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 4 Seasons Organizations Go Through-and How to Lead in Each

Organizations, like people, move through different seasons, each with its own rhythms and demands. Most leaders are rewarded for driving the organization hard and fast. But the wiser leaders learn to pause and ask, "What season are we in, and what kind...

How GLP-1 Medications Are Changing Consumer Behavior

A PwC analysis shows that GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Zepbound may be catalyzing a behavioral and economic shift that's on par with major technological breakthroughs. A transformation that begins with biology is now cascading across categories...

Is AI a Boom or a Bubble?

Nvidias $100 billion commitment to OpenAI-and OpenAIs reciprocal chip purchases-signal an AI arms race accelerating at breakneck speed. How can leaders make sense of this market? An examination of recent history (particularly the parallels between this...

8 Simple Rules for Beating Digital Exhaustion

Digital exhaustion is a modern workplace challenge that arises not from poor management, but from the way digital tools disrupt our cognitive and emotional balance. Fragmented attention, constant context switching, and the need to infer meaning from...

Stop Overloading the Wrong Part of Your Brain at Work

Most leaders rely heavily on one key region of the brain: the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is responsible for high-order functions like focus, planning, self-regulation, and decision-making. But the PFC has limits. It fatigues quickly, struggles with...

How to Be a Great Coach-Even When You're Busy

It's easy to assume that good coaching requires hours dedicated to lengthy formal conversations. But the most powerful managerial coaching actually happens not in scheduled sessions, but in the everyday moments when work is actually getting done. By...

A Systematic Approach to Experimenting with Gen AI

Gen AI tools offer unprecedented opportunities, but organizations adopting them rarely realize significant value right away. As with past general-purpose innovations, companies often experience an initial dip in productivity before seeing sustained gains...

Building a Company Culture That Encourages Feedback

There are a number of benefits to encouraging your employees to seek out feedback. When people across an organization regularly ask each other for input, it sets a powerful norm that the organization values constant learning more than perfection. This...

Don't Lose Your Star New Hire

When you've landed a star employee, it's tempting to think they'll solve all your problems from day one. But even the most capable hire needs time to deliver their best work. More importantly, they need reasons to stick around. So, what can you do to...

The Best CEOs Can Spot Where Their Organization Is Under the Greatest Pressure

Great CEOs don't just lead; they build systems that turn the noise of internal and external tension into signal, discomfort into direction, and pressure into strategic posture. That requires them to operate across three simultaneous leadership fronts,...

Life's Work: An Interview with Esther Duflo

The Nobel laureate talks about why she became an economist, how she and her colleagues popularized the use of randomized controlled trials in their field, which tools and interventions have shown success in reducing poverty, and the role of...

How to Lead When the Conditions for Success Suddenly Disappear

In today's volatile environment, the conditions for success rarely stay static. Sponsors move on. Budgets shrink. Regulations change. The leaders who endure aren't those who cling to the original design. They're the ones who broaden their coalitions,...

The CEO of Advocate Health on Fostering Innovation Through Partnerships

Advocate Health, formed by the merger of two major health systems, aims to redefine patient care by leveraging its scale of 69 hospitals and 1,000 other sites to partner with academic institutions and leading businesses. Key initiatives include the use...

The Right Way to Interview Senior Talent, According to the Former CEO of Coach

During former CEO Lew Frankfort's tenure at Coach, he emphasized that the leadership team needed to be "investment-grade," comprising seasoned professionals with diverse experiences, especially those who could grow brands through adversity. The goal was...

Should a CHRO Abandon Performance Improvement Plans? (HBR Case Study and Commentary)

At Barton Creek Technologies, Anna Chen, the chief human resources officer, faces a dilemma over the company's performance improvement plan (PIP). Introduced as a supportive tool to rehabilitate struggling employees, the PIP has widely become perceived...

