News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Life
Culture & Art
Hobbies
News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Culture & Art
Hobbies
How Companies Can Mitigate the Harms of AI-Driven Inequality
A major source of unease around AI is how its advance can make societies’ existing inequities even worse—a systemic phenomenon called “artificial inequality.” This happens as socioeconomic opportunities and outcomes are concentrated within narrow societal segments. Unfortunately, artificial inequality is complex and can be hard to fix. To understand—and combat—this phenomenon, companies need to understand how and where it exists. They should look to six specific divides: data, income, usage, global, industry, and energy. There are three levers that companies can manipulate to try to mitigate harm across these six divides: technologies, institutions, and markets. The article offers suggestions of specific actions that companies can take across the six divides and three levers.
When Picking a New CEO, Ask Them for a Growth Plan
Corporate boards often rely on backward-looking data when selecting CEOs, leading to flawed decisions. To improve the selection process, boards should ask candidates to create a growth plan that outlines their vision for the company’s future, providing a structured and comparative look at their strategic thinking. This approach not only helps in assessing the candidate’s alignment with the company’s goals but also fosters accountability and transparency in the appointment process.
Building a Strong U.S. Middle Class Requires High-Productivity, High-Dignity Service Jobs
President Donald Trump’s drive to rebuild the U.S. manufacturing sector ignores the reality that expanding manufacturing jobs alone won’t be enough to rebuild the American middle class. Even more important is turning service jobs into ones that are highly productive, pay decently, offer good working conditions, and provide career paths. In May 2023, 9.1 million Americans held production and nonsupervisory jobs in manufacturing . During that same month, more than 40 million worked in frontline service jobs. Service jobs, such as stocking shelves, preparing food, and caring for the elderly, are essential and hard to automate. There is an operations model for workplaces with such jobs, and numerous companies, including Costco and QuikTrip, have adopted it. Policymakers, worker organizations, corporate leaders, and business schools must work together to make high-productivity, high-dignity service jobs the norm.
When You’re Asked to Meet Impossible Goals
Change is no longer an occasional disruption but a constant. Employees are now experiencing five times more planned change initiatives than they did just a decade ago. Add unrealistic goals, and the result is predictable: disengagement, burnout, and a sharp decline in execution—in short, widespread change fatigue. Leaders who take on impossible goals don’t do it because they lack judgment—they do it because pushing back feels risky to them. The real leadership skill is not figuring out how to do it all; it’s knowing when and how to push back. That’s where strategic refusal comes in. Strategic refusal is a structured method to force prioritization and push back on unrealistic demands that jeopardize team productivity, morale, or well-being. The idea isn’t to avoid responsibility, but rather to protect the team, maintain long-term performance, and ensure sustainable outcomes—all while safeguarding your reputation.
How to Get Celebrity Investors to Back Your Business
Celebrity shareholders offer several major benefits. Their investment signals market confidence, attracting institutional and retail investors. High-profile investors can sway other stakeholders, creating a ripple effect that boosts stock demand. Celebrity investors generate media attention, enhancing visibility and positive coverage. Active investors contribute to company strategy, offering valuable insights and potentially avoiding hostile campaigns. Well-connected investors can open doors to strategic partnerships, M&A opportunities, and potential acquirers. To attract celebrity investors, companies need a differentiated business with a compelling value proposition and strong fundamentals. Demonstrated growth potential with clear financial metrics and strong revenue growth is essential. Robust corporate governance structures are crucial to protect investor reputation.
The Workplace Psychological Contract Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.
It’s easy to view the debates between company leaders and employees over return-to-office mandates as overreaction on both sides: out-of-touch senior executives who don’t understand that the world has changed versus pampered, entitled, and unmotivated workers. But the fury the debates produce suggests that there is a deeper problem: a shifting psychological contract between employees and employers, and not just about return-to-office policies. This contract—the implicit understanding that employees have about what they owe the company and what the company owes them—is in fact changing. Employers view the contract from an ethics of justice perspective (assuming that if a policy is rationally justified and applied equally to all, it should be accepted), and this ignores real changes in employees’ perspectives on work. These changes, while supercharged by the Covid-19 pandemic, took root decades prior to it. Rather than making decisions through the justice lens, organizations should instead apply an ethics of care lens. This article explains what this lens is and how organizations can use it to repair the employer-employee relationship.
Winning the Right Customers Isn’t Just a Sales Issue
If you’re trying to lead growth of any kind, from revenue to margin expansion, it’s critical that your sales organization has a clear understanding of your go-to-market strategy. Here are three areas to focus on to ensure your sales team not only understands your strategy, but is ready to execute it in every interaction with prospects and customers: 1) Get clear with your sales leaders and teams about the kinds of business you expect them to pursue, and just as important, not pursue. 2) Make sure they’re clear on your company’s points of greatest value and differentiation, including a deep understanding of the kinds of client issues and objectives that lead to your premium offerings and the solutions you’ve invested most in creating. 3) Emphasize how the sales experience is the customer experience (CX). When products, services, and even advanced capabilities begin to look similar, or even identical, in the eyes of customers, it’s the quality of the sales experience that can tip the scales in your favor.
