North america

The paradigm shift is instructive to other industries, too.

The U.S. may be the world’s leading innovator, but it won’t be for long if investors, regulators, and the legal establishment continue to penalize companies for risk taking, says Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. Recently, the council’s National Innovation Initiative, a leadership network of CEOs and university presidents, released a report in […]

Six guiding principles.

Research says we've been massively underestimating the number of jobs that would become available.

How do people in business feel about women in executive roles? The short answer is, attitudes have improved, but not as much as men seem to think. In the July–August 1965 issue of HBR, Garda W. Bowman, N. Beatrice Worthy, and Stephen A. Greyser examined the views of 2,000 U.S. executives (half were men, half […]

The CEO of Carbonite makes the case against the Burr-Feinstein bill.

The most successful entrepreneurs aren’t 20-somethings.

Hardware startups are easier to launch than ever.

There’s strength in numbers.

It’s not just about skills and education.

There’s a certain logic to wealthier, more liberal states leading the way.

A couple of years ago, I coauthored with Rob Lachenauer an article called “Hardball: Five Killer Strategies for Trouncing the Competition.” The piece, along with a subsequent book, was misunderstood by many people. Critics said that hardball meant playing dirty or mean, neither of which is true. What is true is that hardball—let’s face it, […]

The Inn at Little Washington, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is one of America’s most acclaimed restaurants, rated number one in North America by Travel + Leisure magazine and listed among the top ten in the world by the International Herald Tribune. Yet, as co-owner and chef Patrick O’Connell explains, exquisite food is the norm at […]

Challenging the traditional model of care.

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Of all the policy changes that could improve the competitive position of the United States and the living standards of Americans, revamping the corporate tax code is perhaps the most obvious and least painful. High corporate taxes divert capital away from the U.S. corporate sector and toward noncorporate uses and other countries. They therefore limit […]

Today, most multinationals have a conspicuous social conscience. They publicize their internal codes of conduct, monitor labor conditions in their global supply chains, and require suppliers to meet basic labor practice standards. But despite efforts to be better global citizens, companies by themselves are unable to eliminate abuses in their supply chains. In fact, so […]

The attributes metros must have to thrive in the digital economy.

Investors won’t settle for the status quo.

In Silicon Valley, exciting new business ideas rapidly attract capital and talent away from less worthy ventures. But in big companies, ideas, capital, and talent are stagnant—prisoners of traditional bureaucratic ways of allocating resources. To capture the Valley’s entrepreneurial magic, your company needs to move from resource allocation to resource attraction.