Harvard Business Review January/February 2023

JUST DOWN THE HALL from my desk sits HBR’s ping-pong table. It’s a reminder of that era—not long ago, really—when employees clamored for fun office amenities, so companies delivered them. Today workers are demanding something else: flexibility. Like many organizations, ours is still figuring out what it means to be a hybrid workplace, how best to use our offices, and how to integrate our growing ranks of all-remote employees with those of us who still go into our Boston headquarters. Sometimes the conversations around flexibility can get emotional: People have strong feelings about how, when, and where they do their best work. In this issue Mark Mortensen and Amy Edmondson caution companies against getting too focused on what employees want right now. “Temptingly simple as this response is, it can be a…

As an undefeated junior fencer, Carol Kauffman would slide into the “zone” of peak performance, but in hindsight she realizes that relying only on pure instinct wasn’t always optimal. “It’s crucial to have more than one way to win,” says Kauffman, now an executive coach. Drawing on years of research and consulting work, she and her colleague David Noble have identified four “stances” that leaders can use to find multiple pathways to success. In writing their HBR Press book, Real-Time Leadership, she says, “David and I called on all the stances when we hit writer’s block. It’s remarkable how many situations the stances can be put to use in.” When Shantanu Nundy was an engineering major at MIT, he spent winter breaks teaching at his family’s school for impoverished children in…

WHEN AN ESTABLISHED consumer packaged goods (CPG) company introduces a new product, it faces a potentially make-orbreak decision: how to brand it. Tying it to an existing brand (as was the case for Cherry Coke and Del Monte Tomato Sauce) is tempting. Customers are more likely to try a new product with a familiar association, and companies have to expend fewer marketing resources to launch it. But the strategy has risks, too: Weak or failed brand extensions can harm the parent brand. When the maker of Coors beer introduced a nonalcoholic beverage, Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water, customers were confused, with some wondering about its alcohol content. Sales of Coors water and Coors beer suffered, and the new product was ultimately discontinued. A new study can help companies make the right…

SHANAEV: Generally speaking, the market is much more rational than you might think. It’s incredibly efficient when it comes to accurately condensing information about value. But sometimes it can be glaringly irrational. HBR: So Groundhog Day isn’t the only anomaly? Not at all. Researchers have also documented the “sell in May and go away” effect, which reflects the fact that the market tends to be at its worst from May through October. Then there’s the January effect, socalled because stocks often rise at the start of the year, and the Monday effect, in which market returns are lower than average at the beginning of the week. Some studies have also found that stocks perform poorly around the full moon and when Mercury is in retrograde. Many of these effects are fairly consistent…

MARICO, THE INDIAN consumer-goods company I founded and still lead as chairman, was conceived around product innovation. I was a young man working at Bombay Oil Industries, the family firm that my father and grandfather had incorporated in 1948, which made and sold edible oils, oleo chemicals, and spice extracts in bulk. It was a commodity business with fluctuating margins and low growth, but I’d spent enough time analyzing our offerings and operations, traveling around India to observe consumer behavior across various regions, and talking to the end users of our products to see a hidden opportunity: We could do better by selling our oils in smaller branded units. I knew how traditional Indian businesses were run, but having visited the United States, I could see different market dynamics bubbling up.…

MANY COMMON PRACTICES for managing employees are hard to explain. Why do companies obsess over cost per hire but spend so little time trying to see if they make good hires? Why do they provide so little training when we know it improves performance and many candidates say they’d take a pay cut to get it? Why do firms delay filling vacancies and let work go undone? Why do they spend so much money leasing personnel from vendors rather than hiring their own? One answer to those questions is the peculiar way that financial accounting in the United States treats employment costs (which differs from the way that international standards treat them). Despite all the rhetoric about “investing in our people,” training and development aren’t considered investments; they’re categorized as a…