Crisis management

He really shanked it this time. Tiger Woods is a champ when it comes to hitting a little white ball into a shiny tin cup. His skills are definitely subpar, however, when it comes to managing scandals. Coming during a relatively slow Thanksgiving news cycle, the initial details of the star athlete’s involvement in an […]

Twelve lessons on analyzing data, communicating information, and protecting your employees.

Working parenthood was hard before Covid-19--now it's an all-out crisis. In "A Way Forward for Working Parents," Daisy Dowling argues that it's time to...

It’s big news when a 168-year-old dies; it’s even bigger news when the demise is self-inflicted. On Thursday, responding to the astonishing (even for British tabloids) phone-hacking and police-paying charges, News International said that it would shutter its News of the World after one more issue this coming Sunday. The company’s predicament and how it […]

The economic situation isn't getting any easier. We all know people (or are people) who have been laid off, had hours radically reduced, or have watched...

Burnout, though not new, worsened during the pandemic. In "Beyond Burned Out," Jennifer Moss presents new research showing the true depths of burnout...

Based on a database of over 2,500 companies.

It’s become the mantra of the moment: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Leaders everywhere are struggling to make sense of the worldwide economic crisis, to learn lessons that will guide them and their companies going forward. My worry is that too many leaders are learning the wrong lessons — they are becoming […]

In 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment was subjected to the most devastating hack in corporate history. Highly sensitive data--salary details, private e-mails...

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 […]

Lessons from two devastating California wildfires.

Three decision-making traps.

A real estate developer considers whether to push forward with an office complex in the midst of Covid-19.

Do you have a plan for leading yours?

This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military. It's the second in a series on the four aspects of VUCA, a framework...

When the author agreed to accept the top job at UPS, the global shipping service, in late winter of 2019, she expected to steer the company toward a brighter...

As the world looks back to look ahead, nothing could ring more true today than Alvin Toffler's prophesy: "The illiterate of the twenty-first century will...

When bad things happen, most of us have a gut reaction. Psychological resilience-the capacity to respond quickly and constructively in a crisis-can be...

The world is awash in increasingly varied, sophisticated, and dangerous fraud schemes. Companies have become quite good at managing predictable, lower-level risks but, perhaps because of this, often have a false sense of security. Senior executives and directors need to be aware of their companies’ risk of serious fraud, yet they may be out of […]

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.