Drone-zapping laser weapons now effective (and cheap) reality

A single burst of light is precisely aimed at a tiny drone flying at breakneck speed far in the distance. Instants later, the deactivated drone crashes into the sea. Not a sound made, no human casualties, no messy explosions. A lethal, multimillion-dollar drone cleanly taken out by a shot that cost less than a good bottle of wine.If you think this is a scene from a sci-fi movie, think again. Only a few days ago, a team of UK scientists and engineers successfully demonstrated that this is viable technology that could find its way on to the battlefield in the next five to ten years.

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Are Robots Overrated?

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, robots have been having a moment. Media outlets across the world have reported on robots successfully delivering on critical tasks in healthcare facilities and their effectiveness as contagion-proof workers in many other settings. Robots have even been extolled as “heroes” helping to “manage” the pandemic.

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Joint Ventures and Partnerships in a Downturn

In this article three consultants outline how companies can shore up their existing JVs through capital-raising, cost-reduction, and synergy-tapping techniques that often aren’t available to wholly owned entities. The authors then describe how parent companies can strengthen their own financial positions by using JVs and partnerships to make partial divestments, consolidate businesses, and collaborate on capital-light, low-risk growth initiatives.

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How Much Board Turnover Is Best?

Some criticize boards for leaving the evolution of their composition to chance, allowing director retirements to dictate the pace of change. Support for annual director elections and for increased transparency around director nominations suggests that some shareholders would like to see more turnover. Is there evidence that companies and shareholders actually benefit when boards add fresh blood? If so, how much change is desirable?

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4 Principles for Improving Customers' Digital Experience

Companies, despite exploding technological power, are failing to keep up with rising customer standards. Customer service technology should build a customer dialogue and foster deeper relationships, just as the best human customer service representatives do. And then it should go beyond, using emerging technology to accentuate and improve what a human agent can physically accomplish. This is what we call “digital empathy.” teThe keys are to offer customers more control, keep the technology so intuitive it feels mindless, provide visibility at points of customer agitation, and blur the divides of the digital and physical domains.

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The Telehealth Era Is Just Beginning

Contrary to what many people think, virtual health care, also known as telemedicine or telehealth, is much more than a cheap digital knockoff of in-person care. When used appropriately, it improves patient health, reduces costs, and makes care more equitable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Its use has soared during the Covid era—and the authors argue that providers around the world should aggressively strive to tap its full potential even after the pandemic abates.

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The Power of Collective Ambition

In the past few years, some companies have not just weathered the economic storm: They’ve emerged stronger than ever. How did such players as Four Seasons, Sephora, and Standard Chartered Bank defy conventional logic? Instead of pursuing a single ambition, such as profits, employees defined a collective ambition. As a result, those organizations deepened their engagement with employees and other stakeholders and became sustainably profitable.

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Developing Mindful Leaders for the C-Suite

The use of meditation, introspection, and journaling are taking hold at successful enterprises.

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Leading in the Flow of Work

Leadership development programs traditionally provide extensive training in how to influence and coach people, give feedback, build trust, and more. A new approach, which draws on faculties everyone already possesses, can greatly enhance those efforts. The leadership-in-flow model focuses on activating your inner core—your best self—by tapping into five energies: purpose, wisdom, growth, love, and self-realization. That can be done in the moment through one or more of 25 actions that take just seconds to perform, like appealing to purpose and values, creating the right frame, affiliating, and sparking joy. Now the basis of a popular course at Columbia Business School, leadership-in-flow can be used by people at all levels to unlock peak performance.

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Loyalty to a Leader Is Overrated, Even Dangerous

The other night I watched Raymond Reddington, fictional star of the TV series The Blacklist, pull off another impossible plotline without breaking a sweat, explaining calmly to one of his minions that the key to winning is to “value loyalty above all else.” The notion of loyalty as a protective force that leads to great success is so much a part of how we think about leadership that it is very easy to accept, even when it is not espoused by someone as exceptionally interesting to watch as James Spader.

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Effective Leaders Move Beyond Empathy to Compassion

For the past two years, leaders have been shouldering a big emotional burden: helping teams recover from the grief and loss of the pandemic, buoying the declining mental health of their employees, and being sensitive to people’s anxieties. The empathy this requires is important to good leadership, but too much empathy can weigh you down and lead to burnout and poor decisions. This can be avoided by moving beyond empathy to the uplifting experience of compassion. “Sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” are often used interchangeably, but whereas sympathy and empathy are emotions felt for and with other people, compassion goes beyond mere emotion to include the active intention to help others. The authors offer six strategies for leading with compassion: take a mental and emotional step away; ask “What do you need?”; remember the power of non-action; coach the person rather than doing something for them; practice self-care.

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How to Deal With a Passive-Aggressive Peer

You’re at the weekly team meeting. Everyone around the table vigorously nods their heads and agrees to a series of action steps. Meeting ends. Three days later, you find out that one of your peers must have blacked out during the head nodding — because he went off and did his own thing. And it’s not the first time he’s done this… it happens over and over again. Welcome to the passive-aggressive peer club.

