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Growth Isn’t the Only Way for Companies to Create Value
In a world where growth is becoming increasingly elusive, companies can still create significant value by adopting a strategy of disciplined stability. By focusing on steady or only slowly growing revenues, businesses can achieve shareholder returns comparable to market averages, but with significantly lower volatility and risk. Strategies that such successful stable companies apply to drive value creation include asset-light services, high-end product offerings, vertical integration, and consistent dividend payouts.
Research: Why Employees Work While Sick—and How Leaders Can Stop It
New research, including a nationally representative study of U.S. workers, suggests that presenteeism isn’t simply a matter of personal choice or lack of sick leave—it’s a structural problem rooted in how jobs are designed and workplace expectations are managed. Gender norms, occupational sorting, and industry-specific job demands create invisible pressures that push employees to work through illness, leading to major consequences for organizational health. Using the Job Demands-Resources framework, leaders can redesign job structures, empower managers to intervene early, and build rapid feedback loops to balance demands and supports. Forward-thinking organizations that integrate sick leave into their structural and strategic planning can build healthier, more resilient, and more productive workforces.
Tariffs, Technology, and the New Geography of Manufacturing
Geopolitical disruptions and tech advances are shaking up manufacturing strategies, pushing leaders to rethink their approaches. Companies need to rethink the way they traditionally decide where to locate plants, and instead utilize scenario planning and the possibility of automation to create a manufacturing footprint that makes sense as tariffs rise.
Research: Women’s Complaints of Workplace Abuse Get Ignored More Than Men’s
In recent years, many organizations have reevaluated and attempted to improve their processes for reporting and investigating workplace abuse. But new research, which analyzed thousands of workplace reports, found that reports made by women are less likely to be taken seriously than identical reports made by men. This gap is widest when reports lack supporting evidence—which is especially common in workplace abuse cases. The authors argue that in order for leaders to address the gendered biases that impact how misconduct is handled, they need to understand why they occur. They analyze their data to offer insights and recommendations to help companies build the kind of equitable systems that their employees can trust.
When Your Go-To Leadership Style Stops Working
In any leadership role, your style of engaging others plays a significant part in determining success, sometimes even more than the subject matter of the work. And when your style suddenly loses its desired impact, it can be hard to know how to shift it without losing your authenticity or confusing those you lead. Here are five strategies to help you successfully meet the moment when your default leadership style stops working: 1) Scan for shifts in the business, stakeholders, and yourself. 2) Identify a style you’re overusing and try on new ones. 3) Be transparent about style changes. 4) Practice, seek feedback, and expect pushback. 5) Commit to developing versatility over mastery.
HBR’s Best Practices for Supporting Employee Mental Health
External forces affecting employee mental health have proliferated steadily in the past few years, with the fast pace of AI implementation changing the shape of many careers, geopolitical tumult bringing worry about stability, and murky and shifting economic outlooks leading in some cases to cost-cutting measures like layoffs. Your employees are feeling the pressure, and as a leader, you likely are, too. Taking a more holistic view of your employees’ mental health—and acknowledging and sharing your own experiences—can make them feel more engaged and improve the health of your organization.
Great Leaders Make People Feel Noticed
According to recent research, just 39% of employees strongly agreed that someone at work cares for them as a person. Additional research shows that 30% feel “invisible” and 27% feel “ignored.” It’s hard for people to care or be engaged at work if they don’t first feel cared for. Feeling seen is essential to fulfilling our fundamental need to matter—a prerequisite for motivation, well-being, and lasting engagement. Noticing is the deliberate act of paying attention to the details, ebbs, and flows of someone’s life and work, and it is a foundational leadership skill that’s increasingly needed today. There are three ways leaders can become better noticers. First, they must identify the barriers to seeing others, particularly being too busy to take the time. Second, leaders must deliberately make space and use time for connection. Finally, they must ask questions and check in, in order to gather information and address their people’s concerns.
