2024

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To Become a Better Presenter, Look Inward

Harvard Business Review

It’s much easier to change and improve how we communicate when we understand why we speak and behave the way we do. That’s why the most effective presenters and communicators often have a strong sense of their identities and a level of self-awareness acquired through reflecting on their beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral patterns. To become more aware of our own communication styles, and how they change due to context, you can do some inner work.

Change 124
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The great miscalculation–and exit–of multinationals in Africa… again

Christensen Institute

Deja vu. In 2015, many multinational companies exited Africa. Nestle cut staff across 21 countries and Barclays, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, Eveready, and SABMiller retreated from different African markets they once believed had promise. The allure of Africa, particularly the widely referenced Africa rising narrative, was fading. The reasons the multinationals cited were all too familiar: failing or inexistent infrastructure, smaller than expected consumer market, struggling institutions, and corruption

Report 143
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A Shared Language for Radical Change

Innovation Excellence

GUEST POST from Greg Satell One of the toughest things about change is simply to have your idea understood. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.

Change 117
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Research: How Gen AI Is Already Impacting the Labor Market

Harvard Business Review

A study of over 1 million job listings posted before and after the introduction of major gen AI tools reveals the effect they’re having on gig workers.

Marketing 128
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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

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Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work”

Harvard Business Review

Today the workforce is getting older, and the number of younger workers in positions of senior management is growing. These two developments might appear to spell trouble, in that they seem to set the generations against one another, but the author of this article argues that in fact they represent an important opportunity: If companies can figure out how to enable the intergenerational transfer of the wisdom that comes with age and experience, they can strengthen themselves — and the workplace

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How to Master Conflict Resolution

Harvard Business Review

Learning to navigate conflicts is not really a choice in today’s organizations. It’s an imperative. In this article, the author explains what conflict resolution is, why it’s an essential skill, and how to approach the conflict-resolution process. She offers four steps: 1) Try to see the situation from the other person’s point of view; 2) Pinpoint what the conflict is really about; 3) Think about your primary goal; and 4) Decide how to proceed.

How To 126

More Trending

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6 Ways to Bring Strategy into Your Work Every Day

Harvard Business Review

Business leaders are expected to be strategic, and while organizational obstacles can prevent you from translating intent into strategic actions, so can your personal limitations and practices. It doesn’t have to be this way. Even when it feels like the odds are stacked against you, you have more choices than you may realize. Small decisions about where to focus and what to do throughout your day may feel inconsequential, but their impacts accumulate.

Strategy 145
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How to Integrate Cloud, Data, and AI Technologies — and Make Your Company More Adaptable

Harvard Business Review

Building a strong, flexible “digital core” that integrates cloud, data, and AI technologies to serve as an interconnected foundation for your company is the key to future growth. It is your means of supporting the current business drive toward efficiency and effectiveness, while remaining flexible enough to respond to the new needs of the organization and quickly adopt and scale the latest technology innovations.

Data 144
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AI Is Transforming the Startup Landscape

Harvard Business Review

The startup ecosystem is shifting due to the rise of artificial intelligence. AI favors larger companies, necessitating a change in mindset for startups from disruption to transformation. While startups will face challenges in accessing sufficient data and computing power, they still have opportunities to innovate by providing AI-driven services directly to consumers.

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How AI Can Change the Way Your Company Gets Work Done

Harvard Business Review

AI offers many ways to enhance a company’s overall internal capabilities and skills. AI can be used to infer skills from employee profiles and their activity. AI can be used to classify learning content and make it more applicable and accessible for the whole workforce, as well as making learning more personalized to each individual. AI can be used to summarize, recommend, and augment learning content.

Company 145
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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

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Research: How to Build Consensus Around a New Idea

Harvard Business Review

Previous research has found that new ideas are seen as risky and are often rejected. New research suggests that this rejection can be due to people’s lack of shared criteria or reference points when evaluating a potential innovation’s value. In a new paper, the authors find that the more novel the idea, the more people differ on their perception of its value.

