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The concept of courage has been associated with leaders and leadership for centuries. The purpose of this article is to explain the concept of courage and how to approach it in leadership practice by drawing on recent behavioural science and practice-based evidence. Specifically, it addresses four questions: What is courage? What does leadership courage look like in practice? Where does courage come from? And finally, how can we grow and sustain leadership courage? It is important both from an individual and an institutional perspective to identify and establish systems that support courageous leadership. Some specific systems include access to peer advisors, coaching, short sabbaticals, and support networks. The Center for Creative Leadership offers three insights about the nature and effectiveness of leadership, which are relevant to cultivating, growing, and sustaining courageous leadership. Firstly, leadership is cultivated and not inherited. Secondly, collaborations build strong leadership. Finally, good leadership never stops—meaning leadership learning and skill development must continue throughout one’s career. Ultimately, showing courage is also about finding meaning, and learning to embrace courage brings purposefulness, which in turn becomes an important ingredient in its sustenance.

Economic downturns are frightening. Consumers curb spending, companies cut costs, and we all wait anxiously for the economy to recover. In such a climate, launching a product-an expensive and uncertain endeavor in the best of times-would seem to make little sense. But a new study finds that products launched during recessions outperform on several important measures. Even though people tend to limit spending during downturns, the timing may confer, for several reasons: There is less noise in the marketplace, making it easier to differentiate products and draw consumers' attention; the cost of running ads is often lower; and going ahead with new products in the midst of a weak economy is often perceived as a signal of corporate health. This article outlines other key insights from the research and offers guidance on how best to time product launches.

New research looked at the extent to which the employees of a fashion retailer followed the stocking recommendations of two algorithms: one whose workings were easy to understand and one that was indecipherable. Surprisingly, they accepted the guidance of the uninterpretable algorithm more often.

In the early 2010s ADM, a century-old agricultural products and services company, embarked on a big transformation. It streamlined and reorganized its divisions, refocused its teams on smart investments and innovation, and became more strategic and disciplined about capital, costs, and cash. But then the leadership team turned its attention to another important C: customers. The goal was to reorient the business toward value-added nutrition products and services, a more stable sector in which it could build a broader base for growth and impact. Now the company is split into three segments: agricultural services and oilseeds; carbohydrate solutions; and nutrition. All three units sell not just raw or processed commodities but differentiated products. And ADM's leaders have identified three long-term global macro trends-food security, sustainability, and health and well-being-around which the company is making capital-allocation, strategic, and operational decisions. This transformation has been methodical and mission-driven. In 2019 ADM unveiled a new corporate purpose-"to unlock the power of nature to enrich the quality of life"-and over the past decade its heightened focus on innovating for the customer has brought it even closer to fulfilling that purpose. This story offers lessons for other companies that are trying to envision and execute similar change efforts.

In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled-a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and change occupations entirely. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge, but to date few have taken it seriously. To learn more about what their role will entail, the authors-members of a collaboration between the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard's Digital Reskilling Lab and the Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute-interviewed leaders at some 40 organizations around the world that are investing in large-scale reskilling programs. In synthesizing what they learned, they became aware of five paradigm shifts that are emerging in reskilling: (1) Reskilling is a strategic imperative. (2) It is the responsibility of every leader and manager. (3) It is a change-management initiative. (4) Employees want to reskill-when it makes sense. (5) It takes a village. The authors argue that companies will need to understand and embrace these shifts if they hope to succeed in adapting dynamically to the rapidly evolving new era of automation and AI.

Governments around the world are increasingly intervening in the private sector through industrial policies designed to help domestic sectors reach goals that markets alone are unlikely to achieve. Companies in targeted sectors-such as automakers, energy companies, and semiconductor manufacturers-may experience dramatic changes in their operating environments. The policies could create new costs or deliver significant financial incentives to shift R&D or manufacturing investments. They might also incent firms to alter their supplier networks or change their trading partners. Managers who have grown up in markets without such interventions are now facing an unfamiliar environment. In this article, HBS professor Willy C. Shih outlines some of the policy approaches and offers a framework for responding to them. Business leaders need to understand the competing interests shaping the policies, engage and educate political leaders and their staffs, collaborate with upstream and downstream partners, and weigh the pros and cons of accepting government incentives.

