Successful change initiatives are often aided by collective organizational anxiety as the need to address a burning platform rallies employees to the cause. But when leaders fail to manage both their own and others’ emotions and worries, that anxiety can trigger “defensive organizing,” in which the transformation initiative itself stalls as managers and employees engage in finger-pointing while the status quo persists. Research points to ways that leaders can do better.
In today’s consulting firms, experience and results are not enough: High-performing individuals who want to earn organizational trust and advance to higher levels need strong visibility within and outside of their organizations. The challenge for ambitious high performers is to make that visibility credible. Interviews with senior partners reveal three levers that advancing leaders must focus on: internal recognition, external reputation, and digital trust. Consider actions that individuals and companies should take to manage visibility.
The most consequential decision that managers of corporate venture capital units must make is whether to prioritize financial or strategic benefits for the parent company. Researchers describe the spectrum of CVC investment strategies and argue that for most CVCs, the approach most likely to succeed puts strategic gains first but also seeks financial returns.
Many leaders and companies shy away from a high-risk strategy built around big gambles. But they still want to grow. According to BCG Institute research, companies that succeed with lower-risk growth have strategies that feature four elements: the commercialization of existing capabilities, small acquisitions, smart partnerships, and diversified bets. Learn from real-world successes.
Companies trying to scale tech products know the hard truth: An offering that connects with people in one environment may fail in another. How can you avoid such an outcome? Leaders must learn quickly and iterate on products using lessons from their organization’s earliest customers, but they often undervalue the strategic choice of which early customers to prioritize. Learn from new research that shows how to choose, and real-world examples illustrating the approach in action.
Conventional wisdom holds that innovation teams should begin their project with a clearly defined problem in order to increase their likelihood of success. However, a study of hundreds of ad hoc teams that formed to participate in a large global company’s annual innovation competition found that those with ambiguous problem definitions at the outset who were able to clarify the problems by the project’s midpoint had a greater chance of seeing their innovations successfully implemented.
Most successful companies start off with a bang — an exciting breakthrough innovation. As time passes, their focus shifts to maintaining and improving existing business lines. To prevent their decline in today’s economy, mature companies need to build a permanent capability for strategic innovation. Research on mature companies that have maintained a flow of innovation has uncovered what that capability consists of and how to build it.
At a time of high stress and uncertainty, leaders must increasingly spend time and energy steadying their people. However, work like comforting a team after layoffs or explaining a change of direction takes a toll. And as this work grows, women leaders report that they are doing an outsize portion of it compared with men. That’s bad news not only for valuable female leaders but also the organizations trying to retain them. But both can learn how to better address the empathy tax.
Many physical accommodations that were originally designed to help people with disabilities, such as curb cuts, now benefit everyone. The same can be true of accommodations in the workplace. Recent research shows that working alongside someone with a disability often spurs team members to generate ideas for new work processes that are ultimately helpful and safer for all. Rather than being one-off exceptions, accommodations can serve as springboards for innovation.
Whether team members collaborate effectively is often rooted in their ability to work through, accept, and capitalize on their differences. Through facilitated discussions following the completion of the widely accepted “Big Five” personality assessment, participants can connect their collective personality traits with team tensions or difficulties — whether latent or overt — and defuse them in the process. For newly formed teams, the same exercise can provide insights that accelerate cohesion.
A longitudinal study on how different countries and industries achieve sustainable growth, resilience, and longevity led to the development of Decompose, Interpret, Reward, and Scale (DIRS), a new framework to help managers determine why initiatives succeeded or failed. DIRS, combined with two other tools, enables leaders to engage in strategic learning and apply the resulting lessons to future business development opportunities and repeatable growth strategies to make better business decisions.
Nearly half of all M&A deals are eventually undone, taking an average of 10 years to unwind. Research reveals that poor initial fit and unforeseen disruptions are the typical causes of failed corporate mergers, which ultimately destroy shareholder value, absorb leadership attention, and damage credibility. The Corporate Divorce Matrix can help leaders diagnose which path their deal is likely to follow and make smarter, more sound decisions at every stage of the M&A process.
Generative AI is transforming retail pricing decisions by providing an accessible and low-cost alternative to traditional pricing algorithms. Unlike traditional approaches, LLM-based pricing relies on natural language prompts, not custom code and historical data. However, LLM-based pricing introduces challenges around consistency, explainability, and potential biases. Implementation examples demonstrate how to prompt LLMs and use their recommendations to optimize product and service pricing.
Real-time businesses are able to make quick, data-driven decisions, enabling them to dramatically outperform competitors. Research points to four key capabilities that the most successful RTBs have: real-time data availability and decision-making, empowered employees, better business agility, and a more integrated customer experience. Case studies of United Airlines, Ikea Retail, and Vanguard illustrate how those companies have engaged in the four capabilities to become successful real-time businesses.
A research study of management consultants who were asked to use a large language model to recommend strategic business decisions found that the AI responded to human validation attempts with persuasive rhetorical strategies. In addition to appealing to the user’s logic, sense of trust, and emotions, the AI also engaged in tactics such as flooding the user with large volumes of unrequested data and analyses that could overwhelm them and convince them to override their expert judgment.
The proliferation of customer experience measurement tools means that marketers now face the challenge of managing, and deriving value from, an overwhelming number of CX metrics. Research has identified ways for businesses to identify the metrics that are of greatest value and align them with customer journey mapping. Collecting fewer metrics yields tracking and reporting efficiencies, and connecting them to key stages of the customer journey gives CX managers more actionable insights.
When selling radical innovations, salespeople often worry that they’ll appear incompetent, which undermines their confidence and stalls sales pipelines. New products’ complexity can get in the way of knowledge transfer via traditional training approaches. Companies should instead reframe the salesperson’s role from expert to orchestrator, provide consultation support through expert tandems and fast-response channels, and foster a culture that values curiosity and collaboration over perfection.
Many leaders say it’s wise to hold back from making new investments or acquisitions during tumultuous times. They posit that significant risk-taking works only if you go into an uncertain period with momentum or with a healthy fallback cushion. A new analysis of data on 6,000 companies that experienced high-uncertainty events reveals that these common beliefs don’t align with actual outcomes. Learn three myths about risk-taking and how to make bold but well-informed business bets.
The conventional playbook for managing supply chain risk is falling short in the face of increasing disruption from geopolitical events like trade wars, sanctions, and armed conflict. A three-part framework for understanding geopolitical signals through scenario planning and risk monitoring, anticipating risks by creating flexible options, and adapting quickly to disruptions can help companies protect their supply chains.
Venture studios help businesses deploy talent, ideas, or resources into new ventures that can innovate in key strategic areas, and their popularity is growing despite challenges like high capital requirements and governance complexity. Four conditions must be met for such ventures to succeed: specialized talent, an internal IP portfolio, or market insights; a combination of internal assets and external capabilities; the right governance mechanisms; and a long-term commitment of time and money.
