Arthur C. Brooks

If you embrace the skill of boredom, you might get better at confronting life’s bigger questions around meaning, happiness, and work. When we are bored, our brain moves to its default mode network, which are structures that switch on when you don’t have anything else to think about. When this happens, your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. This makes us uncomfortable, but this kind of thinking is beneficial. To begin, commute with nothing, not even the radio. Try phone-free periods of 15 minutes and longer. And have device-free meals with your family.

Michelle Taite

For leaders in the age of AI, creativity and adaptability will be the most important skills, more sought-after than static expertise. One valuable way of developing such skills is to embrace strategic amateurism, the practice of intentionally engaging in new and unfamiliar pursuits to maintain cognitive flexibility and innovative thinking.

HBR Editors

Adapted from our September-October 2025 magazine, this succinct write-up offers insights from a recent study on incentives and group performance. Across 722 escape-room teams in Germany, comprising more than 3,300 participants, from 2015 to 2017.

Pim de Morree

In southern Spain, inside a hangar, seven self-managing teams are running an aerospace supplier. Decisions happen on the shop floor.Salaries are…

Many leaders treat culture as a communication strategy. They believe it lives in messaging—in the articulation of purpose, the rollout of values, the tone of internal campaigns. But culture doesn’t shift because a new narrative is introduced. It shifts when systems change.

Last week, we caught up with Ken Everett and his son Peter. 

JP Pawliw

Teams need to be able to take risks—from making hard decisions, to naming inconvenient truths, to having a hard conversation—in order to be successful. But human biology makes risk-taking the exception, rather than the rule. So, how can leaders encourage smart risk-taking among their employees?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn

In today’s high-stakes, fast-moving, and ambiguous environment, leaders hold onto decision-making for a number of reasons. They want to protect quality, avoid mistakes, or keep things moving. However, not delegating decision-making creates a hidden cost.

Jackie Colburn

Workshops are powerful moments for alignment, creativity, and decision-making. But when they’re ineffectively designed or facilitated, they…

Johanna Rothman

I've been working with several supposedly “agile” teams and their managers. Everyone knows their project is in trouble. And they have no idea what to do about it. The team members say, “We're on a death march. We have no predictability. Everything takes longer than we think it will.” The managers say, “We have no […]