   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S63Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?   The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
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S53S35Is CVS Caremark Out-Innovating Apple?  In January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the company’s latest innovation: The wafer-thin MacBook Air laptop. Jobs proudly touted how it was the world’s thinnest laptop, measuring just three-quarters of an inch at its thickest point. Commercials show the laptop coming out of a thin manila envelope.
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S30S42The Conference That's Trying to Reinvent How We Network  This past May, I found myself at a conference unlike any other I’d ever attended. What made it so different was the way people were interacting. One group sat in a circle of chairs suspended from the ceiling, a net beneath them in case anyone fell. Two others were in seats on the ground, positioned back to back with virtual reality goggles on, conversing with one another’s avatar. Two more were climbing up a ladder into a giant nest-like structure. Another pair chatted while pumping their legs on exercise bikes on an elevated catwalk. And, out back, strangers were taking Ferris wheel rides together.
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S69Vaccination Dramatically Lowers Long Covid Risk  Several new studies reveal that getting multiple COVID vaccine doses provides strong protection against lingering symptomsAt least 200 million people worldwide have struggled with long COVID: a slew of symptoms that can persist for months or even years after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. But research suggests that that number would likely be much higher if not for vaccines.
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S52S47S62Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language  The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
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S48S61Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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S26The Value of Teaching Your Customers How to Spell My wife and son and I drove to Alabama and back last month. Thanks in large part to Yelp, we ate only one chain-restaurant meal the whole way (at a Cracker Barrel outside Atlanta). The Yelp app on my iPhone steered us instead to a surprisingly good sushi place in Fredericksburg, Va., a Southern buffet in Elizabethtown, N.C., a barbecue joint in Macon, Ga., a soul food restaurant in Knoxville, TN, a magical getaway in the hills above Blacksburg, Va., and finally a vegan place in downtown Scranton, Pa., where the staff knew just where we needed to go to get our fix of scenes from the opening credits of The Office.
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S60Earth's newest 'baby volcano'  On the afternoon of 10 July, the Earth cracked open. Three fissures appeared north-east of the base of Litli-Hrútur – a small mountain on the Reykjanes Peninsula in south-western Iceland – and began to spew molten lava high into the air accompanied by plumes of gas.Iceland's latest eruption wasn't a total shock; Litli-Hrútur (which translates to "Little Ram") is part of the Fagradalsfjall volcanic area that erupted in March 2021 and August 2022 after a break of almost 800 years, and the surrounding area had been shaking for several days with more than 12,000 earthquakes recorded prior the start of the eruption.
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S40Making Sure Your Employees Succeed  It’s common knowledge that helping employees set and reach goals is a critical part of every manager’s job. Employees want to see how their work contributes to larger corporate objectives, and setting the right targets makes this connection explicit for them, and for you, as their manager. Goal-setting is particularly important as a mechanism for providing ongoing and year-end feedback. By establishing and monitoring targets, you can give your employees real-time input on their performance while motivating them to achieve more.
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S57Does Your Family Business Have a Succession Plan?  Rohit Gera had turned his family’s boutique real estate development firm into a dynamic housing solutions innovator for urban Indian families. But as he prepared to retire, Gera had to decide who would take over for him. Should he define a strategy for future growth and pick a successor who would enact it? Or should he identify his replacement and allow them to set the company’s new strategy? And should Gera’s replacement come from within his family or not?
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S54S29How Trade Secrets Hurt Innovation  Trade secrecy, where companies choose not to disclose information about their inventions, is considered an increasingly important defense strategy and source of competitive advantage. One of the primary ways that employers seek to protect trade secrets is by having employees sign non-compete contracts and non-disclosure agreements – these aim to prevent employees from moving to competitors and from disclosing valuable information to new employers. But while greater trade secrecy may protect existing innovations, it’s not clear how this might affect future innovation. In a recent study, researchers examine this issue, and find that strengthening employers’ trade secrecy protection can backfire by dampening inventors’ productivity and hurting innovation in the long run.
