Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i MIT Sloan Management Review

IT TAKES A TRULY CONFIDENT leader to admit what they don’t know — and a brave one to ask their subordinates what they really think. A telling anecdote about the kind of leader Bob Stiller wanted to be comes early in his recent book about how he grew a small Vermont business into Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. When the company was young, he became aware that his employees were working with a set of unwritten rules referred to as CBS — shorthand for “’cuz Bob says” — based on offhand comments he had made. He saw that as a problem: “I wanted people who were close to the work to figure out how to do it better.… I wanted people to think for themselves — not just tell me what…

Speaking Out: The New Rules of Business Leadership Communication Matthew Kohut, Georgetown University Press, October 2024, 176 pp. AMID GREAT PARTISANSHIP AND polarization, CEOs face pressure to speak out on social and political issues. Matthew Kohut, the managing partner of a media coaching firm, explains, “The lack of trust in institutions — particularly in government — has left CEOs filling a leadership void out of necessity rather than ambition.” His new book offers an engaging history of how leaders of brands in the spotlight navigated communication with customers, employees, and shareholders on issues as complex as leaving Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, open-carry gun laws, and notorious anti-trans “bathroom bills.” Kohut spells out the risks of speaking out and identifies fossil fuel and firearms as the industries that most…

Bob Stiller founded Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Waterbury, Vermont, in 1981, serving as CEO and president until 2007 and chairman until 2012. Nasdaq named the company’s stock its top performer of the decade in 2009 even as the firm won first place on Business Ethics magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens lists in 2006 and 2007. Green Mountain Coffee also became the world’s largest supplier of fair trade coffee, a story Stiller tells in his new book, Better & Better: Creating a Culture of Purpose, Engagement, and Transformative Human Engagement (McGraw Hill, 2025). Stiller is a strong proponent of Appreciative Inquiry, an approach to problem-solving that essentially identifies what’s working and maximizes it. It engages people at all levels of an organization in a four-step process to discover strengths, imagine…

MANAGERS ARE RESPONSIBLE for keeping employee morale and productivity high. Yet when they try to reduce burnout and improve worker well-being, many report not knowing where to start or what to do. Absent clear solutions, they tend to focus on fixing the person, such as by offering the overworked employee productivity tips and encouragement to assert healthy boundaries, or providing stressed-out workers with training in mindfulness techniques or yoga classes at lunchtime. However, fix-the-worker strategies do little to resolve stress caused by long hours and unreasonable workloads. The problem is not new but remains urgent and costly. HR leaders are painfully aware that disengagement and burnout are significant threats to productivity and talent retention. In the U.S., 67% of workers report feeling disengaged from their work, and 49% intend to…

NOWADAYS, DEPLOYING ARTIFIcial intelligence no longer guarantees a competitive edge. What truly sets companies apart is access to diverse, extensive, high-quality data that enhances their AI system’s performance compared with that of their competitors. But concerns over data privacy can limit the use of unique, relevant data for analysis. This problem can be alleviated by means of privacy-preserving federated learning. This technique, in combination with a special type of encryption, enables an AI model or any other type of algorithm to be trained using data from multiple, decentralized servers controlled by different organizations — all while respecting the privacy of the individuals or organizations whose data is being used for the training.¹ Simply put, federated learning entails sending the algorithm to the data rather than sending the data to the…

AI promises are many — quick content, better productivity, bigger bottom lines. Even still, companies struggle to figure out exactly when, where, why, and how to use AI. On Me, Myself, and AI — a collaboration between MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group — you’ll learn how the world’s leading companies use AI to change the way we work and the future we’re working toward. Featuring insight-packed conversations with tech leaders from Meta, Samsung, Microsoft, Shopify, Google, NASA, Intel, and more, Me, Myself, and AI is your ticket to AI success. Subscribe to Me, Myself, and AI on your favorite podcast platform.…

WHEN BOARDS ARE HIRING A NEW chief executive, they have tough choices to make as they negotiate terms of employment with their top pick. CEO contracts are complex documents that typically include incentives tying compensation to performance on a range of metrics. But how should a CEO’s contract be structured to produce the best results for company performance? Here are three findings from recent academic research that boards can consider during the process: 1. Encourage innovation through cash-flow metrics. CEOs whose compensation is tied to internal cash flow metrics tend to avoid the problems of both overinvestment and underinvestment. Their focus on boosting free cash flow makes these leaders more prudent about picking projects with a good rate of return; those projects then have better odds of success because more…

