North america

Everyone agrees that managing change is tough, but few can agree on how to do it. Most experts are obsessed with "soft" issues, such as culture and motivation,...

Retreat isn't just inadvisable; it's dangerous.

Strategy at many companies is almost completely disconnected from execution. Establishing a dedicated unit to orchestrate both will help to bridge the divide.

Companies profess devotion to shareholder value but rarely follow the practices that maximize it. What will it take to make your company a level 10 value creator?

The most successful entrepreneurs aren't 20-somethings.

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

The top team’s annual strategic off-site differs from all other meetings in its potential impact on the company. That’s why it should be designed and managed differently.

How the current system works, and why it needs fixing.

The U.S. may be the world’s leading innovator, but it won’t be for long if investors, regulators, and the legal establishment continue to penalize companies for risk taking, says Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. Recently, the council’s National Innovation Initiative, a leadership network of CEOs and university presidents, released a report in […]

How do people in business feel about women in executive roles? The short answer is, attitudes have improved, but not as much as men seem to think. In the July–August 1965 issue of HBR, Garda W. Bowman, N. Beatrice Worthy, and Stephen A. Greyser examined the views of 2,000 U.S. executives (half were men, half […]

Focus on the people who already live in your community.

In Silicon Valley, exciting new business ideas rapidly attract capital and talent away from less worthy ventures. But in big companies, ideas, capital, and talent are stagnant—prisoners of traditional bureaucratic ways of allocating resources. To capture the Valley’s entrepreneurial magic, your company needs to move from resource allocation to resource attraction.

And electronic tools can help them do it.

The Inn at Little Washington, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is one of America’s most acclaimed restaurants, rated number one in North America by Travel + Leisure magazine and listed among the top ten in the world by the International Herald Tribune. Yet, as co-owner and chef Patrick O’Connell explains, exquisite food is the norm at […]

Stuck with excess inventory, Neptune Gourmet Seafood is toying with the idea of launching a second, inexpensive product line. But if Neptune stoops to conquer, rivals might retaliate with price cuts, and the new line might end up cannibalizing the old.

Right now, U.S. companies are chartered by states. But what if they were chartered by the federal government?

Whether you’re running a company or feeding, clothing, and equipping an army, the bedrock principles of leadership don’t change: Know your stuff and listen hard, and your troops will fight like lions for you.

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Companies have focused so much on downsizing to contain costs that they've largely neglected a looming threat to their competitiveness: a severe shortage...

Employers have a lot of indirect influence.