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. 

Download the perspective

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.

Download the assessment

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

The Hidden Driver of Workforce Polarization

Amy Bernstein

November 30, 2025

We recently published an article that’s really stuck with me. Partly because the piece examines the surprising role that moral philosophy plays in the workplace and partly because I keep seeing its surprising premise borne out.

Titled “The Hidden Driver of Workforce Polarization”, the article argues that polarization over such issues as migration, climate, reproductive rights is not actually an expression of the disagreements between the political left and right. Rather, say Namrata Goyal of Esade Business School and Krishna Savani of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, polarization is rooted deeply in the differences between moral absolutists and moral relativists. Moral absolutists come down hard against any practice they deem immoral, while moral relativists are open to exceptions to practices they deem immoral. Critically, note the authors, both absolutists and relativists sit all along the political spectrum.

Because the differences that arise from this division over such questions as sustainability policies, return-to-office rules, and corporate activism are often treated as left-versus-right problems, the corporate responses are usually ineffective. The authors encourage us use the moral lens to diagnose the trouble, shift the conversation from “who’s right” to “how we decide,” and to build decision processes that give both absolutists and relativists a fair hearing.

They also caution against three common practices when devising the response:

• Over-relying on facts and data. Absolutists rarely shift their stance when core values are at stake, and “data dumps” can backfire.
• Labeling employees politically. This short-circuits deeper understanding and can alienate both sides.
• Forcing premature compromise. Pushing for middle-ground solutions before acknowledging absolutists’ non-negotiable values often erodes trust.

Goyal and Savani argue that this approach should be a relief to leaders who’ve struggled in the past with workplace polarization. “The good news is that recognizing this divide frees leaders from a false choice,” they write. “Collaboration does not require changing people’s politics. It requires navigating the rigidity-flexibility spectrum in moral reasoning.”

***

Thanks for reading,

The post The Hidden Driver of Workforce Polarization 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.

Climbing the High Summits: Why Every Leader Must Master Human Skills to Get the Most Out of AI

Diane Belcher

November 10, 2025

At Machu Picchu’s Sun Gate, a clear view of the citadel can vanish in minutes. Skies that seem calm turn quickly into downpours, leaving the path slick with rain and the descent treacherous. Those prepared for the unpredictable weather are glad to have their rain jackets, but gear alone is not enough. What makes the difference is the ability to adapt and stay resilient as conditions change.

Today’s organizations are climbing into their own unpredictable conditions, an era of relentless disruption, technological advances, data security threats, volatile markets, and geopolitical risk. Within view is an unprecedented capability to reimagine strategy, accelerate performance, and unlock value at scale and speed. But reaching the summit requires something more than high-tech gear.

It requires every member of the organization—from the CEO and C-suite to managers, frontline teams, and technical experts—to master the complementary human strengths that no machine can replace. In the face of unexpected turns, humans bring a kind of adaptability, judgment, and creativity that technology can’t yet match. And it’s these capabilities that make the difference between stalling short of the peak and reaching it.

The Gear Is Critical, but It’s Not the Guide

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the modern expedition’s gear: precise, powerful, and more functional than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago. But the gear is not the guide.

The guide’s role is to read the mountain, adjust the route to conditions, set the pace, make safety-critical decisions, and ensure the team’s resources, skills, and morale are all there. Teamwork and resilience make all the difference, just as in business. Rapid, continuous change exhausts even very capable workforces. Leading through it takes leaders with strong social and emotional intelligence, the ability to create psychological safety, and a genuine interest in people’s well-being.

The most successful AI adoption comes from a distributed leadership model. The CEO sets the tone and embeds AI into the business strategy, but the chief information officer, chief operating officer, functional heads, and line managers must all take responsibility for integrating AI into workflows, decision making, and customer experiences. Without that shared commitment, AI doesn’t get scaled to its full potential.

