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...

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, relationships, and coordination at work and at home. When

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, companies must redesign mentoring for the AI era. By making

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 enforcement increasingly determined by political expedie

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 varieties of this powerful tool-some of which are more e

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, from how to find your organization's strategic center to

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 show employers overwhelmingly emphasize words like "genius,

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 expertise, and decision-ready outputs. KPMG and researchers fr

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 the lived organization employees actually work in. She

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 cheap capital and shares a roundup of HBR's best Manageme

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 impact, materiality, and disclosure, CFOs and CEOs need to un

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 real-time assistance tools. Interviews with 120...

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, recruitment, and biotechnology, researchers found that em

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 the experiences of three small-to-medium sized business

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 govern through legacy processes that reward predictabili

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 must pay close attention to how people are experiencing

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 development experts believe that techniques from Integrated F

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 that drives differentiation is the human insight that h

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 research shows that working alongside someone with a disa

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 solutions to more customers, which requires structured, repeata

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 beyond communicating abstract support, by setting a tan

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 comprehensively to top leaders' questions. But showing off

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 performance metrics reflect true customer priorities; using pre

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 support incremental learning, and co-invention cycles between

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 optimization problems that require a predictive recommen

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 against Peloton, iTutorGroup, Workday, Cigna, and other

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 and listens. Plus, Gavett invites subscribers to take t

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 a compliance exercise into a strategic capability that h

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 organization's inertia. Yet McKinsey research across more than

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. Companies can close that gap by adopting a disciplined si

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 MBA graduates found that three capabilities will distingui

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 contextual expertise, and increasingly homogeneous thinking. T

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. High-performing teams deliberately reduce interruptions through focus

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

When Developing an AI Strategy, Beware the Urgency Trap

Theres a consistent pattern in failed or underperforming AI initiatives. Business leaders tend to frame AI through the lens of what they see as the most urgent problems-bottlenecks in productivity, rising costs, slow decision-making, or inefficiencies in