Harvard Business Review May - June 2018

Political risk in the corporate sphere used to have a pretty specific meaning. It was the danger that a country would act in some way that harmed a multinational’s ability to do business. Think of a dictator seizing foreign assets. But as Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart note in “Managing 21st-Century Political Risk,” on page 130, we need to broaden that definition. “A great deal of the political risk within and across countries now comes from other players: individuals wielding cell phones, local officials issuing city ordinances, terrorists detonating truck bombs, UN officials administering sanctions, and many more,” they write. Rice and Zegart identify three forces driving the new threats, and they’re largely the same ones that are reshaping business itself. First, geopolitics has become more volatile in ways that go…

In her role as the faculty director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute, Cathy Tinsley often heard others mention gender-based differences. “Women are just so much more cooperative,” they might say. Or “Women are more cautious.” Though the comments portrayed women in a positive light, Tinsley always wondered whether they were true—especially since women weren’t moving ahead quickly in the workplace. She decided to look into perceived gender differences, and in her article with Robin Ely, she shares what she has learned. Being married to a colleague (INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri) spurred Jennifer Petriglieri’s curiosity about the interaction between people’s home and work lives. For the past five years she has studied more than 100 dual-career couples and interviewed the heads of people strategy at 32 large companies that employ…

As B2B offerings become more commoditized, business customers’ subjective, sometimes quite personal considerations are increasingly important in purchases. To discover what matters most to B2B buyers, the consulting firm Bain analyzed scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. All told, it identified 40 discrete “elements of value,” which fall into five categories—table stakes, functional, ease of doing business, individual, and inspirational—and range from strictly objective to more subjective. Understanding this full range of rational and emotional considerations, and tailoring the value proposition to the ones customers prize most, is critical to avoiding the commodity trap. People frequently buy on emotion and justify with facts. The biggest challenge we face in B2B tech marketing is that most vendors still want to churn out boring “justify with facts” content. It’s like the wings…

How to Increase Your Influence at Work BY REBECCA KNIGHT The 3 Things Employees Really Want: Career, Community, Cause BY LORI GOLER, JANELLE GALE, BRYNN HARRINGTON, AND ADAM GRANT Being a Two-Career Couple Requires a Long-Term Plan BY AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX To Handle Increased Stress, Build Your Resilience BY AMA MARSTON AND STEPHANIE MARSTON How Are You Perceived at Work? Here’s an Exercise to Find Out BY KRISTI HEDGES 5 Ways to Get Over Your Fear of Public Speaking BY MARK BONCHEK AND MANDY GONZALEZ Plan a Better Meeting with Design Thinking BY MAYA BERNSTEIN AND RAE RINGEL…

In a utopian corporate world, managers lavish a constant stream of feedback on their direct reports. This is necessary, the thinking goes, because organizations and responsibilities are changing rapidly, requiring employees to constantly upgrade their skills. Indeed, the desire for frequent discussions about development is one reason many companies are moving away from annual performance reviews: A yearly conversation isn’t enough. In the real world, though, constant coaching is rare. Managers face too many demands and too much time pressure, and working with subordinates to develop skills tends to slip to the bottom of the to-do list. One survey of HR leaders found that they expect managers to spend 36% of their time developing subordinates, but a survey of managers showed that the actual amount averages just 9%—and even that may…

Why are you making this shift now? IBM’s cultural transformation is aligned with the reinvention of our business, with almost half our revenue coming from businesses we weren’t in six years ago. We’ve fully embraced design thinking and agile methodologies, which changes the way we work and assemble teams to drive value for our clients. It requires more Connector behaviors from all IBMers. We’re systematically creating opportunities for learning through peer-to-peer coaching. What are the advantages of this approach? It’s more market driven. Too often learning and development teams focus on creating and pushing out new kinds of programs for employees—the incentive is really around creation. This approach recognizes that there’s a lot of value in “pull”—when people seek what they need. It also offers advantages in cost and speed. Rolling…