Articles

How Much Time Do Your Employees Spend Botsitting?

AI promises to reduce workloads and improve organizational performance, but its benefits often come with a hidden cost: “botsitting,” the work employees do to make AI useful, from supplying context...

How to Recognize When Your Customers Want You to Act

Customer-listening systems have become adept at identifying what customers want and how they feel, but they often miss a third critical signal: when customers expect action. By combining AI with...

Why Lateral Hires Rarely Become CEO

Internal CEO succession candidates are primarily judged on whether they can lead the enterprise. Lateral hires are judged on two dimensions: whether they can lead the enterprise and whether they have...

Don't Let AI Flatten Your Leadership Style

As leaders increasingly rely on AI, they risk delegating not just tasks but the judgment, voice, and presence that define effective leadership. Protecting their agency requires being intentional...

What to Consider Before Giving Advice on a Global Team

People from different cultures often have fundamentally different assumptions about what makes advice helpful, respectful, and supportive. New research shows that Americans tend to value advice that...

Research: Employees from Lower-Class Backgrounds Negotiate Less-and Face More Backlash

Negotiation is often treated as a neutral, meritocratic process: Employees ask, managers assess, and the strongest case wins. New research challenges that assumption, showing that individuals from...

AI and IT Teams Often Clash. But They Don't Have To.

The arrival of AI has exposed a growing organizational fault line. Although AI and IT are often grouped together as echnology,they typically operate with very different priorities: IT emphasizes...

How AI Agents Orchestrate Work Across Silos

While many companies now use AI to improve individual tasks, most still struggle to apply it to the cross-functional work that makes or breaks enterprise performance. Drawing on field research at...

For Hope to Inspire, It Has to Be Grounded in Organizational Reality

Hope is not optimism or wishful thinking—it’s a goal-oriented motivational force that links present action to a desired future, even amid uncertainty. Leaders often fail to inspire hope effectively...

3 Warning Signs Your Supplier Is in Distress

Suppliers to multinational corporations are under growing pressure from tariffs, logistics disruptions, compliance demands, and repeated global shocks, yet many buyers still rely on conventional...

AI and the Looming Competition for Margin

New technologies, like AI, deliver productivity growth by changing the ratio of inputs to outputs in one of three ways: 1) Reducing input costs (i.e. “Same with less”); 2) Growing outputs with the...

The Case for Hiring Job Hoppers

Conventional wisdom tells leaders to avoid hiring “job hoppers,” assuming frequent movers are unreliable and unlikely to stay. In a new study, however, researchers analyzed the employment histories...

Research: How AI Agents Broaden the Scope of Knowledge Work

AI agents don’t just speed up knowledge work; they change its nature. In a field study of Perplexity’s conversational assistant and autonomous agent, researchers found that not only did the agent...

Don't Underestimate the Power of Customer Referrals

Companies that systematically track referral behavior uncover a powerful, underutilized growth engine. An analysis of more than 10 million consumers reveals that while about 20% of new customers come...

3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities

Leaders today are operating in a state of “ambient urgency,” where constant change, competing priorities, and relentless demands make everything feel equally important. Traditional prioritization and...

Don't Let AI Make Bad Analytics Worse

AI is making data analysis faster and more accessible, but it can also amplify flawed reasoning by producing more answers to the wrong questions. Organizations can avoid that trap by building...

The Invisible Work Draining Your Best Employees

Most leaders assess workload through hours, deadlines, and output, but these measures overlook the mental load employees carry: the ongoing cognitive and emotional effort required to manage tasks,...

Why Mentoring Matters More in the AI Era

As AI automates more routine work, organizations are losing the everyday experiences that once helped employees develop judgment, pattern recognition, and leadership instincts. To close the gap,...

The End of Independent Federal Agencies Will Change Your Business

For executives, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter v. Trump will likely lead to less certainty and consistency for the regulated aspects of their businesses, with federal rules and their...

The 4 Types of Hope

In this week’s The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett writes on new research from IMD’s Alyson Meister, Nele Dael, and David Bach that distinguishes hope from optimism and maps four...

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,...

Are Your Job Postings Driving Away Creative Talent?

Many organizations say they want innovative talent but undermine themselves with the wrong recruitment language. An analysis of 10,000 creative job postings and experiments with 2,000 job seekers...

Research: Why Some Junior Employees Work Well with AI-and Others Don't

Organizations need to understand how individuals create value beyond the AI baseline in real organizational settings, particularly in higher-stakes professional work requiring judgment, domain...

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...

AI Is Squeezing Middle Managers

In this week’s The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett writes on new research showing how AI adoption is overloading middle managers. Gavett also unpacks a new article on the end of...

