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...

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,...

How Japan's Oldest Companies Navigate Uncertainty

In the period from 1994 to 2024, Japan's family businesses matched or exceeded the returns of peers in the United States, Germany, and Canada while taking on far less risk. Their advantage came not...

The Store Isn't Dead-but the Merchant Model Is

The decline of many retailers reflects not the death of the physical store but the failure of the traditional merchant model, which requires retailers to forecast demand, own inventory, and absorb...

You Need to Understand Your Employees' Caregiving Responsibilities

Employees regularly balance work with caregiving responsibilities, whether it is child care, eldercare, or caring for another family member. Yet many organizations lack visibility into who their...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Learning from Failure

Our Management Tip of the Day newsletter continues to be one of HBR's most popular newsletters. In this article, we've compiled 10 of our favorite tips on learning from failure, from how to apologize...

A Formula for Calculating Your Company's Geopolitical Exposure

Geopolitical volatility is no longer a disruption to the operating environment-it is the operating environment. To assess the enterprise value at stake, McKinsey has developed a formula, which...

Do Your B2B Customers See the Value You Deliver?

Many B2B companies suffer from a "value gap": Customers benefit from their products but cannot clearly measure, articulate, or defend that value to stakeholders within their companies. As a result,...

The Right Way to Deliver Bad Earnings News

Leaders often assume that delaying bad financial news until an earnings announcement will soften the market's reaction. Early disclosure won't eliminate the harm entirely, but how the warning is...

How to Spot a Toxic Leader-Before Hiring Them

Leaders with toxic interpersonal behaviors often make excellent first impressions, which means they're surprisingly difficult to identify in traditional interviews. As a result, organizations can...

4 Steps to Transform the "Middle Office" with AI

Companies are spending heavily on AI, but many are still struggling to turn that investment into measurable business results. One reason is that they're overlooking the middle office, where work such...

The Science of Developing Creative Talent

Companies often make consequential bets on talent based largely on instinct. Research on more than 4,200 musicians suggests a more systematic approach. Managers should assess three forms of capital:...

How to Grow Without Betting Big

Many leaders and companies shy away from a high-risk strategy built around big gambles. But they still want to grow. According to BCG Institute research, companies that succeed with lower-risk growth...

Three Approaches to Measuring and Managing AI ROI

Many leaders and companies fail to effectively track and grow the returns that their artificial intelligence investments yield. The three approaches that emerged from recent research reflect...

Redefine What 'Professionalism' Means

What constitutes professionalism varies from one organization to the next, but most rarely examine or codify appropriate workplace behavior. The most effective professional norms are fair, well...

The Empathy Tax Female Leaders Pay

At a time of high stress and uncertainty, leaders must increasingly spend time and energy steadying their people. However, work like comforting a team after layoffs or explaining a change of...

Create Generative AI Value at Scale

Companies that have established a new kind of internal AI organization called the "AI spine" are using the cross-functional structure to rapidly develop innovative generative AI use cases with users'...

Scaling AI With Adaptive Governance

As organizations adopt diverse flavors of AI more widely and scale applications across the enterprise, managing new risks that arise in the development process or during application use becomes...

Resolving Muddled Objectives in Corporate Venture Capital

The most consequential decision that managers of corporate venture capital units must make is whether to prioritize financial or strategic benefits for the parent company. Researchers describe the...

Why AI Isn't Transforming Finance Yet

Finance offices have been slow to meaningfully adopt artificial intelligence, often due to leaders' perception of the function's traditional role. Finance leaders who encourage teams to stay alert to...

AI Is Undermining Leaders' Judgment. Here's What to Do About It.

As organizations gain more "intelligence" with AI tools, leaders are being trained out of the very capacity that creates competitive advantage-original judgment. Two interlocking capacities shape a...

Is Your Organizational Culture Too Nice?

Organizations with a culture of icenesscan undermine performance when leaders prioritize harmony and comfort over candor, accountability, and results. Shifting toward a more rigorous culture...

Why Executive Teams Shouldn't Write "Culture Decks"

Research: What Physical Retail Stores Deliver in a Digital Economy

As shopping becomes increasingly digital, the role of physical stores is shifting from simply completing transactions to solving customer problems that online channels cannot. Research on multi-brand...

The Art of Profound Visioning: Leadership Lessons From the Sagrada Familia

This article explores leadership lessons from Antoni Gaudí?s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Drawing on the basilica?s century-long development, it highlights three interrelated...

How to Respond to the Coming AI Cost Shock

Today's AI adoption has been fueled by heavily subsidized pricing from enterprise software vendors, but that era is ending. Companies are shifting toward usage-based charges. As organizations replace...

How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations

Every strategy, decision, and transformation begins as a conversation. Yet leaders rarely think intentionally about how those conversations unfold. The highest-performing teams steward conversation...

