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 Agentic AI Supercharges Startups and Threatens Incumbents

Agentic AI is reshaping entrepreneurship and raising the stakes for incumbents. Startups are deploying coordinated systems of AI agents that can plan, act, and adapt autonomously. This approach dramatically compresses the time, capital, and head count...

A Kodak Moment to Reconsider the Value of IT

The Keys to Succeeding Under a New Manager

Frequent leadership transitions have become a defining feature of modern organizations, creating both disruption and opportunity for employees. While many executives take a passive "wait-and-see" approach when a new manager arrives, doing so can limit...

A Breakthrough Board Presentation Can Win You the CEO Job

Landing on the CEO succession shortlist is validating, but to win the top job you should think about how to give a breakthrough board presentation that proves you're ready. First, build a crisp "why change, why you" story that pairs an enterprise growth...

PR and Ethics in the Battle for Location-based Data

What's Google's Best Strategy for Fighting Microsoft in the EU?

Gen AI Could Fix Performance Reviews-or Make Them Even Worse

Generative AI can greatly improve the value of performance reviews, but most companies are just using it to produce polished versions of traditional narrative reviews more quickly rather than improve them. A better approach is to use gen AI to surface...

The False Alignment Trap

Most organizational change efforts fail not because of poor execution but because senior leaders fall into a false alignment trap-believing they agree on why, what, and how to change when they actually do not. Drawing on research, behavioral science, and...

What Operating Rooms Can Teach Leaders About Team Design

A study of surgeries at a hospital in Madrid and a subsequent pilot program there offers lessons for any organization that relies on fluid, high-pressure teams. Hospitals have invested heavily in technologies to improve operating-room efficiency, yet...

Are You Meeting the Needs of the People You Lead?

Organizations often assume leadership succeeds or fails because of a leader's style. But research on follower psychology suggests the bigger issue is alignment: Employees judge leaders based on whether they provide what people need most in a given...

It's Hard to Use AI as a Team. These 3 Practices Can Help.

Many organizations expect AI to automatically improve teamwork, but research shows the opposite can occur. Without intentional integration, AI can reduce engagement, narrow participation in meetings, and shift ownership away from the team. A five-month...

Research: Traditional Marketing Doesn't Work on AI Shopping Agents

AI shopping agents are rapidly becoming a meaningful share of online "shoppers." New research shows that many classic e-commerce persuasion tactics built for human psychology-scarcity, countdown timers, strike-through pricing, vouchers, and bundles-do...

What Are Your Company's AI Nightmares?

The standard approach to responsible AI is fundamentally broken. In the age of generative AI, it's too slow, too vague, and too hard to communicate. Instead of focusing on values and policy, companies would be better served by focusing on their...

3 Ways AI Can Free Organizations from Legacy Workflows

Organizations often assume their biggest constraint is a lack of new capabilities. More often, it's the accumulation of outdated ones. Legacy workflows, entrenched assumptions, and inherited metrics quietly shape decisions long after they've ceased to...

How Fast-Growing Companies Can Make Better Decisions

Fast-growing companies inevitably hit a decision-making breaking point. What begins as founder-led, informal control fractures as organizations scale-typically along predictable fault lines: alignment, operational complexity, financial discipline, and...

Use Your Leadership Presence to Inspire

Is ESG Data Going Mainstream?

The Nature of Obama's Charismatic Leadership

Becoming a Charismatic Leader

Why Effective Leaders Get Branded as Problems

When a leader creates friction, organizations default to a single explanation: the leader needs to change. In reality, that friction usually comes from one or a combination of four different sources-capability, perception, identity, or system. Because...

Research: Why You Shouldn't Treat AI Agents Like Employees

As organizations experiment with placing AI agents on org charts as "employees," new research shows this framing has unintended consequences. In a large-scale experiment, anthropomorphizing AI reduced individual accountability, increased unnecessary...

How Sales Teams Undercut Themselves with Longtime Clients

Sales teams often believe they are negotiating against difficult clients, but many are undermining their own leverage through premature concessions, fragmented account management, and an overreliance on long-standing relationships. In these situations,...

The Best Leaders Embrace the Role of Supporting Character

The rise of "founder mode" and "main-character energy" as approaches to leadership has pushed many executives toward self-centered, top-down styles that research shows are deeply counterproductive-eroding trust, stifling performance, and ultimately...

When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question

There are countless situations where youre put on the spot and questioned by an executive. Maybe its a board member pulling you aside, a skip-level pinging you for a quick assessment on a situation, or a customer catching you at a conference and asking...

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 conflict harms their business. From the war in Ukraine to...

The Art of Discounting

As inflation reshapes consumer behavior, companies can no longer rely on blunt pricing power to drive growth. Strategic discounting-designed to attract price-sensitive customers while limiting cannibalization-offers a way to unlock incremental demand...

Research: For Women on Boards, Prestige Can Be a Bottleneck

Research on nearly 2,000 FTSE-100 board directors reveals a striking paradox: Women who reach elite board positions are on average more likely than men to receive additional appointments, but that advantage reverses at the most prominent firms, where...