Does the Chief Marketing Officer Role Need an Update?
The chief marketing officer (CMO) role has expanded significantly due to digital technologies, data, and AI, increasing both executional demands and strategic expectations. While the CMO title remains common and respected, its growing complexity has led some companies to split marketing leadership into specialized roles like chief digital officer or chief customer officer. A “reset” or rebranding of the title could better reflect marketing’s evolving scope, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Ultimately, companies should tailor the marketing leader’s title to their specific needs, making it clear, strategic, and appealing to top talent.
To Make Your Workplace Fairer, Take Charge of Its Norms
There are certain rules and standards at work that are shared in formal trainings and onboarding, but there are also many norms that employees pick up over time—like whether taking vacation is encouraged or seen as signaling a lack of commitment or whether meetings start on time or a few minutes after the hour. Norms shape individual and collective behaviors and represent organizational culture or “how we do things here.” When set intentionally, they can also ground teams and create fairer workplaces in times of uncertainty. Anyone, regardless of seniority, can become “norm entrepreneurs” by taking three actions: 1) Change perceptions of “how we do things here,” 2) find the right audience, and 3) leverage collective action.
Research: Do LLMs Have Values?
The authors, who study AI ethics and policy, recently asked nine popular generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to rank their own values using a questionnaire typically used to ascertain human values. They did so as part of their work on the alignment problem—the challenge of ensuring that LLMs act in alignment with human values and intentions. In this article, they discuss their methodology and results, which suggest that although all of the LLMs in their study share some overarching values, they differ in meaningful ways. The authors provide a brief values profile for each LLM, the goal being to help leaders can make more informed strategic decisions about which one best aligns with their organization’s mission, specific task requirements, and overall brand identity.
In Uncertain Times, Ask These Questions Before You Make a Decision
In today’s perma-crisis world, waiting for stability is like waiting for a train that’s never coming. When everything around you feels unsteady, four questions can serve as strategic tools to help you work through ambiguity, reframe risk, and strengthen your decision-making muscles: 1) What decision today will still make sense a year from now? 2) If a year from now this decision was used as an example of our leadership, what would it teach? 3) What if this isn’t the storm—what if it’s the climate? 4) What’s the cost of waiting? Your answers to these questions will reveal faulty assumptions, spotlight hidden opportunities, and help you focus on what’s within your control.
Research: When Extra Effort Makes You Worse at Your Job
We’ve all been there: after proactively trying to streamline a process at work, you feel mentally drained and less able to perform other tasks well. But did taking initiative to improve your job tasks actually make you worse at other activities by the end of the day? A new study of French workers found strong evidence that the more workers try to improve tasks, the worse their mental performance by closing time. This has implications for how companies can best support their teams so they have what they need to be proactive without becoming mentally fatigued.
AI Is Great at Routine Tasks. Here’s Why Boards Should Resist Using It.
AI should be implemented thoughtfully to enhance rather than diminish the strategic influence of board chairs. By identifying key strategic roles and the actions through which leaders exercise the power inherent in their roles, as well as fencing AI involvement, board chairs can strike a balance between technological advancement and effective governance. The goal should not be to resist AI but to integrate it in a way that preserves leadership influence and strengthens the board chair’s strategic objectives. With careful planning and oversight, AI can be a powerful ally in governance—one that supports, rather than supplants, the individuals entrusted with leading organizations toward success with intuition, insights, persuasion, and power.
Empathy Is a Non-Negotiable Leadership Skill. Here’s How to Practice It.
When leaders have misconceptions of what empathy entails, they don’t know how to practice it—or they practice it badly. Many don’t bother to intentionally lead with empathy at all, and the stakes are high for those who don’t: low morale, poor retention, and burnout among employees, and failure to connect, inability to gather information, or being perceived as inaccessible for leaders. Empathy is a requisite to mobilize, connect with, and engage others. To better lead with this non-negotiable skill, leaders can use six strategies: Develop an empathy protocol, be other-focused, balance individual and group needs, facilitate support instead of taking over, model boundary-setting, and update language to connect.
AI Can Make the Relative-Valuation Process Less Subjective
This article presents a new methodology for relative valuation that incorporates artificial intelligence. The methodology uses AI to review historical data—such as revenues, earnings, and debt levels—to detect patterns and relationships related to historical valuations that traditional methods might miss. By integrating AI into the relative-valuation process, organizations can transform a traditionally subjective art into a more rigorous, transparent, and data-driven science. The process not only enhances valuation accuracy but also builds confidence among stakeholders by clearly showing the rationale behind each valuation decision. As a case study, the authors apply their methodology to Mastercard, analyze the results, and then recommend four key steps that companies should take if they are looking to integrate AI into valuation.
