Harvard Business Review

What to do when your boss is a jerk, a workaholic, or simply incompetent, on the latest episode of #DearHBR: https://t.co/uy3TJOmnCl

Life’s Work: An Interview with Deepak Chopra

Dustin Aksland<p>At age 45, Chopra left his career as a prominent physician and hospital administrator in Boston to start his own center, in California, focused on integrative medicine. The author of 86 books and a seasoned public speaker, he also advises organizations and individuals.<p>HBR: What’s the …

How Worried Should We Be About the Power of Big Companies?

Miguel Montaner<p>The first episode of Capitalisn’t, a new economics podcast by Kate Waldock, of Georgetown University, and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, contemplates a future in which Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg becomes president of the United States and revises antitrust law to make …

Case Study: Should an Algorithm Tell You Who to Promote?

Miguel Montaner<p>Aliyah Jones was having trouble paying attention to the farewell toasts. Although she was sad to see her longtime colleague Anne Bank go, she was more consumed with trying to figure out who should replace her.<p>As a VP of sales and marketing for Becker-Birnbaum International, a global …

Bad Bosses

Is your boss making your life miserable? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, <i>Dear HBR:</i>, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Moshe Cohen, a senior lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. They talk through what to do when your boss is a …

7 Traits of Super-Productive People

Is there someone on your team who seems unusually productive? Someone who gets a huge amount done — without working longer hours?<p>Super-productive people are in every industry. The most productive software developers write nine times more usable code per day than the average developer, according to …

The Best Flu Prevention Might Be Behavioral Economics

Alongside popular misconceptions that healthy people do not need the flu shot and myths about the harmful side effects of the vaccine, numerous studies have shown that one of the biggest reasons people don’t get vaccinated is that a physician never recommends it. (Eighty percent of patients say …

How to Lose Your Best Employees

You want to be a great boss. You want your company to be a great place to work. But right now, at this very moment, one of your key employees might be about to walk out the door.<p>She has consistently brought her best game to work and has grown into a huge asset. But her learning has peaked, her …

How to Get People to Accept a Tough Decision

Imagine this: You’re a general manager for a manufacturing company and orders are up. You know you should be celebrating, but instead, you feel gut punched. Your plants are facing severe capacity and material constraints and you know you can’t fill these orders. Now you have to decide which ones to …

Research: When You Don’t Have an Alternative in a Negotiation, Try Imagining One

Conventional wisdom suggests that negotiators need alternatives to succeed. Alternatives give negotiators the confidence to negotiate offers more ambitiously, to push for more optimal outcomes, and to walk away from the table when needed. But negotiators often have no alternative at all. For …

4 Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing

In the past decade, content marketing has become a widely established practice. Companies have hired writers and Chief Content Officers to run departments, create blogs and other materials, and, in the process, some have assured sales people that content marketing can mean the end of cold …

The Right Way to Ask for Help at Work

Miguel Montaner<p>Few of us enjoy asking for help. As research in neuroscience and psychology shows, the social threats involved—the uncertainty, risk of rejection, potential for diminished status, and inherent relinquishing of autonomy—activate the same brain regions that physical pain does. And in …

Preparing for Political Risk When You Don’t Know Where It Will Come From

In 2010, Gabriela Cowperthwaite read a news article that changed her life. It described how an orca whale had killed a trainer during a show at SeaWorld in Orlando. Cowperthwaite, a Los Angeles filmmaker who liked taking her twins to see orcas at the San Diego SeaWorld, spent the next two years …

A Better, Fairer Approach to Layoffs

Two great forces are transforming the very nature of work: automation and ever fiercer global competition. To keep up, many organizations have had to rethink their workforce strategies, often making changes that are disruptive and painful. Typically, they turn to episodic restructuring and routine …

What Most Companies Get Wrong About Men and Woman

The conversation about the treatment of women in the workplace has reached a crescendo of late, and senior leaders—men as well as women—are increasingly vocal about a commitment to gender parity. That’s all well and good, but there’s an important catch. The discussions, and many of the initiatives …

When Companies Make People Choose Between Their Career and Their Spouses’

As the head of a large manufacturing plant at a multinational conglomerate, an executive I’ll call David had proved himself a competent, trustworthy manager. So when the presidency of one of the company’s key businesses unexpectedly became vacant, the CEO sat David down to share the good news that …

The Best Leaders See Things That Others Don’t. Art Can Help.

