For this final issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, Benjamin Laker and Maria Papacosta offer advice on ending things well. In that spirit, we want to reflect on the impact our editorially independent publication has had in its 67 years. Over the past few months, we’ve been buoyed by many messages and online comments validating… →

Rob Dobi The Research The authors identified 56 individuals with purpose leadership roles who were representative of a variety of industries, company sizes, and regions. Of the CPOs interviewed, 60% identified as female and 40% as male. They conducted semi-structured interviews online from 2022 to 2025 to explore participants’ role experiences, strategic practices, and key… →

Rob Dobi What’s wrong with loyalty? Isn’t it a virtue to display steadfast allegiance to something or someone other than oneself? After all, loyalty has been celebrated as a virtue across many cultures for millennia. As economic headwinds and a tough job market appear to be empowering more authoritarian styles of leadership, it’s a good… →

Rob Dobi The Research This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of a professional services firm whose leaders initiated a major transformation to reverse declining performance. The research involved nearly 760 hours of observation across leadership and project team meetings, more than 300 interviews, and analyses of internal documents spanning the full life of… →

“It’s the economy, stupid.” For the past three decades, this phrase has been a reliable shorthand for describing what voters really care about.   But these days, political rhetoric often centers on cultural flashpoints like religion or immigration instead of the economy. This tendency to highlight cultural issues over economic ones is surprising, as voters consistently… →

The business of Wall Street used to be very slow.  Stocks were bought and sold in person. Clerks manually recorded transactions. And fleets of messengers hand-delivered bond certificates. Trading hours were limited to five to six hours a day so that the rest of the financial industry could keep up with the paperwork.   Today, technology… →

As video games become increasingly popular, they present a great opportunity to teach a variety of subjects. But that leaves companies attempting to both teach and entertain in a bind. Push the educational content too hard, and players might check out. But dial up the fun factor to increase engagement, and the educational mission could… →

You can either help build cars or you can manage the workers who build them. You can write code or set the five-year roadmap for an entire team of coders. You can care for patients or oversee the hospital’s growth.   In short, you can be an expert—an “individual contributor”—or you can be a manager.  “There… →

The United States is famous for its market-based health-insurance system, where—nominally, at least—many private companies compete and customers have choices.  In reality, U.S. health-insurance markets are dominated by a small group of insurers—or sometimes just one. According to Kellogg professor of strategy Amanda Starc and Martin Gaynor of Carnegie Mellon University, the largest insurer in… →