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Leadership development has long been a primary concern for businesses. In recent years, owing to the high cost of traditional leadership development programs, organizations have shifted attention to leader self-development initiatives to facilitate human resource development. This article examines why people develop themselves for leadership positions. Drawing from the subjective expressions of business practitioners from multiple countries, our study identifies variations in leader self-development patterns for leadership positions within the subjects' organizations. Our findings suggest that individual perceptions of leadership have a strong effect on leader self-development processes. We use the insights gained from our inductive approach to develop a four-factor leader self-development model that provides useful developmental strategies and prescriptions for business practitioners and their organizations.

This article develops a conceptual model that supports and aligns supply chain strategies with organizational culture and leadership styles. We examine various supply chain theories and organizational behavior concepts to develop an integrated supply chain: the human factor model. Based on the underlying dimensions of environmental uncertainty and product complexity, we propose a 2x2 typology to identify four different supply chain systems that can be used by organization leaders to identify suitable supply chain strategies and compatible people management practices. We provide a useful and practical framework to analyze the alignment between the external environment and the internal organization of a supply chain system.

Digital transformation is rapidly changing the competitive landscape and the war on talent for today's organizations. As part of this economy, organizations and their HR units must continuously reevaluate leadership structures and practices that exploit core competencies while allowing for innovation (i.e., leadership ambidexterity)and incorporate big data with predictive analytics. In this vein, understanding how HR executives can create better solutions around this problem remains sparse. Specifically, what frameworks can HR executives apply to identify potential alignment failures in leadership succession planning in light of newer emerging markets? What internal decision-making traps need to be recognized? Finally, what specific forms of data and evidence must test these plans for relevance and recharge and renew the talent-to-strategy pipeline? In this article, we examine these questions by reviewing the gaps in the literature and identifying through our four-step model how organizations can incorporate ambidexterity building as a leadership succession planning practice.

The internet brought disruptive change to the business landscape through the creation of a whole host of digital marketing tactics. But with these new tactical options has come the need for marketing managers to (1) prioritize what they wish to accomplish and (2) determine which digital marketing tactics to invest in. We consider these issues from the perspective of four business strategies: prospectors, analyzers, low-cost defenders, and differentiated defenders. In this article, we provide marketing managers with insights into how businesses pursuing various strategies approach these digital marketing issues, with the ultimate goal being to assist managers in the efficient and effective implementation of their firm's adopted strategy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, different nations have adopted a variety of response strategies to fight and contain the new coronavirus. Such national response strategies can be classified into three categories based on their underlying philosophy: strict control with unlimited resources, relentless contribution with limited resources, and rough rationality with limited resources. We discuss the philosophies, characteristics, and performances of the three response strategies and when they should be adopted. We also examine what marketing innovation strategies enterprises should adopt to survive and grow their businesses in both the short and long term. This study provides important strategic implications for national policymakers and enterprises on the use of response strategies as well as marketing innovation tactics and strategies to be used both during and after the pandemic.

#MeToo has become a global phenomenon since 2017, when many famous women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment (SH) against many famous men. Our purpose here is to help managers of both sexes understand their role in the wake of the #MeToo movement. We reviewed recent research on SH and #MeToo from both academic and practitioner outlets to get a pulse on what is currently being written on these topics. We also studied data we collected on current attitudes and behaviors men and women are experiencing in the wake of #MeToo, as well as examined one of the newer forms of harassment, namely online SH. We use our data and research to explore actions managers can take to prevent SH and respond to it when it occurs. In doing so, we provide new insights for business practice that both managers and scholars need to be aware of, and act upon, in the wake #MeToo.

Doing business on the dominant digital platforms makes it difficult for companies to differentiate their products and services and pursue competitive strategy. Platform-dependent businesses must understand the risks and how to navigate them.

Business ecosystems provide valuable access to external capabilities, scale fast, and can be very flexible and resilient. But only 1 in 7 ecosystems achieves sustainable success. The metrics and red flags described in this article can help you track the key drivers of ecosystem health and ensure that your company beats the odds.

