Knowledge that Transforms

Whether team members collaborate effectively is often rooted in their ability to work through, accept, and capitalize on their differences. Through facilitated discussions following the completion of the widely accepted “Big Five” personality assessment, participants can connect their collective personality traits with team tensions or difficulties — whether latent or overt — and defuse them in the process. For newly formed teams, the same exercise can provide insights that accelerate cohesion.

Employees on the front lines are well positioned to see opportunities for improvement in areas like customer experience. But when leadership fails to offer encouragement or support, workers may come to believe that creative new initiatives are not welcome. The result is missed opportunities for both the organization and employees. Middle managers and senior leaders must recognize their critical roles in resourcing ideas, enabling small experiments, and building employees’ innovation identities.

AI can make individual creators more productive and inventive — but at a collective cost. Across four studies spanning short-story writing, circular-economy solutions, humor, and collaborative storytelling, the authors found that AI consistently limited the diversity of ideas across groups. The result: higher average quality, but fewer breakthrough outliers. Managers who understand this paradox can design workflows that harness AI while preserving the originality that fuels long-term innovation.

At the Community College of Philadelphia, generative AI tools didn’t magically free up people’s time or supercharge one productivity metric across the board. An analysis found that GenAI resulted in different workflow gains for key roles: decisiveness for executives, speed for operational leaders, and resolution efficiency for student-facing professionals. When judging GenAI’s success, examine how your organization’s work changed shape.

Pfizer succeeded in digitizing its manufacturing operations not by improving the technology alone but by rebuilding trust, processes, and collaboration between digital and plant teams. This case study demonstrates that successful transformation depends first on strong operational foundations, integrated systems, and organizational alignment.

The most consequential decision that managers of corporate venture capital units must make is whether to prioritize financial or strategic benefits for the parent company. Researchers describe the spectrum of CVC investment strategies and argue that for most CVCs, the approach most likely to succeed puts strategic gains first but also seeks financial returns.

Many leaders and companies shy away from a high-risk strategy built around big gambles. But they still want to grow. According to BCG Institute research, companies that succeed with lower-risk growth have strategies that feature four elements: the commercialization of existing capabilities, small acquisitions, smart partnerships, and diversified bets. Learn from real-world successes.

At a time of high stress and uncertainty, leaders must increasingly spend time and energy steadying their people. However, work like comforting a team after layoffs or explaining a change of direction takes a toll. And as this work grows, women leaders report that they are doing an outsize portion of it compared with men. That’s bad news not only for valuable female leaders but also the organizations trying to retain them. But both can learn how to better address the empathy tax.

As organizations adopt diverse flavors of AI more widely and scale applications across the enterprise, managing new risks that arise in the development process or during application use becomes increasingly complex. New and adaptive forms of governance must be put in place and systematically embedded across processes so that companies can gain the benefits of moving quickly with AI innovation without exposing themselves or stakeholders to harms.

Finance offices have been slow to meaningfully adopt artificial intelligence, often due to leaders’ perception of the function’s traditional role. Finance leaders who encourage teams to stay alert to changes in the business environment, experiment in the course of work, think differently about the future, and embed new practices may see greater AI adoption and benefits.