Management - Leadership

Most companies approach hiring with faulty assumptions and poor practices. They believe talent is fixed rather than contextual. They fail to create real partnerships between internal recruiters and hiring managers. And they rely too much on salary surveys and rigid compensation formulas.

Accelerating technological improvements have changed the speed with which new innovations penetrate markets. Graphed over time, the market adoption of innovations now resembles a dramatic shark fin--a dangerously deformed version of the classic bell-curve model of diffusion.

Cognitive technologies are increasingly being used to solve business problems; indeed, many executives believe that AI will substantially transform their companies within three years. But many of the most ambitious AI projects encounter setbacks or fail.

Fifty years ago a good blue-collar job was with a large manufacturer such as General Motors or Goodyear. Often unionized, it paid well, offered benefits, and was secure. But manufacturing employment has steadily declined, from about 25% of the U.S. labor force in 1970 to less than 10% today.

More than a billion people in the developing world remain in extreme poverty and outside the formal economy. Traditional CSR programs have done little to alleviate the situation and rarely produce transformative change.

Customer satisfaction depends on creative problem solving, not empathy.

What do you call a dense, overly lengthy contract that's loaded with legal jargon and virtually impossible for a non-lawyer to understand? The status quo, says Shawn Burton, the general counsel for GE Aviation's Business & General Aviation.

It mostly makes people avoid the peers who criticized them, new research shows

What sets exceptional business leaders apart? One thing, says Sydney Finkelstein, is their ongoing commitment to giving direct reports one-on-one instruction. Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, has studied world-class leaders for more than a decade.

Although CEOs are charged with recognizing when their firms need a major change in direction, their power and privilege often insulate them from information that would help them perceive looming opportunities or threats. No one in the company wants to tell the CEO of problems, much less that he or she is mistaken.