Generative AI systems that model language have shown remarkable proficiency at a variety of tasks, and employees have embraced them to speed up writing and software development work in particular. The productivity boosts promised by these tools, such as ChatGPT, are leading many managers to incorporate them into workflows. However, our research reveals that the potential efficiency improvements come with a potential downside. Overreliance on AI may discourage employees from expressing their specific know-how and coming up with their own ideas, and could also result in increasingly homogenized outputs that limit the advantages of employee diversity. In the long term, this could diminish innovation and originality. Managers seeking to gain efficiencies via large language models (LLMs) will need to help employees thoughtfully balance productivity and creativity in their collaboration with…

Why do so many managers underestimate the time it will take to complete a significant project? Almost half of business projects fall behind schedule, and up to a third are not completed at all, according to a 2021 report by the Project Management Institute. The Berlin Brandenburg Airport took 14 years to construct instead of the estimated five, and its cost ballooned from a 2009 budget of 2.83 billion euros to over 6 billion euros by the time it was completed. And after the V.C. Summer nuclear plant expansion project in South Carolina was abandoned in 2017, two executives involved in what became known as the “Nukegate” scandal pleaded guilty to fraud charges stemming from their efforts to conceal delays. Late projects trigger cost overruns, reduce quality, and upset clients.…

People are often confused about what is strategy. In particular, they get confused between strategic objectives and the business model. I now see strategy as comprising three parts. Strategic objectives are important goals, such as to diversify or double market share; strategic moves, such as campaigns, which are about how to achieve these objectives, and are dynamic and adapt over time; and the business model, which is how the business operates on an ongoing basis. The Business Strategy Formula is good because it pushes companies to think about how to focus on strategic differentiation rather than tactical differentiation. Particularly in China, companies excel in operations and implementation, often placing less emphasis on strategy. By emphasizing leverage points, the Formula helps companies understand how to maximize their resources effectively. A good…

When decision makers include individuals from varied economic backgrounds, generations, genders, races and ethnicities, sexual orientations, physical abilities, and religions, everyone is better off — employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and the people in the communities where businesses operate. I have worked with global companies for over two decades to advance opportunities for people who are underrepresented in leadership. The diverse teams we built became stronger, more trusted, more resilient, and more innovative and were therefore better prepared to create more value for their stakeholders. We know that to change anything, you need influence, support, and action from people who are invested in the outcome. That’s why building partnerships with stakeholders both inside and outside the organization is a critical component of meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. From 2006 to…

TODAY’S TOP LEADERSHIP PRIORITIES include attracting and retaining top talent, fostering innovative thinking and action, motivating employee performance, and enhancing stakeholder value in an increasingly diverse and competitive market. At the same time, many leaders have supported diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to address inequities for marginalized groups. But our research shows that there is a broader opportunity to use DEI as a strategic lever in tackling the key challenges noted above and make the practice a critical driver of organizational effectiveness and performance. Earlier research has found that there is a robust business case for DEI, with an array of potential benefits to organizations, including access to new markets, increased innovation, and improved employee engagement.¹ A recent study of DEI practices at U.S. credit unions that I conducted…

IT’S BEEN SAID THAT WE HIRE FOR COMPEtence and fire for character. Consider Boeing, which has been brought low by poor leadership decisions that have severely compromised its planes’ quality and safety, and hence public trust, forcing its CEO to announce a year-end departure. And yet the debate about who should be the next CEO of the troubled airplane manufacturer has centered on the merits of engineers versus accountants — that is, competencies. Missing from the conversation is the recognition that what’s needed is a leader with strong character-based judgment. As potential new leaders have been discussed, there’s been no talk of relative strengths or weaknesses in character. While managers often think that they hire for character, most have equated character with values fit. They’ve tended to give too much…

While the pandemic was a wild ride of uncertainty for me and many of my peers in leadership, it feels like we never regained our footing. Now, we are being hit with events in our industry that we never anticipated, plus a huge wave of hype around new technologies. How can I ground my thinking as we go into another strategic planning cycle with so many unknowns? SO MANY OF US WERE BLIND sided five years ago by the global pandemic, which brought home the fact that you can’t predict the future. It’s not only uncertainty that has increased, but also the pace of change sure has — and that makes it hard to get your bearings while also adding more variables to consider. So first, acknowledge that as a…