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 Do Workers Develop Good Judgment in the AI Era?

AI is creating a major organizational challenge: People with deep experience get huge productivity gains, while junior employees often can't tell whether AI‑generated work is any good or how to improve it. Because AI now handles the messy, repetitive...

9 Trends Shaping Work in 2026 and Beyond

CEO expectations for AI-driven growth remain high heading into 2026, even as evidence shows most AI investments are failing to deliver meaningful returns. The result is a set of emerging risks-from premature layoffs and cultural dissonance to declining...

The Management Practices That Make Employee Ownership Pay Off

While many companies try to foster an "ownership culture" to boost engagement and performance, true success comes when employees are given actual equity stakes. However, financial ownership alone is insufficient; the most effective organizations combine...

Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI's Potential-Not Its Performance

AI has been cited as a cause of layoffs, but is it actually displacing jobs? And if not, whats going on? Based on a survey of 1,006 global executives in December 2025, AI is behind at least some layoffs, but that these are almost completely in...

Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale

Scaling innovation today demands contributions from multiple partners. Many innovations fail not because of flawed ideas but because teams and organizations struggle to collaborate across boundaries. Whats needed is a particular kind of leader: the...

How Gen Z Uses Gen AI-and Why It Worries Them

When it comes to gen AI, the habits, attitudes, and ideas of Gen Z are a harbinger of the future of work-and how the rest of us will feel when we get there. A survey of nearly 2,500 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 28 years old revealed some...

When Tipping Becomes a Customer Experience Problem

Tipping has evolved from a hospitality tradition into a widespread expectation across many service sectors, including airlines, medical offices, and self-checkout kiosks. Surveys show that a significant portion of Americans feel tipping culture is out of...

AI Has Made Hiring Worse-But It Can Still Help

While AI has the potential to transform hiring, its important to be realistic about what has actually happened so far. For all the talk about AI supercharging talent, the reality is that talent markets remain as inefficient as ever, with employers...

When You Have to Assign Work No One Wants to Do

Managers often try to generate buy-in for unwanted assignments by persuading, incentivizing, or softening the message-but these tactics can backfire. Research shows that what matters more than choice is acceptance: when employees see an assignment as...

For Multinational Companies, Localization Matters More Than Ever

Companies now face conflicting trade regimes, strict data sovereignty rules, and rising government expectations that key activities be executed within national borders. In response, leading multinationals are evolving into networks of regionally embedded...

Research: When Used Correctly, LLMs Can Unlock More Creative Ideas

Large language models are now central to the ideation phase, where possibilities are explored and assumptions are challenged. Their adoption for idea generation and brainstorming has surged, making these activities among the most common uses in...

How Corporate Venture Capital Helps Firms Explore New Territory

Manage Your AI Investments Like a Portfolio

Companies should apply a step-by-step portfolio management approach when it comes to AI. They should view the connected portfolio through a dual lens: first, as an advancement pipeline with clear gates through which projects must pass; and second, as a...

Your Team Is Anxious About AI. Here's How to Talk to Them About It.

While certainty about the future cannot be promised, leaders can provide a framework for managing team anxiety surrounding AI transformation. It's important for both the leader and team to equally share in transparency and open dialogue in order to...

Policies Aren't Enough to Retain Top Talent. You Need Systems.

Enduring talent retention is driven not by isolated HR policies or industry norms but by the presence of coherent, integrated systems in which hiring, compensation, advancement, and retention practices reinforce one another. An analysis of nearly one...

Gen AI Is Threatening the Platforms That Dominate Online Travel

Even as the dot.com upstarts disrupted traditional companies in the late 1990s, new entrants powered by generative AI are now threatening to do the same to the dot.com giants. They are transforming online discovery, threatening the dominance of digital...

Succeeding as an Outsider in a Legacy Culture

Every leader eventually enters a culture they didnt build, where history and unwritten rules shape influence. Succeeding as an outsider means balancing respect for what exists with the perspective you were hired to bring. Start by observing how decisions...

To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior

Most organizations try to change workplace behavior through education, communication campaigns, and training, but these efforts are costly and rarely translate into measurable shifts in how people actually act on the job. A new four-step model can help...

How Leaders Can Practice Wise Empathy

Empathy has become a baseline expectation of modern leadership, but practiced without judgment it can backfire, leaving leaders depleted and employees feeling misunderstood. Effective leadership requires a more discerning approach: wise empathy, which...

The Best Leaders Are Great Followers

In an era of complexity, specialization, and rapid change, the most effective leaders are those who exhibit the same attributes as exemplary followers. They excel at listening, learning, and adapting rather than commanding from the top. Leadership and...

Leaders, It's Time to Build Your Tolerance for Uncertainty

In todays volatile business environment, leaders must develop uncertainty tolerance as a core skill. Here are three ways to do so: Anchor yourself in clear values and enduring priorities to give yourself stability when everything else is in flux; embrace...

The Questions CEO Candidates Need to Ask

Talented executives too often accept CEO roles without fully interrogating whether the context-not just the title-sets them up to succeed, leading to costly failures for both leaders and organizations. Extensive boardroom and CEO advisory experience show...

Survey: How Executives Are Thinking About AI in 2026

Heading into 2026, leaders are still bullish on AI despite worries about a bubble and struggles to demonstrate value with AI investments. According to a survey of digital leaders at leading global companies, the vast majority of leaders believe that AI...

When Another Company's Crisis Hurts Your Reputation

Your company doesnt have to do anything wrong to get wrapped up in a crisis. When peers face things like product recalls, fraud, or accidents, stakeholders often assume others may be at risk, including your brand. This erodes stakeholder support and...

