May–June 2026

Data Privacy Is a Growth Strategy

Protecting customer data is more than a legal or IT obligation. It can be a meaningful driver of business growth. Researchers analyzed 360 real-world company announcements about new or improved privacy practices over 14 years. They found that markets consistently rewarded firms that took privacy seriously, especially companies that had previously experienced data breaches. The researchers also connected privacy practices to customer behavior using brand-level data from Osano and YouGov. Brands with strong privacy reputations saw a 12.31% increase in customer patronage. Experimental evidence explains why: Strong privacy practices increase trust and reduce concern, leading to higher purchase intent. For leaders, the message is clear: Make privacy visible, proactive, and central to the customer experience, not just a back-office requirement.

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How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better

In periods of rapid change, the teams that outperform everyone else are not those with the best plans or the most talent but those that learn the fastest. Research across thousands of teams reveals a consistent pattern: High-performing teams—“superteams”—build cultures of continuous improvement. Their leaders encourage experimentation even when things are going well, make curiosity and intellectual humility contagious, surface problems early, stay close to the work, give feedback that supports learning rather than punishing mistakes, and invest in people’s growth even when it doesn’t pay off immediately. When work is tied to shared meaning and progress matters more than perfection, teams become more resilient, adaptable, and capable of sustained success—in business settings and beyond.

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Negotiating When There Is No Plan B

How can negotiators find leverage even when they appear to have no viable alternatives? The absence of a clear BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) doesn’t mean dealmakers are powerless; they can expand the concept of alternatives to include partial, temporary, and procedural options that can shift the negotiation dynamics. Creative approaches—such as identifying partial substitutes, looking for hidden strengths in your position, seeking tacit consent rather than explicit approval, reframing threats as warnings, and appealing to fairness—can help you gain leverage and achieve better outcomes, even when facing seemingly one-sided dependency or “take it or leave it” ultimatums.

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Employees Are Relying on AI for Personal Support. That’s Risky.

Employees are increasingly turning to AI for career advice, emotional support, and even friendship. However, researchers Constance Noonan Hadley of the Institute for Life at Work and Sarah Wright of the University of Canterbury found that despite these interactions, more than half of 1,545 U.S. knowledge workers surveyed felt lonely at work—a factor linked to lower job satisfaction and greater intent to quit.

Their research suggests that AI cannot replace the benefits of human connection and may erode collaboration, trust, and social skills over time.

The authors recommend taking five measures to prevent those problems: Monitor AI’s social impact, establish guidelines for its use, design it to foster human interaction, employ it for organizing social activities, and train employees in healthful AI use.

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Managing Difficult Directors

Boards often struggle not because of strategy or information gaps but because one director’s behavior disrupts how the group works. There are three main types of difficult directors: passive passengers (who remain silent), dominators (who crowd out other perspectives), and misguided experts (who mire the board in details). Although the behaviors differ, their impact is similar: slower decisions, strained dynamics, and eroded trust. To deal with difficult directors, effective boards set explicit expectations and provide early and direct feedback. They also use structural and procedural levers such as agenda design and speaking order to steer participation productively. When problems persist, they escalate through formal governance processes, including peer feedback and, if necessary, leadership change.

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The Rise of the Urban Knowledge Campus

Corporate headquarters aren’t vanishing; they’re being rebuilt as vehicles for collaboration, innovation, and talent attraction. Traditional office districts impose heavy costs through long commutes and fragmented daily logistics. But knowledge campuses support the full rhythm of daily life—work, meetings, learning, socializing, and movement—within a single, highly connected place. Linked to major transportation hubs, they cut down on commuting time and improve workers’ productivity and overall life satisfaction.

In this article the authors explain how and why place has become a key factor in talent attraction and productivity. They outline the four key elements of the knowledge campus. And they lay out the principles that business leaders can use to think more deliberately about location—not as a real estate cost or as a marker of status but as a driver of competitive advantage.

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Should You Appoint an Interim CEO?