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What Makes People Follow Reluctant Leaders

In today’s knowledge-based and highly-automated enterprises, companies look for the cleverest and most capable people they can find. But having hired such talent, organizations face a challenge. Places full of highly mobile and in-demand workers operate more democratically. Leaders don’t necessarily gain power by dint of high rank; they need to earn it every day. How do they do that? And, for the would-be leader in an organization like this, what are the secrets to rising to the top?

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Why It's So Hard to Be Fair

When employees believe they are being treated fairly—when they feel heard, when they understand how and why important decisions are made, and when they believe they are respected—their companies will benefit. Research shows that practicing process fairness reduces legal costs from wrongful-termination suits, lowers employee turnover, helps generate support for new strategic initiatives, and fosters a culture that promotes innovation. What’s more, it costs little financially to implement. Yet few companies practice it consistently.

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Online Retailers Should Care More About the Post-Purchase Experience

In 2005 A.G. Lafley, who at the time was CEO of the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, introduced a marketing concept he called “the moment of truth” for building brand loyalty. Soon retail brands aligned their strategies around two critical moments: 1) when a customer decides whether to purchase a product, and 2) when a customer uses the product for the first time. With the rise of new technologies like the internet and mobile, there are additional critical junctures for increasing the buying likelihood, including at the research stage. Five years ago, online review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor led to Google introducing the zero moment of truth, a crucial part of the buying process. Meanwhile, stats show that half of e-commerce is now done on mobile, heralding in the mobile moment of truth.

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Why You Should Approach Your Career Like a Game

Every time you use a strategy to achieve your goals, you play a game. Have you ever thought about the kind of games you play? Ask yourself these five questions to become aware of the games you play. What games are you playing? Paying attention to this is the first step to uncovering what these games mean for you. What makes your games worth playing? Only you can decide which game is better for you at this particular moment in your life. Who makes the rules of your game? What are the self-imposed rules you’ve created about your career, life, or business? How do they make you feel? How do you keep score? Ask yourself how you measure success, achievements, and goals. Whose games are you playing? Are you living by the expectations of society or creating your own ones?

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Three Tips For Overcoming Your Blind Spots

Ernst Cramer, the late, great editor-in-chief of the German daily Die Welt, once recounted how as a college student in America in the midwest, just after World War II, he questioned in a math class whether the textbook was not mistaken in a particular instance. The lecturer reflexively, and rather sternly, dismissed the possibility. Several months later, Cramer was working on a farm during summer vacation when he looked up to see his professor jogging across the field from a parked car in the distance. “Cramer,” a repentant voice yelled, “you were right – the book was wrong and they’ve changed that section!”

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Who Really Makes the Big Decisions in Your Company?

In many companies, the top management team is officially responsible for helping the CEO make a company’s big decisions. But another, unofficial group usually does that job de facto. That’s the way it should be, argues Frisch, of the Strategic Offsites Group, provided that the CEO is deliberate in devising the role of this informal and unnamed “kitchen cabinet.”

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Breakthrough ideas for 2006

Our annual survey of emerging ideas considers the single most important trait of future leaders, the marketing potential of digitally split personalities, a challenge tougher than managing risk, and the best hope for oil-importing countries.

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Centralized Decision Making Helps Kill Bad Products

Anyone who has visited Samsung’s office towers in Seoul, South Korea, will not be surprised to know that the Lee family – the dynasty that controls the conglomerate – runs a tight ship. The three towers, which dominate the landscape of the Gangnam district, were built to consolidate many of the activities of the firm; their imposing presence is emblematic of the company’s hierarchal culture. Inside, elaborate security procedures, long working hours, and deference to senior managers are all in plain view. Also in plain view is the firm’s recent decision to issue a massive recall of and then terminate the Galaxy Note 7.

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The CEO of General Electric on Sparking an American Manufacturing Renewal

About 30 years ago, as its appliances business became less profitable, GE began moving manufacturing to low-cost countries. But competitors soon emerged there; shipping and materials costs rose; wages increased in China and elsewhere; and GE didn’t control the supply chain. Finally, core competency was an issue: the company’s most innovative appliance-design work is done in the United States, and at a time when speed to market is everything, separating design and development from manufacturing no longer made sense.

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Lessons from Clear's Failure

About two months ago, a colleague convinced me to sign up for Verified Identity Pass’ Clear service. I dutifully filled in the forms, had the company capture my fingerprints and take pictures of my iris, forked over a couple hundred bucks, and received my Clear pass in the mail. I wouldn’t quite say the Clear […]

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Decision-Driven Marketing

The gap between marketers’ aspirations and what their organizations can accomplish creates intense pressure to reshape how marketing is done. In recent years some leading companies have developed an innovative approach that focuses on the seams between marketing and the other functions it interacts with—the C-suite, IT, sales, finance, and so on. It is at these seams that communication most often breaks down and processes stall.

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Mission Command: An Organizational Model for Our Time

This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military. In the July/August HBR, Roger Martin argues that business is being held back by the idea that strategy development and execution are separate, and he recommends a choice-cascade model to overcome it. The spotlight on the military in the November issue […]

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