Aron Vellekoop León/Ikon Images Transparency can be a powerful lever, yet it is also combustible. When businesses raise visibility faster than they build the capacity to deliver on what they’ve disclosed, transparency produces resistance and often backlash from multiple directions, even from those who share the same social-progress goals. This dynamic is particularly explosive with…
Maria Bloom/Ikon Images Many large companies have invested significant amounts of time and capital into sustainability reporting. In 2022, the European Union’s ambitious sustainability reporting framework, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, was projected to generate approximately €1.7 billion (about $1.8 billion) in one-off costs and €1.9 billion in recurring costs. Even in less regulated markets…
What happens when the focus of the family business becomes … other businesses? After building wealth through their primary enterprise, a growing number of family offices are now looking to invest directly in other businesses. Kellogg’s Matt Allen and Jose Liberti have labeled this approach “legacy equity”—an investment model that resembles private equity but with…
We live in the era of the constant political campaign. As soon as the votes are tallied and the winners declared in one election, pundits crank up the speculation on the candidates’ prospects for the next one. Researchers at the Kellogg School keep an eye on political campaigns as well, studying everything from the…
When NFL quarterback Jalen Hurts was ruled out for the season due to dangerous blood clots, fans of the Philadelphia Eagles were quick to write off the team’s chances. It’s a common refrain among football fans: we could’ve been contenders if it weren’t for the injuries. But the impact of injuries on NFL teams is…
If you’d looked at surveys of Americans’ attitudes five years ago, you would have seen a hopeful story. Biases against people based on their race, sexual orientation, and disability were consistently dropping across the country, says Tessa Charlesworth, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School. This included both explicitly stated bias…
Sergio Ingravalle/Ikon Images High-stakes disruptions test businesses’ cultural agility as well as their operational resilience. As supply chains stretch across continents and leadership teams span time zones, cultural agility becomes a business essential. Many crises now unfold across cultures as much as they do across borders, but few executives are prepared for what happens when…
Lesotho’s garment-sector reforms emerged through a fragile interaction between international private regulation and public law. In this blog, Pauline Jerrentrup explains how foreign economic dependence enabled reform while also creating internal tensions over authority and ownership, and how Lesotho’s unique circumstances offer lessons for scholars and policymakers. In 2019, reports of widespread sexual harassment in…
Getty Images Operations that run under extreme risk — such as nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers, and air traffic control centers — have long understood that safety depends not just on good technology but on how people exercise judgment under uncertainty. The scholarly field of high-reliability organizing (HRO) has identified a clear normative framework to…
When an organization seeks transformational change—whether that’s a new approach to sales, a better product, or a cultural reset—it’s often left to the C-suite to generate new ideas. “The top decides a strategy, and they expect people to go out and execute on it,” says Sanjay Khosla, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of marketing…