March–April 2025

How Is Your Team Spending the Time Saved by Gen AI?

Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot are helping employees complete tasks much faster—cutting the time it takes to do them by up to 56%. But a new study shows that many people aren’t putting that newfound time to good use. Here’s what managers can do to get the most out of the time savings.

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AXA’s CEO on Insurance as a Tool to Drive Positive Impact

AXA is one of the world’s largest insurers, with a portfolio focused on property and casualty insurance. The company’s leaders are well aware of the risks associated with climate change, geopolitical instability, public health crises, and socioeconomic tensions.

Since becoming AXA’s CEO, in 2016, Thomas Buberl has focused the organization on its social and societal role. He explains why he stepped away from insuring the fossil fuel industry and how AXA partners with clients to reduce their environmental impact and risks.

One big area of the company’s socially responsible innovation is its Emerging Customers group, which was launched in 2016 to address a pressing need: insurance for mass-market and low-income customers in the developing world who can’t afford traditional policies but earn too much to fall into social safety nets.

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The Power of Strategic Fit

Companies that don’t align the essential elements of their strategy won’t be able to create sufficient value for their firms and their stakeholders to sustain long-term success. Too many leaders, facing heavy pressure to increase the worth of their company, use simplistic “spreadsheet strategies”: They set financial goals that will meet analysts’ expectations and find ways to back into them. They don’t address the essential elements of strategy or improve the fit and synergies among them.

Drawing on the example of Self Esteem Brands—a fitness, health, and wellness company—the authors, partners at Bain & Company, show how to create a cohesive strategy that unleashes the power of strategic fit. They identify seven strategic factors: the mental model, purpose and ambitions, stakeholder value creation, macro forces, markets and products, competitive advantages, and the operating model. And they explain how aligning them generates beneficial multiplier effects.

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Precedents Thinking

What if “old wine in new bottles” is actually the secret to game-­changing innovation? The authors explore what they call precedents thinking, illustrating how radical breakthroughs such as Henry Ford’s assembly line and Reed Hastings’s Netflix model grew out of creative combinations of existing ideas. They describe the three-step process of precedents thinking: framing the challenge, searching for relevant precedents, and combining them to generate innovative solutions. They demonstrate how this method can drive innovation in both startups and established companies, drawing on the successes of DoorDash and a multinational they call Global Foods, among others.

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How Women Can Win in the Workplace

Although women today outperform men in educational settings, they immediately lose ground once they enter the workforce, moving up the career ladder at significantly lower rates. One of the big reasons for this, say three McKinsey consultants, is that women aren’t building as much experience capital—the knowledge, skills, and wisdom that can be gained only on the job. Multiple systemic issues are at work here, but there are actions women can take to address this problem themselves. They include finding supportive employers with a strong, diverse learning culture and smart strategies; making big, bold career moves that grow their skills; taking on leadership and line roles; choosing growing occupations and industries; and deepening their familiarity with technology, particularly AI.

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Strategy in an Era of Abundant Expertise

We are at an early stage in the AI era, and the technology is evolving extremely quickly. Providers are rapidly introducing AI “copilots,” “bots,” and “assistants” into applications to augment employees’ workflows. Examples include GitHub Copilot for coding, Service­Now Now Assist to improve productivity and efficiency, and Salesforce’s Agentforce for everyday business tasks. These tools have been trained on a wide range of data sources and possess expansive expertise in many domains.

The level of expertise in these tools is still growing rapidly while the cost of accessing it is decreasing. In the relatively near future, more-advanced “AI agents,” equipped with greater capability and broader expertise, will be operating on behalf of users with their permission.

Companies that take advantage of AI’s benefits will be able to conduct business more efficiently, innovate more nimbly, and grow with sharpened vision and focus.

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The Secret to Cross-Cultural Negotiations

Companies increasingly seek growth in international markets. But cutting deals across borders is difficult owing to differences in expectations and norms. And too often, the parties rely on conventional wisdom and cultural stereotypes to guide their behavior.

To reach good outcomes, respect four basic rules: Focus on the individual, not the culture; determine what your counterpart’s intentions are; create shared norms for the negotiation; and leverage differences in preferences between parties to generate value for both sides.

Successful cross-cultural negotiations require clear communication, trust-building, and flexibility throughout the process while avoiding power-based tactics. By following these guidelines, negotiators can navigate cultural complexities and build stable, lasting, and mutually beneficial agreements.

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Who Are You as a Leader?

Social scientists have recently developed a new appreciation for how your conception of yourself can affect your professional and personal lives. The good news is that recent research has shown that you can curate your identity in the workplace in ways that will improve your performance as a leader, the trust you’re able to inspire in others, and even your overall well-being. The author discusses this research, including some of his own, and presents best practices for curating a multifaceted identity that will serve you well professionally and personally. At the center of this approach is the construction of what Ingram calls the identity map—a simple device that allows people to identify, visualize, and ultimately leverage the many interconnected elements that make up their sense of who they are.