How To 143
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The Most Strategic Leaders Excel in 4 Disciplines

Harvard Business Review

Strategic fitness is a leader’s ability to learn from and adapt to their environment to set direction and create a competitive advantage. A study of 77 C-suite executives over four years found that strategically fit leaders excel in four disciplines : 1) Strategic fitness, or setting clear direction and calibrating when necessary; 2) Leadership fitness, or refining their style to meet the moment; 3) Organizational fitness, or investing in thinking about the future state of the business; and 4) C

Exercises 145
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The Limits of GenAI Educators

Harvard Business Review

While generative AI tools have been heralded as the future of education, more than 40 years of academic research suggests that it could also harm learning in realms from online tutoring to employee training for three reasons. First, the best student-teacher relationships are empathetic ones but it is biologically impossible for humans and AI to develop mutual empathy.

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All Business Strategies Fall into 4 Categories

Harvard Business Review

The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether an opportunity is attractive or whether a given strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. This article introduces a framework, built on an in-depth analysis of the creativity literature, that aims to fill that gap by providing a systematic approach to identifying potential strategies.

Strategy 145
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How To Select the Right Software for Innovation Management

Finding the right innovation management software is like picking a racing bike—it's essential to consider your unique needs rather than just flashy features. This oversight can stall your innovation efforts. Download now to explore key considerations for success!

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How to Get Your Team to Actually Speak Up

Harvard Business Review

There is a common leadership misconception that merely encouraging team members to voice their opinions will foster an environment of openness. But people won’t speak up unless they feel safe doing so. As a leader, this means you have to address the underlying reasons for employee reticence, including the individual and systemic barriers to speaking up.

How To 145
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How AI Can Make Make Us Better Leaders

Harvard Business Review

Humans are good at inventing tools, but not as good at adapting to the change these tools can cause. While there has been much focus on the technical impacts and potential dark side of AI, the authors’ research has shown that AI can enhance and empower leadership, actually helping make leaders more human. To do this, we need to invest just as much in the development of our human potential as we do in harnessing the power of AI.

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Creating Stability Is Just as Important as Managing Change

Harvard Business Review

When we think about change at work today, we tend to assume its inevitability and focus our attention on how to manage it — what methods and processes and technology and communication we need to put in place to have it move ahead more smoothly. Of course, some change is necessary, and some is inevitable. But not all of it. What the scientific literature on predictability, agency, belonging, place, and meaning suggests is that before we think about managing change, we should consider the conditio

Change 144
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How to Improve Women’s Advancement Programs

Harvard Business Review

Most corporate women’s advancement programs center on teaching women a predefined slate of skills purported to give them more control over their careers. But by taking this approach, companies may be unintentionally communicating a culture of conformity by asking women to change who they are to succeed. This leaves many women, especially senior women, feeling stuck, because strong leaders need to have the ability to set expectations, not just fulfill them.

How To 144
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How To Set Up Innovation So That It Aligns With And Enables Corporate Strategy

Speaker: Paul Heller

Most innovation work proceeds independently from company strategy. As a result, the products that arrive in the market are not well aligned with the company’s goals. This challenge is particularly significant in organizations with transformation-oriented strategies, where innovation must directly support growth, scalability, and strategic pivots. In this session, we will discuss why innovation in large companies is so often not aligned with the company’s strategy and what innovation leaders, pro

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Learning to Delegate as a First-Time Manager

Harvard Business Review

Learning how to delegate well is a skill every first-time manager needs to learn from the very start. Many people are promoted into management for doing their previous job well. But once you’re promoted into a leadership role, you must accept that you can’t do everything on your own — nor should you. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the more senior you become in an organization, the less you’ll be involved in doing the day-to-day work.

Learning 145
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How Starbucks Devalued Its Own Brand

Harvard Business Review

Starbucks is struggling. It has strayed from its successful strategy of offering customers exceptional experiences and, in the process, has commoditized itself. This article analyzes where it went wrong and offers ideas for how the company can turn itself around. It holds lessons for other companies that compete by providing customers distinctive experiences.

Strategy 144
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How to Present to an Audience That Knows More Than You

Harvard Business Review

What happens when you have to give a presentation to an audience that might have some professionals who have more expertise on the topic than you do? While it can be intimidating, it can also be an opportunity to leverage their deep and diverse expertise in service of the group’s learning. And it’s an opportunity to exercise some intellectual humility, which includes having respect for other viewpoints, not being intellectually overconfident, separating your ego from your intellect, and being wi

How To 145
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3 Ways to Clearly Communicate Your Company’s Strategy

Harvard Business Review

For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three recommendations: 1) Present the alternatives considered and explain why they were not adopted. 2) Explain how each choice is linked to the organization’s p

Strategy 145
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Driving Responsible Innovation: How to Navigate AI Governance & Data Privacy

Speaker: Aindra Misra, Senior Manager, Product Management (Data, ML, and Cloud Infrastructure) at BILL

Join us for an insightful webinar that explores the critical intersection of data privacy and AI governance. In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, building robust governance frameworks is essential to fostering innovation while staying compliant with regulations. Our expert speaker, Aindra Misra, will guide you through best practices for ensuring data protection while leveraging AI capabilities.