The Gen AI Playbook for Organizations

Leaders can't afford to take a "wait and see" approach to adopting generative AI. They need a plan for applying it differently than others in the value chain, say the authors. In this article they introduce a framework for thinking about gen AI...

How to Monetize Your Data

Many organizations are sitting on valuable proprietary data but lack a clear plan for commercializing it. As interest in selling data grows-driven by advances in AI, pressure to find new sources of revenue, and the success of firms like Amazon,...

Stop Running So Many AI Pilots

Companies eager to adopt generative AI often launch numerous pilots across departments, chasing quick wins and marginal efficiencies. But a scattershot approach won't deliver transformative impact. The global consumer packaged goods company Reckitt took...

What Every Company Can Learn from Private Equity

Private-equity-backed companies consistently deliver faster, more substantial gains than their public or family-owned peers, often transforming their performance within just a few years. Their playbook consists of six practices: conducting full-potential...

The Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders

Leadership theory suggests CEOs should focus on high-level issues such as strategy and resource allocation. These authors challenge this conventional wisdom by spotlighting CEOs who dive deep into day-to-day execution rather than hovering at the...

Does Your C-Suite Really Operate as a Team?

New research from Gartner finds that in many companies, the C-suite team isnt acting like one. Surveys show that just 31% of C-suite executives consider the C-suite to be their primary team. When senior leaders are asked about their team, theyre more...

Lessons from Market Crashes Past

In the book 1929, the New York Times journalist and CNBC coanchor Andrew Ross Sorkin explores the events leading up to the historic stock market crash that set off the Great Depression. The parallels between them and those chronicled in Sorkin's earlier...

Become an Octopus Organization

As companies pour trillions into transformation efforts, few see lasting results. That's because most organizations approach change like machines-rigidly, predictably, and from the top down, argue Amazon Web Services enterprise strategists Jana Werner...

Making Decisions Together (When You Don't Agree on What's Important)

When You're the Executive Everyone Relies On-and You're Burning Out

Many senior leaders are finding themselves overwhelmed as organizations cut budgets and staff while maintaining ambitious goals. In these conditions, bosses often assign extra projects to their most dependable performers, stretching them thin and leading...

The Power of Metaphors When Introducing Change Initiatives

Change can be scary, which can activate the brain's fight or flight response. So how can senior leaders help calm that threat response when introducing change initiatives? Research has shown that storytelling can help. However, busy executives often lack...

Preventing Rejection at Work

Use Design Thinking to Navigate Ambiguity

It's safe to assume that accelerated change is here to stay. At the core of today's frequent disruptions is ambiguity: situations where the available information is incomplete, contradictory, or constantly shifting, and clear answers are impossible...

How to Coach Hyperenergetic Executives

Many high-performing executives operate like caffeinated squirrels-hyper-driven, fast-moving, and constantly generating ideas-but their unchecked energy can create chaos, dilute strategy, and exhaust teams. While this intensity often looks like...

The Hidden Beliefs That Hold Leaders Back

High-performing leaders often face internal limiting beliefs that hinder their effectiveness and career growth. Identifying and reframing these hidden blockers can unlock greater leadership potential and improve team and organizational outcomes. Common...

When Authentic Leadership Backfires

While authenticity is linked to higher self-esteem and well-being, it does not necessarily translate into perceptions of leadership competence or effectiveness. In fact, research shows that impression management-adjusting your behavior to meet...

5 Critical Skills Leaders Need in the Age of AI

To thrive in the rapidly evolving age of generative AI, senior leaders need to recognize that success hinges less on the technology itself than on leadership and organizational transformation. In particular, they'll need to develop five key skills: 1)...

How to Drive Digital Innovation Without Wasting Resources

Companies are under pressure to pause digital innovation as costs rise and uncertainty grows-but holding back risks falling further behind in the age of AI and data-driven change. Research shows the most effective organizations avoid waste by funding...

