HBS Working Knowledge

Launching a social justice startup takes more than a moving story. Ask Harley Blakeman, the 32-year-old founder of Honest Jobs.He has perfected his elevator pitch, but that doesn’t mean launching his business has been easy. A once-homeless teenager from Florida, Blakeman turned to selling drugs—a lucrative gig that taught him a lot about business but ultimately landed him in prison. Once he’d served his 14 months, Blakeman sought to build…

Walt Disney’s time in Paris during the waning days of World War I helped shape him into a visionary entrepreneur who would ultimately build a beloved international brand. Dwight Eisenhower and Robert McNamara discovered the importance of humility and how to motivate subordinates from their service during military conflicts.As countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom honor their veterans this month, Harvard Business School Professor Robert…

African people, businesses, and nations are becoming increasingly stressed by climate-related perils like droughts, river flooding, extreme heat, and rising sea levels. This is leading not only to the destruction of assets but also challenges to lives and livelihoods—not to mention disturbing the area’s peace, stability, and national security. And the situation is getting progressively worse, partly due to people migrating out of suddenly unlivable situations.“Governments and development finance institutions…

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from chapter one of Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream, written by Karen G. Mills, senior fellow at Harvard Business School. The second edition was published in 2024 by Palgrave Macmillan.The cycle of fintech innovation in small business lending is not yet complete, but we can already see its promise. As technology opened the doors to vast troves of data, opportunities emerged…

If a chatbot can Slack convincingly in the boss’s voice, will employees follow orders once they realize the CEO is actually a machine?A novel two-part study finds that an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained to write like a technology company’s CEO responded to questions so believably that many employees thought the answers came from the boss himself. But there’s a caveat: When employees perceived that a response came from AI—even…

From tech to media to management consulting firms, layoffs are back.Downsizing during a healthy economy can help lay the foundation for efficient growth or make space for new roles that harness newer technology, such as artificial intelligence. Companies such as Dropbox and Intel have also announced staff cuts in reaction to slowing or declining demand. US government data from October suggests that employers remain cautious, adding just 12,000 new positions…

Brian Kenny On September 17, 1987, advocates for people with disabilities marked a major milestone, the closure of the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island. Since opening in 1945, Willowbrook had become the largest state-run institution for people with disabilities in the United States. It had also come to epitomize the absolute disdain that many people had for some of the most vulnerable among us. Severe overcrowding, rampant physical and…

John Judis and Ruy Teixeira heralded a new age of US politics in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book predicted that the growing Latino population, coupled with a clear Democratic lead in many other growing segments of society, would strengthen the party’s hold on the US electorate for decades to come.Judis and Teixeira actually made two predictions: that Latinos and other Democratic-leaning groups would become a larger…

Exports from Vietnam to the United States have grown significantly since America’s trade war with China began in 2018. At the same time, Vietnam has been importing more Chinese goods. This has led many to question: is “Made in Vietnam” really “Made in China"? Not as much as the public would think, say Ebehi Iyoha and Jaya Wen, assistant professors at Harvard Business School. By one broad measure of products,…

Millions of Americans, from hourly retail staffers to corporate vice presidents, wrestle with the demands of work while parenting young children, caring for a sick spouse or aging parent—or both.That juggling act is made even tougher by rigid practices and rules set by employers, such as inflexible or unpredictable work schedules, and employers’ failure to grasp how employees are struggling and to provide them with support, according to a new…

When science fiction writer Neal Stephenson dreamed of the metaverse—a term he coined in his 1992 novel Snow Crash—he envisioned a long city street that’s “always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance.”While Las Vegas certainly isn’t known for its constraints, Stephenson believed a digital world could be truly limitless. Chatter about the metaverse peaked in late 2021, almost three decades after Stephenson’s novel…

As partisan vitriol flies in the final month before the US presidential election, a new study offers insight into the question of why people share political misinformation.Even when a news article would flatter their political party, people tend to expect that sharing true information on social media would benefit their personal reputations more than spreading misleading articles, the research shows. Furthermore, when political articles are shared on Twitter (now X),…

Brian Kenny: In her 2013 blog post titled, “Welcome to the Unicorn Club,” venture capitalist, Aileen Lee, coined a term that has come to define the benchmark for investors the world over. Unicorns, that is privately held startups that are valued at $1 billion or more, are more common today than they were in 2013 when there were just 39 firms that met that definition. Today, the number is closer…

The deadline on an important work project is looming, but you keep getting distracted by news stories and silly cat videos online. Even though installing an Internet-blocking app might help you stay focused, you resist the idea, telling yourself you should have the willpower to white-knuckle your way through that critical project.But first, just one more cat video … Research has shown that people are more likely to follow through…