Research: The Innovation Problems AI Can't Solve

Generative AI can accelerate innovation, but the article argues that its default use often reinforces the human bottlenecks it is meant to solve. In ideation, models steer teams toward familiar ideas...

Why Agentic AI Could Transform Procurement

Procurement stands to benefit from agentic AI more than almost any other business function because its work is structured, financially measurable, and filled with judgment-intensive tasks that have...

Transformation Should Be a Learning Journey

Most corporate transformations fail because theyre approached as fixed, top-down programs with predefined goals, timelines, and financial targets. But as the environment changes-because of...

Before Rolling Out a New Strategy, Assess Your Team's Readiness

Many leadership teams excel at crafting strategy but fail to create the conditions needed to execute it successfully. Before launching a major initiative, leaders should assess their organization's...

AI Makes Building Easy. Choosing What to Build Is Harder.

AI is making it possible for individuals with little technical expertise to build sophisticated products, raising questions about whether collaboration is becoming less important. Observations from...

Collaborate on the Core. Compete on the Edges.

Companies don't win by isolating themselves, but they don't win by overcollaborating, either. The real advantage comes from knowing what to build together and what to keep for yourself. It makes...

How Much Should You Be Investing in Growth?

One of the biggest strategic challenges companies face is how much they should invest in growth. Drawing on an analysis of a decades worth of performance data on 2,900 U.S. public companies, the...

AI Is Revolutionizing Strategic Decision-Making

For decades, the limits of time and brain capacity meant that teams could consider only so many strategic options before making decisions. Strategy tools-SWOT analyses, portfolio matrices-were simple...

The HBR Interview with Verizon CEO Dan Schulman

Following a successful nine-year stint as the CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman was ready to retire. But after the board of Verizon repeatedly urged him to step in, he became the CEO of the...

Why Family Businesses Lose Control

Family businesses often fail to prepare the next generation for their most important role-not as executives, but as owners. As a result, families can gradually lose the ability to direct the...

Why Cash Rewards Don't Always Produce Better Ideas

Many companies try to encourage innovation by offering financial rewards for new inventions. The assumption is straightforward: If employees are paid for innovative output, they will produce more of...

"Leadership Drift" Is Stalling Your AI Strategy

Organizations often blame employees when AI adoption stalls, assuming resistance stems from fear or lack of skills. Research across 23 interviews and three leadership workshops in 11 European IT...

Is Our Subscription Program Really Working? (HBR Case Study and Commentary)

Hohenbruck Motoren, a German luxury automaker, launched a car subscription service in 2021 called Hohenbruck Access. The monthly fee is higher than that of a typical lease, but a subscription is...

The CEO of HCLTech on Pivoting for the AI Era

When gen AI emerged, HCLTech recognized that it would fundamentally alter the economics of IT services, breaking the traditional link between revenue growth and workforce expansion. CEO C...

Life's Work: An Interview with Dionne Warwick

The legendary recording artist on moving from backup singer to solo star, collaborating with industry legends, navigating racism and other career hurdles, becoming an AIDS activist, staying true to...

Research Roundup: AI on Org Charts, Job-Hoppers' Skillsets, Autorenewal Subscriptions, and More

This roundup features insights that can help your company make informed strategic decisions. Topics cover the best way to communicate a price increase, why autorenewal promotions may be discouraging...

What You Can Learn from a Competitor's Job Postings

Executives spend heavily trying to predict competitors' next moves, yet often overlook one of the clearest signals of strategic intent: job postings. Because companies must hire before they can...

The Predictable Executive Career Arc Is Over

Careers are becoming harder to plan because two long-term trends are unfolding at once: working lives are growing much longer, and AI is making the future of work increasingly unpredictable. As the...

What Does AI Talent Look for in an Employer?

The competition for AI talent remains strong-and expensive. How can companies possibly compete for skilled AI talent when Silicon Valley behemoths are offering salaries and signing packages...

Research: How Remote Work Is Narrowing Early-Career Opportunities

Remote work is quietly reshaping early-career opportunity. A study that included analysis of 50 million European job postings and experiments with 1,200 hiring managers found that remote roles demand...

Algorithmic Shopping Is Here. Is Your Company Ready?

Executives have spent years preparing their organizations to use AI internally. The next challenge is preparing for AI as the customer. As intelligent shopping agents increasingly evaluate, compare,...

5 Ways to Wield Influence When You Lack Authority

As formal authority becomes less effective in modern organizations, leaders increasingly face the challenge of influencing outcomes without direct control. So, they must learn to exert indirect...

The 4 Stages of the CEO-Board Relationship

CEOs succeed or fail in large part based on how deliberately they manage their evolving relationship with the board. That relationship follows a predictable progression: building trust and...

AI Experiments Need Domain Experts. Here's How to Support Them.

Building AI solutions at companies requires the buy-in of the organization's domain experts, who will need to commit time and energy to figuring out how this technology could be used to reconfigure...