May–June 2025

Why CEOs Should Think Twice Before Using AI to Write Messages

What would happen if CEOs began writing employee communications using gen AI? Would anyone notice? Probably not, according to a new study. But that doesn’t mean CEOs should use it to write everything. Here’s what they can do to effectively and transparently write with gen AI.

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The Commissioner of the WNBA on Transforming the League Ahead of a Breakout Season

To new followers and outside observers, the WNBA’s success in the 2024 season might have seemed sudden. As star rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese entered the U.S. women’s professional basketball league, it set records for TV viewership, game attendance, social media engagement, merchandise sales, and media and sponsor revenues. However, it took years of hard work and preparation to get to that turning point.

Founded in 1997, the WNBA had struggled through ups and downs in its first two decades. When Cathy Engelbert became its commissioner in 2019, it had big ambitions and a strong brand and product, featuring high-quality play and exceptional athletes, but it lacked resources.

She set out a new guiding strategy centered around players, fans, and other stakeholders and intentional investment in marketing and digital capabilities, underpinned by a focus on sustainable growth. Thanks to a postpandemic capital raise, she and her team were able to execute on that strategy.

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Lean Strategy Making

Most companies understand the benefits of standardizing critical processes: reduced variation, higher throughput and quality, and lower costs. Yet they tend to approach strategic decisions completely differently, thinking that each one is unique and requires its own bespoke process. As a result, they handle similar decisions in vastly different ways. That inconsistency slows them down and leads to suboptimal choices and poor results—a problem that was clear in a survey of executives by Bain & Company.

There’s no reason, however, that the strategy process can’t become standard work, just as manufacturing processes are. Several leading companies demonstrate how. Their executives attack strategic decision-making in three stages:

First, they set priorities by articulating a performance ambition, comparing it against a multiyear outlook, and identifying which issues must be addressed to close the gaps between them. Those issues go onto a strategic backlog. Next, for each issue on the backlog, they methodically gather facts and explore alternatives and then make highly specific choices and commitments. Last, they monitor their success at meeting those commitments, making adjustments and, if needed, returning issues to the backlog. By adopting a rigorous approach to strategy, these companies are able to reduce waste, move faster, make wiser choices, and gain a competitive edge.

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What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety

Psychological safety—a shared belief among team members that it’s OK to speak up with candor—has become a popular concept. However, as its popularity has grown, so too have misconceptions about it. Such misunderstandings can lead to frustration among leaders and employees, stymie constructive debates, and ultimately harm organizational performance.

In this article the authors identify the following six common misperceptions: Psychological safety means being nice; it means getting your way; it means job security; it requires a trade-off with performance; it’s a policy; and it requires a top-down approach.

They explain why each misperception gets in the way and give advice on how to counter it. They also offer leaders a blueprint for building the kind of strong, learning-oriented work environment that is crucial for success in an uncertain world. Leaders should clearly communicate what psychological safety is and what it isn’t, and take steps to improve the quality of conversations and to establish structures and rituals that will help teams assess their progress in building a psychologically safe environment.

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Are You Missing Growth Opportunities for Your Platform?

Seven of the world’s 10 most valuable companies have launched platform businesses, as have over 60% of unicorn startups. Many companies that didn’t start out as platform businesses—from retailers Walmart and Amazon to software providers Salesforce and ServiceNow—have also successfully accelerated their growth through platform strategies. But numerous companies have missed out on growth opportunities.

Why does one platform company succeed at growth while another does not? The authors’ research points to four main reasons: Unsuccessful firms don’t systematically consider all growth options; they mistakenly believe they must own the various kinds of interactions that occur on the platform, not realizing that huge growth often lies in not owning them; they overlook options to engage companies that can add value or even disrupt their businesses; and they don’t identify a compelling theme that broadens their scope.

This article offers guidance for overcoming those impediments to growth.

