July–August 2025

How AI Is Redefining Managerial Roles

Gen AI has already begun transforming work by speeding up and even automating tasks, but looking further up the org chart, how will it change the work of middle managers? A new Harvard Business School study finds that using gen AI can flatten the corporate hierarchy and streamline productivity by freeing managers from some tasks of project coordination—but first companies must determine what to automate, and who will benefit the most.

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The CEO of Kaspi.kz on Designing an Essential Superapp

In 2007 Kaspi was a bank with no online presence and was struggling to survive amid a global financial crisis. Today, it is the most widely used platform in Kazakhstan for financial and government services, payments, and e-commerce. How did Kaspi effect such a dramatic transformation? With an unwavering focus on making everything it touches cheaper, faster, and more convenient for customers.

Central to that mission was the decision to create a superapp, giving people all the digital services they need to manage their lives in one place. Any employee can suggest a new product or feature for the app, but Kaspi develops only those ideas with the highest potential to improve the everyday customer experience. Additionally, the company is rigorous about gathering detailed feedback from customers on what they like and don’t like, using it to systematically refine the offerings. The focus on quality and usefulness has paid off: Kaspi has the greatest penetration and highest engagement in its home market of any technology company.

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“Speed Is a Leadership Decision”

When Andy Jassy succeeded Jeff Bezos as the CEO of Amazon, in 2021, he stepped into one of the most scrutinized leadership roles in business. But under Jassy’s leadership, Amazon has not only sustained its momentum but accelerated. In this wide-ranging conversation with HBR’s editor at large, Jassy reflects on what it takes to get a behemoth like Amazon to operate like a startup and how he pushes his team to take chances. “If you aren’t failing,” he says, “you’re either not inventing enough or not pushing the envelope.” He explains his decision to get workers back to the office five days a week, why he’s working to flatten the organization, and how Amazon is embracing AI. An optimist by nature, Jassy predicts that AI will transform the customer experience, but he’s clear-eyed about the challenges that accompany rapid technological change.

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The Conflict-Intelligent Leader

As civil strife grows around the world, clashes are on the rise in the workplace too. Incivility on the job is getting worse, and each day it costs companies billions in lost productivity and absenteeism. To navigate the discord, today’s business leaders need to develop conflict intelligence, writes Coleman, a Columbia professor and expert on conflict resolution. Like emotional intelligence, conflict intelligence involves empathy, self-regulation, and social awareness, but it also includes situational awareness and understanding the social dynamics and systemic forces that influence disputes.

Drawing examples from the work of peacemakers, diplomats, and business executives, Coleman highlights seven strategies that conflict-intelligent leaders use to manage volatile situations: laying the groundwork for better communication and trust, fostering collaborative relationships through meaningful joint ventures, balancing firmness with creative solutions, using adaptive approaches, leveraging the broader context, investing in the long term, and being opportunistic.

Leaders who use these tactics do more than tamp down disagreements, Coleman notes. They also create company cultures where employees feel more safe, satisfied, and creative and can handle uncertainty and stress better.

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How Pioneering Boards Are Using AI

Few board members recognize AI’s potential to help them prepare for and engage in substantive, well-informed, and strategically focused discussions with management and their board colleagues. That’s what the authors discovered when they conducted focus groups with more than 50 board chairs, vice chairs, and committee chairs from public and private companies in Europe, Asia, and North America. Most board members readily acknowledge AI’s value as a personal productivity tool and recognize its critical role in corporate operations. But they shy away from using it to improve board performance. That’s a mistake.

This article explains how AI can contribute to boards’ work by assisting individual board members, supplying the whole board with better information, and joining the board and actively participating in discussions. It also examines some of the risks commonly associated with AI, such as information leaks and sample biases, and describes how to mitigate them. Finally, it offers an adaptive learning-by-doing process for making AI an integral part of deliberations in the boardroom. It is the responsibility of board chairs to create engagement, help orchestrate collective experimentation, and maintain momentum.

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Your Company Needs an Eldercare Policy

For the first time in U.S. history, the number of working adults providing care to an older adult (nearly 23 million) has surpassed the number providing care to preschool children (21 million).

