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,...

What Actually Sets High Achievers Apart?

While many high achievers rely on positive internal attributes, including intelligence, passion, and perseverance, research shows that external factors also play a big role in their success. In this...

How Leaders Talk About AI Predicts Adoption

New research from BCG finds that how a company talks about AI is a material predictor of adoption results. The companies where leaders' stories provide clarity, hope, and growth are seeing outsized...

A Collection of HBR's Most Insightful Research on AI at Work

Research on AI in the workplace can show us how the technology is really being used and what it does to the way we work. Recent studies offer lessons for leaders on how employees are actually using...

Is Reluctance to Step into Leadership a Sign of Maturity or a Red Flag?

Organizations often equate eagerness to lead with readiness, overlooking employees who hesitate to step forward. But reluctance can reflect self-awareness, careful consideration of the role's...

How CEOs Set the Tempo

CEOs are judged not only by the strategies they choose but by the pace at which they execute them. Move too quickly and organizations burn out, make avoidable mistakes, or outrun their capabilities...

Why Even Your Best Employees Override AI Systems That Work

Companies are deploying AI systems faster than they are redesigning the governance surrounding them. As a result, many AI systems remain permanent advisers rather than actual decision-makers-not...

Building a Competitive Advantage in the Healthcare AI Market

As advanced AI becomes widely accessible, healthcare companies can no longer rely on superior technology alone for lasting advantage. Instead, they need a coherent AI strategy built around five...

How Leaders Counter Pessimism in Trying Times

When teams face challenging times and are overwhelmed by negative news, failures, roadblocks, or uncertainty, the learned helplessness and pessimism they feel can erode engagement, energy, and...

Your Chatbot Will Define Your Brand

As AI chatbots become customers' primary interface with companies, relationship management is shifting from a marketing challenge to a product design challenge. Customers increasingly experience the...

When Raising Prices Is Better Than Cutting Quality

When costs rise, companies often look beyond price increases to protect margins. But cutting product quality, or "skimpflation," can carry the greatest long-term risk. Across 25 experiments involving...

Bob Iger on Power, Succession, and Leading Disney Through Upheaval

Longtime Disney CEO Bob Iger sits down with Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, to reflect on what it takes to lead a company as iconic-and complex-as Disney: honoring the past...

The More Accessible Information Is, the Less Employees Remember

Greater connectivity can make employees better at finding knowledge while leaving them less likely to retain it. Across five experiments involving more than 1,000 people, participants who formed...

Closing the Gap Between AI Investment and Financial Return

Companies today often use AI to pursue low-value opportunities: adding a new feature that doesn't truly matter to the customer or giving employees tools that save them time but don't capture...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Building Influence

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 building influence, from how to give a...

The Global Scaling Gap: Why Strategic Clarity Is Crucial in the Age of AI

Digital platforms and generative AI have made it easier than ever for startups anywhere to access global talent and markets, but companies outside major hubs still struggle to scale. The culprit...

The Hidden Cost of AI-Assisted Creativity

AI can make individual creators more productive and inventive - but at a collective cost. Across four studies spanning short-story writing, circular-economy solutions, humor, and collaborative...

How a Healthy Work Culture Helps Trauma Survivors

A large percentage of individuals have experienced adverse childhood events that can cause troublesome psychological and behavioral issues in adulthood. Positive workplace experiences and managers...

Robots Are Coming - but Not Everywhere

Humanoid robot technologies are advancing fast, but the pace of adoption may move less predictably. Each use case demands distinct technology to fulfill the robot's specialized role. In geographic...

How Leaders Unlock Innovation on the Front Lines

Employees on the front lines are well positioned to see opportunities for improvement in areas like customer experience. But when leadership fails to offer encouragement or support, workers may come...

What CEOs Need to Know About Sovereign AI

An Accenture survey of 1,928 executives across 28 countries reveals that most companies treat sovereign AI as a compliance issue rather than a strategic opportunity. Sovereignty is a continuum of...

A New Way to Address Troubled Team Dynamics

Whether team members collaborate effectively is often rooted in their ability to work through, accept, and capitalize on their differences. Through facilitated discussions following the completion of...

GenAI Success Metrics: Look Beyond Reduced Workload

At the Community College of Philadelphia, generative AI tools didn't magically free up people's time or supercharge one productivity metric across the board. An analysis found that GenAI resulted in...

Leadership's Blind Spot in the Age of AI

AI's computation and pattern-recognition capabilities don't encompass all intelligence. Leaders must also cultivate organic intelligence as expressed by embodied cognition, as well as source...

The Link Between Explicit AI-Generated Images and Offline Crime

A new research study reveals that broad availability of AI-generated adult content may have led to sharp increases in sexual criminality. An analysis of detailed crime data released by Japan's...

How GenAI Can and Can't Help Manage Customer Insights

Companies want to harness insights about customers from a wide variety of places. Generative AI tools can help in new ways, but some classic knowledge management obstacles remain. Here's what...