The Risks of Collecting Employees’ Biometric Data
As biometric and health-tracking technologies become more accessible, companies are increasingly collecting employees’ bodily data to boost productivity and safety. But research shows these efforts often undermine job security—especially when data collection feels coercive or is linked to performance reviews—leading to lower morale, mental health strain, and reduced productivity. Legal compliance alone is insufficient; organizations must ask why they’re collecting data, whether employees benefit, and how to avoid harm. Two key practices can help: 1) Be transparent about data use, and 2) decouple collection from performance evaluations to preserve autonomy. Employees also have tools to protect their rights by seeking clarity, proposing alternatives, and citing legal precedent. Thoughtful, ethical design is essential to ensure these initiatives build trust and resilience, not fear.
Assessing Your Talent Needs in the Age of AI
As your company adopts AI, what skills will your employees need and how can you develop them? This HBR Executive Playbook offers advice on how to engage in scenario planning to better understand where and when AI may have the most impact, how to focus on skills as the unit of talent planning in your organization (and which skills should get the most attention), and how to get past common hurdles in upskilling your people.
A Plan Is Not a Strategy
Strategy involves placing a bet on a desired outcome—often shaped by uncertain customer behavior—and building a logical, testable theory for how the company will achieve competitive advantage. Planning, on the other hand, is about allocating resources and setting out actions within a company’s control, like opening a new plant or hiring staff. It feels safe because it deals with the known and the controllable. In this HBR Executive Masterclass, Roger L. Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, explains why so many leaders confuse the two and how to avoid the trap of strategic planning.
7 Key Tensions Every Leader Must Balance
Leading today means balancing between a series of traditional and emerging styles. For example, an intuitionist makes decisions from their gut instincts, while an analyst looks at the data and evidence before coming to a conclusion. The most effective leaders sense what the situation and people require, and adjust accordingly. In this HBR Executive Masterclass, IMD leadership professor and social psychologist Jennifer Jordan identifies and offers tactics to navigate seven key leadership tensions.
The Right Way to Implement Stretch Assignments
Stretch assignments can accelerate career growth—but new research shows they don’t benefit all employees equally. In a study of early-career engineers, men and White or Asian employees were more likely to see these projects lead to raises or promotions, while women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander engineers often did not. These disparities weren’t linked to skills or effort, but to unequal recognition and reward. To build a more diverse leadership pipeline, organizations must treat stretch work as a strategic talent tool—clarifying expectations, tracking who gets and benefits from these opportunities, and ensuring recognition is equitable across teams and identities.
Turn Anxiety into Action
Successful business leaders tend to catastrophize more than most people. But, according to HBS professor Arthur Brooks, worry actually blocks real problem-solving. In this HBR Executive Masterclass he offers practical steps to help leaders move fear from the emotional to the rational part of their brain, so they can make a plan to move forward.
Apply Strategic Thinking to Create a Meaningful Life
Leaders can take the principles of strategy used in boardrooms across the world and apply them to their own lives, as explained in this HBR Executive Masterclass. BCG’s Rainer Strack and colleagues developed a concept they call “Strategize Your Life” to help you identify the choices you can make that will position you to live the life you want. In this video, he walks you through a series of seven strategic questions, the answers to which will help you determine your personal purpose. The next step is to assess your portfolio of choices to assess whether you’re satisfied with how you’re spending your time.
Delivering Bad News to Your Board
The way in which you share bad news with your board can either damage their trust—or deepen it, transforming tough situations into opportunities for stronger alignment and support. This playbook outlines three key challenges—timing, communication, and managing reactions—and offers practical strategies to navigate each one.
How CEOs Should Manage Their Time
If you feel like you’ve lost control of your schedule, it’s because you’re not smartly allocating your scarcest resource—your time. The most effective CEOs know their role is not to do everything themselves, but to amplify their impact through indirect influence—strategy, culture, and team. That means resisting the temptation to micromanage—especially for former COOs—and instead building a top-tier leadership team they trust fully. Ultimately, how a CEO allocates time is a powerful act of leadership: It not only drives results; it signals to the organization what truly matters.
