HBR IdeaCast

By Harvard Business Review

Business

What's HBR IdeaCast about?

A weekly podcast featuring the leading thinkers in business and management from Harvard Business Review.

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Staying Agile Beyond a Crisis

05.26.2020

Darrell Rigby, partner at Bain & Company, says many firms have rapidly adopted agile principles to react to the coronavirus crisis. Namely, they’ve been ditching bureaucratic planning processes and instead fast-tracking ideas, holding focused meetings, and empowering decisions at lower ...

HBR IdeaCast episodes:

05.26.2020 Staying Agile Beyond a Crisis Darrell Rigby, partner at Bain & Company, says many firms have rapidly adopted agile principles to react to the coronavirus crisis. Namely, they’ve been ditching bureaucratic planning processes and instead fast-tracking ideas, holding focused meetings, and empowering decisions at lower ...
05.19.2020 Smarter Side Gigs Ken Banta, founder of the Vanguard Network, and Orlan Boston, partner at Ernst & Young, argue that every aspiring leader needs to have a side gig -- not to pursue a crazy dream or earn some extra cash but to ...
05.12.2020 To Build Strategy, Start with the Future Mark Johnson, cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight, says that too many managers develop strategy while focusing on problems in the present, and that’s especially true during a crisis. Instead, he argues, leaders should imagine the future and work backward, ...
05.05.2020 How Marketers Can Drive Social Change and Profits Myriam Sidibe, senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, says that brands are uniquely positioned to encourage shifts in consumer behavior that benefit individuals, communities, and the environment. A public health expert, she has studied these types of mission-led marketing ...
04.28.2020 Digital Transformation, One Discovery at a Time Rita McGrath, professor at Columbia Business School, says the need for organizations to adopt digital business models is more important than ever. Change is accelerating as startups tackle incumbents. And suddenly the coronavirus crisis is forcing the hand of many ...
04.21.2020 Another Workplace Crisis: Loneliness Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General, says that, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were facing another health crisis: loneliness. Studies show that, around the world, more people have been feeling a greater sense of social isolation, which has many ...
04.14.2020 Managing Crises in the Short and Long Term Eric McNulty, associate director of Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, studies how managers successfully lead their companies through crises such as the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the Boston Marathon terror attack. He identifies the common traps that leaders fall ...
04.07.2020 How Entrepreneurs Succeed Outside Silicon Valley Alex Lazarow, venture capitalist at Cathay Innovation, says that start-ups in cities around the U.S. and the world are creating their own rules for success. While Silicon Valley companies have sparked key innovations and generated huge wealth over the past ...
03.31.2020 Working Parents, Let Go of the Idea of Balance Stewart Friedman, organizational psychologist at The Wharton School, and Alyssa Westring, associate professor at DePaul University’s Driehaus College of Business, say it’s a mistake for a working parent to think of career and home life as competing interests that have ...
03.26.2020 Real Leaders: Oprah Winfrey and the Power of Empathy In 1976, broadcast journalist Oprah Winfrey moved to Baltimore to coanchor the evening newscast at a local TV station. But she struggled in that spot and was moved to the morning talk show. That demotion led Winfrey to discover a ...
03.24.2020 Adjusting to Remote Work During the Coronavirus Crisis Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that there are simple ways leaders can help their employees stay productive, focused, and psychologically healthy as they work from home during the current global pandemic. The right technology tools and ...
03.19.2020 Real Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and the Power of Emotional Discipline In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln wrote a scathing letter to his top Union general, who had squandered a chance to end the Civil War. Then Lincoln folded it up and tucked it away in his desk. He never sent ...
03.17.2020 Square’s Cofounder on Discovering — and Defending — Innovations Jim McKelvey, entrepreneur and cofounder of Square, says that most companies that think of themselves as innovative are really just copycats. True innovation, he argues, is about fearlessly exploring novel solutions and dramatically expanding markets. Doing so also helps startups ...
03.12.2020 Real Leaders: Rachel Carson Seeds the Environmental Movement In 1958, writer Rachel Carson began her exhaustive research on the effects of widespread pesticide use for her next book, Silent Spring. Over the next four years, she built up an airtight case showing how the world’s most powerful chemical ...
03.10.2020 Why Capitalists Need to Save Democracy Rebecca Henderson, professor at Harvard Business School, says that both capitalism and democracy are failing us. She argues that it will take public and private leaders working together to simultaneously fix these two systems because free markets don't function well ...
