Insights

The C-Suite View

Insights that sharpen decisions and accelerate enterprise-wide impact.

Guide

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A Strategic Conversation Guide for the C-Suite

This guide includes 10 questions designed to spark high-level conversations across your executive team, helping you build organizational capacity to execute against your most urgent business goals and prepare your leaders for the challenges ahead. 

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Perspective

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A New Kind of Collective Intelligence: How AI Is Transforming the Living, Learning Organization

With AI woven into the fabric of business, planning is no longer static—it’s a dynamic exchange between people and machines. This creates a new form of collective intelligence and ushers in an era of the adaptive enterprise. 

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Assessment

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10 Strategic Questions for the C-Suite

AI is transforming strategy, execution, and leadership at a pace that exceeds many organizations’ readiness. Yet only 36% of organizations say their leaders excel at embracing AI as a core part of strategy and operations.

Use these 10 questions to assess how well your organization is adapting in a fast-moving world.

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The post The C-Suite View appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Strengthening the Leaders Who Power Transformation

Midlevel leaders are at the heart of every major shift in a business. They drive strategy forward, keep teams aligned, and make change happen. But the role has grown more complex—and most leaders haven’t been given the tools to keep up.

To meet the demands of constant change, these leaders need to think strategically, move quickly, and connect the dots across people, priorities, and tech.

Explore the full infographic to see how these leaders are stepping up to lead transformation.

View the infographic

The post Strengthening the Leaders Who Power Transformation appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Leadership Imperative

Equipping Leaders and Organizations to Thrive Amid Accelerating Change and AI-Driven Transformation

Leadership today has undergone a fundamental transformation compared to just a few years ago. 

Effective leadership development ensures leaders at every point of influence are equipped to drive impact, align teams, and deliver results in a world of acceleration.

The post The Leadership Imperative appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Leveling Up Your Midlevel Leaders

Midlevel leaders are under more pressure than ever. They’re expected to deliver today and drive transformation for tomorrow. But many feel stuck in the middle—pulled between big goals from above and the needs of their teams below.

We surveyed over 600 global leaders to understand what’s really going on. The data shows a clear story: midlevel leaders are ready to step up, but they need the right support to do it.

Explore the full infographic to see what midlevel leaders are facing—and how to help them thrive.

View the infographic

The post Leveling Up Your Midlevel Leaders appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

A New Kind of Collective Intelligence: How AI Is Transforming the Living, Learning Organization

With AI woven into the fabric of business, planning is no longer static—it’s a dynamic exchange between people and machines. This creates a new form of collective intelligence and ushers in an era of the adaptive enterprise. 

The post A New Kind of Collective Intelligence: How AI Is Transforming the Living, Learning Organization appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

A Strategic Conversation Guide for the C-Suite

10 Questions the C-Suite Should Be Asking Now About Their Leaders

AI is reshaping strategy, execution, and leadership—faster than most organizations are prepared for. 

The post A Strategic Conversation Guide for the C-Suite appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Full-Immersion Learning: Building Confident and Capable Leaders

Abbey Lewis

October 13, 2025

When you land in a new city, a familiar challenge emerges—how do you see, taste, and experience the most in the little time you have?

For every city, there are hundreds of guides and itineraries, each promising the “best” way to explore. Following one offers structure but also keeps you on rails, walking someone else’s path rather than discovering your own. The experience offers an easier way to explore, but it falls short of being truly transformative.

The alternative is immersion: stepping into the streets, wandering without a script, and experiencing the city in its true state. In those unplanned moments—trying local food, navigating side streets, asking strangers for directions, you begin to understand the city as it really is.

Leadership development is no different. Leaders must master new skills faster than ever. Yet they identify lack of time as the single greatest barrier to mastery. To make the most of scarce time, organizations must shift from traditional learning methods to full-immersion learning.