To Create Value with AI, Improve the Quality of Your Unstructured Data
To improve how businesses use unstructured data, leaders should follow a series of steps that begin by addressing unstructured data quality issues, identifying and assessing the data to be used, and assembling the right team to manage it all. From there, the team should prepare data using human sources as well as large language models. The application you develop should be tested until it works, and all learnings should be applied and adopted to future content generation efforts.
What Makes an Innovative Leader?
Leading today is less about getting people to follow you to the future, and more about getting them to co-create it with you. In this HBR Executive Masterclass, HBS professor Linda A. Hill spells out the new ABCs for leading innovation. As an “architect,” you must focus on building your company’s culture and capacity for innovation. As a “bridger,” you must forge partnerships outside your organization to get access to the talent and tools you need to innovate at scale. And as a “catalyst,” you must accelerate co-creation throughout your entire ecosystem.
Managing Conflict on Your Executive Team
Conflict on executive teams is inevitable—and necessary. CEOs need to hear a variety of well-informed opinions and arguments to lead through today’s tough challenges and foster innovative organizations. But unhealthy conflict on executive teams can be extremely damaging, derailing strategy and corroding culture. This playbook offers strategies to help CEOs elicit diverse viewpoints while rooting out disruptive patterns and behaviors.
Building Trust with Your Board
Trust between a CEO and their board isn’t optional—it’s the foundation for strategic alignment and effective leadership. Too many leaders erode trust by treating the board as an audience to impress, hiding what they’re worried about, or trying to manage problems on their own. This playbook offers advice on how to form strong relationships with a team of seasoned advisors.
AI Alone Won’t Transform U.S. Healthcare
AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by providing personalized treatment plans, streamlining clinical trials, and aiding in the development of novel therapeutics. However, AI alone cannot fix the flaws in the U.S. healthcare system; it will require serious structural reforms. There are three priorities: accelerate the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, and integrate AI in the next generation of value-based care strategies; embed AI into medical education and training; and engage doctors and patients in AI development and use.
Strategy Isn’t a Mystery
In this HBR Executive Masterclass, HBS professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee argues that strategy does not begin with profit, but with value creation—measured as the difference between a customer’s willingness-to-pay and a supplier’s or employee’s willingness-to-sell. Companies create value by increasing customer willingness-to-pay (through better quality, complements, or network effects) and by decreasing willingness-to-sell (through higher pay or more attractive jobs). Profits emerge as the residual once value is split among customers, employees, and the company itself.
How CEOs Can Build a Better Relationship with the Board
First-time CEOs often assume that more frequent and transparent communication with their boards guarantees success, but research based on 90 interviews and dozens of board observations shows that it’s not volume but timing and structure—what the authors call “board synchronization”—that determines whether a CEO-board relationship flourishes or falters. By replacing exhaustive one-on-one previews with concise written briefs, sharing the stage in formal meetings to showcase the top team rather than monopolizing the discussion, and personally leading targeted post-meeting debriefs instead of outsourcing follow-ups, CEOs can avoid the misaligned power shifts and boundary confusion that erode trust. When executed in sequence—light previews, inclusive meetings, direct debriefs—this approach transforms a reactive, mistrustful cycle into a positive, virtuous one, giving CEOs the strategic leverage they need to thrive in their critical first three years.
Can AI Agents Be Trusted?
Personal AI agents—autonomous systems that act on a user’s behalf—are moving rapidly from concept to deployment, promising to streamline tasks like scheduling, research, and shopping. But as these agents gain decision-making power, they also introduce significant trust and accountability risks, including susceptibility to hacking, marketing manipulation, misinformation, and conflicting loyalties. To ensure user trust and long-term adoption, the article argues that personal AI agents should be treated as fiduciaries, held to legal and ethical standards that prioritize the user’s interests. It recommends a three-pronged approach: 1) create legal frameworks that establish fiduciary duty, 2) encourage market-based enforcement through tools like insurance and agent-monitoring services, and 3) design agents to keep sensitive data and decisions local to user devices. Without clear oversight, users may hesitate to delegate meaningful authority—potentially stalling one of AI’s most promising use cases.
