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...

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 friction; what determines success is how companies structur

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 managers' impact on upskilling efforts, why intrinsically mot

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 consistency lost when products, experiences, and decision

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 problem is that existing merger and acquisition (M&A) framew

Are You Biased Toward Job Candidates Who Reply Quickly?

Hiring managers believe they prioritize experience, credentials, and fit when they wade through job applications. But a new study found that how quickly candidates reply to messages powerfully influences who gets hired. An analysis of more than 11 million

4 Hidden Traps of Team Dynamics

Many leaders believe that diverse teams naturally produce better ideas and decisions. But difference creates value only when leaders can navigate the friction that accompanies different perspectives. Four common leadership traps-certainty, inconsistency b

The Best Teams Know When to Work Alone

In the July 13, 2026, edition of The Insider, managing editor Gretchen Gavett highlights three shifts in how organizations should think about work. First, new research on "superteams" finds that quiet, uninterrupted time is just as essential to great coll

AI Can Measure How ESG Really Impacts the Bottom Line

Advances in large language models are making rigorous sustainability analysis dramatically faster and cheaper, allowing investors and other stakeholders to connect companies' disclosed environmental and social risks directly to financial performance in a

U.S. and Japanese Companies Struggle with Different Parts of AI Adoption-and Offer Different Lessons for Making It Work

Companies in both the U.S. and Japan are struggling to deploy AI, but often in very different ways. In the U.S., deployment is wide but shallow, meaning companies struggle to create real value with AI. In Japan, deployment has moved slowly, but where it h

Great Leaders Know Which Emotions Their Feedback Will Trigger

People don't learn from feedback simply because they receive it-they learn when the emotions feedback triggers keep their attention focused on improving the work rather than protecting themselves. Drawing on more than a decade of research, the authors exp

AI Adoption Is Testing Modular Firms

Organizations have spent decades becoming more modular, breaking themselves into agile teams, business units, and platforms to improve flexibility and speed. But many are discovering a new constraint: They can decompose work far more easily than they can

When Companies in a Supply Chain Work on Different Timelines

Industries are increasingly split between fast-moving digital demand and slow-moving physical capacity, creating costly coordination failures. Traditional collaboration models-built for sequential decision-making and limited visibility-cannot manage these

What 60 Years of Data Reveals About How Men and Women Experience Leadership

In 1965, Harvard Business Review surveyed 2,000 male and female executives to track perceptions of women in leadership. Since then, researchers have replicated that study every twenty years to gauge shifting attitudes toward women in top posts. In this la

Performance Management Needs New Metrics in the AI Era

Even as they adopt AI, companies are measuring employee performance with familiar metrics of success: productivity, goal completion, and efficiency. As such, employees who rely heavily on AI may appear highly productive, while those who slow down to verif

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 found that pro-America marketing has increasingly shifted

The Case for Performance-First Management

What began as a crisis-driven response to the Covid pandemic laid the foundation for todays dominant management paradigm: people-first management. But todays business demands a different approach, as performance and productivity have replaced engagement

Tailor Your Digital Strategy to Reach Every Customer

Most companies operate multiple go-to-market models simultaneously, yet often try to govern them with a single digital strategy. That approach can fail because digital tools, AI systems, and decision rights must be designed differently for digital-first,

Your Talent Strategy Has to Keep Up with Your AI Transformation

The entry-level job pipeline is thinning globally, and the consequences of eliminating these types of roles in favor of AI are compounding. Eliminate entry-level roles, and you reduce the headcount that justifies mid-level managers. Reduce mid-level manag

How to Get AI to Surface Your Brand

As AI increasingly mediates product discovery, traditional brand-building advantages such as awareness, storytelling, and emotional appeal are becoming less decisive. Instead, brands gain visibility in AI-generated recommendations when their value can be

What Global Turmoil Means for Company Structure

Global geopolitical turbulence signals not the end of globalization but its structural reconfiguration. Businesses are confronting the weaponization of supply chains, the segmentation of digital ecosystems, and an increase in industrial policy competition

Why Business Leaders Need to Champion Democracy

Almost all executives agree that a well-functioning democracy is important to a strong economy. But many are unsure about what role they can play in supporting it. The authors suggest four actions: Defend democratic institutions and processes; support ind

How AI Helps the Best and Hurts the Rest

Can generative AI serve as an on-demand business adviser? A field experiment with hundreds of small business owners in Kenya found that AI access boosted revenues and profits by 15% for high performers - but caused a nearly 10% decline for those who had a

The Trap That Skilled Negotiators Miss

In negotiations, first offers act as powerful psychological anchors - and even skilled negotiators struggle to escape them. New research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology finds that adopting a choice mindset when you receive a fir

Gain Consumer Insight With Generative AI

Marketing research traditionally costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes months. Large language models are changing this by compressing timelines from months to days. LLMs enable synthetic consumer "digital twins" for rapid concept testing, AI-modera

Job Pivots in the Age of AI: Lessons From 'Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel'

As AI reshapes the job market, many people will need to reinvent their professional identities. Where can they find comfort and guidance? A classic children's book from 1939, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, meets the current moment well. Its messages

Reinveiting Enterprise Models In the Age of Generative AI

While AI adoption promises significant productivity and revenue gains, the authors argue that the greatest barrier is human and organizational: bringing people along and redesigning how work is done. Their four-lens framework - amplified intelligence, dyn

