HBS Working Knowledge

Leaders intent on boosting team performance could learn from the old-school, military-style approach of Deion Sanders, a former star athlete and now the unorthodox coach behind the revival of two college football teams.“When I’m teaching executives, most of them say they want to hold their subordinates accountable, but they have no clue how to do that,” says Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Hise Gibson in explaining what drew him to…

Brian Kenny: When the Klondike Gold Rush swept the nation in 1896, the tiny lumber town of Seattle became a bustling city almost overnight. On the heels of the Gold Rush came a shipbuilding boom, followed by a post-war bust and the great depression. Then Boeing to the rescue, as Seattle became the epicenter of aircraft manufacturing for the US forces in World War II. Decades later, Boeing passed the…

With each month clocking record-breaking temperatures across the planet, this Earth Day reflected the renewed urgency of regulators and businesses to find climate-change solutions.The US Securities and Exchange Commission recently adopted new rules that will mandate many companies to disclose more about their environmental impact. And the European Union has set ambitious targets for companies to measurably slash their greenhouse gas emissions. Business leaders now must decide how to measure—and…

The idea of supporting social change has propelled impact investing assets to more than $1 trillion. But what if those funds aren’t as impactful as investors expect? Recent Harvard Business School research indicates that while impact investors do behave differently in some important ways, the vast majority tend to invest in companies that are also able to raise capital from non-impact investors. More than half of funding rounds involving impact…

Business leaders face a wide variety of difficult decisions: whether their companies should stay small or go big, whether layoffs are necessary for survival, whether a proposed partnership is a good idea or a recipe for disaster.When faced with difficult decisions, it can be tough for leaders to cut through all the questions that inevitably run through their heads so they can instinctively choose the right path. The best way…

Almost one-third of Americans consider immigration the most important “problem” that the United States faces, according to a new Gallup poll. And yet, companies say they need far more workers than the current system allows.Some business leaders say that visa restrictions remain too tight on visas for skilled and unskilled labor. Either way, immigration will be a critical issue during the US election season. The carefully negotiated bipartisan bill that…

For almost four years, Omar Asensio and his colleagues have been studying the impact of federal energy programs on low-income neighborhoods.The intersection of technology—artificial intelligence, in particular—and public policy has long been an area of focus for Asensio, a visiting fellow with the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS) at Harvard Business School. When the team’s research was published in Nature Sustainability in March, one organization watching closely was…

Brian Kenny: On February 6, 2023 a 7.8 Magnitude earthquake shattered the pre-dawn calm in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria. Tremors could be felt as far away as Israel and Cyprus. A few hours later as the sun appeared on the horizon, another powerful quake struck 60 miles to the north. In the days that followed the death toll would exceed 45,000 making these the deadliest earthquakes in 1500 years.…

Think about all the routines you follow on a regular basis: When you’re getting ready for work, you brush your teeth, go for a 20-minute walk, then take a shower. Before giving a big presentation in the office, you might repeat a mantra to mentally prepare. And at the end of a long workweek, you gather with your spouse and kids to enjoy pizza and a movie on Friday nights.These…

Inflation remains front and center for consumers and businesses, which continue to reel from the double-digit rise in prices during the COVID-19 pandemic and the interest rate hikes designed to cool them. While price increases for goods have slowed, the climate remains uncertain, with inflation ticking up again as recently as February.How should companies navigate the mood of shoppers, who remain cautious after being squeezed over the past two years,…

(Image created with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence tool)Happiness, an elusive condition we all want to experience, is a popular topic. It’s a complex subject. It may or may not require everything from good health to sufficient wealth to good relationships in varying degrees for each of us. The result is measured in terms of outcomes that may be more or less than we expected, just as customer satisfaction is measured…

Absenteeism is so pervasive in Latin America and Asia that 10 percent of a business’ workers might not show up on any given day.This risk can create tremendous uncertainty, especially for businesses running on low margins, says Jorge Tamayo, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. “You can’t control absenteeism, and you don’t know when you will receive an order for a very important buyer,” he says. “So how do…

Brian Kenny: If you've listened to Cold Call before, you may have heard our discussions about cases that focus on individual acts of courage and leadership, like the case about Muhammad Ali risking his boxing career as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, or the one about Madame Curie, whose tenacity led to discoveries that forever changed the world of medical science, netting her two Nobel Prizes. We discussed…