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You Need New Skills to Make a Career Pivot. Here’s How to Find the Time to Build Them.

Harvard Business Review

With any significant change in your career comes the need for new skills. But that’s even more true when you want a radical career change. In these situations, it’s going to take more than listening to a few webinars to build the knowledge you need get to where you want to go. You must set aside a significant amount of time for self-directed learning, formal training, or even a second job to gain the skills for the big leap.

How To 145
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Does Your Boss Practice Toxic Positivity?

Harvard Business Review

Being happy and positive at work can be a win-win for employees and organizations. But what happens when your boss practices toxic positivity? No matter how bad or stressful the situation is or how difficult the circumstances, they convince themselves that simply acting happy or thinking positively will change the outcome — then spread this toxic positivity to their teams.

Change 145
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When the World Is Too Distracting — and It Feels Impossible to Work

Harvard Business Review

As much as we wish we could, we can’t eliminate uncertainty in the world. But we can control how we respond to it, and one of the ways that we can respond is to help create workplaces where people feel seen, supported, and able to contribute meaningfully. This article includes a curated list of HBR articles and podcast episodes to help you manage yourself, your team, and your organization when you’re consumed with what’s happening outside of work.

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Is Your Mindset About Generative AI Limiting Your Professional Growth?

Harvard Business Review

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has garnered immense publicity over the past few months. Some believe it’s a passing fad or a threat to human creativity. For young professionals, it’s the source of a unique dilemma: Do you “buy into the hype” of AI and use it as a guidepost for your professional development and ambitions? Or do you stick to the beaten path, focusing on building more traditional skills and pursuing more conventional trajectories?

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HR Meets AI: The New Way of Keeping Large Workforces Connected and Engaged

Speaker: Miriam Connaughton and Donald Knight

As organizations scale, keeping employees connected, engaged, and productive can seem like a monumental task. But what if AI could help you do all of this and more? AI has the power to help, but the key is implementing it in a way that enhances, rather than replaces, human connection. Join us for an exploration into how industry trailblazers are using AI to transform employee experience at scale while addressing both the potential and the pitfalls.

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How to Give Busy People the Time to Innovate

Harvard Business Review

Most companies are full of really busy people, which makes it hard to slow down and focus on trying new things. At the same time, stopping everything to focus on innovation can leave day-to-day tasks neglected. So, how can leaders make sure workers are able to balance operational necessities with innovation? Four strategies can help: 1) Clearing the “process debt” that’s blocking innovation time; 2) Subtracting something old before you add something new; 3) Putting innovation at the top of the l

How To 138
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Making the Time to Build Your Side Hustle

Harvard Business Review

Fifty percent of Gen Zs want to ditch the corporate world to become their own boss. However, this can be challenging when you lack the funds and flexibility to leave your day job. As a result, many ambitious young people begin by balancing full-time work with a side hustle — but managing both commitments can be challenging. You might feel drained after work or find it difficult to be consistent.

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3 Steps to Cultivate an Innovator’s Mindset

Harvard Business Review

If you want to move up the corporate ladder, you need to do more than meet deadlines and produce strong results. Employees who quickly move up often have an innovator’s mindset. These people ultimately position themselves as valuable assets by questioning assumptions and pushing their organizations to stay competitive. By consistently bringing fresh ideas to the table and demonstrating a proactive approach to problem-solving, they naturally attract the attention of higher-ups.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

Harvard Business Review

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one.

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Best Practices to Streamline Compensation Management: A Foundation for Growth

Speaker: Joe Sharpe and James Carlson

Payroll optimization can be one of the most time-consuming and complex factors of small business management. Yet, organizations that crack the code on streamlining employee compensation often discover innovative avenues for growth. With the right strategies in place, outsourcing and streamlining payroll processes can result in substantial time and resource savings.