Business services sector

Context is key.

Three mindsets that lead to "nondisruptive creation."

In the wake of a series of gross corporate abuses around the turn of the century, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley, which was intended to make corporate...

The search for an alternative to interruptive ads.

What they should prove before you bring them on board.

The Internet promises to give marketing the same boost in productivity that new operational strategies have given to manufacturing.

Political scientists, legislators, educators, business executives, lawyers, consumerists—practically everyone, it sometimes seems—is calling for better public management. For businessmen, the need is especially important because they feel surrounded by government institutions with which they are legally required to interact. But enthusiasm for good government is one thing; understanding the nature of it, to say nothing […]

Which one should you invest in?

Strategic dreams often turn into nightmares if companies start engaging in expensive and distracting restructurings. It’s far more effective to choose a design that works reasonably well, then develop a strategic system to tune the structure to the strategy.

This is the fourth in HBR’s series of interviews with some of the world’s recognized leaders—individuals who have led not a company but a country. Each leader illuminates something different about the subject of leadership: the quality of thinking, the sense of responsibility, the style of management. The qualities of the individuals vary, in part […]

Greatest Southeast Community Hospital is a 494-bed acute care facility located in southeast Washington, D.C. With revenues of $145 million and 2,650 employees, it is both the largest private employer and the only medical facility in a troubled and isolated community called Anacostia. Nearly a quarter of the area’s residents live below the poverty line, […]

High-definition televisions (HDTVs) should, by now, be a huge success. Philips, Sony, and Thompson invested billions of dollars to develop TV sets with...

Most CEOs who specialize in turning around struggling companies focus on costs. But for Fred Hassan, chairman and CEO of Schering-Plough, the primary...

New organizations are emerging in its place—organizations that are corporate in form but have no public shareholders and are not listed or traded on organized exchanges. These organizations use public and private debt, rather than public equity, as their major source of capital. Their primary owners are not households but large institutions and entrepreneurs that […]

For a leader, a public apology is always a high-risk move. Understanding what apologies can and cannot do will help you avoid both foolhardy stonewalling and unnecessary contrition.

Learning and development is a lifelong journey.

Everyone assumed that no one would pay for television programming—until cable came along. The same thing’s going to happen on the Web.

Susan Carter, a partner at a prestigious strategy consulting firm, is caught in a dilemma she never expected: her firm's most important client has made...

Can the firm really retrain hundreds of thousands of employees?

A close look at ad campaigns from Hillary Clinton and Apple.