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What the Like Button Can Teach Us About Innovation

The invention of the like button, which today can be found everywhere on the internet, transformed digital advertising and marketing and fueled the rise of the social media industry. While most people attribute it to Facebook, the button was actually used in some form by multiple companies several years before Facebook adopted it. In fact, after spending three years researching its origins, the authors were unable to identify a single inventor of the button. And that’s what makes its origin story so instructive. The like button’s design and development could be considered a miniature case study on the true nature of innovation—which is distributed, unpredictable, and far more modest in ambition than heroic innovation narratives suggest. That holds important implications for managers, who must stop trying to tightly manage innovation and learn to embrace its messy and iterative nature. To succeed, they’ll have to be open to surprises, legitimize inconsistencies, encourage diverse contributions, and balance structured processes with flexibility and curiosity.

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Sustainability as a Business-Model Transformation

Many global companies have made public commitments to sustainability targets. Fulfilling these commitments will require firms to transform their business models and organizational architectures.

A few pioneers are leading the way, demonstrating that companies can make sustainability not only a goal but also the driver of their business model. They are leveraging what they’ve learned from developing innovation capabilities to help them on their sustainability journey.

This article identifies three fundamental tensions that companies must address. First, they need to maintain a long-term sustainability vision while delivering on short-term financial targets. Second, they must introduce systemwide change while keeping their employees engaged at the local level. And third, they have to be open to external collaboration while maintaining strong internal integration.

Drawing on real-world examples such as the Italian energy group Enel and Swiss cement giant Holcim Group, the authors describe the practices companies can use to face each challenge with intention.

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How Gen AI Is Transforming Market Research

While gen AI is already having a profound impact on marketing activities like customer service and content creation, it has the potential to be absolutely revolutionary in another area: market research. After spending two years studying the technology’s use there, two professors believe that gen AI offers firms unprecedented opportunities to understand customers, better assess the competitive environment, and push data-driven decision-making deep into their organizations. These fall into four categories: supporting current practices for collecting data and generating insights by making them faster, cheaper, or easier to scale up; replacing current practices by leveraging synthetic data (artificially generated data that mimics real people’s behaviors and preferences); filling existing gaps in market understanding by obtaining insights and evidence that aren’t available in conventional data; and creating new types of data and insights (often with the use of digital twins).

Gen AI does have limitations and risks, of course, and as marketers harness it, they’ll need to keep that in mind, being sure to ground their strategies in fairness, accuracy, and genuine customer insight.

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The Power of Mattering at Work

Quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, chronically low engagement numbers, increasing numbers of labor disputes, demands for equity and dignity in the workplace—business leaders have been warily watching these trends for years and fighting each fire separately. But the trends continue, because leaders are missing the underlying problem that connects these symptoms: Many employees don’t feel that they matter to their employers, bosses, and colleagues.

Mattering—a mainstay concept in psychology—is the experience of feeling significant to those around us because we feel valued and know that we add value. In this article the author shows leaders how to apply this concept in the workplace.

First, leaders need to truly see and hear team members during daily interactions. They must also regularly affirm their people’s significance. And finally, senior leaders need to scale these skills up to the organizational level so that mattering becomes a cultural norm.

These behaviors may seem like common sense, but they’ve ceased to be common practice in a world of brief digital communications and condescension toward soft skills, and they’re well worth relearning. The article includes three activities leaders can use to get started.

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Leading Global Teams Effectively

Western managers leading global teams face a challenge: Their expertise and training usually are rooted in individualistic contexts and emphasize values such as autonomy, empowerment, egalitarianism, and authenticity. Yet more than 70% of the world’s workforce comes from collectivist and hierarchical cultures.

To be successful, managers need to develop “cultural intelligence”—a fluency in adapting to culturally complex situations. A good starting point is to understand four common mistakes that derail Western leaders:

Too much autonomy. Autonomy is not equally motivating for everyone. Some individuals thrive when given clear processes and struggle to be productive in the absence of directive leadership.

Too much psychological safety. People from collectivist cultures are often uncomfortable with an emphasis on open debate and frank speaking.

Too much emphasis on differences. When people become overconfident in their understanding of differences, it can lead to rigid thinking in which behavior is reduced to stereotypes.

Too much transparency. For people from face-saving cultures, it can be disorienting to hear a leader speak candidly about a mistake.

Cultural intelligence is the key to navigating these complexities on cross-cultural teams.