Rapid scaling is a key element of platform strategy, but it is not the best move for all platforms in all markets. Sometimes a more careful, incremental, and slower approach to scaling is better. In studying platform businesses like Airbnb and Uber, the authors found that regulatory complexity and regulatory risk are two significant but often neglected factors in the success of platform growth strategies.

Companies whose executives are digitally savvy outperform other companies on growth and valuation by large margins. But less than 10% of companies have digitally savvy top teams in place. Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Information Systems Research describes the level of digital savviness found in top teams, the business value it delivers, and the actions you can take to increase the digital savviness of your company's executives.

Many companies are unable to consistently gain business value from their investments in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. A study of the data science functions and initiatives in three of India's largest private-sector banks identified five obstacles to successful data science projects and suggests remedies that can help companies obtain more benefit from their data science investments.

As the chairman of a publicly traded multinational corporation, it's difficult to contemplate replacing a charismatic, visionary CEO who tripled your organization's revenue, increased its net income sixfold, and grew the company from $30 billion in market capitalization to $300 billion during his 10-year tenure. As a chief executive, it's perhaps even harder to think about how to replace yourself with someone who you believe will do the job better than you could over the next decade. But Mastercard found a way to approach its most recent CEO transition thoughtfully and systematically by sticking to several rules: It cast a wide net, considering more than 40 internal employees and a handful of standout externals. It committed to inclusivity in decision-making, asking the entire board to participate. It insisted on solving for tomorrow's problems, not today's, in clarifying what type of new leader was needed. It focused on developing and retaining all its current and future stars--not just filling the top job. Finally, the authors pledged to keep their minds open and their personal opinions to themselves--while discouraging early preferences and groupthink among the directors--until one final candid and decisive debate.

Agile methodology, created to fast-track software development, is now being used throughout organizations by teams that want to execute projects quickly. But those efforts often don't pan out, say Babson's Rob Cross and Alia Crocker and Harvard Law School's Heidi K. Gardner. Their research reveals that many large agile initiatives not only miss their goals but also cause organizational disruption--including staff burnout, the loss of key talent, and infighting among teams. What's going wrong? With the help of organizational network analysis--a methodology for mapping how people collaborate--the authors have identified where unforeseen barriers undermine agile initiatives. The main problem they found: Traditional practices for executing agile projects are ineffective. Companies err by staffing agile teams only with stars, isolating them from the main business, and dedicating members 100% to teams. In this article, they offer alternative approaches: tapping "hidden stars," who will be less overloaded, for agile initiatives, and then identifying and reaching out to highly connected potential resources who can bring in expertise as needed.

For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they've backed--Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more--are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually do and how they create value. To pull the curtain back, Paul Gompers of Harvard Business School, Will Gornall of the UBC Sauder School of Business, Steven N. Kaplan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Ilya A. Strebulaev of Stanford Business School conducted what is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of VC firms to date. In this article, they share their findings, offering details on how VCs hunt for deals, assess and winnow down opportunities, add value to portfolio companies, structure agreements with founders, and operate their own firms. These insights into VC practices can be helpful to entrepreneurs who want to raise capital, corporate investment arms that want to emulate venture capitalists' success, and policy makers who seek to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in their communities.

Senior leaders, particularly CEOs, confront a central paradox in their work: They generally have access to more lines of communication than anybody else, but the information that flows to them is suspect and compromised. Warning signals are tamped down. Key facts are omitted. Data sets are given a positive spin. All of it isolates leaders in a dangerous information bubble. But they can escape that bubble, the authors argue, by working actively to create a more expansive "listening ecosystem." They first have to learn how to listen actively themselves, without distraction or judgment, purely for comprehension; then they have to create systems and processes all around them that elevate listening to a constant state of hypervigilance. This sort of sustained attention to listening allows leaders to pick up on early signs of both danger and opportunity--and that, in turn, allows them to do their jobs and serve their organizations better. The authors conclude this piece by sharing advice--gleaned from interviews and personal experience--about how leaders can learn to listen better.