Full-immersion learning places leaders in business-relevant contexts such as simulations, role play, or real-world challenges where they apply knowledge in real time. It is experiential, contextual, and designed for speed, engagement, retention, and confidence. Among the most effective forms are practice-first learning and action learning projects, which demonstrate how immersion accelerates both skill and impact.

Practice-First Learning: Learning by Doing

Arriving in a new city can feel overwhelming. There are countless streets to explore and hundreds of foods to try. Reading a guidebook may help, but you won’t know which meals you love until you taste them. By exploring first, you discover the city through your own senses—and then deepen your understanding with research.

Practice-first learning creates the same effect in business. Instead of starting with abstract instruction, employees engage directly with real work challenges, experiment, and learn by doing. They recognize their own gaps as they encounter obstacles, then reinforce their knowledge with the applicable research-based concepts. The results are higher engagement, faster skill development, and greater confidence—addressing the issues of low engagement in traditional learning.

Action Learning Projects: Building Skills While Driving Results

When you travel with a group, everyone has different priorities. One person hunts for the best food, another searches for history, and someone else wants art and culture. Without alignment, the group risks a fragmented journey.

Leaders and their teams face the same challenge. Action learning projects solve it by anchoring development in real business issues. Each member brings a different lens, but together they apply knowledge, solve problems, and drive outcomes that matter. The learning is immediate, motivating, and efficient. Skills grow at the same pace as results.

Research confirms this; immersive, contextual, team-based learning doesn’t just accelerate development, it also fuels innovation.

From Wrong Turns to Real-Time Feedback

Even in the best-designed learning experiences, leaders need feedback to know where they stand. Without it, they risk repeating mistakes or overlooking gaps. It’s much like exploring a new city; you may order a dish that looks appealing but doesn’t match your taste. In the process, you learn something new about your preferences.

One of the most persistent challenges in leadership development is identifying and addressing individual skill gaps. Artificial intelligence (AI) now provides the real-time feedback loop leaders have long been missing. By analyzing performance, it not only highlights the gaps but also delivers feedback that is immediate and contextual. Paired with immersive learning methods, AI accelerates the cycle of practice, feedback, and adjustment, enabling leaders to close gaps faster and with greater confidence.

Bottom Line

Travel reminds us that the richest experiences often come when we choose to immerse ourselves in our environment. The meals you remember, the neighborhoods you love, and the insights you carry home come from stepping off the itinerary and plunging into the life of the city.

Immersive learning delivers the same depth in the workplace. When leaders learn in real contexts, it accelerates skill development, fuels engagement, and builds confidence. Leaders are better equipped to apply new skills in ways that spark innovation.

As Harvard Business School’s Ranjay Gulati argues, now is the moment for organizations to lead with courage. By diving into learning head-on and embracing risk, they build leaders with the practical skills to thrive in disruption.

At Harvard Business Impact, we deliver innovative and immersive learning through HBR Spark, combining world-class content, AI-driven personalization, and hands-on experiences such as leadership labs to accelerate growth and performance.  In our blended learning experiences, leaders engage in immersive learning through simulations, business impact projects, and other high-touch methods that connect your business challenges directly and drive meaningful impact.

Full-immersion learning is not just about acquiring new skills—it’s also about transforming leaders into the innovators of the future.

The post Full-Immersion Learning: Building Confident and Capable Leaders appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Midlevel Leaders: The Bridge to Your Organization’s Future

In Harvard Business Impact’s recent survey of 600 midlevel and senior leaders across industries and global regions, both groups agreed that expectations of midlevel leaders continue to rise.

The post Midlevel Leaders: The Bridge to Your Organization’s Future appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The post Building the Collective Intelligence of Humans and Machines appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Why the Tortoise Doesn’t Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive Advantage

Mark Marone, PhD

August 18, 2025

For 2,000 years, the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” has offered a lesson in patience and persistence. “Slow and steady wins the race,” the story goes. Deliberate, methodical progress beats speed.

But in today’s business landscape, that moral increasingly feels outdated.