4 Organizational Red Flags That Turn Off Job Candidates

A survey of hundreds of executives shows that the most common "red flags" that deter qualified candidates from interviewing for or accepting jobs with organizations are a lack of clarity about the job or organization, bad recruitment practices,...

When Shareholder Engagement Hurts More Than It Helps

As companies grow and ownership becomes more complex, leaders often assume the answer is to get everyone more involved. But too much participation can bog down decisions, fuel frustration, and weaken cohesion. The smarter move is to foster shareholder...

6 Red Flags That Keep Good Candidates from Getting Hired

A survey of hundreds of executives point to six red flags that derail organizational hiring, sometimes preventing otherwise qualified candidates from securing roles to which they might be suited. They include poor self-awareness, lack of preparation,...

When Managing Your Team Becomes Too Much

Your team needs you, but you're exhausted. You need to focus on the big picture, but you can't move past the daily firefight. This is the classic trap of leadership: The more indispensable you become, the less time and capacity you have to lead...

How AI Is Upending How Consulting Firms Hire Talent

AI is dismantling the traditional hiring model of professional services firms, which relied on large classes of junior associates to supply a handful of future partners. With entry-level roles shrinking, firms must shift from hiring for grunt work to...

A Smarter Way to Disagree

To foster constructive disagreements, organizations should encourage individuals to modify their observable behaviors during conflicts. More specifically, the authors research has shown that employees should be more attentive to their linguistic...

What Happens When AI Sets Wages

Generative AI is no longer just automating text; with AI-based wage-setting, its shaping paychecks, livelihoods, and access to opportunity. Left unchecked, these systems risk reinforcing, or even widening, global inequalities. New research shows that...

New Research on How the Best Managers Shape Employees' Careers

New research reveals that a manager's true value-for both individuals and their firms-lies not in being a great motivator or monitor, but in their ability to strategically place talent. Analyzing 20 years of data from 200,000 employees and 30,000...

Senior Leaders Still Need Learning and Development

While mid-level leaders are often offered structured onboarding programs, frequent manager engagement, 1:1s, skip-level 1:1s, and formal mentorship, senior leaders often enter a new role or organization to...silence. They transition from being nurtured...

Hope Inspiring Leadership

In this question-and-answer session, Ivey Business Journal editor-in-chief Thomas Watson speaks with Gerard Seijts and Kimberley Young Milani about their book, Character: What Contemporary Leaders Can Teach Us About Building a More Just, Prosperous, and...

Scenario Planning Amid Radical Uncertainty

Radical uncertainty is paralyzing leaders and companies across the U.S. Unlike manageable risk, radical uncertainty has no boundaries or historical data to suggest the way forward. Two dangerous patterns can emerge as a result: overindexing on short-term...

The Six Stances of Emergent Decision Making

In today's fast-changing world, traditional ways of making strategic decisions aren't effectively meeting demands. This article introduces a more flexible approach: Emergent decision-making. This approach is built around six practical leadership stances...

Restoring Trust in Our Polarized Age

Trust in institutions like government, media, and universities is at an all-time low, leading to social division and the rise of prominent leaders who are seen as "authentic," even if they are deeply flawed. As traditional sources of moral guidance fade,...

Managing Trumptopian "Psychodrama"

Donald Trump's return to power has ushered in a new era of unpredictable trade policy, with sudden tariffs and political drama shaking up long-standing rules. With no clear long-term plan, US trade decisions now swing rapidly, using volatility as...

How to Report Properly to a Corporate Board

Many CEOs rely on informal updates-like emails or presentations-rather than submitting structured, written reports to their boards. This often leads to a lack of transparency, missed performance issues, and weaker board oversight. In contrast, a...

AI Can Improve How Humans and Robots Work

Teaming humans with robots delivers better results for warehouse operations than having only robots, but there are opportunities to improve that collaboration in the face of increasing demands for speed and accuracy in e-commerce fulfillment. A new...