The world’s refugee population has exploded over the last decade, straining the resources of international resettlement agencies as staff struggle to keep up with manually matching millions of refugees and asylum seekers to host countries.Artificial intelligence and machine learning—which have transformed several industries over the past two years—may offer solutions for overwhelmed resettlement programs run by both nongovernmental organizations and governments, according to a study by Harvard Business School Assistant…

Pundits love a political horse race, parsing the latest polls to predict who might win an election. And in the final runup to the US presidential contest, these forecasts can influence markets and shape public opinion and policies.But as America heads to the polls in November, new research warns forecasters to use caution with one large body of data: past demographic voting trends. Analyzing census figures and US presidential and…

Stop multitasking. Budget your time. Put down your phone. From juggling your family’s personal commitments to urgent work projects, the start of a new academic year can bring seasonal overwhelm. But it can also offer an opportunity to reflect: How to do things better, achieve more balance, and set more meaningful priorities at work and at home. As we begin the last quarter of 2024, Harvard Business School faculty experts…

Brian Kenny: In 1970, about 15 percent of adults in the United States met the clinical definition of obesity. By 1990, that number had doubled. Today it sits at 42 percent for adults and 19 percent for children and adolescents. That's over a third of our nation's population grappling with the health conditions that can result from obesity, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and joint problems among others, not to mention…

Political polarization has seeped so deeply into US society that it shapes who Americans befriend, date, and marry, where they live, raise their families, and retire—and how they run their businesses.A recent paper illustrates how the partisan divide permeates corporate America, segregating executive suites, start-up firms, and even entire professions and industries. Within finance, in particular, decisionmakers’ political views influence investment returns, credit ratings, asset allocations, loan terms, and bond…

Surging inflation drove many consumers to cheaper brands or lower-quality products, but new data suggests that switching might not have saved them as much as they might have expected. During the most recent period of high inflation, prices of the least expensive products increased more than those of the costliest, according to an analysis of microdata from large retailers by Harvard Business School Professor Alberto Cavallo. In a forthcoming article…

What would Aristotle think about self-driving cars?As the abilities of artificial intelligence systems to automate complex tasks accelerate, warnings about the dangers of outsourcing life-and-death decisions to machines are pumping the brakes on the powerful technologies. From Emmanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill, philosophers have wrestled with the age-old questions autonomous vehicles are now raising—in new and urgent ways—for businesses and their leaders. “And by genuine ethical decisions, I mean…

It’s Wall Street doctrine that small firms struggle to raise capital at reasonable rates and are often rejected for credit lines and loans because banks think their risk profile is too high.“If you really want to drive investment, targeting those firms that look like they have financial slack could lead to substantial growth.” But new research suggests that small businesses are far more fiscally conservative than banks realize. In fact,…

Remote work is giving companies new opportunities to tap additional markets and talent pools. However, a global workforce also brings a challenge: As some employees are getting up in the morning, others are winding down their workday.“There are many benefits to the individual and the company from embracing work-from-anywhere.” Mismatched working hours makes it difficult for employees to connect, and even a one-hour schedule difference can hurt communication, introduce complexity,…

Brian Kenny: What beverage created by monks, dates to 2000 BC, has been used as both a medicine and a party drink, lasts for up to 100 years, and was once the favorite currency in the state of Pennsylvania? Here's a hint, it begins with a “W”. That's right, it's whiskey. With recipes passed on and perfected through the ages, this spirit has been adopted in markets around the world,…

CEOs have never had so many ways to communicate with their employees. But despite the availability of Slack, internal newsletters, and virtual town hall meetings, organizations can still go quiet.One of the most common culprits: Major leadership transitions, according to a recent study of 500 million emails and 80 million meeting invitations. Shortly after a new CEO takes over, uncertainty among employees dampens communication within a company. However, after about…

As investor pressure mounts on companies to show their environmental impacts, leaders are encountering an unwieldy tangle of terms and approaches. Climate accounting basics and a dictionary of sorts can help demystify the calculations and voluntary targets that companies need to know now, says Michael Toffel, the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School.Roughly 42 percent of Fortune 500 companies said they’d reached an environmental target…

AI can help you become a better writer, coder, and researcher. But can the powerful technology boost business acumen and economic performance?Sort of, says a recent study. An experimental artificial intelligence (AI) mentor designed to answer business questions from Kenyan entrepreneurs helped some become more successful—but led others down the wrong path, says Rembrand Koning, the Mary V. and Mark A. Stevens Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business…

