Articles

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,...

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 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...

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...

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...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Setting Strategy When the Path Is Unclear

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 setting strategy when the path is unclear,...

Every Organization Has Two Realities

In this week’s The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett writes on “the two-organizations problem”: the widening gap between the polished organization leaders present in board rooms and...

You Outsourced the AI-but You Still Own the Risk

Enterprises increasingly deploy AI systems they did not build, yet courts and regulators are holding them responsible when those tools discriminate, mishandle data, or harm customers. Recent lawsuits...

How to Ensure Your Company Acts on Your New Strategy

Most organizations invest top management time in strategy design. Fewer invest as much in its mobilization—the critical work between decision and execution that ensures a strategy survives an...

When Evaluating an M&A Opportunity, Consider the Broader Digital Ecosystem

When executives evaluate acquisition targets, they increasingly recognize the importance of the broader ecosystem of developers, partners and complementary technologies of potential targets. The...

Research: Navigating the Business Risks of Changing Pro-America Sentiment

U.S. firms increasingly operate in a marketplace where “Made in USA” is no longer a neutral provenance claim but a charged political signal. A new study analyzing 5,355 companies over twenty years...

Lessons from Chinese AI Firms on Owning Customers' Habits

As U.S. AI firms compete in an escalating race for superior models, bigger benchmarks, and more advanced features, Chinese companies are pursuing a fundamentally different strategy: embedding AI into...

Where Does China Fit in Your Company's Innovation Strategy?

For decades, multinationals treated China primarily as either a vast growth market or a rising competitive threat. But as growth slows, competition intensifies, and operating conditions become more...

What Global Companies Lose When Decision-Making Revolves Around Headquarters

Global companies often default to an HQ-satellite model in which strategy is shaped less by market insight than by who is present when decisions are framed—an imbalance amplified by time zones and...

Bring Back Managing for Value

After years of cheap capital, many companies drifted away from managing for shareholder value in favor of loosely defined stakeholder models. Now capital costs are moving back toward historical...

The Power of Strategic Centering

In a dematerializing economy-where value has shifted from physical assets to intangibles such as data, software, and capabilities-traditional strategy frameworks no longer provide enough guidance...

The Case for Hiring a Chief Resilience Officer

There's a major governance gap inside most organizations: No single executive is accountable for coordinating enterprise-wide resilience and recovery when failures cascade across functions. That's...

Resolution 2011: Make Your Strategy Coherent

There's no doubt about it; numbers don't lie. Companies that demonstrate strategic coherence - think Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola - earn a market premium in terms of higher earnings and greater shareholder...

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

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

A Kodak Moment to Reconsider the Value of IT

Will Insurance Protect Your Company in Times of War?

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

The Future Is Shrouded in an AI Fog

AIs rapid advance is creating new limits on leaders visibility into the short-term future and challenging the criteria they use to commit to forward-looking investments. Staring into this fog,...

In Winner-Take-All Markets, Diversification Is a Liability

Conventional wisdom holds that diversified firms' ability to shift resources across businesses creates competitive advantage. In winner-takes-all markets, however, this flexibility could be taken for...

New Research on How Brand Associations Drive Customer Spending

Research has shown that measuring customer surplus value, or now how much compensation a customer requires to forgo the brand, can help companies determine how valuable they are to their customers...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Look for New Ways to Create Value When Deploying Gen AI

Gen AI is delivering real productivity gains, but across industries, those gains are being competed away, eroding margins rather than expanding them. An analysis of 800 public companies finds no link...

Rethinking Strategy in a Hyperpolitical World

In an era of intensifying polarization, the boundary between business and politics has effectively vanished, rendering political and ethical dynamics as no longer peripheral risks but central...

6 Ways to Make Strategy Resonate with Skeptical Leaders

To leaders of successful organizations, strategy can feel like a slow, political exercise that invites too much debate, increases bureaucracy, and distracts the organization from what made it...

Why Some Companies Grow Rapidly While Others Stall

While every company aims for revenue growth, only a few achieve accelerated returns. To understand what makes the difference, Egon Zehnder consultants surveyed of more than 500 senior revenue-driving...

Your Strategy Needs a Visual Metaphor

Many strategies fail not for lack of vision, but because employees don't understand or aren't sold on enacting them. A new study found-and years of consultant work affirm-that while traditional,...

Will Your Investors Support Your Strategic Pivot?

Strategic pivots often fail-not because of poor ideas or execution but because companies misjudge how attached investors are to their existing strategy. Firms actively cultivate shareholders who are...

Do You Know What Your Customers' Aspirations Are?

Guiding your customers to change means understanding the why behind what people buy from you-and then bringing together the resources to make that outcome happen. There are four types of aspirations...

Gen AI Is Threatening the Platforms That Dominate Online Travel

Even as the dot.com upstarts disrupted traditional companies in the late 1990s, new entrants powered by generative AI are now threatening to do the same to the dot.com giants. They are transforming...

What Leaders Get Wrong About Strategic Alignment

Getting everyone in a company working toward the same goal is crucial for success. When teams arent on the same page, problems like poor teamwork, slow changes, missed targets, and lack of trust pop...

Research: LLMs Respond Differently in English and Chinese

Generative AI is now embedded in daily workflows, shaping how people think, create, and decide. Yet, a critical assumption often goes unnoticed: that AI behaves consistently across languages. A new...

How to Lead When Things Feel Increasingly Out of Control

Leaders everywhere are confronting the reality that things increasingly feel out of control. Three distinct forces are colliding to create a pervasive sense of fear and uncertainty: daily policy...

3 Questions to Ask About Your Corporate Strategy in the Age of AI

In the age of AI, corporate strategy must shift from the industrial logic of scale and scope to a modern intelligence logic centered on knowledge and expertise. As a corporate strategist, your...

Investing in Your Company's Physical Risk Resilience

Extreme weather events, infrastructure and technology failures, and transportation accidents are on the rise globally. These physical threats often have cascading effects that reach all areas of a...

The Gen AI Playbook for Organizations

Leaders can't afford to take a "wait and see" approach to adopting generative AI. They need a plan for applying it differently than others in the value chain, say the authors. In this article they...

How to Monetize Your Data

Many organizations are sitting on valuable proprietary data but lack a clear plan for commercializing it. As interest in selling data grows-driven by advances in AI, pressure to find new sources of...

Research: How Old Companies Can Ignite New Growth

Most companies slow down as they mature, but stagnation is not inevitable. In a global study of 848 firms, the BCG Henderson Institute identified 99 that reignited their momentum, delivering breakout...

The Importance of Correctly Timing Acquisitions for Growth

Many high-growth firms treat acquisitions as a race, pursuing rapid dealmaking to stay ahead of competitors. But new research examining more than 5,100 acquisitions finds that timing matters as much...

Why Should I Do Business with You?

What It Takes to Lead Through Digital Disruption

Researchers found that leaders who successfully navigate digital disruption draw from a mix of traditional and emerging leadership styles. Most impactful, however, was a tension between two...

Your Company Needs a Gaming Strategy

The rise of video games as a dominant digital medium has transformed consumer engagement, prompting companies across industries to adopt gaming strategies to connect authentically with modern...

What Happened When Researchers Co-Founded a Startup with AI

Startups are undergoing a profound transformation as artificial intelligence becomes a foundational element from day one. Rather than being a tool added later, AI is now positioned as the first hire,...

Make Sure Your AI Strategy Actually Creates Value

A companys success will not rest on AI per se; it rests on what companies do with it. When companies lead with AI or treat it as the answer, they put the cart before the horse and risk compromising...