That’s why AI literacy for everyone matters too. Ensuring that every team member understands both AI’s capabilities and its blind spots helps them know when to trust the model and when to trust their instincts. In a truly AI-enabled organization, frontline employees aren’t just end users. Instead, they’re active contributors who spot risks, surface opportunities, and feed insights back into the system.

Reading the Signs Machines Can Miss

Even in clear weather, strong leaders question assumptions, reassess the plan, and prepare alternatives. They look for hazards the map can’t show and act before those hazards become crises. When crises do occur, they size up the problem with a sense of proportion and draw on their creativity to improvise solutions when necessary.

Just as in business, leaders must cultivate integrative thinking, which is the ability to hold competing perspectives, connect dots across functions, and generate new paths forward. As research from Harvard Business School has shown, the strongest creative ideas often emerge when humans and machines work together, combining human originality with AI’s ability to refine ideas and test their feasibility. This is what turns AI potential into transformative capabilities.

The Partnership That Gets You to the Top…and Back Home

The most successful digital transformation strategies rely on constant coordination between people and technology. Despite detailed plans, it’s the team who decides when to deviate to avoid danger, preserve energy, or seize an unexpected break in the weather.

For high-performing organizations, the C-suite, product leads, operations managers, legal teams, human resources departments, engineers, customer-facing teams, analysts, and even administrative staff learn to collaborate with AI tools in ways that elevate both their work and the organization’s overall performance.

Leading at Extreme Altitude

The companies that succeed won’t just be the ones with the most advanced AI tools. They’ll be the ones that have deliberately elevated the human capabilities that give those tools purpose and given everyone a role in finding new ways forward.

They will:

• Enhance human strengths, developing emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, resilience, creativity, and integrative thinking in every role.
• Build widespread AI literacy, so every employee can partner effectively with AI.
• Share ownership of creating the organization’s future, engaging the leadership team and broader workforce in seeking ideas to leverage AI, not isolating it within a single function.

Reaching the summit involves building a digitally literate workforce, whose human capabilities have also been sharpened. When leaders at every level champion these complementary elements, the organization doesn’t just climb higher, it becomes more capable of navigating whatever terrain lies ahead.

The post Climbing the High Summits: Why Every Leader Must Master Human Skills to Get the Most Out of AI appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Are You Managing—or Teaching?

Amy Bernstein

October 31, 2025

This month I want to consider the issue of micromanagement. As leaders, we’re told not to get too involved in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day operations. If we’re too controlling, if we monitor too closely, we run the risk of destroying trust with our teams and crushing their motivation.

This all rings true to me. One the hardest things about becoming a leader was learning to pull myself out of the everyday details so that I could focus on the big-picture stuff—vision, strategy, resource allocation, and so forth. Let others think about process—right?

Maybe not.

Scott Cook, cofounder of Intuit, and Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, studied four of the world’s top-performing companies—Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota—and made a discovery. At these companies, they write in “The Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders,” the most senior leaders “spend an inordinate amount of time…architecting the day-to-day methods of execution in ways that set the standard and teach others to do work well.”

They’re not micromanaging. These leaders are teaching and modeling behaviors, Cook and Nohria write, with the goal of building “a system that performs reliably even when they’re not in the room.”

That’s a worthy goal, by any definition of leadership.

***

Thanks for reading,

The post Are You Managing—or Teaching? 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.

Assessment: 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.

Download the assessment

The post Assessment: 10 Strategic Questions 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.

Leading Through Transformation: Rethinking the Role of Midlevel Leaders

As business imperatives evolve, midlevel leaders are playing an increasingly vital role in leading and executing transformation efforts.

Findings from Harvard Business Impact’s global study of more than 600 leaders highlight this shift:

• 96% of midlevel leaders say they’ve taken on increased responsibility to lead or participate in more transformation initiatives over the past year.
• 65% of midlevel leaders say they provided strategic input or supported the implementation of transformation efforts.

Explore the full infographic for additional insights.

View the infographic

The post Leading Through Transformation: Rethinking the Role of Midlevel Leaders appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.