I don’t often start essays about leadership with insights from French novelists, but in this case it seems appropriate. “The real act of discovery,” Marcel Proust wrote, “consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” Today the most successful companies don’t just outcompete their …

How Successful CEOs Manage the Middle of Their Tenure

Every leader understands the importance of the first hundred days or the first year in office—the period during which one must assess and diagnose, formulate a vision and a strategy, and create the early wins that build trust and legitimacy. And dozens of books and articles offer guidance about how …

4 Ways to Teach Your Kids About Work (Without Adding More to Your Plate)

As a leader, you probably juggle many things at work and at home. You’re not alone. Most executives I coach struggle with balancing parenting and work duties. They worry that they aren’t spending enough time with their children, and they’d like to help their children learn from their experience and …

What to Consider Before Hiring a Friend

I got an early start in business. By the time I was 17 years old, I was a partner in a fast-growing company, and when I decided to hire a close friend of my father’s, I was thrilled when he agreed to join.<p>But it was awkward from the beginning. This man had known me since I was in diapers. I …

Research: Drunk People Are Better at Creative Problem Solving

Professor Andrew Jarosz of Mississippi State University and colleagues served vodka-cranberry cocktails to 20 male subjects until their blood alcohol levels neared legal intoxication and then gave each a series of word association problems to solve. Not only did those who imbibed give more correct …

Agile at Scale

By now most business leaders are familiar with agile innovation teams. These small, entrepreneurial groups are designed to stay close to customers and adapt quickly to changing conditions. When implemented correctly, they almost always result in higher team productivity and morale, faster time to …

Marketing in the Age of Alexa

T<i>he autonomous car dropped Lori at her home and then left for its scheduled service at the dealership. It would be back in time to take her to the airport the next morning. On the way into her house, Lori gathered the drone deliveries from the drop box on her stoop. The familiar voice of Eve, a</i> …

Caroline Fairchild on LinkedIn: “It makes sense that stereotypes…

It makes sense that stereotypes about men and women in the workplace run rampant: Stereotypes allow us to simplify complex issues and speak in …

How to Give Employees Structure Without Stifling Them

Leaders know they need to give people room to be their best, to pursue unconventional ideas, and to make smart decisions in the moment. It’s been said so often that it’s a cliché. But here’s the problem: Executives have trouble resolving the tension between employee empowerment and operational …

How AI Can Improve How We Work

<b>Paul Daugherty</b> and <b>James Wilson,</b> senior technology leaders at Accenture, argue that robots and smarter computers aren’t coming for our jobs. They talk about companies that are already giving employees access to artificial intelligence to strengthen their skills. They also give examples of new roles …

How Stitch Fix Turned Personal Style Into a Data Science Problem

Alanna Hale<p>At Stitch Fix our business model is simple: We send you clothing and accessories we think you’ll like; you keep the items you want and send the others back. We leverage data science to deliver personalization at scale, transcending traditional brick-and-mortar and e-commerce retail …

How to Ask Great Questions

Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an …

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

<b>"What does AI mean for your business? Read this book to find out." -- Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google</b><p>Artificial intelligence does the seemingly …

Do Entrepreneurs Need a Strategy?

As a start-up, RapidSOS was an easy sell: It would bring 911 calls into the smartphone age. Emergency-response systems had evolved in a premobile era, which meant that few of them could accurately identify the location of callers who were using mobile phones, compromising response times and medical …