November–December 2024

Reducing the Risks of Corporate Activism

When companies take a stance on social issues—something more and more businesses are doing these days—they can antagonize large swaths of customers. But there’s a way to decrease the chances that will happen, say Kimberly Whitler and Thomas Barta. Before launching a campaign or making a public statement, executives should analyze two things: how divisive an issue is, and how well a position fits with a firm’s mission and values.

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People Who Keep Company Secrets Find More Meaning at Work

This interview with Columbia Business School’s Michael Slepian explores how confidentiality at work affects employee well-being. Slepian and his co-researchers found that while keeping secrets can lead to stress and frustration, it also gives employees a sense of importance and status, making their work feel more meaningful. The study highlighted the balance between the negative and positive effects of maintaining organizational secrets and the importance of context in this dynamic.

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The CEO of NatureSweet on What Happens When You Champion Workers

Pop open any package of NatureSweet cherry or grape tomatoes, turn over the top, and you’ll find a face looking back at you—a portrait of one of the company’s associates printed on the sticker. It might be Paco Herrera in maintenance, Rocío Cortés in packing, Jessica Lara in preharvest, Gloria Vargas in food safety, or any of about a hundred others. With each one you’ll find a QR code and a URL to access more information about their lives and jobs. Why are NatureSweet team members featured so prominently in the packaging? It’s simple: It’s their hard work that makes the greenhouse-grown tomatoes look and taste great. Those portraits and the profiles are one important way to show appreciation. But the company doesn’t stop there. It also offers full-time employment; competitive wages; safe and comfortable working conditions; and training, development, and educational opportunities, including a new pilot program that will allow its first class of 30 participants to earn their bachelor’s degrees in agriculture by 2028.

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Why Employees Quit

The so-called war for talent is still raging. But in that fight, employers continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades. Why? Because they’ve been so focused on challenges such as poaching by industry rivals, competing in tight labor markets, and responding to relentless cost-cutting pressures that they haven’t addressed a more fundamental problem: the widespread failure to provide sustainable work experiences. To stick around and give their best, people need meaningful work, managers and colleagues who value and trust them, and opportunities to advance in their careers, the authors say. By supporting employees in their individual quests for progress while also meeting the organization’s needs, managers can create employee experiences that are mutually beneficial and sustaining.

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Turn Employee Feedback into Action

To manage the employee experience, leaders must deeply understand employees’ perceptions, feelings, and desires and respond thoughtfully. This is particularly crucial when immense resources are invested in gathering employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, and data scraping from internal communications. But leaders are often overwhelmed by the data and struggle to translate it into actionable insights. The authors conducted detailed interviews with executives and HR leaders from more than 20 multinational companies in sectors such as technology, financial services, and consumer goods. Their work reveals that although technology has simplified the collection of data, the real challenge lies in making sense of it and integrating it into a coherent strategy.

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Reimagining Work as a Product

Is there a better way to approach the employee experience? The authors challenge traditional paradigms by proposing that work be viewed as a product employers offer to employees. Drawing on the jobs to be done theory, they suggest that employees “hire” their jobs to fulfill specific needs, much as customers choose products. This perspective shifts the focus from maximizing productivity to something akin to customer satisfaction. Eric Anicich and Dart Lindsley argue that reimagining work as a product not only addresses the disengagement and dissatisfaction rampant in the workforce but also aligns employees’ needs with organizational goals.

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We’re Still Lonely at Work

In recent years, the huge impact that work loneliness is having on healthcare costs, absenteeism, and turnover has received widespread attention. Despite growing awareness, the problem remains, with one in five employees worldwide feeling lonely at work.

In this article, the authors debunk myths about work loneliness, such as the belief that in-person work or team assignments can solve the issue. They emphasize that loneliness is not just a personal problem but also an organizational one, influenced by the work environment.