You’ve probably never thought about all the split-second adjustments you make in a single day to perform different tasks. Wake up in a hotel room, walk into a library, sit behind the wheel of a car, or swipe up to access your phone apps. Each time, you automatically “self-orient” before you even begin a task, pivoting your perspective of where you are and what you can do as your environment…

What does it take to put a price tag on open source software (OSS), a resource so critical to the global economy that some 96 percent of commercial programs include some code created, tinkered with, or distributed for free by public-facing tech forums?A new paper presents an eyebrow-raising figure. Without open source software and their ubiquitous code-creation networks, firms would pay an estimated 3.5 times more to build the software…

Common wisdom holds that oil and gas companies, electric utilities, and other industries known for their large carbon emissions generally oppose clean energy policies. Now, a study of corporate advocacy spanning 30 years reveals that many companies are more flexible than previously thought. When confronted with political, policy, and market conditions that necessitate change, well-known companies like Duke Energy, Exelon, and Dominion Resources have in fact supported climate-friendly regulation when…

You feel your career stalling, with no clear path for advancement or a raise. You know the right conversation, artfully navigated, with the right individual at the right time is necessary—but approaching that moment requires ingenuity and skill.From politics to sex, hot-button topics arise all the time in the workplace and can be addressed wisely—or poorly—says Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Christina Wing, whose forthcoming book Unspeakable offers advice for…

To succeed in academia, professors often feel the pressure to “publish or perish.”But in evaluating professors’ productivity based on total published studies and grant funding, are institutions overlooking other factors that affect a faculty member’s ability to conduct important research? “We rely on things like the publication record and grant databases, which are not designed for us to see how science is operating.” Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Kyle Myers…

Brian Kenny: It's hard to find a better example of an inventive genius than Thomas Alva Edison, creator of the light bulb, the phonograph, alkaline batteries, x-rays, and over a thousand other devices that changed the world. And he was equally prolific in business, launching over 100 companies to promote his inventions. But there was just one thing, Edison was a terrible manager. He took enormous risks to grow his…

Some of Apple’s most loyal customers think nothing of upgrading to the latest iPhone every time one comes out. But what about consumers who can’t splurge on a $1,000 iPhone 15 Pro? And what about the electronic waste that would accrue if people threw away functional phones?Long before there were titanium phones with bionic chips, Marcelo Claure, then head of the telecom firm Brightstar, saw an opportunity. A few years…

Managers almost universally say they want to see passion in their employees. Yet sometimes, they can’t spot it when it’s right in front of them.Extroverted employees are more likely to be considered passionate compared to more introverted colleagues—even if it’s not true—according to recent Harvard Business School research. That’s because they tend to demonstrate their feelings more, using cues like animated facial expressions, while introverts come off as more aloof…

Artificial intelligence is changing the nature of work on a scale some predict will be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution. It’s also exposing the yawning gaps in a fractured US employment system that many companies and workers find difficult to navigate.The situation demands a dramatic overhaul of how policymakers, educators, and employers devise, construct, and manage career pathways, which are the routes aspiring workers take as they graduate from…

There’s a virtual elephant in AI’s room: It’s nearly impossible to make the technology forget.And there are an increasing number of scenarios where consumers and programmers may not only want to remove data from a machine learning model—they may be required to do so by law. For instance, since Europe’s tougher data privacy regulations went into effect in 2018, they have created complications for companies worldwide. Questions around data privacy…

Brian Kenny: One sage piece of advice I heard long ago, is to worry only about what I can control, which works great until you're responsible for an outcome that involves others over whom you have no control. Such as the conundrum of firms everywhere, including 96 percent of the Global 250 who have committed to reducing their carbon footprint. There are things you can control in your physical plant,…

Companies struggling with diversity, equity, and inclusion might be tempted to hide their workforce data. Why shine a light on a company’s limited progress—or worse, risk a public-relations headache?It turns out, all news is good news when it comes to letting customers know how diverse—or not—your workforce is, says a recent paper by Harvard Business School researchers. Even when a company’s numbers aren’t ideal, their transparency sends the message that…

Superstar talent brings the kind of wattage that can power a business to the next level, as recent high-stakes decisions facing soccer legend David Beckham show.Two new Harvard Business School case studies examine the questions Beckham and his team pondered as he transitioned from the world’s biggest sports stage to cementing a legacy as a businessman, entrepreneur, and club owner. What’s the best way to build a team around a…