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S49S19Metadata Marketing: Risks and Opportunities The explosion in user-generated content will enable organizations to gain previously unparalleled Browse the entire HBR List.Listen to the podcast.Take the poll. views of customers. This has important implications for user privacy–and presents excellent opportunities for marketers. To explain: Both user-generated digital content (an appointment made on a BlackBerry, photos taken on a cell phone) […]
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S33Playing Games with Customers We all know that computer gaming is big business. Companies like Sony and Electronic Arts are making pots of money selling gaming software and the hardware to play it. But a growing number of executives are looking for ways to marry the public’s love of gaming with their companies’ strategic objectives. In fact, some companies—Chrysler, Coca-Cola, and the U.S. Army, to name a few—have begun to add games to their marketing, training, and recruiting tool kits. While it’s too early to get an accurate ROI, the data thus far are encouraging.
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S37Six Myths of Product Development Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused techniques. While this tactic can boost the performance of factories, it generally backfires with product development. The process of designing products is profoundly different from the process of making them, and the failure of executives to appreciate the differences leads to several fallacies that actually hurt product-development efforts.
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S46S65The neglected clean heat we flush down the drains  In the midst of winter, the streets of Vancouver will be carpeted with a light layer of snow, punctuated by steaming openings where it has already melted. The access holes to the drains below ground are caused by the heat flowing through the city's sewers, warming up the pavements. "There's enough heat in the sewerage system to literally heat up neighbourhoods," remarks Derek Pope, manager of neighbourhood energy for the city of Vancouver, Canada. "That's what we've been doing here in False Creek since 2010."The residents of False Creek, a recently redeveloped neighbourhood of Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada, get their energy from a rather unusual renewable source – their sewage wastewater. Increasingly, municipalities around the globe are harnessing this underground form of excess heat as they decarbonise their energy networks.
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S45S67The Science of 2024's Epic Solar Eclipse, the Last for a Generation  Unique studies of gravity waves, atmospheric holes and dazzling coronal displays will accompany April’s total solar eclipse across the U.S., Mexico, and CanadaA view of the sun's corona in green-wavelength visible light, obtained by Amir Caspi of the Southwest Research Institute and his colleagues during airborne studies of the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. Caspi and his team are planning similar observations for the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024.
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S34Gillette, Razor Blades, and Creative Destruction Gillette is perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the world, constantly reinventing its own model, often upending past products in favor of the new in a fit of what most people call creative destruction. And no surprise, Gillette is at it again, with the first new shaver developed since Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005.
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S59Want to Be a Better Leader? Stop Thinking About Work After Hours.  It’s not uncommon for managers to continue thinking about their job, even after the official workday is over. This may involve ruminating about an issue with an employee, trying to think of a solution to a client problem, or creating a mental to-do list for the next day. But new research shows that this tendency may not be beneficial, particularly for people new to a leadership role. In fact, constant rumination leads managers to be more depleted and less able to show up as leaders — something even their employees can pick up on.
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S38Should You Take That Innovation Job? You’ve been working at a small start-up for a while now when a large, deep-pocketed corporation comes knocking, asking you to join its innovation team. Should you take the job? Will this be the chance to exercise your entrepreneurial imagination in a more secure environment with ample assets? Or will you end up drowning in bureaucracy, pining for the white-knuckled start-up pace you’re used to?
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S66Cash-on-delivery fraud is a nightmare for gig workers in Vietnam  One night in November, when Grab delivery worker Nguyen Hai reached Hanoi’s Old Quarter to drop an order of 30 pieces of fried chicken, he was met with a rude shock. He could not find the address mentioned on the app anywhere in the neighborhood. He tried calling the number given with the order at least seven times, but there was no reply. Hai had paid for the order from his pocket — a norm for cash-on-delivery orders in Vietnam — and failing to reach the customer meant he would lose all that money.“I was really sad because the order was worth nearly a million [dong ($41)], while each night I make just 200,000 [$8],” the 27-year-old told Rest of World, adding that he ended up eating the fried chicken as his meals for the next three days.