Dynamic Work Design Blending a Discovery Mindset with Structured Problem-Solving

Putting automatic processing on hold and embracing structured problem solving can break the biases that come with past success - and lead to new levels of performance. In this book excerpt, and drawing on their lived experiences teaching courses at MIT, t

Think Like a Boss: Tackling the Allure of the Singular Story

When leaders become overly atttached to their own interpretation of events, they can fall into the "singular story" trap. In this book excerpt, the author argues that effective leadership requires shifting from certainty to curiosity and actively seek out

The Transformation Economy: Fostering Human Flourishing

This article argues that the purpose of business is to enable human flourishing by guiding customer transformations across four interconnected spheres: health and well-being, wealth and prosperity, knowledge and wisdom, and purpose and meaning. Drawing on

The ABCDE of Digital Transformation

Digital technology adoption across organizations increased by 270 per cent between 2015 and 2024, yet many firms continue to struggle to translate these investments into meaningful impact. Our research suggests that the primary barrier to successful digit

Audit Yourself to Get More From GenAI

How can you tell whether you're conducting your sessions with ChatGPT or Claude wisely? One executive's solution was to build a self-audit. He shares the macro-prompt he created to assess GenAI interactions across five goals and 30 habits that are key to

Managing Up: A Skill Set That Matters Now

Managing up represents one of the most significant and least appreciated talents you can master - one that's vital to both your career and your organization's success. Working successfully with people above you in the hierarchy requires you to carefully b

Rethink Responsibility in the Age of AI

As AI systems take on more organizational decision-making, traditional models of accountability - focused on identifying a single culprit when something goes wrong - are breaking down. Drawing on recent research, the authors introduce narrative responsibi

The Best Customers to Study When Scaling Into a New Market

Companies trying to scale tech products know the hard truth: An offering that connects with people in one environment may fail in another. How can you avoid such an outcome? Leaders must learn quickly and iterate on products using lessons from their organ

The Art of Simplification: Putting a Behavioural Intervention in the Spotlight

Considerable research suggests that making information simpler is better. Simplification improves the efficiency of information extraction and lowers psychological frictions, leading to its popularity with policymakers and practitioners worldwide. However

AI Adoption Is Overloading Your Middle Managers

Researchers conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with partners, managers, and junior consultants at two major consulting firms to understand how people at each level were actually using AI, what support they received, and where the friction was. They f

The Two-Organizations Problem

What if the company you're leading isn't the one you think it is? Most companies operate as two organizations: the polished version executives see in dashboards and boardrooms, and the messier, more revealing reality lived by employees. This gap isn't acc

Great Leaders Question Philosophical Assumptions

Business leaders increasingly face decisions that are not just technical or financial but deeply philosophical. Questions about what a company is for, what counts as reliable knowledge, and what responsibilities organizations owe customers, employees, and

Teach Your AI How You Make Decisions

As AI agents take on more complex work, the key constraint is no longer access to technology but an organization's ability to make its decision-making processes explicit. Many critical judgments-about risk, exceptions, quality, escalation, customer treatm

Startup Founders Need a New Sales Playbook

Technology founders are trying to sell in markets that are far more crowded, skeptical, and fast-moving than the environments traditional sales playbooks were designed for. Drawing on interviews with more than 250 founders worldwide, we argue that many st

Does Your AI Have a Personality Problem?

As companies embed AI more deeply into work, performance depends not only on what systems can do but how they behave. Research shows that AI personas-supportive or hostile-shape employee stress, resistance, and work quality, often in ways traditional surv

The 5 Types of AI Investment-and How to Capture Their Value

There are five types of AI investments-two tactical to maintain market position and three strategic to build durable advantage-and none can be measured against traditional ROI calculation tools. Tactical investments include ones made for competitive parit

The End of Cheap Capital

As the era of cheap capital comes to an end, executives will need to relearn the discipline of rigorous capital allocation. For nearly two decades, historically low interest rates allowed companies to prioritize growth, tolerate weak returns, and rely on

Our Favorite Management Tips on Decision-Making

Our Management Tip of the Day newsletter continues to be one of HBRs most popular newsletters. In this article, weve compiled 10 of our favorite tips on decision-making, from how to make choices under pressure to how to lead with clarity and care when e

LLMs Misunderstand Luxury Brands. Here's How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy for AI.

As AI agents and LLMs increasingly mediate consumer choice, luxury brands face a distinct visibility and interpretation risk. New research shows that while models reliably process explicit cues (brand names, prices, overt "luxury" claims), they frequently

How to Design Agentic Systems Around the Implicit Rules that Govern Your Company

As companies rush to deploy AI agents, they are discovering that much of their most important organizational intelligence lives outside formal systems and documented processes. Examples from financial services, software, and consulting firms demonstrate h

The Strongest Teams of AI Agents Will Be Built Using Different Models

Agentic AI is so prevalent that some business leaders now count AI agents as part of their regular workforce. Yet, without attention to the diversity of this burgeoning agentic workforce, business leaders are likely to find that many of the promised benef

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 users' everyday habits. The authors argue that this "ha

3 Forces Are Redefining the Transition from Manager to Leader

The seven shifts that define the move from functional to enterprise leadership remain similar to those introduced in a classic 2012 HBR article. But todays dynamic business environment means that the shifts now require different capabilities. Generative