03.05.2020 Real Leaders: Ernest Shackleton Leads a Harrowing Expedition In 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship became trapped in ice, north of Antarctica. For the next two years, he kept his crew of 27 men alive on a drifting ice cap, then led them in their escape. How Shackleton ...
03.03.2020 How Workplaces — Not Women — Need to Change to Improve Equality Michelle King, director of inclusion at Netflix, says it’s time to stop telling women to adapt to the male-dominated workplace and time for the workplace itself to change. Her prior academic research shows that diversity training and anti-harassment efforts address ...
02.25.2020 Rules for Effective Hiring — and Firing Joel Peterson, chairman of JetBlue Airways, has spent a career leading teams, building businesses, and managing people at every level. Along the way, he's learned valuable lessons about the best ways to bring on new talent – as well as ...
02.18.2020 Defining Radical Candor – and How to Do It Kim Scott, a cofounder of the executive coaching firm Radical Candor, says that too many managers give meaningless positive feedback, while many others are highly critical without showing any understanding. Scott, who previously worked at Google and has consulted for ...
02.11.2020 How People Succeed By Defying Expectations Laura Huang, associate professor at Harvard Business School, has studied groups that face bias in the workplace, from entrepreneurs with accents to women and people of color. She says that the best way for individuals to overcome this type of ...
02.04.2020 How to Set Up — and Learn — from Experiments Stefan Thomke, professor at Harvard Business School, says running experiments can give companies tremendous value, but too often business leaders make decisions based on intuition. While A/B testing on large transaction volumes is common practice at Google, Booking.com, and Netflix, ...
01.28.2020 How to Capture All the Advantages of Open Innovation Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, coined the term "open innovation" over a decade ago. This is the practice of sourcing ideas outside your own organization as well as sharing your own ...
01.27.2020 Revisiting “Jobs To Be Done” with Clayton Christensen In this repeat episode, we honor the legacy of HBS professor Clayton Christensen, who passed away on January 23, 2020. The legendary management thinker was best known for his influential theory of “disruptive innovation,” which inspired a generation of executives ...
01.21.2020 Why Business Leaders Should Solve Problems Beyond Their Companies Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School, believes the world demands a new kind of business leader. She says so-called “advanced leaders” work inside and outside their companies to tackle big issues such as climate change, public health, and ...
01.14.2020 A New Way to Combat Bias at Work Joan Williams, professor and the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, says that it's extremely difficult for organizations to rid their workforces of the unconscious biases that can ...
01.07.2020 Setting a High Bar for Your Customer Service Horst Schulze, cofounder of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, started out cleaning ashtrays as a busboy before working his way up through some of the world's best hotels and becoming COO of Ritz-Carlton and later CEO of Capella Hotel Group. He ...
12.31.2019 The Right Way to Form New Habits James Clear, entrepreneur and author, says that the way we go about trying to form new habits and break bad ones — at work or home — is all wrong. Many people, he says, focus on big goals without thinking ...
12.24.2019 How One CEO Successfully Led a Digital Transformation Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer, has successfully shifted her company’s business to digital products over 15 years. The Dutch multinational started in the 1830s as a publishing house and now earns more than 90% of its revenue from digital. ...
12.17.2019 The Art of Asking for (and Getting) Help Wayne Baker, professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, has spent much of his career researching the best way to effectively ask for help at work. Whether you're soliciting support on a tricky assignment or ...
12.10.2019 The Tipping Point Between Failure and Success Dashun Wang, associate professor at Kellogg School of Management, crunched big datasets of entrepreneurs, scientists, and even terrorist organizations to better understand the fine line between failure and success. One surprising finding is that people who experience early failures often ...
12.03.2019 Why Cybersecurity Isn’t Only a Tech Problem Thomas Parenty and Jack Domet, cofounders of the cybersecurity firm Archefact Group, say that most organizations are approaching cybersecurity all wrong. Whether they're running small companies or working in multinational corporations, leaders have to think beyond their IT department and ...
11.26.2019 A Nobel Prize Winner on Rethinking Poverty (and Business) Esther Duflo, an MIT economist, won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Duflo’s early life working at a non-governmental organization in Madagascar and volunteering in soup kitchens in her native France ...
11.19.2019 To Truly Delight Customers, You Need Aesthetic Intelligence Pauline Brown, former chairman of North America for the luxury goods company LVMH, argues that in additional to traditional and emotional intelligence, great leaders also need to develop what she calls aesthetic intelligence. This means knowing what good taste is ...