To help employees rise to this challenge, the authors argue, employers need to step up, just as the majority have done for childcare, by providing more support in the form of new and expanded business policies, programs, and benefits. The business case for doing so is straightforward: Supporting elder caregivers improves productivity, retention, recruitment, and diversity.

In this article the authors discuss who the providers of eldercare are, what demands they face, and what kinds of support they need most. The authors also provide examples of organizations that are leading the way in offering eldercare support to their employees. They conclude by providing some practical guidance to leaders who want their organizations to meet the challenges and opportunities of this demographic shift.

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Achieve DEI Goals Without DEI Programs

In the past few years, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been rolled back in both private and public organizations. For champions of workforce diversity, who feel as if their work is being undone, this is a difficult time. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that many management innovations designed to improve performance actually boost workforce diversity as well. And they don’t invite the backlash that formal DEI programs do.

Executives across many industries have begun relying on high-performance management techniques that target different periods of the career cycle, from recruitment to retention. The animating idea of these efforts is simple: Valuing and supporting employees improves engagement and business outcomes. But it turns out that they also have a natural by-product: diversity.

The authors describe five high-performance management techniques and how they’ve been implemented at well-known companies: referral programs at Oracle, skills upgrading at Walmart, mentoring programs at IBM, scheduling flexibility and stability at Gap, and performance-based retention at Amazon. Many techniques companies use to improve performance have a better record of fostering inclusion than diversity trainings and grievance processes do.

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Attract New Customers Without Alienating Your Old Ones

In the pursuit of growth, companies often strive to attract new kinds of customers. But if those new segments have needs, values, and preferences that differ from current buyers’, that approach can backfire spectacularly, driving away a firm’s loyal base and shrinking revenues. Kohl’s, Starbucks, and Bud Light are among the many brands that have encountered this problem.

Before targeting new customers, executives need to understand how they’ll interact with the old ones. The two critical factors are whether the two segments seek the same or different value from a brand and how sensitive they are to each other’s identities. Those factors combine to create four kinds of relationships: separate communities, connected communities, leader-follower segments, and incompatible segments. Each relationship type calls for different management strategies. However, most conflict emerges between incompatible segments. To resolve it, firms need to shift them to another type of relationship by building walls, creating hierarchies, or, in worst-case scenarios, firing one segment.

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You Should Be Able to Boil Your Strategy Down to a Single Clear Visualization

Why do investors respond favorably to some CEO presentations but not to others? In an analysis of 654 presentations on acquisitions, two professors found one factor that stood out: whether a compelling visualization of the strategic rationale for the deal was included. Unfortunately, they discovered, the majority of strategic visualizations aren’t designed to have impact.

In this article the professors explain why visualizations are so important to the communication of strategy and describe how to create one that will win buy-in from employees and investors alike. By combining insights from research on how the brain processes information with their study of deal presentations and experiments testing people’s responses to various visual approaches, they have identified five critical design principles: Group ideas into three or four main concepts, create layers with increasing detail, use color and shading only to distinguish the layers, indicate a clear sequence of relationships among the elements, and present information horizontally.

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How to Identify the Perfect Cofounder

One of the first and most important decisions entrepreneurs make is whether to go it alone or bring on cofounders.

Many investors favor startups with multiple founders, believing that a team reduces business risk by diversifying skills, sharing responsibilities, and preventing burnout. But forcing a cofounder relationship can do more harm than good: Research has shown that conflict within the founding team is one of the primary reasons high-potential startups fail.

Entrepreneurs should consider bringing on a cofounder if they have unmet needs in three key areas: partnership, expertise, and experience.

Finding the right cofounder is not as difficult as finding a life partner, but it’s close. It is critical to think carefully about what you want in a cofounder and spend time nurturing prospective relationships. Key steps in the courtship process include conducting a listening tour, writing a job description, “dating” various candidates, and having a prenuptial conversation.

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Hybrid Still Isn’t Working

A growing body of evidence shows that hybrid or remote work arrangements lead to lower overall performance.

