North america

An online tool takes objective and subjective factors into account.

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.

Femtosecond lasers emit pulses of light that last just a millionth of a billionth of a second. These lasers enable surgery so precise that a single mitochondrion can be removed without harming the rest of the cell, and machining so controlled that structures can be micromachined within a piece of glass. Eric Mazur, a professor […]

Focus on the people who already live in your community.

Midcareer employees and managers, who should be at their peak of productivity, are the most disaffected segment of the workforce. Companies need to find ways to rekindle the fires of this vast, neglected group of people—or risk losing them altogether.

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.

It can help lower costs and reach more people.

Under pressure to keep costs down, customers may only look at price and not listen to your sales pitch. Help them understand—and believe in—the superior value of your offerings.

The most dubious business plan can look solid—even smart—if it’s cast as a virtuous circle. “See, we invest our profits in innovation to create delightful products that customers buy—which generate profits that we invest in innovation!” Who could argue with that? Indeed, the merit of self-reinforcing systems seems so obvious that businesspeople instinctively describe their […]

An interview with Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

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.

Recruiters should search public data on where engineers live and work.

Today, most multinationals have a conspicuous social conscience. They publicize their internal codes of conduct, monitor labor conditions in their global supply chains, and require suppliers to meet basic labor practice standards. But despite efforts to be better global citizens, companies by themselves are unable to eliminate abuses in their supply chains. In fact, so […]

Lessons from a revitalized neighborhood in Washington, DC.

The world of the manager is complicated and confusing. Making sense of it requires not a knack for simplification but the ability to synthesize insights from different mind-sets into a comprehensible whole.

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.

Everyone knows that being fair costs little and pays off handsomely. Then why do so few executives manage to behave fairly, even though most want to?

The Taft-Hartley health plans, which arise out of collective bargaining, offer a proven model.

In making decisions, you may be at the mercy of your mind’s strange workings. Here’s how to catch thinking traps before they become judgment disasters.

Are the energy markets shifting back toward coal? In some ways, they never left—coal generates more than 50% of U.S. electricity, for example. Yet since the 1950s, coal’s share of that market has declined against natural gas and other fuels, largely because emissions from coal-fired plants have hurt the environment and stirred up not-in-my-backyard sentiments. […]