Decision making and problem solving

A close study of the real thing — seafarers’ insurrections during the Age of Discovery — might help you decide.

The business world is abuzz today about Greg Smith's parting shot at his long-time employer, Goldman Sachs. Is it accurate? Hard to say, but it has the...

I'm hardly the most objective source, but in this post I will give my thoughts on the new book Supercrunchers, by Ian Ayres. It's about the rise of analytical...

(Editor's note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by these posts will...

A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t good for patients.

People aren’t getting dumber, but they’re often treated that way. Politicians, educators, and the media assume the public is uncomfortable with nuance and grateful for prescribed solutions. Business, too, is being progressively dumbed down, not only by book authors who teach management by parable but also by managers themselves. Ironically, the infantilization of work is […]

Just because this is a time of transformation doesn’t mean that it’s easy to sell transformational ideas. Economic uncertainty has reduced the audience for bold, grand rhetoric. Besides, even in boom times innovation is risky. Innovators often have to ease anxieties by sounding conservative while doing something radical. We all want breakthroughs; it’s just that […]

A fictional bank CEO must make a fast decision in the face of an unthinkable crisis. What would you do in his place? Editors’ Note: This fictional case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, and your comments will be considered for publication in the magazine. We’ll email you if your […]

by Brook Manville (Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and I are at work on a book on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organizational, not just individual, strength. Over the next few months, we’ll each be authoring posts in this blog to test-drive ideas and invite input as the research progresses.) I’ve been mulling […]

Good things aren’t necessarily a good use of your time.

How social norms can help people become more sustainable.

Over the last couple of weeks in Singapore I’ve wandered the halls of the regional and global headquarters of three pretty big companies with more than $150 billion in combined revenues. I figured the calamitous economic news out of the United States and Europe coupled with riots in England would result in corporate cube dwellers […]

If you're like most people I work with in companies, the demands come at you from every angle, all day long, and you have to make difficult decisions...

It worked even better than other anti-bias programs.

Probably not.

by Lauren Keller Johnson

The key challenge for companies will be deciding how to use it.

Many negotiations collapse over differences of opinion about how the future will unfold. Companies need to realize that it’s often better to bet on uncertain events than to argue about them.

Focus your analytics on your most valuable customers.

Tales of great strategies derailed by poor execution are all too common. That's because some organizations are designed to fail. For a company to achieve...