When You've Outgrown Your Relationship with a Trusted Advisor

The signs that youve outgrown an advisor arent always immediate or obvious. Often, they show up as a subtle frustration or hesitation-a sense that the conversations arent moving you forward. When that quiet sense of misalignment doesnt fade-or when you...

Weave Mentorship into the Fabric of Your Organization

Despite widespread availability of mentorship in organizations, actual uptake remains low. Employees cite time pressures, unclear expectations, limited training, and poor program visibility as reasons they do not participate. And while some groups...

Research: Conventional Cybersecurity Won't Protect Your AI

As AI embeds itself into every corner of business, most executives continue to underestimate the distinct security risks these systems pose. Legacy defenses, designed for rule-based software, cannot safeguard gen AI systems that learn and adapt from data...

What Wise Leaders Always Follow

To Execute a Unified Strategy, Leaders Need to Shadow Each Other

A one-company approach, characterized by an integrated strategy, aligned organizational structures, and common firm-wide practices, is essential to ensure a consistent client experience, especially during strategic transformations. Capturing the full...

The Three Obstacles Slowing Responsible AI

Many organizations intend to check their AI systems for fairness, accountability, and transparency but struggle to implement responsible AI processes due to structural and cultural obstacles or a lack of commitment. The authors recommend five strategies...

What It Takes to Lead Your Team Through Turbulence

A cross-national study found that 80% of employees struggle to concentrate during political crises and social disruption. Interviews with managers and members of their teams revealed that there are interconnected dynamics at play that influence how...

How Design Became a Boardroom Bystander

Design is losing its luster as a strategic discipline that is key to innovation and creating new value, and it is increasingly being targeted in cost-cutting initiatives. The fault lies with design leadership that fails to demonstrate the value that the...

What's Your Edge? Rethinking Expertise in the Age of AI

When AI tools have many of the answers, what's the value of expensive experts? It's their ability to ask better questions and recognize gray areas, which shifts their value from content to context. Leaders should focus on developing people's...

From Employee-Owners to Environmental Champions

Employee-owned companies achieve significantly better environmental performance than traditionally structured businesses. Research shows that for every $83,571 of company stake allocated per employee, companies improve on one additional environmental...

Five Traits of Tech-Driven CEOs

What distinguishes leaders of successful companies in the AI age? Such CEOs see technology as a growth engine and rethink their companies' futures accordingly. Accenture has studied the advent of those leaders and surfaced five qualities that tech-driven...

Integrate Sustainability and Innovation to Find New Opportunities

Companies that think about sustainability as an opportunity for innovation and growth instead of a compliance problem find ways to overcome challenges in balancing performance metrics with environmental objectives. Five innovation practices can help:...

Why Agency Helps Employees Cope With Change

Change is frequently destabilizing to employees and can result in low morale and reduced productivity. Leaders must give their employees the time and support they need to process their responses to a disruption to how they are accustomed to working...

Business Model Innovation: Seven Essentials

Many leaders believe that business model innovation success comes down to novelty. But research on 300 companies across two eras - the 1990s dot-com boom and the mature digital economy of the 2010s - reveals that this perception is wrong. Novel business...

Change Management: How to Avoid the Hero Trap

Many leaders blame employee pushback when change efforts fail - but they may need to look in the mirror. When leaders try to play the hero, they often stop listening and take criticism of proposed solutions personally. Three change management strategies...

When Being a Family Business Becomes a Competitive Advantage

Family businesses often underestimate the strategic power of their familial identity, defaulting instead to corporate models that erode the trust and long-term relationships that set them apart. A Family-to-Family (F2F) strategy reframes customers and...

It's Not All About Growth for Social Enterprises

When There's Nowhere to Promote a Star Employee

Your rising star expects a promotion. It feels inevitable: the rightful reward for their effort. The problem is you cant deliver it. Managing the gap between their expectations and reality is one of the hardest parts of leadership, and its becoming more...

Why AI Boosts Creativity for Some Employees but Not Others

Generative AI is transforming workflows, yet its impact on employee creativity remains uneven. New research reveals one explanation: AI boosts creativity primarily for employees with strong metacognition-the ability to plan, monitor, and refine thinking...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Creating Meaning and Happiness at Work

Our Management Tip of the Day continues to be one of HBRs most popular newsletters. In this article, weve compiled 10 of our favorite tips on finding meaning and happiness at work, from how to relaunch a team thats lost its spark to how to be more...

Don't Underestimate the Value of Professional Friendships

Most people try to keep work and friendship in separate boxes, but that division is counterproductive. Professionals now spend more time with colleagues than with anyone else, and strong personal ties at work are directly linked to trust, learning,...

New Research on Copycat Products, Your Pitch-Day Dress Code, When Hand Gestures Help Persuasion, and More

Drawn from the January-February 2026 issue of our print magazine, this collection spotlights fresh research from universities, consulting firms, and other expert sources-and outlines what these findings could mean for your business. The insights span...

The HBR Charts that Help Explain 2025

A lot happened in 2025. Luckily, charts can help make sense of it all. Here are some of HBRs most popular, topical, and important charts of the year. They cover a wobbly economy, an explosion of AI-generated slop at work, the challenge of finding joy in...

How Work Changed in 2025, According to HBR Readers

2025 was a year of big change-in general, and in the workplace. HBR asked its global social media community to weigh in on the question: How did your work change this year? Overall, three major themes stood out: AI adoption, the importance of people and...

How a French Spirits Company Created Employee Buy-In for AI

Digital transformation often stalls when employees resist new technology. To overcome this common challenge, French spirits company Pernod Ricard drew upon four strategies: proving value through A/B testing, reducing risk by adjusting performance...