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The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift

At age 35, Taylor Swift has been at the top of the music industry for two decades. She’s one of the top 10 best-selling artists of all time and the most financially successful musician of her generation. Her Eras Tour, which set off a global frenzy, was the highest-grossing tour in history. And while the music business has undergone profound technological and business model disruptions, Swift has managed to thrive throughout all the changes.

The secret to Swift’s long-term success, this article argues, can be attributed to four behaviors: targeting untapped markets, finding opportunities to create stickiness, maintaining productive paranoia, and adapting to radical shifts in platforms. By studying the sophisticated moves she has made, business leaders can draw valuable lessons on innovation, reinvention, and strategic thinking.

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How Salespeople Game the System

Salespeople often exploit incentive programs to maximize their gain through various schemes, with damaging effects on company performance. Common cheating tactics include sandbagging, falsifying data, and giving excessive discounts or incentives to close deals quickly, among others.

To counter these practices, companies should use data to detect irregularities, revise incentive plans to close loopholes, and establish ongoing monitoring. Communication and education about acceptable behaviors are also crucial.

Not all gaming tactics need immediate action, however; some may be tolerated if they have a minimal impact on performance and would cause undue disruption to the sales organization. So companies should adopt a continuous process to identify and mitigate cheating while balancing the need to maintain sales productivity and motivation.

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The Uniqueness Trap

Project managers and planners are highly prone to believing that their projects are one of a kind—partly because those that seem new and distinctive are more likely to win support. But research on 1,300-plus projects reveals that few, if any, actually are unique. The problem is, the perception of uniqueness causes managers to think there’s nothing to learn from other projects, which leads them to underestimate risk, make poor decisions, and blow through budgets and schedules.

The cure is to always assume that someone, somewhere has undertaken a project like yours. If you can’t find an analogue, break your project into components, which may prove comparable with other projects. Then use forecasting and other risk assessment tools to avoid biases that undermine good choices.

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The Secrets of Extraordinary Low-Cost Operators

There’s a misconception that becoming a low-cost leader in an industry can be achieved by implementing one-off programs aimed at efficiency improvement and waste reduction. But the reality is much different. The author has spent decades studying how extraordinary low-cost organizations differ from their competitors, and he distills what he has learned in this article.

Companies that have enjoyed sustained low-cost positions have unique leadership styles and cultures. Their CEOs, for instance, share some notable characteristics: respect for people, a long-term commitment to the organization, a preference for decentralized decision-­making, and a zeal for making change happen. Low-cost exemplars also take a distinctive approach to the design and execution of their operating systems. They eliminate long-standing industry barriers to lower costs; ensure that product design and process design reinforce each other; develop original multipurpose technologies that connect the company to the customer and reduce cost; and use cycle time and variance as a management tool.

The article offers executives three questions to ask to assess their company’s prospects for becoming the low-cost leader in their industry.

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What Sets Inspirational Leaders Apart

When people around the world are asked to reflect on both inspiring leaders and infuriating leaders, they point to three factors that distinguish the former from the latter. Inspiring leaders are visionary: They see the big picture and offer an optimistic, meaningful view of the future. This fulfills the human need for meaning and purpose. Inspiring leaders are exemplars of desired behavior: They are calm and courageous protectors, authentically passionate, extremely competent but also humble. This fulfills the human need for protection and passion. Finally, inspiring leaders are great mentors: They empower, encourage, and are empathetic toward others, but they also challenge others to be the best version of themselves. This fulfills the human need for support and status.

Each of us can develop the capacity to be inspiring in all three dimensions of leadership. For example, to get into a visionary state of mind, use strategies that broaden your perspective: reflecting on your core values, considering your past and the winding road that led to your present, and vividly imagining the future. To prime the exemplar pump, think of a time when you had power, when you felt secure and in control, when you were your best self. And to shift into a mentor state of mind, work to learn from those below you in the hierarchy.

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Case Study: Should My Side Hustle Become My Main Gig?

Evan Hale, a successful engineer at Vitalisync, faces a career-defining choice between stability and ambition. His side business, Fritch Audio—a growing brand he cofounded with his best friend, Drew Lawson—has become a $5 million venture in high-end audio. While Evan’s supportive boss offers him a promotion, he warns that the new role requires full commitment, limiting flexibility for Fritch. Meanwhile, an investor offers $1 million to scale Fritch but insists on Evan’s full-time dedication. At home, Evan’s wife, Lily, is anxious about finances but encourages him to follow his passion. Caught between a stable career, a dream of entrepreneurship, and his family’s security, Evan must choose a path forward.

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Getting Big Things Done

Three new books discuss why accomplishing things has become so difficult: Why Nothing Works, by Marc J. Dunkelman; Stuck, by Yoni Appelbaum; and Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Laird Hamilton

The big-wave surfing pioneer talks about innovation and risk, effective collaboration, and coaching high performers to even greater heights.

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