Today’s leaders need to be able to innovate over and over again despite fast-changing market conditions and a multitude of other uncertainities. Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill has spent years researching the true drivers of innovation, taking lessons from the world’s most successful leaders and companies.

She explains why leading innovation requires a different set of leadership skills including the need to shift from a focus on decision-making and producing to creating the conditions for collaboration, experimentation, and smart decision-making across teams, silos, and wider ecosystems. She shares examples from Mastercard, Pixar, and more and outlines some newly defined ways of looking at leadership roles: as Architects, Bridgers, and Catalysts. Hill’s new book is Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation.

Key episode topics include: leadership, leading teams, managing yourself, decision making, innovation, strategic thinking, organizational culture

Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: The New Leadership Structures that Unblock Innovation

Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Since 2023, HBR On Leadership has brought you insights and inspiration from across the HBR archive, curated to unlock the best in those around you. But the time has come for HBR On Leadership to hit pause on new episodes.

While this feed is going on hiatus, there are many other ways to keep up with the best leadership insights from HBR. To start, you can hear new, weekly conversations spanning leadership, strategy, innovation and much more on our flagship show, the HBR IdeaCast. Or, you can sign up for one of our newsletters to get new and curated content in your inbox.

The best way to stay on top of everything you need to lead is to subscribe to HBR, for access to our full archive, exclusive subscriber content, events, new audio offerings, and tools to put the best management ideas to work for you.

Thank you for joining us each week. Until next time.

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Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

When it comes to solving complex, layered problems, the default for many organizational leaders is to take their time to work through the issues at hand. Unfortunately, that often leads to problems that linger with no clear resolution. Instead, Anne Morriss offers a different problem-solving framework based on speed, momentum, and trust. Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of the Leadership Consortium. With Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, she authored the book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.

Key episode topics include: leadership, leading teams, managing yourself, Decision making, problem solving, organizational culture

• Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: How to Solve Tough Problems Better and Faster

There are many productivity tools and tactics that promise to help you make the most of your workday. But there is one simple practice that’s consistently been shown to be effective: timeboxing. Timeboxing is about merging your to-do list with your calendar, reserving time each day for each task you want to get done, and then truly focusing on that one thing at a time.

The return on merging your to-do list with your calendar is higher productivity, better collaboration, and less distraction, explains entrepreneur and author Marc Zao-Sanders. He shares how to try the method yourself and how your team and organization can also benefit from it. Zao-Sanders is the author of the book Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time.

Key episode topics include: leadership, leading teams, managing yourself, time management, stress management, personal productivity

• Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Stop Multitasking and Try Timeboxing

We all know the stereotypes of leaders who use charisma, manipulation, domineering behavior, or their status in the hierarchy to exert control. But there is another type of leader whose power isn’t necessarily related to their position on the org chart. Chris Lipp has spent years studying people who’ve developed this “personal power” that is rooted in their internal values. Lipp is a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, an executive coach, and the author of the book The Science of Personal Power. He’s investigated where this second type of power comes from and how to tap into it using simple strategies and tools.

Key episode topics include: leadership, leading teams, managing yourself, power and influence, personal growth and transformation

• Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: How to Enhance Your Leadership with ‘Personal Power’

Shake Shack started in 2001 as a hot dog cart in New York City’s Madison Square Park. It’s now a global fast-casual restaurant chain renowned for both quality and hospitality. In 2024, following a rapid rollout of digital tools like kiosks and mobile ordering, Chief Growth Officer Steph So found herself asking, had Shake Shack built a model that could truly scale, or one that still needed work? Would automation undermine the guest experience or change what it meant to work at Shake Shack? Could personalization and operational efficiency coexist with the company’s hospitality ethos?

Harvard Business School professor Chris Stanton joins So and host Brian Kenny to discuss the case “Shake Shack’s Playbook for the Digital Era.” Together, they explore what it means to scale hospitality in a tech-driven industry and how Shake Shack is balancing brand values, digital adoption, and the evolving role of its frontline team.

Key episode topics include: leadership, leading teams, customer experience, customer service, digital transformation, retail and consumer goods

Listen to the original Cold Call episode Shake Shack’s Digital Playbook: More Tech, Same Hospitality?

Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Leaders are often called upon to pitch ideas to senior management about how to change the way their company does business. Perhaps you have proposed an improvement to an existing process, a new product, a technological tool, or a way to break into a different market entirely—with mixed results.

In this conversation, Sue Ashford, professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and Ellen Bailey, former vice president of business and culture transformation at Harvard Business Publishing, give suggestions for framing those ideas so that executives buy into them, including the research findings they keep in mind, questions they ask themselves and others when vetting an idea, and what they learned from the times they fell short.

Key episode topics include: leadership, leading teams, managing yourself, power and influence, change management, personal growth and transformation

• Listen to the original Women at Work episode: How to Manage: Selling Your Ideas to Leadership

What is the real definition of efficiency in a world powered by AI? What if it was quality, not quantity? Neuroscientist Mithu Storoni has researched how and when our brains are the most creative and truly productive at knowledge work. In this conversation, she shares how we can train our brains to be more effective at doing work that really matters. She explains how our brains tackle different kinds of work, how we can better schedule our days to align with those states of mind, and what this all means for leaders and organizations. Storoni is the author of the book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.

Key episode topics include: leadership and managing people, entrepreneurs and founders, innovation, organizational culture, corporate strategy, succession planning

● Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Training Your Brain to Work More Effectively

Communicating clearly sets you up to have the leadership impact and influence you need to drive change. But what if you’re running on empty? Expressing your ideas and giving direction when you’re sleep-deprived, burned out, or simply overwhelmed can feel nearly impossible. So, what helps? Leadership development coach Muriel Wilkins, author of Leadership Unblocked and host of the podcast Coaching Real Leaders, talks us through communication techniques that meet you where you’re at mentally and emotionally so that you can rise to the moment (even when you’re worried you can’t).

Key episode topics include: leadership, managing yourself, business communication, personal resilience, leading teams

Your company changes. Your role gets eliminated. A dream project gets assigned to someone else. These are examples of the kinds of difficult change that are inevitable in life, but few of us have the skills to navigate well. But there are lessons from psychology that can help us be more resilient. Dr. Maya Shankar, cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, shares ideas that can help you understand, react, reframe, and better adapt to change in life or work. She offers evidence-based strategies for how leaders can build resilience in the face of personal, organizational, and technological upheaval while also finding paths to growth and learning. Shankar is author of the book The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.

Key episode topics include: leadership, managing yourself, change management, psychology, personal resilience, career transitions, personal growth and transformation

● Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: The Cognitive Science Behind Sudden Change