Does your firm's culture support its strategy? If not, you'll need to retool your culture, and that's not so easy to do. The values, beliefs, and norms that make it up are intangible and diffused throughout your organization, and employees tend to resist anything that threatens established behaviors and relationships. To figure out the secret to doing cultural change well, the authors examined how business leaders around the world approached it. They learned that successful ones didn't begin with workshops, studies, or new HR policies. They began by creating stories highlighting actions that were deeply inconsistent with a firm's established culture but reinforced an alternative culture more aligned with its strategies. The most effective stories were authentic, featured the leaders themselves, offered a break with the past and a path to the future, appealed to hearts and minds, and were dramatic and memorable. Most critically, they empowered employees to begin crafting their own stories about cultural change so that everyone in the organization ended up co-creating a new culture together.

In recent years leading executives-from firms like Google, Bridgewater, and Netflix-have touted the advantages of a work environment marked by candid feedback. Employees seem to have bought into the benefits too. In a 2019 survey, 94% said that corrective feedback improved their performance when it was presented well. Unfortunately, the increased diversity of our workplaces has made it much more likely that feedback won't go over well and will be misinterpreted as an act of hostility. That's because people from different cultures, genders, and generations have varying expectations for how feedback is delivered and by whom. What's standard in America, for instance, can come off as harsh or baffling in other countries. Boomers and Millennials hold radically different ideas about what's appropriate too. And gender differences add to the complexity. Women who are frank are often seen as aggressive, and men have a bad tendency to offer unwelcome advice. This article explains how to navigate the divides: Understand the norms of feedback recipients and adjust for them. Follow the three A's-make sure any advice is intended to assist, actionable, and asked for. Last, get everyone on your team on the same page by establishing a common approach and building regular feedback loops into your collaborations.

Generative AI and other easy-to-use software tools can help employees with no coding background become adept programmers, or what the authors call citizen developers. By simply describing what they want in a prompt, citizen developers can collaborate with these tools to build entire applications-a process that until recently would have required advanced programming fluency. Information technology has historically involved builders (IT professionals) and users (all other employees), with users being relatively powerless operators of the technology. That way of working often means IT professionals struggle to meet demand in a timely fashion, and communication problems arise among technical experts, business leaders, and application users. Citizen development raises a critical question about the ultimate fate of IT organizations. How will they facilitate and safeguard the process without placing too many obstacles in its path? To reject its benefits is impractical, but to manage it carelessly may be worse. In this article the authors share a road map for successfully introducing citizen development to your employees.

Business leaders are being urged to adopt a multistakeholder approach to governance in place of the shareholder-centered approach that has guided their work for several decades. But through hundreds of interviews with directors, executives, investors, governance professionals, and academics over the years, the author has found wide differences in how those leaders understand stakeholder capitalism. That lack of clarity can put boards and executives on a collision course with one another when decisions requiring difficult trade-offs among stakeholders' interests arise. It also creates expectations among stakeholders that if unfulfilled will fuel cynicism, alienation, and distrust. To help reduce the risk of such negative consequences, the author has created a guide for corporate leaders that illuminates four versions of stakeholder capitalism: instrumental, classic, beneficial, and structural. They reflect significantly different levels of commitment to the interests of stakeholders and rest on very different rationales.

Companies typically treat their innovation projects as a portfolio, aiming for a mix of projects that collectively meet their strategic objectives. The problem, say the authors, is that portfolio objectives have become standardized, and innovation projects are often only weakly related to a company's distinctive strategy. This article introduces a new tool to help leaders better align their innovation investments. The strategic innovation tool kit has two elements: a strategy summary framework and an innovation basket. Leaders start by clarifying a unit's strategy and determining what needs to change to achieve it. The change needs are translated into innovation goals, and leaders create their "innovation basket" by plotting each project against those goals. They can then cut projects that aren't aligned and create new ones that are. It's an iterative and creative process: Projects are adjusted to fit the strategy but can also shape it. Examples from the authors' research demonstrate how the process of creating an innovation basket gives managers fresh insight into what their innovation activities are really doing for their strategy.