Practical actions that employers can take to reduce work loneliness include measuring loneliness, designing slack in workflows, creating a culture of connection, and building social activities into the rhythm of work. Simple activities like communal lunches and happy hours are particularly appreciated by employees of all types.

Work loneliness is an epidemic, but a cure is within reach, the authors contend. By helping employees make social connections, companies build a happier, healthier, and more productive workforce.

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Scaling Up Transformational Innovations

For large companies operating in mature sectors—such as Procter & Gamble in consumer goods, Apple in consumer electronics, and Adobe in cloud software—driving growth is a perennial challenge. Growth through acquisition is always an option, but companies often quickly find that the costs outweigh the benefits. According to the authors, the only reliable path to maintaining market leadership is transformational innovation: major changes to products and services that redefine what customers expect by delivering significantly improved performance, providing new kinds of value, resolving long-standing trade-offs, and/or radically reducing manufacturing costs. To understand what makes transformational innovations successful, the authors studied two of them at Procter & Gamble: Oral-B iO, a “smart” electric toothbrush that step-changed the experience of oral hygiene, and Always Infinity, a best-in-class menstrual pad that resolved the long-standing tension between comfort and protection. In this article the authors present a playbook for scaling up transformational innovation, organized around four major challenges: providing sufficient leadership, building the right team, mobilizing resources and capabilities, and making big-bet decisions.

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How Robust Is Your Climate Governance?

During the past few years, as evidence of climate change and its effects has mounted, many corporate boards have added climate governance to their agendas. But the maturity of boards’ climate-oversight processes and activities varies widely.

To better understand how climate issues are being handled in the boardroom and to determine what good climate governance looks like in practice, the authors interviewed 20 directors who hold leadership positions on the boards of S&P 500 companies. Drawing from those interviews and other research, they identify eight hallmarks of meaningful climate oversight. For example, “the board is knowledgeable about the company’s climate profile,” “the board has the expertise needed for effective climate oversight,” and “the board can articulate the company’s climate positioning and strategy.”

The authors also offer their perspective on the set of issues associated with each hallmark that corporate leaders must grapple with as they decide how to incorporate climate issues into their company’s governance.

Climate concerns are here to stay, and climate governance will increasingly be seen as a core element of good governance.

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Design Products That Won’t Become Obsolete

Today all kinds of products adapt and change to suit users’ evolving needs. Toys can be reconfigured to suit children of varying abilities; Teslas receive software upgrades that regularly improve their performance; tunable eyeglass lenses can adjust for changes in vision. These “products that grow,” as the authors call them, last longer, so they save consumers money and promote sustainability. At the same time they help companies forge deeper customer connections, respond quickly to market changes, and continually innovate.

This article outlines the consumer challenges that products that grow address, such as age-related developments, technological change, and shifting learning needs. It then describes how companies use software and hardware to build such products. The authors go on to outline models for capturing value with them: premium pricing, charges for upgrades, complementary products, monetizing maintenance, brand communities, and resale and modification.

In a market that increasingly emphasizes flexibility, durability, and environmentalism, companies that make the shift from static offerings to products that grow will position themselves for success.

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Personalization Done Right

More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like.

Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024). Drawing on decades of work consulting on the personalization efforts of hundreds of large companies, they have built the defining metric to quantify personalization maturity: the Personalization Index. It is a single score from 0 to 100 that measures how well companies deliver on the five promises they implicitly make to customers when they personalize an interaction.

The authors argue that personalization will be the most exciting and most profitable outcome of the emerging AI boom. They describe how companies can use AI to create and continually refine personalized experiences at scale—empowering customers to get what they want faster, cheaper, or more easily. And they show readers how to assess their own business’s index score.

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A Better Way to Link Sales and Marketing

Many companies have siloed customer data and an incomplete suite of capabilities, making it impossible for their customer-facing teams to access real-time, synchronized data—and to provide the personalized and seamless experience that business customers crave.