It was a brief dalliance, just a few weeks in length, over text and video only.The end of the affair was nonetheless just the beginning for Stephen Easterbrook, the McDonald’s CEO who went from being hailed as the company’s “savior” by doubling its share price in less than five years to losing his job and getting banned from serving as an executive or director at any other company for five…

Brian Kenny: From the moment your alarm sounds in the morning to the moment you put your smartphone on the nightstand, almost everything you do throughout the day involves one thing, a silicon chip. Your kitchen appliances, TVs and tablets, your treadmill, your ride to work, the office equipment you use. All of these things are powered by wafer-thin integrated circuits called chips. They're more than just important. Silicon chips…

As a polarizing US presidential election nears, moderating controversial content on social media poses a pressing problem for tech giants.But no matter how many employees they hire, lines of code they write, or new content policies they implement, major platforms face an overwhelming task. In the second quarter of 2023 alone, for example, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, took action on 13.6 million pieces of terrorism-related content and 1.1 million posts…

A new space race—one fueled more by commercial conquest than intergalactic domination—is charting solutions to pressing problems in national security, climate change, and communication.With costs poised to drop and innovation on the rise, the economics of cosmic exploration and commerce are rapidly changing. Harvard Business School Senior Associate Dean Matthew Weinzierl’s new research explores the business opportunities hidden among the stars, particularly in data from and through space, but also…

When ChatGPT and other large language models began entering the mainstream two years ago, it quickly became apparent the technology could excel at certain business functions, yet it was less clear how well artificial intelligence could handle more creative tasks.Sure, generative AI can summarize the content of an article, identify patterns in data, and produce derivative work—say, a song in the style of Taylor Swift or a poem in the…

A year ago, most experts thought the US economy was thundering headlong toward recession, as the Federal Reserve moved at a historic pace to slow inflation by bridling interest rates.Yet, despite recent tremors in the stock market, no recession has materialized. Part of the reason may be stock and credit market dynamics—and investor behavior. HBS Working Knowledge spoke with Robin Greenwood, the George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking at…

Brian Kenny: To say that men's leagues have historically dominated the world of professional sports is understating the case. In fact, it literally took a World War to launch the first professional women's league. In 1943, Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs proposed the idea of a professional women's baseball league to keep baseball in the public eye, while many of the best male players were overseas. The All-American…

The following is an excerpt that was adapted and lightly edited from chapter nine of Smart Rivals: How Innovative Companies Play Games That Tech Giants Can't Win, written by Feng Zhu and Bonnie Yining Cao and published August 20, 2024. In today's global digital and tech business landscape, traditional businesses may struggle to adapt to the constantly changing nature of ecosystem strategies. In his book, Smart Rivals: How Innovative Companies…

In a US presidential election year with more twists and turns than most in recent memory, many of the issues on the ballot impact business. And keeping politics in the workplace respectful is forefront on managers’ minds as a divided nation prepares for weeks of potentially rancorous discourse.Ahead of the Democratic National Convention, HBS Working Knowledge gathered insights from Harvard Business School faculty about what’s at stake for companies, and…

When cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike distributed a faulty software update in July, it impacted a staggering 8.5 million devices. The crisis rippled through commercial airline operations, package delivery logistics, ecommerce, and health care, to name a few.This incident serves as a stark reminder that business disruptions are not just potential threats, but common occurrences that demand immediate attention from CEOs, C-suite teams, and boards. It's time for leaders to take stock…

The CrowdStrike tech security outage in July revealed the true interdependence—and fragility—of global computer systems. Following several high-profile data breaches, policymakers are calling on businesses to do more to fix code weaknesses and protect systems from cyber criminals.A new study highlights one simple change companies could make: updating software sooner after improved versions hit the market. The research finds that some 60 percent of US organizations continued to use a…

In the past decade, physician burnout has evolved from a serious concern to a troubling epidemic, affecting 50 percent of physicians and physicians-in-training. Excessive workloads, process inefficiencies, and administrative burdens related to electronic medical records (EMR) documentation are hampering productivity and significantly impacting physician well-being.In the United States, physicians spend between 34 and 55 percent of their workday compiling clinical documentation and reviewing EMRs. While some of this contributes to…

Immigration will be a central issue in the upcoming US presidential election, just as it motivated the recent snap elections in France. After all, the number of migrants rose 27 percent to 281 million globally in 2020, compared with 2010, according to United Nations estimates. The number of individuals displaced by natural disasters could surge to 1.2 billion by 2050, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace. Beyond the…