Harvard Business Review

JOIN US ONLINE WWW.HBR.ORG FACEBOOK @HBR INSTAGRAM @harvard_business_review LINKEDIN Harvard Business Review YOUTUBE @harvardbusinessreview X @HarvardBiz TIKTOK @hbrearlycareer CONTACT HBR PHONE 800.988.0886 EMAIL editors@hbr.org customerservice@hbr.org designers@hbr.org publishers@hbr.org The New Taylorism AS A BOOK editor at Harvard Business Review Press, Kevin Evers routinely scouts for authors who can bring complex management topics to life. In early 2022 he was looking for a writer to tell the story of the music industry’s disruption, in which one example kept cropping up. In the previous two decades the industry’s distribution model had shifted from CDs to iTunes to streaming services like Spotify, and experts consistently pointed out how deftly Taylor Swift had navigated the changes, becoming more successful at every turn. Kevin wasn’t a Swiftie, and he hadn’t set out to write a book.…

Kweilin Ellingrud has been passionate about gender equality for as long as she can remember. As a child she spent time in China, Japan, Ecuador, France, and the United States and was struck in each place by the roles that women played. Today she focuses much of her professional work at McKinsey on the gender gap. “I have three daughters,” she says, “and I want them to experience a world that’s a lot more equal than the one I’ve worked in.” Her article in this issue, coauthored with Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez, offers thoughts about how to achieve that. 64 How Women Can Win in the Workplace Are inspiring leaders born or made? That question has bedeviled scholars and practitioners for years, but Adam D. Galinsky finally has…

GENERATIVE AI is changing how we work. Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot help people write everything from emails to blog posts to plans for internal analyses 40% faster than they used to, according to a 2023 MIT study. The new technologies are transforming technical jobs in particular. A study by MIT Sloan, Microsoft Research, and GitHub determined that gen AI coding tools can cut programming time by 56%, for instance. How should workers use such time windfalls? Experts have been debating that ever since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, in November 2022. Boston Consulting Group, for example, found that many people devote their extra hours to problem-solving, interacting with others, or learning new things. Thirty-eight percent of the managers who gained extra time by using AI admitted to wasting more than half…

WHEN I LEFT management consulting in 2005 to take a job at AXA, one of the world’s leading insurers, my friends chided me for what they viewed as a questionable career move. “Why do you want to work in such a boring industry?” they asked. But having done research on credit risk for my PhD, I’m fascinated by the business of insurance. While some view it as a bureaucracy designed to simply track and pay claims, I see a much deeper purpose: to help people, companies, and societies thrive by distributing risk. Thus insurers (and their investment arms) are important vectors for positive change in the world. Two decades later, as the CEO of AXA, I’m even more confident in that opinion. As systemic risks—climate change, geopolitical instability, public health…

Near the end of a lengthy strategy session at a prominent S&P 500 company, a senior executive posed a simple yet profound question: “Are we winning?” It sparked an intense discussion. On the one hand, the company had been delivering impressive financial results for nearly two years, exceeding both internal plans and analysts’ expectations. As a result, most executives received healthy bonuses. On the other hand, the company’s five-year stock price appreciation was below the S&P 500 average, indicating that investors’ confidence in its future performance was below average. Employees were burned out. Innovation was sluggish, and the release dates for next-generation products kept slipping. Collaboration among operating units was lacking. Some analysts valued the company at less than the sum of its parts. The senior leaders resolved to increase…

When we teach innovation at the world’s largest companies and in Stanford University’s most popular courses on entrepreneurship, we often start by asking what these four innovations have in common: (1) the moving disassembly lines of Chicago slaughterhouses in the late 1800s; (2) quick-drying nitrocellulose black lacquer used in what is known as “japanning”; (3) staff profit-sharing, introduced by Procter & Gamble’s cofounder William Procter in 1887; and (4) Isaac Singer’s 19th-century network of local dealers selling sewing machines. Even the brightest corporate and startup minds rarely guess the correct answer. When revealed, however, it seems obvious: Henry Ford. Inspired by the slaughterhouse process, Ford invented the moving assembly line. He adopted japanning to speed up production of the Model T, leading to his famous policy of offering “any color…as…