Ask a roomful of senior executives what AI can do for their business, and the answers will probably cluster around the same themes: lower costs, smaller headcount, faster processes, leaner operations. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency—it’s an almost universal reflex. It’s also a badly misguided one. At a recent roundtable of senior financial-services executives, we posed a […]

Leaders have always lived with stress—it comes with the territory. But today’s strain feels especially acute. Many executives describe pressure mounting on multiple fronts, from economic uncertainty to technological disruption to geopolitical volatility. We’ve studied these sources of stress over the past six years, and the trend is unmistakable: According to Brunswick Group’s Leadership Stress Index, […]

There’s a growing leadership gap that few are talking about. Many leaders are relying on skills that no longer match the needs and demands of their role and today’s workplace. The unintended consequences are popping up everywhere. Trust is eroding, employee engagement is at an all-time low, talent is leaving, and innovation is suffering. Even well-intentioned decisions […]

Being an effective board chair is harder than ever. Today chairs have to manage a growing and increasingly diverse group of stakeholders whose demands often conflict, while the environment their firms operate in has become more and more chaotic. With new risks emerging from climate change, technologies like artificial intelligence, and political instability, the number and complexity […]

Competition is fierce among the companies offering gen AI tools based on large language models (LLMs). Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek release new functionalities on an almost monthly basis. Many of these AI-based systems, all of which use a language-based model that enables them to interact in conversational ways with users, are evolving from […]

Innovation increasingly depends on partnerships. As complexity and specialization rise and technologies such as AI reshape workflows and product portfolios, no single team or company has all the capabilities, tools, or authority needed to move ideas from prototype to scale. Organizations must “partner or die,” as one executive told us. But sharing the driver’s seat is difficult. […]

For decades, businesses have been trapped in a cycle of painful, episodic change, launching massive re-engineering projects and investing in new IT systems, only to find their organization’s fundamental metabolism remains sluggish. Immense transaction costs—the friction of coordinating people, managing information, and aligning complex work—have made deep, continuous transformation prohibitively expensive and risky. According to […]

A recent Financial Times analysis of S&P 500 filings found that 374 companies mentioned AI on their earnings calls last year—and nearly nine out of 10 described it in glowing terms. When pressed to explain the upside, however, most leaders fell back on vague promises of still unrealized “productivity gains.” Not only that, their annual reports were far […]

Leadership is the ability to coordinate collective human activity. When it functions well, it can turn a group of people into a high-performing team. This requires significant expertise, intelligence, and self-awareness, not to mention the right combination of personality traits. Despite a well-established science of identifying leaders and no shortage of reliable tools to assess leaders’ potential, half of senior […]

Periods of organizational transformation—such as acquisitions, strategic pivots, and reorgs—create a paradox for leaders. While they’re focused on navigating big changes, employees often feel uncertain about their futures. Research from KPMG, for example, shows that attrition rates can double after an acquisition announcement. In industries facing cost pressures and shifting skill needs, this uncertainty doesn’t just […]