HBR Articles

What are some of the sources of great risk organizations often overlook when thinking about AI ethics? Procurement officers, senior leaders who lack the expertise to vet ethical risks in AI projects, and data scientists and engineers who don’t understand the ethical risks of AI. Addressing these risks requires both awareness and buy-in on your AI ethics program across the organization. Download this report by AI expert Beena Ammanath and ethical risk specialist Reid Blackman to uncover six strategies for achieving success.

With remote work more common than it’s ever been thanks to the pandemic, what is the best way to create a “work-from-anywhere” arrangement when negotiating a job offer? What about those who’ve discovered they prefer working virtually and don’t want to return in person to the office in their current position? Discover five steps for negotiating a remote work agreement. For instance, be prepared to show the impact you can make despite your physical location. Download for more tips from career coach Susan Peppercorn.

We’ve all gotten pretty good at adapting to change over the past year and a half. As executives try to navigate this new business landscape and keep pace, what is a realistic expectation for adapting to change? How much change is good? How fast should the changes happen? How can we manage the sheer amount of change being thrown at us? This article by David Michels and Kevin Murphy explains that the first step is understanding your company’s capacity for change, and then describes the factors that they believe determine a company’s change power.

What do you do if you see that an important task needs to be done but it’s outside of your job description? Before you decide whether to switch lanes, consider this research based on observations and recordings of first responders completing mass-casualty incident simulations. Margaret M. Luciano, Virgil Fenters, Semin Park, Amy Bartels, and Scott Tannenbaum, authors of this HBR article, note to be mindful of the environment, beware of crossing team boundaries, and remember to update your team and leaders.

Many organizations are trying to respond to intensifying competitive pressures and challenges by asking too much of their employees. But focusing on a few important initiatives can lead to greater impact. By expanding the total amount of value created for their customers, employees, and suppliers, IT leaders can position their companies for enduring financial success.

Objectives and key results (OKRs) have become a popular method teams use to plan for success and measure it. This framework has been so successful, Jeff Gothelf says, because it focuses on the impact of the work rather than the actual work itself. But when organizations apply OKRs to individuals, as some do, it presents two problems: Employees tend to create goals that are easy to measure but don’t actually determine whether they’ve grown or improved in a meaningful way, and they tend to choose targets they know they can hit, rather than taking a risk on something more ambitious.

What’s the difference between digitizing and digital transformation? For the past year, organizations have focused on digitizing – spearheading digital initiatives to help them stay in the game during COVID-19. Now, write Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani, businesses need to shift gears and focus on digital transformation – building a long-term competitive advantage to succeed in the future. “We are hearing many executives express concern that they are actually falling behind on making the important choices that lead to differentiation,” they write.

Many people swear by their personal productivity hacks, whether that’s the elusive “inbox zero,” time boxing their calendars, or even their good old pen and paper to-do list. However, these and other individual techniques and preferences fall short when working in a complex organization with interdependencies among people and teams. To make a true impact on the productivity of an entire organization, improvements must be made on a systems level, writes Daniel Markovitz in this article.

Most would agree that people are an essential component to a successful digital transformation, but Becky Frankiewicz and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic get to the heart of why talent far outweighs technology in importance in this HBR article.