Make the Business Case for Your Sustainability Initiative

Sustainability proposals often stall not because they lack merit, but because they are framed in a language that does not match how senior leaders allocate capital. While CSOs tend to emphasize...

AI Has Broken Hiring. Here's How to Fix It.

Generative AI is rapidly undermining the reliability of traditional hiring signals, making it easier for candidates to manufacture polished résumés and perform convincingly in remote interviews with...

When Employees Are Held Accountable for AI-Generated Decisions

Organizations are rushing to embed AI into core decisions, but frontline workers are left to explain outputs they neither created nor fully understand. In a multi-year field study spanning banking,...

AI Is Changing How Customers Choose Your Business

As AI increasingly mediates how customers research, evaluate, and choose suppliers, competitive advantage is shifting from direct customer understanding to managing AI-shaped interactions. Drawing on...

Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver

Leaders must model the transformation they expect others to deliver. Yet many leadership teams undermine their own ambitions by promoting agility, experimentation, and innovation while continuing to...

When Employees Are Drowning in Change

Employees can pragmatically absorb only one or two major changes per year, yet leaders are planning three or four by 2027, according to research. Leaders who want to help their teams navigate change...

How Leaders Can Move Past Personal Obstacles

Professional growth can require leaders to acknowledge and release beliefs and behavioral patterns that have been interfering with good decision-making or working relationships. Some leadership...

The Innovation Advantage GenAI Can't Give You

Ideas used to be the scarce resource. GenAI changed that. So, what have startups like Cursor and established companies like Procter & Gamble figured out about innovation and generative AI? The factor...

How Job Design for Disability Improves Work for Everyone

Many physical accommodations that were originally designed to help people with disabilities, such as curb cuts, now benefit everyone. The same can be true of accommodations in the workplace. Recent...

What It Takes to Scale Value-Based Industrial Solutions

New research on manufacturers moving to a value-based sales model finds that delivering initial solutions on a one-off basis is relatively straightforward. The challenge lies in scaling those...

Data Transformation Is the CEO's Business

A multiyear data transformation project at Caterpillar that has made the company AI-ready provides an exemplary case for what leadership commitment to such a technology project involves. CEOs must go...

Ask Sanyin: Why Can't They See That I'm Visionary?

Rising leaders often emphasize the skills and abilities that have won them promotions throughout their careers, such as a deep knowledge of their organization and an ability to respond quickly and...

Resolve the Conflict Between Efficiency and Resilience

Studies of the airline industry show that resilience does not have to come at the cost of efficiency. Managers in a variety of industries can meet both objectives by ensuring that operational...

Why Businesses Should Experiment With Quantum Computing Now

Companies shouldn’t wait until quantum computing technologies have reached maturity to invest in them. As an enabling technology, quantum requires hands-on experimentation, feedback loops that...

Calibrate AI Use to the Decision at Hand

Leaders should understand the differing capabilities of different flavors of AI when applying the tools to decision-making. Analytical AI, such as traditional machine learning models, are useful for...

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...

The Most Popular Articles of 2026 (So Far)

In the July 20, 2026, edition of The Insider, managing editor Gretchen Gavett highlights the most popular articles for HBR subscribers so far this year, as well as a roundup of more recent must-reads...

Responsible AI Is Becoming a Growth Strategy

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in products, services, and decision making, trust is emerging as a critical competitive advantage. Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) must evolve from...

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...

Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems

Frontline employees often know exactly what’s preventing organizations from performing at their best, yet traditional engagement surveys rarely uncover those insights or translate them into action...

Research: AI Is Changing What Employers Want from New Hires

Generative AI is transforming what employers expect from knowledge workers—not by replacing expertise but by raising the bar for it. A study of three sectors that recruit the largest proportion of...

Design AI Systems That Actually Strengthen Human Reasoning

Research from management, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction indicates that users often accept AI-generated outputs uncritically, leading to cognitive offloading, the erosion of...

The Office Amenity That Actually Improves Teamwork

Research on more than 6,000 knowledge workers suggests that the most effective teams are defined less by office perks or work arrangements than by their ability to protect focused work...

How Highly Effective Global Teams Collaborate Across Cultures

Global companies often blame collaboration failures on cultural differences, but the bigger problem is usually organizational design. Time zones, language, and national culture create unavoidable...

Research Roundup: The Death of the Cover Letter, Boring Meetings, Wide Salary Ranges, and More

Staying on top of new research can help your company make more informed decisions. This research roundup, drawn from the July-August magazine issue, offers insights into topics including middle...

Stop AI from Eroding Your Brand

Artificial intelligence is changing how companies operate and how customers experience their brands. New research suggests that companies with lower levels of “brand debt”—the trust, relevance, and...