How to Lead an All-Hands After Delivering Bad News
Leading an all-hands meeting after delivering bad news requires a delicate balance of acknowledging reality while also leaving room for optimism. What you say (and how you say it) can either offer relief—or create more pressure. Here are strategies for how to strike the right balance: 1) Set a shared vision 2) Lead with empathy 3) Clarify the path forward 4) Open the floor 5) Reawaken to purpose 6) Be available. Avoid scheduling other meetings immediately after the all-hands and stick around to allow for individual conversations.
One Simple Way to Get Better at Reading Data
Senior leaders are likely to be a consumer of statistics calculated by their direct reports to help them make informed decisions. While data are observed, the presenter decides which statistics are relevant in a particular context. Should the average of the data be presented? Should the standard deviation also be presented? The authors argue that there is one basic statistical issue in how we look at data—the use of percentages can be used in confusing ways to influence others. The confusion typically resides with the denominator. As leaders, we need to talk back to the data. One simple but enlightening question to ask is “What’s the denominator?”
How to Rescue a Failing Strategy
Market conditions are evolving rapidly as a result of the trade war, but leaders shouldn’t let strategic uncertainly lead to operational and tactical paralysis. They need to revisit, review, and revalidate or revise their strategy, but the world won’t wait for them to finish thinking. There are four no-regrets moves leaders can make as they revise their strategy: actions that will create the flexibility to weather major shocks or grab unexpected opportunities, improve operations, and protect or increase revenues now. First, protect liquidity and increase financial flexibility. Second, improve the fitness of the commercial organization. Third, embrace the most profitable customers. Finally, strengthen risk management and cybersecurity.
Agentic AI Is Already Changing the Workforce
AI agents are fast becoming much more than just sidekicks for human workers. They’re becoming digital teammates—an emerging category of talent. To get the most out of these new teammates, leaders in HR and procurement will need to start developing an operational playbook for integrating them into hybrid teams and a workforce strategy. That strategy will require that companies either develop a talent-acquisition function of their own that allows them to integrate AI agents into their workforce, or partner with firms that now offer both human and AI staffing solutions. To succeed in this new environment, however, organizations must actively shape how AI is integrated into their labor strategy rather than waiting for the market to evolve around it. In this article, the authors survey this rapidly evolving terrain and recommend seven critical actions that companies should take to successfully adapt.
How to Delegate to Someone Who Doesn’t Report to You
The higher you rise in an organization, the more your success depends on delivering results through people who don’t report to you, namely your peers. Delegating across means managing egos, politics, and invisible dynamics. Here are practical strategies for how to share the load and enlist the help you need, without overstepping: 1) Assess which tasks fit the bill. 2) Frame requests as partnerships. 3) Contract to create accountability. 4) Address pushback with curiosity. 5) Follow up without overstepping. At first, sideways delegation can feel slower and more cumbersome than handing something off to your team. But once trust is built and you’ve dialed in your process, you can each achieve unprecedented results.
How Gen AI Could Disrupt SaaS—and Change the Companies That Use It
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize enterprise software, transforming traditional workflow systems into dynamic, goal-oriented environments. This shift will redefine how work is designed and executed, offering significant efficiency gains and new opportunities for innovation. Leaders must proactively guide their organizations through this transition, focusing on governance, organizational readiness, and strategic responses to harness the full potential of AI.
Could the GPT Store Turn ChatGPT into a Platform Powerhouse?
ChatGPT’s success to date has generated a debate about whether it could harness network effects to dominate the market for the type of generative AI product known as large language models (LLMs). Its growth has been driven by being a superior product, clever marketing, virality, and a strong brand, but these may not be enough against big tech competitors and open-source alternatives. It probably can’t count on one type of network effect to achieve a dominant position: data network effects —the information that a company gleans from users that enables it to improve its product. However, another type shows potential: cross-side network effects —similar to the ones between iPhone users and app developers. In January 2024, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, opened the GPT Store, which allows users to discover third-party GPTs built on top of OpenAI’s GPT models. OpenAI has an opportunity to turn it into a major platform franchise like Apple did with its App Store.