Research: The True Cost of Corporate Scandals? Talent.

New research tracking millions of career moves shows that corporate misconduct carries a significant hidden cost: voluntary employee departures. An analysis of 735 large public companies found that...

AI Transformation Requires Redesigning Work, Not Cutting Roles

AI is beginning to reshape workforce decisions, but many companies are moving faster than the evidence warrants. Early AI-driven layoffs have often failed to deliver expected returns, exposed gaps in...

When a Team Member Underperforms-but Has Organizational Capital

Leaders sometimes inherit an underperforming employee they cannot remove, leaving them responsible for results without the authority to address the problem. They can limit the damage by testing...

What Leaders Need to Know About AI and Psychological Safety

AIs perceived neutrality plays a role in reshaping how psychological safety is experienced in organizations. When employees use AI to surface concerns they dont feel safe raising directly, they are...

Case Study: How Hard Should You Push Diversity?

The Hidden Costs of Monitoring Employees with AI

AI is making employee monitoring cheaper, more granular, and continuous-but lower costs can encourage companies to overuse controls without considering their broader consequences. Research shows that...

Research: Work Stress Isn't Always About Workload

When employees seem stressed, leaders typically blame workload and respond with the usual remedies: task redistribution, time off, time management training. But a meta-analysis of 515 studies reveals...

When There's More Work Than Your Team Can Handle

When demands increase while resources shrink, leaders cant simply absorb the extra work or push an already-overextended team harder. Both approaches carry costs: burnout for you, and eroded trust and...

Research: Gen AI Is Collapsing Creative Processes

Generative AI is transforming creative work by making it faster and easier to brainstorm and visualize ideas. But a new, yearlong study following senior creatives in charge of television and...

Will Your Organization Stand By Its Values-Even When It's Hard?

Organizational values often emphasize what companies stand for, but their real power may lie in defining what they refuse to do, especially when doing so carries a cost. The "Refusal Framework of...

You Think You're a Good Collaborator. Do the People You Manage Agree?

Senior leaders often pride themselves on listening and empowering others-but the people around them may experience something quite different. Research with more than 10,000 professionals and 400...

The Human Side of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Business Model Innovation

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is growing in popularity, yet insights on its application to business model innovation (BMI) are scarce. Drawing on a qualitative, multiphase study...

How to Achieve Large-Scale Social Impact

The authors combine scholarship from social entrepreneurship and systems literature to identify two dominant pathways used by mission-driven organizations to achieve large-scale social impact. The...

Identifying and Overcoming Challenges in Intelligent Process Automation

The global services industry increasingly adopts software for intelligent process automation, including robotic process automation, low-code and no-code development solutions that are enhanced by...

BYOC: Strategic Choices Along the AI Compute Ownership Spectrum

For almost two decades, digital leaders grew as asset-light firms, scaling on software, data, and talent. The arrival of generative AI changed that logic. Compute and energy are now production...

Bringing Back Intuition into Scenario Planning

Intuitive logics is a prominent scenario planning method of strategic foresight that organizations use to plan in the context of uncertain future operating environments. Designed to counter linear...

Challenges in Navigating Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is often promoted as a way to challenge assumptions and prepare organizations for uncertainty. Yet little is known about what happens when scenarios confront leadership bias and...

Scenario Planning for Strategic Decision-Making, Learning, and Managing Uncertainty

In times of radical uncertainty marked by geopolitical conflict, technological disruptions, societal transformations, and climate risk, scenario planning is critical for strategists. In this...

Silver Economy Influencers: Unlocking the Untapped Potential of Mature Content Creators

While older consumers are among the fastest-growing and most affluent demographic segments, they remain largely neglected in marketing practice and research, and firms often struggle to determine the...

The Dynamic Capabilities of Chinese Companies: Leadership In An Age Of Disruptive Innovation

Leading Chinese and US companies are building the dynamic capabilities needed to compete and innovate in fast-changing global markets. The most resilient companies are blending strategic vision with...

Weaving Urban Circularity: The Role of Fashion Startups

London's circular fashion start-ups are reshaping the industry while struggling to integrate with the city's broader sustainability goals. Through three innovative businesses - a clothing swap...

Advancing Circularity: The Dynamic Capabilities to Drive Transformative Change

Most corporate sustainability efforts remain incremental, focusing on reducing harm rather than transforming systems. That's insufficient to address escalating environmental challenges...

Food Supply Chain Orchestration for Circularity: The Lost Food Project

Supply chains are vital units of analysis of the circular economy (CE), and network orchestrators are central to fostering the CE's essential interorganizational collaboration. However, orchestration...

Tensions in Data Sharing Governance for Circular Cities: The Case of the Digital Product Passport

Data sharing across organizational boundaries has become increasingly important for advancing the transition to circular cities. To establish a structured data-sharing effort among different actors,...