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,...

Chain Stores vs. Amazon

Who Owns the Customer in the Age of AI Agents?

AI agents are changing the nature of customer relationships by taking on more of the discovery, comparison, negotiation, and purchasing decisions that companies once controlled through their own...

Sustainability Reporting Isn't the Same as Risk Preparedness

Sustainability reporting has become widespread among large firms, but strong disclosure does not necessarily translate into preparedness for climate-related risks. This research identifies a critical...

Don't Grieve for the Great A&P

What Top Performers Do Differently with AI-and Why They See the Biggest Benefits

AI isn't simply replacing sales work or automatically equalizing sales performance; it's providing disproportionate lift to individuals and organizations that can build systems around their inherent...

How Copycats Can Reveal Your Competitive Advantage

Imitation is becoming easier and faster as e-commerce, social media, and AI lower the barriers to copying successful products, services, and business practices. While companies need to defend their...

Your Executive Team Needs More Productive Conflict

Many leadership teams struggle not with too much conflict, but too little: Executives avoid challenging one another, leaving important ideas and decisions insufficiently debated. Productive conflict...

The 6 Essential Skills Your Workforce Needs to Keep Pace with AI

AI upskilling efforts often leave employees feeling overwhelmed and organizations feeling disappointed. Instead of creating an ever-expanding checklist of skills, Gartner research has identified two...

Research: Sleep Deprivation Is a Leadership Problem

Sleep deprivation remains widespread among leaders, and many leaders underestimate how much fatigue affects their performance. A new survey of 1,009 U.S. managers and executives suggests that the...

Do You Know What Your Customers Value?

Many executives mistakenly believe that because theyve spent heavily on gathering customer feedback, monitoring competitors, and analyzing market trends, they understand what customers want. But the...

There's No Such Thing as an AI-Ready Culture

Organizations today need to simultaneously perform (run the business reliably for today) and transforming (change the business for tomorrow). The challenge is that most organizations are much better...

Research: When Pay Fluctuates, Workers Walk Away

Today, more than 80% of employers offer some form of variable pay. From performance bonuses to tipped service jobs to demand-based gig work, more and more workers are taking home paychecks that...

What the Honda Super Cub Can Teach Us About Designing for Global Markets

Most companies enter emerging markets through one of three flawed strategies: selling premium products to the wealthy few, stripping features to cut costs, or offering micro-sized portions-all of...

AI Is Making Verification the Bottleneck for Companies

Hierarchy does more than route information; it also verifies: deciding what information means, what deserves the firm's attention, which outputs can be trusted, and which are worth generating at all...

Remembering Howard Stevenson, Who Transformed the Study of Entrepreneurship

Howard Stevenson transformed entrepreneurship from a study of founders personalities and business formation into a way of managing: pursuing opportunity beyond the resources currently controlled. His...

The Mindsets Leaders Need as AI Accelerates the Pace of Business

AI is changing not only what leaders need to know, but how they need to think. Yet many are struggling to adapt to the speed, uncertainty, and emotional complexity of an AI-driven workplace. To keep...

Will Your Leadership Improvements Stick?

Debt and the Future of the U.S.

How AI Is Changing Cyber Threats-and Cybersecurity-for SMBs

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have long been at a disadvantage on cybersecurity. State-of-the-art cybersecurity and resilience programs have historically been expensive and pursued only by...

Why Companies Should Support Crisis Volunteer Work

Employees who volunteer during a crisis bring more back to work than a sense of having helped: They can also become more resilient, adaptive, and innovative. Research across multiple crises in the U...

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...