Harvard Business Review

LIKE MOST OF YOU, I have a cluttered work calendar. The people I meet with are as busy as I am, so even when I’m convening a small group, it sometimes takes weeks to find a time that works. Filling my days with meetings feels necessary and essential: Leadership involves listening to and influencing others, and it’s hard to do that if you’re working in isolation. Even so, my colleagues and I recognize the costs of having so few unbooked hours. To better accommodate “deep work,” we’ve tried instituting no-meeting Fridays and other potential solutions, but those initiatives never seem to stick. In this issue’s cover story, “Beware a Culture of Busyness,” Kellogg professor Adam Waytz tackles this pervasive problem, starting with an exploration of why a jam-packed calendar has become a…

Born in the U.S. Rust Belt, Ben Armstrong is drawn to the mysteries of manufacturing: Why do aerospace workers make so much more money than autoworkers? Why has the global adoption of robots remained flat while the technology keeps advancing? As executive director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, Armstrong looks for answers in data and on the factory floor. “Addressing technology and workforce puzzles will be key to competitiveness in a new era of American industry,” he says. His article in this issue, with Julie Shah, is their first in a wide-ranging research agenda on automation and the workforce. In 2012, as CEO, Ginni Rometty helped launch IBM’s SkillsFirst initiative, which put the emphasis in hiring on candidates’ skills rather than academic degrees. The move made IBM not only more competitive,…

Whether you’ve heard this from your boss or just thought it to yourself, it should serve as a wake-up call: Strategic thinking is a critical part of getting and staying ahead. In this issue we’ve collected HBR’s most relevant articles explaining what it means and how to do it. SPRING ISSUE AVAILABLE ON NEWSSTANDS AND ON HBR.ORG. Each quarterly Harvard Business Review Special Issue focuses on a single, timely theme and includes expert-authored articles from HBR’s rich archives, along with concise article summaries.…

CORPORATE TRAINING ISN’T all fun and games, but maybe it should be. Most of us have (often grudgingly) used corporate learning systems. We skim through the 50-slide PowerPoint decks hoping to correctly guess enough answers to pass so that we can get back to our “real work.” Anything we learn may be forgotten by the time we receive our certificate of completion. But a new study shows that gamified training done right—lessons conducted carefully and over time, incorporating elements such as progression through challenges and levels, instant feedback, points, and competition—can significantly improve employee performance. The research took place at the professional services firm KPMG. “Leaders had developed a gamified training tool for their employees, but they didn’t want to just roll it out and wonder whether it worked,” explains Ryan…

Christian Gossan, a director at the advisory firm KPMG Australia, led the creation of the gamified training platform described in the accompanying article. He recently spoke with HBR about KPMG’s experience with this learning approach. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow. What problem was gamified training meant to solve? We have numerous service lines, so we needed to deepen employees’ understanding of all our offerings and capabilities. Rote training is boring—but games are the opposite of boring. And their interactive nature means that people can’t just click through to completion. We started with a pilot for employees in our Australian offices. Australians are mad for sport, so we used an athletics-themed platform. When we decided to go global with the approach, we made a more universally appealing one called KPMG Globerunner, which…

Companies often spend millions on the design of their logo in the hope of differentiating their brand, building loyalty, and boosting overall performance. A new study finds another reason to get the logo right: It can cushion the brand in the event of a corporate transgression. Across five experiments, the researchers showed that a cute design—one with babylike features—can inspire consumers to “take care of” the brand if it comes under attack. In the first experiment, participants saw one of two versions of a logo for a fictitious pharmaceutical company: a cat with a high or a low level of cuteness. Some in each group were told that to increase profits, the firm was raising prices by 300% (putting its drugs out of some patients’ reach); the others were told that…