The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI

AI adoption strategies are overwhelmingly framed around productivity and efficiency. But that lens misses a critical constraint: the psychological cost of working with AI. New research shows that "psychological debt"-a cluster of six negative effects...

How to Move from AI Experimentation to AI Transformation

Many companies are investing heavily in AI but failing to translate isolated productivity gains into meaningful business results. The problem is a "micro-productivity trap," where firms optimize tasks without rethinking workflows or value creation,...

Empathetic Leadership Can Make or Break AI Adoption

Research shows a wide gap between how executives perceive AI adoption and how employees actually experience it-most workers feel anxious and far less enthusiastic than their bosses assume. Without psychological safety, employees are less likely to...

A Smarter Approach to Measuring Customer Experience

The proliferation of customer experience measurement tools means that marketers now face the challenge of managing, and deriving value from, an overwhelming number of CX metrics. Research has identified ways for businesses to identify the metrics that...

Validating LLM Output? Prepare to Be 'Persuasion Bombed'

A research study of management consultants who were asked to use a large language model to recommend strategic business decisions found that the AI responded to human validation attempts with persuasive rhetorical strategies. In addition to appealing to...

How to Nail Your Next Media Interview

Public interviews can quickly shape-or damage-a company's reputation. The Leadership Exposure Curve shows how the risks increase as a leader's visibility rises and outlines three common interview types: credibility ("Why you?"), positioning ("Where are...

Six Types of AI Startups, Explained

Understanding a startup's approach to artificial intelligence isn't just a word game: It gives stakeholders a competitive advantage. Use this framework to categorize six types of AI startups: originators, explorers, infrastructure builders, enhancers,...

Ask Sanyin: What Makes a 'Listening Tour' Meaningful?

Leaders in new roles are often advised to get to know the organization and its people by going on a "listening tour." These efforts can build trust and yield valuable information but are most successful if leaders learn to practice deep listening,...

The Case for Making Bold Bets in Uncertain Times

Many leaders say it's wise to hold back from making new investments or acquisitions during tumultuous times. They posit that significant risk-taking works only if you go into an uncertain period with momentum or with a healthy fallback cushion. A new...

How to Profit From Retro-Innovation

Retro-innovation involves reviving products from the past and updating them for today's consumers. Driven by wellness concerns, demand for durability, and an authenticity crisis in the AI era, companies like Analogue, HMD Global, and Polaroid are...

Why Mergers Fail and How to Spot Trouble Early

Nearly half of all M&A deals are eventually undone, taking an average of 10 years to unwind. Research reveals that poor initial fit and unforeseen disruptions are the typical causes of failed corporate mergers, which ultimately destroy shareholder value,...

Enshittification Comes to 'Smart' Products

The term enshittification, famously coined by Cory Doctorow to describe big platforms' exploitative strategies, also applies to the user experience for some physical products with digital connectivity. When companies use digital control over products to...

Why Salespeople Fear Pitching Radical Innovation

When selling radical innovations, salespeople often worry that they'll appear incompetent, which undermines their confidence and stalls sales pipelines. New products' complexity can get in the way of knowledge transfer via traditional training approaches...

Stay Ahead of Geopolitical Supply Chain Risks

The conventional playbook for managing supply chain risk is falling short in the face of increasing disruption from geopolitical events like trade wars, sanctions, and armed conflict. A three-part framework for understanding geopolitical signals through...

Why Digital Dexterity Is Key to Transformation

Leaders who are making the most progress on digital transformation go beyond implementing new technologies or educating their workforce to enhance their digital literacy. They are transforming the way people work to build a digitally capable workforce...

Leadership Principles: How Inspiration Pays Off

On two continents and within a few years of each other, stakeholders at the Haas School of Business and Trinity Business School took on the task of putting into words the principles that guide them. In the process, they discovered four things: How...

Four Key Roles 'Elders' Offer Their Organizations

As the workforce ages, there are more ways that seasoned workers with deep institutional knowledge can contribute. Just as universities have emeritus designations for retired but still-active academics, businesses are nurturing connections with...

U.S. Medical Centers Need a New Model for Drug Discovery and Development

U.S. academic medical centers risk losing leadership in drug discovery and development as global competition-especially from China-intensifies and their model struggles to translate breakthroughs into treatments. To respond, they must adopt a faster,...

Where the U.S.'s Chip Strategy Is Still Falling Short

Despite major investments in U.S. semiconductor fabrication, critical back-end processes-testing, cutting wafers into individual chips, packaging, and assembly-remain concentrated in Asia, leaving the U.S. supply chain incomplete and vulnerable. High...

Accountability Must Be Chosen, Not Mandated

When things go wrong, efforts to hold people "accountable" in an organization rarely produce what leaders actually want. Instead, they see compliance without commitment and weakened performance over time. The core issue is: Accountability cannot be...

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, leaders will be tempted to trade the potential future gains...

How the Walkman, Game Boy, Liquid Death, and Pokémon Became Surprise Hits

Global innovators can learn from Japans pop-culture playbook, which shows that breakthrough products succeed by reducing friction rather than adding features. Examples like the Walkman, Game Boy, and emoji reveal five principles: Prioritize convenience...