Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images “What’s the best-case scenario that you can logically describe?” As an academic and adviser who has spent more than 30 years forecasting future intersections of people and the political economy through the lens of technological change, I’m often asked that question. My answer is always the same: Best-case scenarios…
Sometimes a concept captivates our readers. With the publication of “Philosophy Eats AI” in January, Michael Schrage and David Kiron didn’t just put an intellectual stake in the ground: They started a business leadership discussion. Consider their assertion: Philosophy is eating AI: As a discipline, data set, and sensibility, philosophy increasingly determines how digital technologies…
At the 2025 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, many tech and business leaders voiced the same frustrations — about AI initiatives that aren’t delivering business value, pilot projects that never made it to production, and their ongoing struggle to figure out what’s going wrong. So we asked those leaders and AI experts in the room to…
Something goes wrong—a mistake, perhaps even a serious incident. What happens next defines not only personal character for a values-based leader, but also organizational culture. This is the power of a sincere apology. As my good friend and former chair and CEO of Medtronic, Inc., Art Collins, observed in our recent conversation on leadership and…
When we have a critical decision to make, it’s natural to lean on our memory. After all, recalling past experiences could help us avoid old mistakes and steer us in the right direction, especially when facing a situation we’ve encountered before. “If the present looks a lot like the past, then of course you’d want…
Fiber internet is one the fastest and most reliable ways to connect to the internet, yet just over half of U.S. households have access to it. This lagging market for fiber internet is just one of many examples of how the market for certain products or services sometimes stubbornly refuses to form or reach its…
I told my plants I love them, and now they’re growing like they’re trying to escape. If you heard a comedian deliver that joke at a club, you might chuckle, or groan, or even toss out a heckle. But what if you found out the performer got the material from artificial intelligence rather than their…
Wall Street is full of copycats, from institutional investors eager to peek over their successful colleagues’ shoulders to retail investors who mimic the trades of luminaries like Warren Buffett and George Soros. In the United States insurance industry, transparency rules create a copycat’s paradise. Regulators require insurers to disclose not only their investment holdings, but…
Matt Harrison Clough/Ikon Images For the past few years, many headlines have been telling us we’re all a little checked out at work. From passive-aggressive quiet quitting to spooky-sounding “ghost working,” people are asleep at the wheel, or at least dozing off every few miles, this line of thinking maintains. But what if that’s not…
Over the course of a career, most executives will take jobs with a variety of companies. These job switches mean not just adjusting to a new job but occasionally leaping from a familiar sector to a new, unfamiliar one. According to Rob Apatoff, a clinical professor at the Kellogg School and executive director of the…