Many firms, however, don’t have the option to bring employees back on-site, for a variety of reasons: They no longer have sufficient office space to house everyone, their employees are now dispersed geographically, or they fear a rebellion by hard-to-replace talent.

But few leaders in those situations have faced this reality: You can’t effectively manage remote and hybrid workers using the same methods you did when employees were still all together in the office.

Re-creating the cooperation and collaboration that happens in the office in a virtual context requires new rules and procedures for how people are managed day-to-day—as well as mandates that reel in some current practices.

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Don’t Let an AI Failure Harm Your Brand

AI is being adopted in everything from automobiles to chatbots, but AI products—like all products—will eventually fail. And how a company markets its AI systems affects the repercussions it will face when a failure occurs.

Julian De Freitas, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has conducted multiple studies into the dangers of AI failures from a marketing perspective. He contends that to successfully promote their AI products, marketers must first understand consumers’ unique attitudes toward AI. Specifically, they need to account for five pitfalls related to consumer attitudes: (1) People tend to blame AI first. (2) When one AI fails, people lose faith in others. (3) People place more blame on companies that overstate AI capabilities. (4) People judge humanized AI more harshly. And (5) people are outraged by programmed preferences.

This article examines how companies should prepare for failures—and what to do after the fact when AI misses the mark. It explores the ways in which companies market their own AI and whether their tactics present risks. And it offers practical advice to managers who want to promote their AI systems while protecting their brands and strengthening consumer trust.

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How the Busiest People Find Joy

Joy, along with achievement and meaningfulness, is one of the three keys to a satisfying life. Yet it’s the missing piece for many ambitious individuals, the authors found after examining data on how nearly 2,000 professionals spend their days. Jam-packed schedules are a factor, their research showed, because people experience more joy during their limited free time than while working or doing household chores. Interestingly, however, what people did with their extra time was more important than how many hours of it they had.

The authors uncovered five strategies that will help you get more out of your free time: (1) Engage with others. Sharing experiences amplifies joy. (2) Avoid passive pursuits. The more time you spend on active ones, the more satisfied you’ll be with your life. (3) Follow your passions. Doing what you find personally rewarding delivers significantly more benefits than doing things that typically are considered “good for you.” (4) Diversify your activities. Variety—not depth—boosts happiness. (5) Protect your free time. Don’t let work encroach on it; if you use it wisely, your well-being and job engagement will both increase, and you’ll actually get more value out of your work.

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Case Study: Do We Reskill or Replace Our Workforce?

To remain competitive in the internet-of-things era, should the CEO of SolidTech Innovations, a fictional elevator company, invest a lot of money in reskilling its entire staff? The industry is moving from hardware to software in the form of smart, connected elevators. But instead of laying off legacy hardware staff and hiring new talent, the CEO wants to offer the employees a “Grand Bargain”: The company will pay for voluntary reskilling and retraining, but the workers will need to take responsibility for their own futures. Those who opt in will gain valuable skills and have a future with the company; those who don’t may face demotions and pay cuts.

However, there is pushback from the company’s shareholders and leaders. Some want to use the program as a fig leaf for laying off staff; others think it costs too much and might put the company at a competitive disadvantage relative to companies that are hiring technologically skilled people right away. Leaders are worried that longtime workers will balk at learning these new skills and end up quitting, causing the company to lose hundreds of years of cumulative experience. The CEO is now unsure of how to proceed.

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Building Everyday Bravery

Three new books—How to Be Bold, by Ranjay Gulati; Fired Up, by Shannon Watts; and Confident by Choice, by Juan Bendaña—offer advice on how to be more courageous.

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Jacinda Ardern

The daughter of a police officer, Ardern grew up interested in public service but wary about the “blood sport” of New Zealand politics. Eventually, though, she found the courage to run for Parliament, party leadership, and, finally, prime minister. From 2017 to 2023, she led her country’s response to crises including a bovine disease outbreak, a mass shooting, floods, wildfires, and Covid-19. Her new memoir is A Different Kind of Power.

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