Welcome to an era where speed to skill—how quickly individuals and organizations can learn, adapt, and apply new capabilities—has become a defining competitive advantage. In fact, it may be the only sustainable competitive advantage left. The new race is to see who learns fastest, applies that learning in real time, and gets maximum ROI before the landscape and the skills needed to navigate it shift again.

The Hare Learns a Lesson

In the classic tale, the hare loses. The advantage of his natural speed is undermined by his arrogance and complacency. But imagine a different version: one where the hare has learned his lesson and recognizes there is no time for napping under a tree. Instead, he scans the terrain for the best way forward, learns from every misstep, and uses those lessons immediately to move ahead, smarter and faster.

That’s today’s winning strategy in business. Companies are now consciously improving their speed to skill, making them more agile and adaptive. And they’re pulling away from competitors, even those making slow but steady progress.

Institutionalizing Learning at Speed

On the cutting edge are companies like Google and OpenAI, which approach learning like an extreme sport. OpenAI, for example, has built systems that treat every launch as a learning opportunity. Nearly 100% of releases are A/B tested, and those insights feed back into rapid cycles of iteration, dramatically increasing what some call their “learning velocity.”

At Google, speed to skill is also measured with surgical precision, especially on engineering teams. Through its DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) framework, Google tracks how long it takes teams to deploy new code, recover from failures, and iterate changes. These metrics reflect how fast teams learn from the real world and integrate that learning into the product.

Speed to Skill at Scale

Learning velocity isn’t limited to tech companies. Unilever has become a global model for what it means to build speed to skill at scale. Through its internal talent marketplace, employees can map their own career paths and identify the skills they’ll need. They can access relevant learning and apply their new capabilities immediately by volunteering for short-term internal gigs. For instance, a marketing professional can learn basic data analysis and then test that skill in a data-driven project in a time frame of just weeks.

This integration of learning, doing, and performing creates a virtuous cycle: faster skill acquisition, faster application, and a faster impact on the business. It’s no coincidence that Unilever consistently ranks among the most future-ready global companies.

Why This Matters Now

The half-life of skills is shrinking, quickly. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2027 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted. AI is transforming job roles at a pace that is making some training programs obsolete before they can be completed.

And the pressure for speed is mounting. According to our 2025 Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused study, 55% of organizations say that incorporating gen AI, AI, or machine learning into business practices is a top priority this year. It follows that nearly half also said there are significantly increased expectations of leaders to upskill their teams in AI.

Faster training delivery alone isn’t the full solution to the problem of accelerating speed to skill. Organizations must first understand the skills they will need, something that must go hand in hand with setting strategy. Second, the training must be effective and applicable. Third, it all needs to happen within an organizational culture that embraces the application of new skills—a change-seeking organization. It is a task for which many business leaders and organizations aren’t fully prepared.

A New Moral for a New Race

So what’s the takeaway for business leaders?

The lesson isn’t that speed always wins. It’s that learning speed wins in a world that rewards insight, agility, and action.

If you’re a leader, ask yourself:

• Is learning embedded in our C-suite strategy discussions?
• How quickly can our teams integrate new technologies, tools, or processes? How do we know?
• Knowing our strategy, do our people have the opportunity to help identify the skills they are going to need?
• Does our leadership create a psychologically safe environment that is conducive to applying new skills?
• Are our performance measurements and incentives aligned with accelerating our organization’s learning velocity?

To compete in this new race, organizations must design for speed to skill. It’s not just about training programs but also systems and environments that make learning continuous, contextual, and integral to performance.

When it comes to learning, it’s time to retire the old fable. The new one is being written every day by companies that are learning their way to the finish line—faster than ever before.

The post Why the Tortoise Doesn’t Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive Advantage appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

On-Demand Webinar

Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused: Collective Intelligence in the Age of AI

Register Now

Mark Marone
Director, Global Insights
Harvard Business Impact

Prarthana Kumar
Director, Strategic Learning Management, APAC
Harvard Business Impact

Rajeev Mandloi
Strategic Learning Manager, EMEA
Harvard Business Impact

The post Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused: Collective Intelligence in the Age of AI appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Insights

2025 Global Leadership Development Study

Harvard Business Impact’s 3rd Annual Study

In the coming year, respondents foresee three objectives for L&D to develop leaders for future success.

