The need for boardroom diversity is well-established. Many European countries have mandated that at least 40% of directors of publicly listed companies must be women, and similar laws have been passed in several U.S. states establishing gender- or race-based quotas. And to be sure, these policies have led to substantial progress: For example, one report found that representation of women on FTSE […]

Company purpose has mainstreamed its way into management vernacular, and with plenty of good reason. Evidence from across industry sectors has proven that genuinely purpose-driven organizations outperform their non-purpose-driven competitors on critical metrics. For example, brands that have a clear commitment to improving their customers’ quality of life outperform the stock market by 120%, and over the last decade, purpose-driven […]

Nathan Green, known to many as Uncle Nearest, was an enslaved man in the 1850s in Lynchburg, Tennessee. He was known to make whiskey using a special technique he learned when cleaning water back home in West Africa. His method of filtering whiskey through sugar maple tree charcoal became known as the famous “Lincoln method.” […]

For a long time, whenever companies wanted to hire a CEO or another key executive, they knew what to look for: somebody with technical expertise, superior administrative skills, and a track record of successfully managing financial resources. When courting outside candidates to fill those roles, they often favored executives from companies such as GE, IBM, and P&G […]

More than 20 years ago my colleague Anthony Mayo and I launched the most ambitious research project I’ve ever undertaken. We started with a question: What are the defining characteristics of extraordinary business leaders? To answer it, we created a list of 1,000 outstanding 20th-century American business leaders and studied each in depth. What we found surprised […]

As record numbers of people have quit their jobs, all sectors of the economy are struggling to fill vacancies. To get people back to work, organizations are changing long-standing policies and offering unprecedented incentives. Transportation companies, for example, have upped their wages to lure long-haul drivers back into truck cabs. California public schools are allowing retired teachers […]

When companies realize they are falling short in improving their operations, expanding their offerings, or connecting with customers, they typically define what they want to achieve, identify relevant metrics, and then try out various strategies until the metrics reveal progress toward their goal. It’s a practice that works, and businesses use it to address any problem they […]

One of the most difficult challenges leaders of all organizations face is managing diverse perspectives. Much has been written on the benefits for teams and organizations of engaging with opposing views, fostering productive disagreement, and creating “teams of rivals.” Yet anyone who has been involved in such work knows that disagreements on strongly held opinions, often related […]

As companies strive to build competitive advantage in a world obsessed with digitizing (which is often a must but rarely differentiating), they find that what they need from their leaders is changing. Their top people must be able to reimagine the company’s place in the world and transform the organization to live up to a more ambitious […]

The August 2021 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that pollution caused by humans has led to an increase in extreme events such as heat waves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from global economic activity are at the heart of climate change, with atmospheric CO2 already 50% above […]