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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Brian Kenny Since ChatGPT appeared on the scene back in the fall of 2022, newsfeeds have been flooded with claims that generative AI is going to change the world, so if you're suffering from a bit of GenAI fatigue, I get it, but even if it's not readily apparent to…
What really fuels a boom-and-bust cycle in the modern global economy? It’s not always household debt, says a new paper that parses in-depth data across 115 countries. Instead, rising corporate debt may flash the clearest warning that a fiscal crisis is on the horizon. In recent years, experts focused on…
On a hectic Friday in October 2016, Josh Domingues wondered if he had made a mistake quitting the security of a well-paying job managing contracts for professional hockey players to start a new venture selling nearly expired groceries at discount prices. After all, a trial run of the 27-year-old entrepreneur’s…
People might be more likely than ever to protest in reaction to a social problem or geopolitical crisis. But do such activist events, even large-scale demonstrations, change public opinion?New research shows that protests rarely change views or alter voting decisions, findings that could have important implications in an election year…
Entrepreneurs must overcome many barriers to get discoveries to market, but academic researchers face an additional one they might not realize: themselves.Academics tend to develop a myopic focus on the unique expertise they spend their lives developing, but that narrow scope can become a commercial hindrance. A recent study of…
The solution seems obvious. Forgiving medical debt should ease both financial and emotional burdens for the two in five people in the US who carry it.Yet a new comprehensive study that tracked more than 200,000 patients and randomly relieved more than $169 million of medical debt for 83,401 patients finds…
Brian Kenny: In April of 1945 while stationed in Italy, a 21-year-old American soldier was struck by enemy fire and left with debilitating wounds to his right arm and hand. That life-changing moment that could have sent him spiraling would instead motivate him in ways he never could have imagined.…
When former President Donald Trump slapped sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports in 2019, the economic dynamics between the world’s two biggest economies forever shifted. American businesses hoping President Joe Biden would return to decades-long precedent instead find some tariffs escalating, upending longstanding principles of free trade established when China joined…
Starting a new job often brings excitement and high hopes of mingling with colleagues, sharing innovative ideas, and making a positive impact on an organization. Soon, however, a new employee’s excitement may start to wane, if the person notices that questions and suggestions aren’t actually welcome.In fact, new hires often…
Ask board members their most important duty, and they will likely say it is appointing and overseeing the CEO. Yet many boards fail to make appropriate choices, often because they don’t prepare candidates for the challenges they will inevitably face after stepping into the role.When CEO appointments go wrong Let’s…
When private equity (PE) firms buy a company, they typically follow a standard playbook to create value—streamlining operations, restructuring debt, changing management, and cutting costs. However, as digital technologies and artificial intelligence allow companies to drive productivity and innovation, PE firms are discovering new sources of value creation, new research…
Brian Kenny: On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, launched a communications revolution with the phrase, "just set up my twttr" all lowercase. Little did he know that 15 years, hence almost to the day, those 16 characters would net him $2.9 million. More specifically, a digital image…
Late one day in the fall of 2021, as she was packing up to head home, Assistant Professor Maria Roche bumped into Andy Wu, a colleague in the Strategy Unit whose office is next to hers. Roche asked how his research was going, and in the conversation that followed the…
