?

Boards often mistake collegiality for alignment, avoiding tough conversations and sidelining dissent. The result is delayed decisions, superficial consensus, unequal participation, and fragmented governance. This weakens their business strategy and...

What the Best AI Users Do Differently-and How to Level Up All of Your Employees

Leaders often struggle to assess whether their employees are using AI successfully. Often, they default to measuring what's easily observable: how much they're using AI tools. To get a clearer picture, researchers partnered with KPMG and observed how...

When Senior Leaders Lack People Skills, Transformations Fail

McKinsey's research shows that roughly 70% of transformation efforts fail, and the root cause is rarely a flawed business case. It's the human element: leaders who can't detect resistance, misread silence as buy-in, or dismiss valid concerns as...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading with AI

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 leading with AI, from how to protect your team from AI-fueled overload to how to keep your AI efforts from...

Why Companies Don't Compete in the Middle Market

Brands always need to differentiate themselves. In analog times, that differentiation didn't have to be dramatic. That's because companies had limited visibility into individual customer behavior and journeys, and feedback to the actions they took was...

LLMs Are Manipulating Users with Rhetorical Tricks

There are three common problems people face when working with AI: not understanding how AI made a decision (opacity), the human in the loop becoming over-reliant on AI and falling asleep at the wheel (complacency), and the AI making mistakes (accuracy)...

Boards Often Misunderstand What Stock Buybacks Really Cost

Boards of directors frequently overlook the financial consequences of share buybacks used to counteract dilution from stock-based compensation. The typical cycle begins with equity grants to employees, eventually requiring companies to spend cash...

7 Factors That Drive Returns on AI Investments, According to a New Survey

Leaders are facing tremendous pressure to deliver on AI. To understand how they are navigating this, researchers surveyed 1,006 global senior executives who had close familiarity with their organizations' AI initiatives, and interviewed 12 technology,...

Research: How the "Accent Penalty" Determines Who Gets Heard

At American firms, accent bias can quietly shape whose ideas gain traction at work by depressing attention and engagement for speakers with nonnative English accents. Drawing on an analysis of 5,000+ English-language TED Talks, research finds a...

Competing LLMs Were Asked to Pick Stocks. Their Choices Revealed AI's Limitations.

Many executives already use gen AI as a thought-partner and c0-strategist. But are these tools reliable across markets? New research found that large-language models can mislead investors when operating outside their home information environments. In...

How to Deliver on ESG Initiatives in Emerging Markets

Multinational firms face growing pressure to demonstrate positive societal impact in the frontier markets where they operate, yet many ESG and CSR initiatives fail to earn local trust-and sometimes provoke backlash. Drawing on six years of field research...

Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got "Trendslop" in Return.

Leaders might assume that LLMs are able to offer a kind of unbiased, outside perspective. But new research found that leading LLMs have clear biases when it comes to strategy and consistently recommend strategies that align with modern managerial...

4 Capabilities that Drive Operational Improvement

Many organizations hope to improve operations using a cycle of fragmented, standalone, short-term improvements. While a great deal of effort is expended, it often isn't enough to move the needle. Research on why some companies outperform others even when...

The Map of U.S. Prosperity Is Changing. Here's Where Companies Should Invest.

In today's era defined by demographic scarcity and environmental volatility, geography is no longer a backdrop for strategy. It directly shapes resilience, cost structure, and long-term value creation. Where an organization locates operations, builds...

Lessons from China's Short-Drama Boom

Chinese short-drama platforms have built a content machine that inverts Hollywood's logic entirely-testing story concepts through thousands of micro-ads before greenlighting production, engineering emotional peaks as deliberately as product features, and...