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Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation

Designers of consumer-facing digital products have tended to focus on novelty and speed (“move fast and break things”). They’ve spent more effort on innovating than on anticipating how customers—and bad actors—might engage with products. But as digital products become a primary way in which consumers connect with others, pay for things, and store private information, that view needs to change.

The authors contend that companies must embed safeguards into the core of their digital products—starting during the earliest parts of the design process. They must also establish a road map for continued improvement and a dialogue with customers. The safety-by-design model can facilitate innovation rather than constrain it by providing a principled approach to product development.

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How to Unlock Value in Founder-Investor Partnerships

Private equity firms increasingly invest in founder-led companies due to their potential for high growth. However, friction in the relationship often arises because of cultural tensions, control-related dynamics, and differing long-term goals.

To address cultural tensions, investors should build rapport and seek to understand founders’ values, while founders should be open to changes needed to grow the business.

Regarding control, founders need to see governance as a tool for amplifying strengths, and investors should demonstrate how becoming more process-focused can enable freedom rather than imposing constraints.

Long-term alignment is crucial; both parties must agree on exit strategies and evolving roles.

Successful partnerships require ongoing communication and mutual respect for each other’s strengths. By focusing on these areas, founders and investors can navigate relational challenges and unlock significant value.

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Are You Really a Good Listener?

Research has shown that when employees feel heard, their engagement rises and their performance improves, delivering big benefits to their firms. Yet 117 studies on workplace listening reveal that many managers aren’t good listeners. Why? Because listening is mentally taxing and demands empathy and patience.

This article describes the five common causes of poor listening and explains ways to counter each. The first pitfall is haste. To avoid it, set aside distraction-free time for conversations, ask clarifying questions, seek more details, and plan follow-up discussions. The second pitfall is defensiveness. When you experience this, you need to calm your emotions, buy yourself time by restating what you’ve heard, and get more information before responding. The third pitfall is invisibility—not showing that you’re listening. So demonstrate that you are with body language and verbal cues and by summarizing what people have told you. The fourth pitfall is exhaustion, which prevents leaders from engaging productively. Setting clear boundaries and acknowledging your limits will help you address this problem. The last pitfall is inaction. The fix here is to always close the loop: Before ending a conversation, affirm what you’ve heard, identify next steps, and agree on a timeline for checking back in.

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Case Study: Should We Drop Our Board Diversity Goals?

When Helena Morrison joined the board of Equinox Markets, an Atlanta-based supermarket chain, all of her new colleagues were white men. After she ascended to chair, the directors all agreed to hire a recruiting firm to diversify their group, asking that only female and non-white candidates be brought to their attention. Three years later 40% of directors come from underrepresented demographics, but now an activist shareholder has accused the board of discrimination and is threatening to call for a shareholder vote on its diversity mandate.

Did Helena and her colleagues err in so aggressively pursuing diversity goals? Should they go ahead with the appointment of Amanda Bryant, a tech company CFO and Black woman, to the board, despite the activist’s protests? Should the board admit a mistake or stand firm—and how should Helena respond to the activist’s call that she step down?

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How to Fix Our Broken Food System

Experts agree that the only way to sustain a population that will grow to 8.2 billion by 2050 is to increase food production and ensure more even, efficient distribution. However, to save our planet, the agriculture industry must at the same time dramatically reduce its environmental footprint and impact. This is the vexing question: How to generate more with less when the stakes are existential? Four new books—respectively authored by a philosopher, a scientist, a journalist, and a non-profit founder—propose solutions, including shared principles, research-backed farming and animal husbandry practices, and pragmatic leadership.

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Prabal Gurung

Growing up in Nepal, Gurung was bullied and abused for being too “girly,” but that didn’t stop him from playing dress-up, loving art and design, and eventually pursuing a career in fashion. After stints at Donna Karan, Cynthia Rowley, and Bill Blass, he launched his own eponymous brand, which has attracted celebrity clients such as Zoe Saldaña and Michelle Obama and is known for clothing made to suit women of all sizes. Gurung’s new memoir is titled Walk Like a Girl.

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