A sudden CEO departure can leave companies scrambling to fill the leadership void. Appointing an interim CEO might seem like a safe temporary solution, but in fact that decision often hurts market confidence and the company’s financial performance. Still, interim leaders are now involved in one out of three CEO transitions. Success or failure depends heavily on context: Boards must assess whether the departure was initiated by the board or the CEO and whether the organization is in a stable or crisis state. Then they can choose among four types of interim CEOs, each suited to a different context. Boards that make effective interim appointments do so by building readiness into governance, clarifying mandates, and securing workforce alignment—ensuring continuity and building a foundation for a successful permanent handover.

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What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans

Despite decades of effort by companies to boost engagement and loyalty, employee trust and customer commitment continue to decline. Most organizations try to fix deficiencies or incrementally raise satisfaction levels. But human behavior does not change in response to mildly positive experiences.

The author argues that behavior shifts only when experiences are extremely positive—when people say they “love” them. Drawing on large-scale research and examples such as Kroger and Disney, he shows that outcomes accelerate only after experiences cross a critical emotional threshold.

People are most likely to love an experience when it meets five conditions in sequence: control, harmony, significance, warmth, and growth. When leaders intentionally build those elements into employee and customer journeys, they unlock deeper engagement, stronger loyalty, and more sustainable business performance.

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How Gen AI Robots Are Reshaping Services

By incorporating generative AI, robots are evolving from scripted machines to adaptive systems that interpret context, learn from demonstrations, and adjust their behaviors in real time. Advances in large language models and related technologies are helping robots deliver consistent, personalized outcomes at scale. Autonomous vehicles and humanoid factory assistants have shown that robots can handle complex instructions and collaborate with people in physical environments. But to successfully deploy gen-AI-powered robots, companies must choose use cases tied to real labor constraints, design interactions that feel natural, position robots as partners to—rather than replacements for—employees, match robots’ capabilities to task variability, and define success metrics. Privacy, transparency, and safety must also remain priorities as robots gather data and influence decisions.

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Tapping into Your Team’s Circadian Rhythms

Although corporate culture has favored “morningness,” effective bosses recognize that people have different, hard-to-change circadian rhythms causing daily fluctuations in peak functioning. They must manage themselves and assign tasks accordingly. Strategic thinking, feedback, and emotionally demanding activities work best during high-energy periods. During low-energy periods leaders should delegate and adopt lower-intensity roles. For teams, schedule high-stakes collaboration during shared peaks and assign challenging tasks during individuals’ peaks and routine work during off-peaks. When peak alignment isn’t possible, prioritize recovery, flexibility, and rotation to prevent burnout and sustain performance.

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The CEO of UnitedHealthcare on Fixing What Frustrates Customers Most

Several years ago UnitedHealthcare launched a Consumer Resolution Center that combines AI insights with human judgment to proactively identify customers in distress and empower skilled employees to resolve their problems quickly. Working across functions and without excessive bureaucracy, CRC teams have since turned service recovery into a source of learning that has enabled the company to rewire processes, policies, and benefits at scale. The story of the CRC’s success shows how effective managers can stay close to frontline reality, trust data over intuition, and move decisively to scale what works.

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Case Study: Should a Funeral Company Shift Its Business Model?

Javier Montoya, the 76-year-old CEO of Chile’s Monteverde Memorial Group (MMG), confronts a strategic inflection point for his burial park business. For decades MMG has prospered by offering burial plots to the growing middle class. But rising land and water costs, new environmental regulations, and shifting consumer preferences—accelerated by Covid’s disruption of death rituals—are slowing expansion. Those trends are also fueling growth in cremation, a lower-margin and increasingly commoditized alternative. Javier wrestles with financial trade-offs and his personal convictions, while external voices—from an anthropologist to his innovation-minded son—argue that the act of remembrance itself is evolving. As cremation demand rises and burial economics tighten, Javier must decide: Should MMG continue investing heavily in memorial parks or pivot toward cremation and a more transactional, possibly digital future?

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Jet Li

In this interview, martial arts and movie star Jet Li reflects on a life shaped by discipline, curiosity, and an evolving sense of purpose. He describes growing up poor and then finding structure, opportunity, and confidence in sport before transitioing to a career in action films, first in Hong Kong then in the United States. He also explains how spirituality and a brush with the 2004 tsunami shaped his philanthropic and creative efforts in the past two decades.

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