(AdobeStock/Halfpoint)Sometimes we experience what Yogi Berra described as “déjà vu all over again.” It happened to me several weeks ago and left me wondering whether it’s déjà vu or whether things really have changed. Years ago, my colleague at Harvard Business School, Len Schlesinger, and I published an article that laid out two human resource strategies that we labeled the “cycle of success” and the “cycle of failure.” Our late…

When US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Edward Chang noticed something interesting: To fill the vacancy, then-President Donald Trump replaced Ginsburg with another woman, Amy Coney Barrett, even though he had previously added two men to the bench.“There was plenty of evidence showing Trump wasn’t particularly pro-diversity,” says Chang, noting that Trump had issued a memo telling federal agencies to halt…

Regulating our own emotions in stressful situations is difficult enough, but business leaders face the added challenge of attempting to regulate the collective emotions of the groups they lead to guide them toward success. Now, research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Amit Goldenberg explores how emotions intensify within groups and uncovers ways that leaders can reorient the negative feelings of employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders to help them work…

As a finance specialist, Harvard Business School Professor Lauren Cohen works to understand the dynamics that make businesses thrive. In his recent research on family companies, he has found one common thread among successful firms: They actively support their employees’ mental health. One of Cohen’s recent case studies spotlights Zak Pym Williams, the son of the late comedian Robin Williams, who is spreading awareness about mental illness after struggles following…

On May 16 of 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, did something that no tech CEO had ever done before. He implored the US government to regulate his industry. One member seemed to speak for the rest in saying "The time for self-regulation is over. It's time we legislate to hold you accountable." Could he be right? Today on Cold Call, we welcome senior lecturer, Jesse Shapiro, and special…

Seeking a programming gig? Wear glasses and keep your laptop in frame if you want your profile picture to attract recruiters on hiring platforms. A new study finds freelancers are more likely to land work when they “look the part” for a particular job. But, as companies increasingly tap into online platforms to hire freelancers, the old saying that looks can be deceiving still rings true. Faced with myriad candidates…

Imagine you’re a consultant and you notice a few eyebrow-raising behaviors, such as a colleague who misuses a client’s meal stipend or an executive who screams inappropriately at his staff. Should you step in and speak up? For consultants, especially those starting out, the tug of war of values and loyalties among clients, colleagues, and partners can present ethical issues that can be difficult to manage, says David Fubini, a…

From software that once came in a box to phone apps that do simple tasks, more products and services are moving to a subscription model—and consumers are feeling it. The average US consumer last year spent $273 a month on 12 paid subscriptions. People were already used to paying for streaming content, cell phone service, and meal delivery, but now there are subscriptions for toothbrushes, razors, pet food, and apparel.…

The pattern has become painfully predictable in recent years: As the economy shows signs of a slowdown, companies hand out layoff notices to stabilize profitability and calm investor fears. That cycle seems to be in place in the post-pandemic business world, as historic spikes in inflation and corresponding increases in interest rates prompt fears of a recession. Indeed, a recent Harvard Business School case study details how four tech giants…

The biggest, thorniest organizational problems can be solved in just one week, say Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, coauthors of the new book Move Fast and Fix Things. Armed with decision-making power and the right change-management toolkit, leaders don’t need to work for months or even years to solve difficult problems. Denouncing Mark Zuckerberg’s informal Facebook motto, “move fast and break things,” partners Frei and Morriss combine their decades of…

The dizzying explosion of generative artificial intelligence platforms has been the big business story of the past year, but how they’ll make money and how smart companies can use them wisely are the questions that will dominate the next 12 months. “Students and executives are no longer asking whether we should adopt AI—but rather, when and how to do so,” says Andy Wu, the Arjun and Minoo Melwani Family Associate…

So much has changed since a groundbreaking study found that daughters of working moms often perform better in their own careers than daughters of stay-at-home moms—and are just as happy, to boot. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across higher education and corporate America have continued to broaden opportunities for women in the workplace over the intervening five years, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into many a working mom’s…

Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson experienced her first big-stakes professional failure when she was just starting out in her academic career, some 30 years ago, after a decade working in engineering and consulting. Little did she know at the time, but that mortifying defeat would open the door to major success down the road. In 1993, as a doctoral student at Harvard, Edmondson conducted a study at two local…

The days of sticking with one job through retirement are long gone. Younger workers are prioritizing happiness over workplace loyalty, often out of necessity. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wallace offers a roadmap for this rebalance in her new book, The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card, which explains how to treat work-life calibration as you would…