Making Mental Health Programs Work at Multinational Companies
Employee mental health challenges significantly impact companies worldwide. Large multinational companies face unique obstacles in implementing effective mental health initiatives due to their diverse workforce and complex organizational structures. Despite investing in various interventions, many companies struggle with low employee engagement in mental health programs. Common pitfalls include misattributing initiative failures to cultural norms, assuming attitudes are unchangeable, and failing to thoroughly plan programs that suit the companies’ employees globally. Successful HR leaders navigate these challenges by uncovering underlying issues, engaging different mindsets creatively, and prioritizing strategic planning from the outset.
What’s the Future of Middle Management?
Predictions about the demise of middle management aren’t new. But with the rise of AI and a trend toward flatter organizations, could these predictions soon come true? Perspectives from three groups of experts suggest that businesses will still need middle managers, particularly when it comes to helping frontline employees shift their roles amid rapid technological and business strategy changes. But it is possible we may need fewer of them in this new environment.
Executive Teams Are Losing Stakeholders’ Confidence. Here’s How to Get It Back.
Stakeholder trust in their leadership teams’ ability to handle volatility and uncertainty is at an all-time low. Unlike routine market or organizational challenges where there’s past experience from which to draw wisdom, what makes the current forces leaders are grappling with particularly difficult is that they’re precedent-setting. That means leadership teams will naturally fumble a bit as they find their footing in uncharted terrain, and that fumbling is often public, causing confidence in the team to dip further. Meanwhile, stakeholders are desperately trying to make sense of the unknown and expect their leaders to know things they don’t know. In a time when so much feels out of control, leadership teams that commit to showing up with transparency, humility, and unity give their organizations something rare: a steady hand.
The Formal Policies That Protect Family Businesses from Interpersonal Chaos
Family businesses often operate on trust and inherited roles, but without formal policies, they risk misaligned expectations and legal ambiguity. The Rossis, a third-generation family in the hospitality industry, faced a crisis when a cousin who worked in the business divorced, and this incident highlighted the need for clear governance structures. Implementing formal policies on ownership, employment, and marital agreements, as the Rossis subsequently did, can protect family businesses from unnecessary risks and ensure long-term success.
HBR Roundtable: Adapting to the New Reality of Tariffs
In this roundtable discussion, HBR Editor at Large Adi Ignatius speaks with three experts about how organizations are navigating the prospect of new U.S. tariffs, especially on China, and the potential reshaping of global trade and supply chains. They discuss the impact on businesses as leaders face historic levels of uncertainty, with inflation, inventory disruptions, and long-term structural changes ahead. The experts urged companies to map their supply chains, collaborate with suppliers, and be transparent with customers. While reshoring is an option, it is slow, expensive, and complicated by labor and capital challenges. Stockpiling goods provides limited protection and must be balanced against cash flow risks. Leaders will need to think creatively about regionalizing production, reducing dependency, and adapting to a more fragmented global economy. Despite the turbulence, those who act strategically now could emerge stronger.
Research: When Leaders Express Positivity Early On, Employees Perform Better
The emotional tenor of a leader’s expressions can have a major impact on their team. While positivity can make their workers feel supported and inspired, negativity can sometimes help employees understand how to grow. In a new study, researchers examined whether the timing of these emotional expressions mattered in terms of worker performance. An analysis of nearly 10,000 consultants and 245 student-athletes found that leaders’ early positivity (at the start of a project or year) was the biggest predictor of team success, especially if partnered with a little negativity at a project’s midpoint. When leaders express positivity during an early stage, the researchers found, team members felt more highly respected and desired to maintain that respect throughout the year.
Don’t Be Distracted by the Trade War. Here’s What Should Inform Your China Strategy Instead.
While U.S.–China trade tensions have drawn intense attention, business leaders who focus too narrowly on tariffs risk missing a deeper, longer-term shift. China’s economic strategy—centered on reducing dependence on foreign firms, building domestic dominance, and translating that into global competitiveness—has quietly and steadily progressed. Its “Made in China 2025” agenda has succeeded in most targeted sectors, creating a domestic profit base and challenging foreign market share. But global competitiveness has lagged in some areas due to limited international leadership experience and structural barriers abroad. For executives, the takeaway is clear: don’t mistake momentary trade flare-ups for the main story. Instead, understand China’s enduring objectives, anticipate continued decoupling pressures, and craft long-range strategies that go beyond policy reaction—diversifying supply chains, stress-testing assumptions, and influencing key regulatory landscapes before the next eruption hits.
What Salespeople Need from Leaders—at Each Stage of Their Careers
Leading a high-performing sales team requires a personalized talent management approach. Salespeople’s needs evolve throughout their careers, and while sales managers often focus on competencies, motivation, and results, they often overlook career stage as a critical fourth dimension. By aligning coaching, development, and retention strategies to career stages, sales leaders can maximize engagement, performance, and long-term success—ensuring a thriving sales force that delivers sustained value.