Despite the high rate of churn in the labor market today, many companies pay scant attention to offboarding employees. That's a mistake, say the authors, who argue that offboarding is an increasingly vital part of talent management--and an opportunity to create long-term value. Drawing on their scholarly research and interviews with HR professionals, the authors recommend a number of best practices. One is to plan well in advance for employees' departures: Because few people stay at one company for their whole career, it's important to have frank conversations throughout their tenure about their goals and prospects for advancement. When employees do choose to leave or get laid off, managers should acknowledge their contributions, provide resources to support them through the transition, and use exit interviews as an opportunity for mutual learning. Companies should also create formal alumni programs to keep former workers connected to the organization. Together, these offboarding practices can create a cadre of ex-employees who become valuable customers, suppliers, boomerang employees, mentors to current workers, and ambassadors for the firm.

During economic slowdowns, consulting, law, and accounting firms often start offering services and taking on clients they really shouldn't, just to keep the lights on. This path is perilous. If a firm's practices have a diffuse mix of clients and unclear strategic positioning, it will weaken the firm's market profile and lead to internal conflicts, especially about the organization's future direction. This article presents two tools that professional service firms can use to manage their client mix and optimize their strategic position. The first is the practice spectrum. All practices fall on a continuum of sophistication that ranges from "commodity" to "rocket science." Any position on this spectrum can be profitable, though the forces driving profits change as you move along it--as do the capabilities and skills required. Successful practices understand their true position on the spectrum and know which performance levers to pull. The second tool is the client portfolio matrix, which separates clients into four categories on the basis of cost to serve and willingness to pay. Rather than spreading clients across all four, firms should target their acquisition efforts and follow different relationship strategies for each type of client.

The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of conduct on their suppliers and perform audits to assess compliance. Do these measures help identify unethical suppliers and lead to improvements? After an unsatisfactory audit, what are the chances the supplier will remedy matters? To answer these questions, the authors studied code-of-conduct audits of thousands of factories around the world. They found that suppliers are more likely to improve conditions if they do one or more of five things: certify compliance with management system standards, adopt lean management, use union workers, avoid piece-rate pay, and serve once-tarnished buyers. The research also identified monitoring methods that can boost the odds of improvement and uncovered several factors that result in more-accurate audit reports. Managing working conditions in global supply chains is an ongoing challenge. The authors' findings can empower managers to better predict which factories are likely to improve working conditions and to design monitoring programs that will foster improvement and accurately track performance.

The natural experiment forced on the world by the coronavirus demonstrates that the academics and tech visionaries who have been talking since the 1980s about the possibilities of remote work were not exaggerating. After months of working remotely, we have all learned that most tasks are accomplished and most meetings go just fine without the office. But that, the authors warn, doesn't mean companies should suddenly abandon their workplaces. Going to the office, they argue, has never been just about work. And technology won't make socializing less dependent on direct interpersonal contact anytime soon. In this article they describe the important social functions of an office: It's where people build trust through personal interaction, learn the nuances of their job, and build and maintain organizational culture. And it's through random in-person encounters between people from different functions and cultures that many of the most innovative business ideas are born. The authors conclude by showing how design, technology, and management practices can be used to make tomorrow's offices more effective as social, learning, and innovation spaces.

Climate change is a pressing concern for Bill Gates, who has just published a new book on the subject. He spoke with HBR's editor-in-chief about the need to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050--and the difficulty of that undertaking. It will require new government policies, changes in corporate and individual behavior, and, above all, more R&D funding and innovation to create cleaner technologies and green products. Gates is optimistic that we can succeed but clear-eyed about what lies ahead if we don't: rising temperatures, the disappearance of ecosystems, disastrous crop failures, economic pain, and massive loss of life.