PPaint/Ikon Images Balancing the daily grind of operations with the spark of innovation is one of the most persistent challenges managers face.1 Regulatory compliance, performance metrics, and the never-ending demands of customers can easily crowd out creative thinking. Work overload or mismanaged operations elevate employee stress, which directly constrains ideation capacity. This cognitive bottleneck triggers…
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images As multinational companies implement artificial intelligence workflows and look to adopt AI across their global operations, they are increasingly running up against country-specific regulations and policies that aim to govern AI and align its use with national priorities and local cultural norms. These regulations and policies — which fall…
Michael Glenwood Gibbs/theispot.com Digital platforms and generative AI have lowered the barriers to accessing global talent, capital, and knowledge for companies everywhere while making it possible to reach customers across languages and cultures. Research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that such tools make it easier for entrepreneurs to serve global markets and for…
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images To understand their customers and markets, a growing number of customer-oriented companies are using generative AI tools, alongside the language and reasoning capabilities of popular large language models (LLMs), to access and analyze their own internal content. These hybrid knowledge approaches, which typically employ a technique called retrieval-augmented generation…
The age-old adage “the right person in the right place at the right time” offers leaders and managers a recipe for success—in theory. But assigning a given task to the right person can be incredibly difficult in practice. Jillian Chown, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and Carlos Inoue of…
Chris Gash/theispot.com The Research The authors synthesized findings from four studies spanning short-story writing, circular-economy solutions, humor caption contests, and collaborative storytelling. Across all four studies, AI assistance improved individual output quality, but it reduced collective diversity, resulting in more similar, convergent ideas across groups. AI had the greatest positive effect on individuals with lower…
Matt Harrison Clough / Ikon Images The Research The authors performed a four-year, fixed-window observational analysis of administrative work inside a large U.S. public higher-education institution. Generative AI tools were introduced to executive leaders, operational leaders, and student-facing professionals throughout the organization in 2026. Staffing levels and work hours remained stable across the period studied.…
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images In 1951, philosopher Martin Heidegger told a small audience, “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” Few understood him then. Seventy-five years later, the observation has become unavoidable because AI has forced every leader to confront a question about the nature…
The thinking was simple: replace combustion with electricity, and voilà! A massive chunk of our carbon emissions would go “poof.” The mantra, dubbed “electrify everything,” was seen as one of our most immediate opportunities to decarbonize; you can wipe out a lot of emissions when you replace a gas-powered vehicle with an electric version. And…
Even in the world of business, money can’t always buy happiness. At least that’s what many modern-day workers seem to believe. In the U.S., workers have increasingly prioritized purpose and meaning in their jobs over pay. And many American companies have responded in kind, collectively donating $44 billion to prosocial causes in 2024 rather than…