11.12.2019 Why “Connector” Managers Build Better Talent Sari Wilde, a managing vice president at Gartner, studied 5,000 managers and identified four different types of leaders. The surprising result is that the “always on” manager is less effective at developing employees, even though many companies encourage supervisors to ...
11.05.2019 Why Meetings Go Wrong (And How to Fix Them) Steven Rogelberg, a professor at UNC Charlotte, has spent decades researching workplace meetings and reports that many of them are a waste of time. Why? Because the vast majority of managers aren't trained in or reviewed on effective meeting management. ...
10.29.2019 Why Open Offices Aren’t Working — and How to Fix Them Ethan Bernstein, associate professor at Harvard Business School, studied how coworkers interacted before and after their company moved to an open office plan. The research shows why open workspaces often fail to foster the collaboration they’re designed for. Workers get ...
10.22.2019 Accelerate Learning to Boost Your Career Scott Young, who gained fame for teaching himself the four-year MIT computer science curriculum in just 12 months, says that the type of fast, focused learning he employed is possible for all of us -- whether we want to master ...
10.17.2019 HBR Presents: The Anxious Achiever with Morra Aarons-Mele On The Anxious Achiever, Morra Aarons-Mele explores the way anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues affect people at work – for better or worse. In this episode, she speaks with clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen and Arvind Rajan, the CEO ...
10.15.2019 How to Have a Relationship and a Career Jennifer Petriglieri, associate professor at INSEAD, studied more than 100 couples where both partners have big professional goals. She finds that being successful in your careers and your relationship involves planning, mapping, and ongoing communication. She also identifies different models ...
10.08.2019 The CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods on Becoming a Gun Control Advocate Ed Stack, the chief executive of Dick's Sporting Goods, decided after the Parkland school shooting to pull assault rifles and high-capacity magazines from all of his company’s stores. The controversial choice hurt revenues. But the retailer weathered the storm, thanks ...
10.04.2019 Melinda Gates on Fighting for Gender Equality Melinda Gates, cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Pivotal Ventures, is committing $1 billion over the next ten years to advance gender equality. She says evidence shows it's the best way to drive economic development ...
10.01.2019 How Companies Like Google and Alibaba Respond to Fast-Moving Markets Dave Ulrich, professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, argues today's companies need to replace old hierarchical models with he calls a “market-oriented ecosystem.” From research at Alibaba, Google, Huawei, Supercell, and others, he shows the impressive ...
09.24.2019 How to Be Less Distracted at Work — and in Life Nir Eyal, an expert on technology and psychology, says that we all need to learn to be less distracted into activities that don't help us achieve what we want to each day. Unwelcome behaviors can range from social media scrolling ...
09.17.2019 Dematerialization and What It Means for the Economy — and Climate Change Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, explains how the U.S. economy is growing and actually using less and less stuff to do so. Thanks to new technologies, many advanced economies are reducing their use of ...
09.10.2019 What Great Coaching Looks Like Richard Boyatzis, professor at Case Western Reserve University, says that every professional can benefit from having a coach — and serving as one for someone else. He says that a coaching relationship moves beyond mentoring or sponsoring in that it ...
09.03.2019 The Inherent Failures of Long-Term Contracts — and How to Fix Them Oliver Hart, Nobel-winning Harvard economist, and Kate Vitasek, faculty at the University of Tennessee, argue that many business contracts are imperfect, no matter how bulletproof you try to make them. Especially in complicated relationships such as outsourcing, one side ends ...
08.27.2019 How African-Americans Advance at Work — And What Organizations Can Do to Help Laura Morgan Roberts, professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, says that organizations are still falling short on promoting racial diversity, particularly in their most senior ranks. While many large companies have "inclusion" initiatives, most leaders still ...
08.20.2019 The Challenges (and Triumphs) of a Young Manager Julie Zhuo, Facebook’s VP of product design, started at the company as its first intern and became a manager at the age of 25. Like many first-time bosses, she made many missteps and acted how she thought managers were supposed ...
08.13.2019 How to Thrive as a Working Parent Daisy Dowling, founder and CEO of Workparent, says that moms and dads with jobs outside the home don't have to feel stressed or guilty about trying to balance their professional and personal lives. The key is to tease apart the ...
08.06.2019 How Robots and AI Are Changing Job Training Matt Beane, assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds that robots, machine learning, and AI are changing how we train for our jobs — not just how we do them. His study shows that robot-assisted surgery is ...