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Build a Change-Seeking Organizational Culture

In this year’s survey, 40% say their organizations are putting even more emphasis this year than last on building a change-ready organization.

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“We use the 4B analysis as we look at the workforce we’ll need in the future and determine how we are going to get it. Are we going to buy, build, or borrow the talent, skill, or expertise? Or does this task get transferred to a button or bot? This kind of analysis is done in every market, every function, every business line now.”

— Head of Corporate Training & Development at a Multinational Food and Beverage Company

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Readiness Reimagined: How to Build a Change-Seeking Culture

Predict the Nonlinear Evolution of Roles

44% of survey respondents say their organization will put greater emphasis this year than last on supporting workforce upskilling and reskilling in their leadership development programs.

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“We have [many] technical people who are strong technical experts, but
with a lower capability in transmitting knowledge back into the leadership.”

— Head of HR in North America for a Multinational Transportation Company

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The Fluid Future of Work: Rethinking Roles in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Accelerate Speed to Skill

Whether learning initiatives are designed to develop a skill, create alignment, improve collaboration, foster new ideas, or encourage changes in perspectives, they all have new requirements: they need to be more easily scalable, happen faster, and be delivered in context for the organization.

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“Taking a broader view that considers how I can strengthen collective intelligence by supporting collective memory, attention, and reasoning can open opportunities to unlock the true potential of human-AI collaboration.”

— Christoph Riedl, “How to Use AI to Build Your Company’s Collective Intelligence,” HBR.org

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Why the Tortoise Doesn’t Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive Advantage

Three Strategies to Address Learning & Development Objectives

Amplify with AI

Lean into Full-Immersion Learning

Champion the Complementary Elements

Research Report

Discover how to prepare your leaders to thrive in an AI-driven world.

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Research Findings

Dive deep into the results from our study.

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See how forward-thinking companies are adapting to change and transforming at scale.

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Charles Schwab

Mastering Leadership in a Dynamic World at Charles Schwab

Through Advanced LEAD, a nomination-based program for high-potential directors and managing directors, Charles Schwab empowers its leaders with the strategic mindset and networks needed to thrive in a dynamic industry.

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Rabobank

Developing Leaders for Transformation at Rabobank

Rabobank leveraged strategic leadership development to navigate significant change and realize its transformation goals.

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Atos

Developing Managers to Lead Confidently through Transformation at Atos

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, is preparing a global population of change-leaders to thrive amid digital disruption by empowering them with the skills to become more consultative partners to their clients and to inspire and motivate diverse individuals and teams. 

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Oman Arab Bank

Building Leadership for the Future at Oman Arab Bank

Oman Arab Bank aims to build a prosperous future aligned with Oman Vision 2040, focusing on innovation, sustainability, and equal opportunities. 

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Maybank

Investing in Digital Learning for Greater Effectiveness at Maybank

To rapidly upskill its employees with the capabilities emerging in the new economy, financial services leader Maybank adopted an agile approach to development: They provided their entire workforce with access to digital learning and anticipated evolving business conditions with the most relevant learning resources. 

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Previous Global Leadership Development Studies

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In 2023, we launched our first study of global leaders responsible for leadership development to understand their business and human capital priorities for the coming year, and in what ways they are relying on their leaders to meet those objectives.

Explore insights from our past global leadership development studies below.

2024 Global Leadership Development Study

Time to Transform

The theme that emerged in 2024 was the need to advance the practice of leadership to meet the needs of transformation efforts across organizations.

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Explore the insights

2023 Global Leadership Development Study

Ready for Anything

In 2023, we discovered a greater need to develop leaders who are truly ready for anything.

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Explore the insights

The post 2025 Global Leadership Development Study appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.