← back to Blog

Management

  • Build Better Pay-for-Performance (PFP) Compensation Plans

    Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images An increasing number of companies are tying employees’ compensation to their performance, and for good reason. The pay-for-performance (PFP) model has always been common in sales but has expanded in recent years to public school systems and even doctors’ offices, where 45% of doctors now receive PFP, up from…

    Read more →

  • Your People Are Not All Right

    Alice Mollon “People are not OK,” professor and author Brené Brown told an audience in October. She’s right. The mood she points to — “emotionally dysregulated, distrustful, and disconnected” — is visible everywhere you look. We’re seeing public CEO meltdowns, as well as pervasive well-being challenges on a worldwide workforce scale. In one stunning study,…

    Read more →

  • Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2026

    Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Organizations tend to change much more slowly than AI technology does these days. This means that forecasting enterprise adoption of AI is a bit easier than predicting technology change in this, our third year of making AI predictions. Neither of us is a computer or cognitive scientist, so we…

    Read more →

  • Stop Making Hollow Apologies at Work

    Harry Haysom/Ikon Images Chad repeatedly undermined Sue by sharing private information behind her back to her subordinates. When Sue confronted him, Chad said he was sorry in order to move past the issue. Brenda continuously micromanaged her subordinates, leading to feelings of disrespect and low morale among her team members. When they talked to her…

    Read more →

  • Why It’s So Hard to Battle Corporate Debt with Policy

    When Donald Trump signed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), it seemed like a huge win for corporations. The new law slashed the corporate tax rate from as high as 39 percent to a flat 21 percent. But beneath that business-friendly benefit lurked some less-favorable changes to how companies calculate their tax burden,…

    Read more →

  • Say Hello to Your New AI Study Buddy

    It’s perhaps the classroom’s worst-kept secret: students are using generative AI to do their homework. Large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are getting so good, in fact, that they’re starting to make traditional homework like essays and conceptual questions feel almost obsolete. “The no-AI case doesn’t exist anymore,” says Robert Bray, a Kellogg associate professor of…

    Read more →

  • When It Comes to Creativity, AI Doesn’t Always Have the Answer

    When Kellogg professor Brian Uzzi wanted to challenge how his students thought about artificial intelligence, he started by giving them a simple test called the Divergent Aptitude Test (DAT), which measures general creativity. Test-takers have four minutes to come up with a list of ten words that are as different as possible from one another.…

    Read more →

  • Calm: The Underrated Capability Every Leader Needs Now

    Chris Gash As companies push for greater productivity, an uncomfortable truth is emerging: Many employees no longer have the capacity to keep up. Leaders describe the same pattern everywhere — too many meetings, too little time to think, constant digital interruption, and a pace that leaves no room for recovery. Beneath these symptoms lies a…

    Read more →

  • The Top Five MIT SMR Videos of 2025

    Our most-watched video of the year took on a tough topic: the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu grabbed readers’ attention with his no-nonsense take on what AI will and won’t do to the modern economy and employment — earning hundreds of thousands of views and sparking a spirited discussion…

    Read more →

  • Three Steps Toward Fairer Talent Management

    Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Despite decades of effort to improve diversity, most organizations continue to struggle with ensuring fairness in how they identify, develop, and promote talent. Traditional approaches still rely on narrow leadership prototypes. Opaque processes and behaviors subtly reinforce exclusion. Practices often replicate existing power structures, unintentionally marginalizing individuals from underrepresented…

    Read more →