Older episodes

HBR IdeaCast

What's HBR IdeaCast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

HBR IdeaCast episodes:

Staying Agile Beyond a Crisis

Smarter Side Gigs

To Build Strategy, Start with the Future

How Marketers Can Drive Social Change and Profits

Digital Transformation, One Discovery at a Time

Another Workplace Crisis: Loneliness

Managing Crises in the Short and Long Term

How Entrepreneurs Succeed Outside Silicon Valley

Working Parents, Let Go of the Idea of Balance

Real Leaders: Oprah Winfrey and the Power of Empathy

Adjusting to Remote Work During the Coronavirus Crisis

Real Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and the Power of Emotional Discipline

Square’s Cofounder on Discovering — and Defending — Innovations

Real Leaders: Rachel Carson Seeds the Environmental Movement

Why Capitalists Need to Save Democracy

Real Leaders: Ernest Shackleton Leads a Harrowing Expedition

How Workplaces — Not Women — Need to Change to Improve Equality

Rules for Effective Hiring — and Firing

Defining Radical Candor – and How to Do It

How People Succeed By Defying Expectations

How to Set Up — and Learn — from Experiments

How to Capture All the Advantages of Open Innovation

Revisiting “Jobs To Be Done” with Clayton Christensen

Why Business Leaders Should Solve Problems Beyond Their Companies

A New Way to Combat Bias at Work

Setting a High Bar for Your Customer Service

The Right Way to Form New Habits

How One CEO Successfully Led a Digital Transformation

The Art of Asking for (and Getting) Help

The Tipping Point Between Failure and Success

Why Cybersecurity Isn’t Only a Tech Problem

A Nobel Prize Winner on Rethinking Poverty (and Business)

To Truly Delight Customers, You Need Aesthetic Intelligence

Why “Connector” Managers Build Better Talent

Why Meetings Go Wrong (And How to Fix Them)

Why Open Offices Aren’t Working — and How to Fix Them

Accelerate Learning to Boost Your Career

HBR Presents: The Anxious Achiever with Morra Aarons-Mele

How to Have a Relationship and a Career

The CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods on Becoming a Gun Control Advocate

Melinda Gates on Fighting for Gender Equality

How Companies Like Google and Alibaba Respond to Fast-Moving Markets

How to Be Less Distracted at Work — and in Life

Dematerialization and What It Means for the Economy — and Climate Change

What Great Coaching Looks Like

The Inherent Failures of Long-Term Contracts — and How to Fix Them

How African-Americans Advance at Work — And What Organizations Can Do to Help

The Challenges (and Triumphs) of a Young Manager

How to Thrive as a Working Parent

How Robots and AI Are Changing Job Training

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