Risk management

The primitive, emotional parts of our brains have a powerful influence on the choices we make. Now, neuroscientists are mapping the risk and reward systems in the brain that drive our best—and worst—decision making.

Your animated interaction in response to my post The Miracle of Making Mistakes delved deep into the subject, broadened the interpretation of a mistake, and even coined a delightful new term: Risktakes. Thank you Notmd, Dawna, Brett, and all the others, who provided terrific insights over the past four weeks. A mistake is as an […]

Rutgers sociologist and disaster studies expert Lee Clarke discusses how organizations unwittingly make pie-in-the-sky plans--what he calls symbolic plans--that...

The “bounded awareness” phenomenon causes people to ignore critical information when making decisions. Learning to expand the limits of your awareness before you make an important choice will save you from asking “How did I miss that?” after the fact.

Managers should make environmental investments for the same reason they make other investments: because they expect them to deliver positive returns or to reduce risks.

Here are the Fortune 100 companies with the best and worst policies.

From how to protect employees to whether it's necessary to revise benefits policies.

Natural disasters, nuclear meltdowns, financial chaos, terrorist attacks, Gen Y liberal uprisings, counter-revolutionary clampdowns, sudden commodity scarcity, social media disruptions, emergent nation corporate competition, deep-sea-oil-well blow-ups, rising nations, falling nations — by now we know that early 21st century is different from late 20th century. But how? The answer is the sharp and unexpected rise […]

In this fictional case, a customer experience manager is torn between loyalty to her family and to her employer after she gets inside information from...

What do Toyota’s sudden-acceleration woes and the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have in common? Both are examples of a type of organizational breakdown that is destined, absent some fundamental rethinking of what “leadership” means, to become ever more common and damaging: complex systems failures triggered by seeming rational patterns of cost-reduction […]

Suppose that an executive wants to make a prediction that bears on his company. Will a particular product sell? How will a particular job applicant perform? When will a new office be ready to open? Under certain conditions, the best way to answer such questions is to ask a large number of people and go […]

Expand access to medicine, and the rest will follow.

Company founders have to be optimistic and resilient. But new research shows that serial entrepreneurs-those who involve themselves in only one project...

Despite the benefit of high profits, as well as the enjoyment of a position of leadership, a company that has a high market share is a tempting target...

More isn’t always better.

For the most part, managers looking to cure their organizational ills rely on obsolete knowledge they picked up in school, long-standing but never proven...

Big investors around the world have soured, FT columnist Gillian Tett reports, on what she calls the “Harvard or Yale investment model.” It’s really the Yale model, since it was Yale and its longtime endowment chief, David Swensen, who led the way. But I guess the Harvard name has more global cachet, so Tett included […]

As reported in the web-exclusive article "Consumer Credit: The Next Crisis," American consumers are carrying a dangerous, unsustainable amount of debt....

It’s hard to reach the 90th percentile in anything, of course, and honesty is no different. So when we ran across one of those exceptional individuals, we wanted to have a word with him. A global controller of a professional services firm of more than 40,000 employees, he’d just participated in a 360-feedback process where […]

HBR asked top management thinkers to share what they were resolved to accomplish in 2011. Here are their answers: Joseph E. Stiglitz will be crafting...