Gen AI tools offer unprecedented opportunities, but organizations adopting them rarely realize significant value right away. As with past general-purpose innovations, companies often experience an initial dip in productivity before seeing sustained gains. This "productivity J-curve" reflects the growing pains of integrating new systems, reorganizing workflows, and investing in complementary capabilities. To bridge the gap between adoption .....more

Advocate Health, formed by the merger of two major health systems, aims to redefine patient care by leveraging its scale of 69 hospitals and 1,000 other sites to partner with academic institutions and leading businesses. Key initiatives include the use of AI tools such as Microsoft''s DAX Copilot to make it easier for doctors and nurses to do their jobs; the creation of The Pearl, an innovation district in Charlotte, North Carolina, that brings .....more

As companies pour trillions into transformation efforts, few see lasting results. That''s because most organizations approach change like machines-rigidly, predictably, and from the top down, argue Amazon Web Services enterprise strategists Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun. In this article, adapted from their forthcoming book The Octopus Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), the authors offer a radically different paradigm: the Octopus .....more

Political and regulatory whiplash is forcing companies to rethink how they weather hostile environments. Beyond the familiar strategy of speaking out against policy or exiting business lines, strategic hibernation offers a way to preserve core capabilities while minimizing exposure, enabling rapid reentry when political winds change. Historical examples-from Prohibition-era brewers, to biotech firms navigating U.S. stem cell restrictions, to Indian .....more

Leadership theory suggests CEOs should focus on high-level issues such as strategy and resource allocation. These authors challenge this conventional wisdom by spotlighting CEOs who dive deep into day-to-day execution rather than hovering at the strategic level. By exploring best practices at Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota, they argue that top-performing companies thrive because of leaders who actively shape how work gets done. These CEOs-Jeff .....more

Private-equity-backed companies consistently deliver faster, more substantial gains than their public or family-owned peers, often transforming their performance within just a few years. Their playbook consists of six practices: conducting full-potential due diligence on a recurring basis, building management teams that are precisely matched to their value-creation goals, "clean-sheeting" labor to streamline operations and boost productivity, .....more

Companies eager to adopt generative AI often launch numerous pilots across departments, chasing quick wins and marginal efficiencies. But a scattershot approach won''t deliver transformative impact. The global consumer packaged goods company Reckitt took a different approach. It chose to go deep in one domain-marketing-where gen AI could be applied across interconnected tasks like insight generation, content creation, and product development. .....more

Many organizations are sitting on valuable proprietary data but lack a clear plan for commercializing it. As interest in selling data grows-driven by advances in AI, pressure to find new sources of revenue, and the success of firms like Amazon, Mastercard, and Instacart-leaders need a structured approach. The most effective strategies start close to home: with core businesses, existing partners, and a focus on data that supports the company''s .....more

To foster constructive disagreements, organizations should encourage individuals to modify their observable behaviors during conflicts. More specifically, the authors'' research has shown that employees should be more attentive to their linguistic behavior-to carefully choose the words they speak-because unlike a person''s thoughts and feelings, language is observable by counterparts, trainers, and mentors. Individuals can use several .....more

Leaders can''t afford to take a "wait and see" approach to adopting generative AI. They need a plan for applying it differently than others in the value chain, say the authors. In this article they introduce a framework for thinking about gen AI strategically and offer practical advice on how to apply gen AI to the tasks composing jobs. The framework focuses on two factors: the cost of errors and the type of knowledge required. If .....more