Authors Prabhakant Sinha, Arun Shastri, and Sally Lorimer—principals at the global professional-services firm ZS and coauthors of The Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook: How to Lead High-Performing Sales Teams (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024), from which this article is adapted—describe how a digital customer hub (DCH) can help. It integrates customer data from various systems into a linked platform, enhancing a company’s digital engagement capabilities. The DCH uses analytics and AI to create actionable insights, helping customer-facing teams work smarter and in sync.

This article explains how a DCH can “transform the way businesses manage and interact with customers.” It also examines the structural choices companies must make when creating one and highlights the potential costs and return on investment.

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How to Avoid the Agility Trap

Agility is all the rage in strategy circles these days. According to conventional wisdom, organizations should rapidly react to technological advances, new market dynamics, and shifting consumer preferences. But in practice this is nearly impossible to pull off, because the environment is evolving much faster than firms can respond to. The consequences of trying to keep up with every change are stark: the erosion of competitive advantages, a myopic focus on the short term, and organizational chaos.

In their research the authors have repeatedly seen that in volatile environments, firms anchoring their strategies in a few enduring factors, rather than many transient ones, are more likely to achieve sustainable growth. This approach is called strategic constancy. It involves recognizing the fundamental aspects of the company’s business model—its core values, customer relationships, brand identity, and key competencies—and remaining dedicated to them despite external pressures. It emphasizes depth over breadth—deepening the company’s competitive advantage in its core areas rather than spreading efforts thinly over many.

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Should Your Next CEO Come from Your Board?

These days a growing number of companies are hiring their directors to be their new CEOs. From 2018 to 2023, 10% of incoming CEOs across the S&P 500 and Russell 3000 came from the board. Though this choice is still more an exception than a rule, there are compelling reasons to consider it. As insiders, board members have a valuable feel for the company’s culture, history, and strategy, and as outsiders, they can more easily challenge the company’s existing ways of operating. Board-to-CEO transitions must be handled with care, however. In this article, the authors describe when it makes sense to appoint a board member to the top office, what can go wrong, and how to manage the sensitive dynamics involved to boost the odds of success.

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Retire Without Regrets

This article explores the significant transition of retirement and offers insights into creating a satisfying postcareer life. It highlights the contrasting experiences of Irene and Lawrence, two retirees who navigated this change differently. Irene embraced retirement by engaging in activities like art classes and beach walks, finding fulfillment and alignment between her self and life structure. In contrast, Lawrence struggled with a lack of activities and responsibilities, leading to heavy drinking and a stint in rehab.

The authors emphasize the importance of four key behaviors for a satisfying retirement: alignment between self and life structure, awareness of this interplay, agency in making changes, and adaptability to unforeseen circumstances. They also provide practical exercises to help retirees assess their current life structure, identify core aspects of their self, and create an ideal future life map. The insights and tools presented can be applied to other significant life transitions, making the process smoother and more fulfilling.

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Case Study: Should We Deploy a Gen AI Salesbot?

After seeing gen AI’s impressive capabilities demonstrated at a conference, CEO Jeannie Weiss is excited to put them work at her digital marketing firm, PulsePoint. A cutting-edge salesbot would allow her to shrink her staff while delivering more-effective and -personalized service to her clients. Two of her top executives have qualms, however—and so does her biggest customer. But if she puts the brakes on the project, will rivals who move faster on gen AI open a huge lead over PulsePoint?

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Getting Over Overwork

There’s plenty of evidence that overwork is damaging to our health and the health of our organizations. Yet powerful internal and external forces nudge us to check one more email, attend one more meeting, or make one more phone call. Four new books address the question of how to deal with this widespread problem: Over Work, by Brigid Schulte; Ambition Monster, by Jennifer Romolini; What Work Means, by Claudia Strauss; and The Rest Revolution, by Amanda Miller Littlejohn.

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Ketanji Brown Jackson

Jackson announced her ambition to sit on the Supreme Court when she was just a teenager. Now she is the first Black woman to do so.

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