North america

What leaders do while they are trying to get power is not necessarily what they do after they have it. In the case of U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, the difference reveals both his genius and his shortcomings.

Reform is about fairness, efficiency, and simplicity - and it should be bipartisan.

Inside the DEI journey of a Black-owned business, Uncle Nearest, which has become the fastest-growing whiskey brand in the United States.

The U.S. may be the world’s leading innovator, but it won’t be for long if investors, regulators, and the legal establishment continue to penalize companies for risk taking, says Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. Recently, the council’s National Innovation Initiative, a leadership network of CEOs and university presidents, released a report in […]

Deep, lasting culture change requires an integrated approach that remodels a company’s social systems. The leadership team of Home Depot employed a remarkable set of tools to do that.

How do people in business feel about women in executive roles? The short answer is, attitudes have improved, but not as much as men seem to think. In the July–August 1965 issue of HBR, Garda W. Bowman, N. Beatrice Worthy, and Stephen A. Greyser examined the views of 2,000 U.S. executives (half were men, half […]

Insights from 50 interviews with HP executives.

Challenging the traditional model of care.

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.

The Inn at Little Washington, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is one of America’s most acclaimed restaurants, rated number one in North America by Travel + Leisure magazine and listed among the top ten in the world by the International Herald Tribune. Yet, as co-owner and chef Patrick O’Connell explains, exquisite food is the norm at […]

Lessons from a revitalized neighborhood in Washington, DC.

A short history.

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Procter & Gamble’s radical strategy of open innovation now produces more than 35% of the company’s innovations and billions of dollars in revenue.

Employers have a lot of indirect influence.

Improving standards for surgery becomes easier.

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 […]

Six guiding principles.

In Silicon Valley, exciting new business ideas rapidly attract capital and talent away from less worthy ventures. But in big companies, ideas, capital, and talent are stagnant—prisoners of traditional bureaucratic ways of allocating resources. To capture the Valley’s entrepreneurial magic, your company needs to move from resource allocation to resource attraction.

For a quarter century, the big winners in consumer markets have pursued strategies of standardization. But success for retailers and product manufacturers now hinges on their ability to cater to local differences—while maintaining scale efficiencies.