The increasing frequency of interactions we have with AI and automated technologies means it is vital to understand how those things make people feel about themselves. Why? Because how people feel about themselves affects a wide range of success factors, including sales, customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, employee satisfaction, and employee performance. The authors have been studying people's reactions to automated technology for more than seven years. In this article they focus on psychological responses to AI and automated technologies that they've observed in service and business-process design, product design, and communication, and offer practical guidance to help leaders and managers figure out how best to use these new technologies to serve customers, support employees, and advance the interests of their organization.

Mastering the art of spontaneous speaking is important for leaders. They must do more than just deliver a good prepared keynote-they need to nail the Q&A and small talk afterward, or crush off-the-cuff toasts and speeches. The author suggests that anyone can become proficient at this art using the right tactics and behaviors: Toasts, Q&As, and small talk don't require any specific personality traits. He offers key strategies that include avoiding conventional responses in favor of establishing genuine connections, and prioritizing brevity while delivering messages. He also highlights the need to speak authentically without the pressure to be perfect-which means daring to be dull. An equally important aspect is active listening to understand and respond effectively to others' needs. And structuring thoughts logically during impromptu conversations is a useful tactic. Fear or nervousness need not deter anyone from communicating effectively on the spot.

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, what lessons have we learned? Four new books-The Big Fail, Lessons from the Covid War, The Phoenix Economy, and Chaos Kings-and a blog series on Crooked Timber search for answers. They examine the response to the crisis, the systemic and societal weaknesses it revealed, and the ways it has fundamentally changed the world.

The 12-time NBA All-Star shares the insights he gained from his mentors and reflects on what it takes to lead both a team and the players' union.

With its ability to take mundane tasks off employees' hands and make everyone more productive, ChatGPT is a game changer. In fact, it is just as big a deal for leaders as COVID-19 was. That according to Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick. In this wide-ranging interview with HBR Ideacast host Curt Nickisch, Mollick describes the main ways to use the technology, which include basic writing tasks and HTML coding. He also touches on the risks involved and the questions leaders need to be asking in order to optimize the use of ChatGPT in their organizations. And for those who haven't yet tried it out, his advice is simple: holding off on experimenting with ChatGPT is a big mistake.

Fraudulent behaviour in corporations is much more common than you might think. Indeed, the stories covered in the media are just the tip of the iceberg. The author, a Chair in Finance at the University of Toronto, shares findings from his research, which found that two out of three instances of fraud likely goes undetected. His analysis of the demise of Arthur Anderson indicates that prior to the 2002 implementation of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), 41per cent of large public firms were misreporting their financial accounts in a material way and 10 per cent were committing securities fraud, imposing an annual cost of $254 billion on investors. He concludes that, if SOX reduced the likelihood of undertaking fraud by even 10 per cent, its high cost - estimated at $3.8 million per firm, on average - would be fully justified.

Whether you've heard the term or not, chances are you've already formed many of your own 'management operating principles'- the guidelines you use to make decisions and get things done from day to day. Understanding how these 'guardrails' influence your work can make you a better leader, says the author, who spent 10 years as a senior executive at Google. She shares her own four operating principles and how she formed them. In the end, she says that it is the combination of your team environment and the team's execution skill that will produce great results. But for that to happen, you need to operate within a consistent framework of core principles.

Every organization can-and should-generate more revenue from its data than it invests in producing and managing it. Yet the idea of turning data into money is often associated with sneaky tactics or 'going too far' with unacceptable privacy violations. As a result, some organizations, especially non-commercial ones, have very little appetite for the term 'data monetization.' The authors say it's time to embrace the concept. They present three approaches to monetizing data: Selling, which entails the exchange of data for money; Improving, which uses data to create efficiencies for cheaper or faster operations; and Wrapping, which uses data to enhance products such that customers want to buy more. In the end they show that, if you will limit what you view as data monetization opportunities, you leave money on the table. Often, a lot of money.

Did you know that waves, tides and currents in bodies of water could provide more reliable sources of energy than either wind or solar? Or that volcanic sand and genetically-edited crops could be significant natural carbon-capture and storage opportunities? Of course, such tech trends on their own cannot predict the future. But by understanding the changes shaping the technology landscape, leaders can make informed decisions and capitalize on new opportunities. The author, who heads up the Future Today Institute, shares three key categories of trends from the Institute's annual Tech Trends Report: Financial Services, Artificial Intelligence and Climate, Green Tech & Energy.