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S445 Ways to Make Conference Networking Easier  Networking at a conference typically means rushing into a teeming crowd for coffee breaks and trying to make small talk. As an introvert, that scene isn’t for me. While I enjoy getting to know people one-on-one or in small groups, shouting to be heard by strangers and engaging in speed dating-style conversations is a nightmare. And yet I attend conferences regularly, as a professional speaker, averaging at least 60 events per year. Here’s how I’ve learned to play to my strengths and network successfully in unexpected ways.
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S58Can Workplaces Have Too Much Psychological Safety?  It is certainly important for people in some jobs to feel safe to speak up, make mistakes, take risks, or ask for help. They include jobs that involve creativity, learning, and exploration. But five studies of workers in a variety of frontline jobs found that more is not always more when it comes to psychological safety. Previous research had focused only on the average effects, which, of course, are made up of high scores and low scores. But psychological safety is not an “either/or” outcome; it is a question of degree. The authors found that when you move from average to high levels of psychological safety, performance in routine jobs actually declined.
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S25Has Google Finally Proven That Online Ads Cause Offline Purchases?  Last week, Google announced that, in an effort to bridge the “online ad–offline purchase” gap, it will begin to connect online ad exposure to brick-and-mortar sales. The company claims it will be able to track about 70% of all credit and debit card transactions and link them to online consumer behavior. These moves are big leaps forward for advertisers. Knowing that consumers who shop at Home Depot also tend to shop at Petsmart also drives decisions such as media purchases and placement, cross-promotions, and even store location for both companies. These advances also raise privacy concerns: do Google and Facebook know too much? Companies’ responses will need to hold up to scrutiny in a world where marketing becomes increasingly automated and where algorithms make most decisions about the targeting of advertising dollars. But better data is always a short-term advantage. Ultimately, marketers will need to learn to use the data to create new and better forms of value for customers.
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S36In Big Companies, Lean Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle  In 2010, one of us was sitting in a room at the Harvard Business School with Eric Ries and a number of budding entrepreneurs. They were pitching their ideas and plans to Eric and their peers; once the pitch was complete, the group would then brainstorm. One of these young entrepreneurs in particular stood out. He was not your standard internet entrepreneur — the student presenting was pitching a project to increase sub-Saharan farm income, by helping farmers shift from traditional crops to rubber trees. He had developed an extensive plan, and had the promise of grant money behind him. The problem with the effort, of course, was that building both the necessary African infrastructure and the logistics network needed to transport the non-indigenous crops was going to be a very expensive proposition indeed.
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S43Get Your Brain Unstuck  It’s 10:20 pm — and you’re still at the office. Any moment now, the cleaning crew will arrive and the vacuuming will start and you’ll have to put on your headphones just to hear yourself think. Your wife calls, asking if she should wait up. “Leaving any minute,” you tell her, staring up at an empty screen. You haven’t produced anything substantive for hours. Yet for reasons you can’t understand, it’s been impossible to walk away. Even now, the answer seems so close.
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S2Is Corporate Venture Capital Right for Your Startup?  In the first half of 2021 alone, Corporate Venture Capital funds (CVCs) around the world inked more than 2,000 deals worth more than $70 billion. It’s an increasingly prevalent alternative to traditional funding options such as VCs and angel investors — but how can entrepreneurs determine whether a CVC is the right fit for their startup? The authors discuss the results of a series of quantitative analyses and qualitative interviews exploring the CVC landscape, identifying four common types of CVCs and three recommendations for founders considering a CVC investment: To build a successful partnership, founders must determine the CVC’s relationship to its parent company, the structure and expectations that will guide its decision-making, and most importantly, their cultural and strategic alignment with the key people involved.
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S50S51S32Quantity vs. Quality in Collaborations (This is part of HBR’s Collaboration Insight Center.) “I can’t do that! I would receive thousands of ideas!” said Alberto Alessi, CEO of the Italian company that’s famous for the design of its home products. “Well, isn’t that exactly the point?” I replied. I was interviewing Alessi, together with Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano, […]
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S41Forget Mentors: Employ a Personal Board of Directors Like avocado colored appliances, mentoring is something you don’t see much anymore. Yes, corporate-sponsored mentorship programs — whether you are the mentor or the protégé — will always improve personal exposure and connections. But the career strategy of hitching your future to some rising manager is rapidly becoming outdated.
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