Across key societal institutions, such as courtrooms, classrooms, and newsrooms, we have an unspoken contract that says only lawyers, teachers, and journalists are entitled to ask questions. In a ...

What’s the difference between culture and employee engagement? It’s a good question. Many people use the two terms interchangeably. In their minds, the term company culture is synonymous with free ...

A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2020 issue of strategy+business. Senior executives, accustomed to annual performance reviews and 360-degree assessments, can be quick to acknowledge ...

Industrial revolutions are momentous events. By most reckonings, there have been only three. The first was triggered in the 1700s by the commercial steam engine and the mechanical loom. The harnessing ...

The job of a chief executive officer at a large publicly held company may seem to be quite comfortable — high pay, excellent benefits, elevated social status, and access to private jets. But the ...

Imagine that you’re one of millions of people whose job is threatened by digital technology. You’re the compliance officer at a bank, an operations manager on an assembly line, a technical writer, a ...

Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken. This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which ...

In the beginning, it was cultural and managerial chaos. When Chinese computer company Lenovo dispatched a team to New York in 2004 to discuss acquiring the personal computer division of IBM, only one ...

Professor Robert Sutton is, above all else, a humanist. That makes him something of a rare breed in the academy of elite management thinkers. Whereas many of the most noted business scholars of the ...

The word philosopher is a pejorative in Larry Bossidy’s lexicon. Philosophers, he says, are people “who are good strategists, but don’t have the capability to translate that strategy into action.” And ...

A large auto manufacturer asked a consulting firm to evaluate its competitive position in relation to ride-sharing startups building autonomous vehicles. Instead of viewing this as a classic strategy ...

A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2016 issue of strategy+business. Most companies have leaders with the strong operational skills needed to maintain the status quo. But they face a ...