One of the dumbest corporate governance issues is whether to split the roles of Board Chair and CEO. That debate is now playing out on the front pages of business sections (print and online) as shareholders will decide next week in a nonbinding vote whether to take the chairman of the board title away from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. This is a reprise, for the zillionth time,...

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If you want to provoke a vigorous debate, start a conversation on organizational culture. While there is universal agreement that (1) it exists, and (2) that it plays a crucial role in shaping behavior in organizations, there is little consensus on what organizational culture actually is, never mind how it influences behavior and whether it is something leaders can change. This is a problem, because without a reasonable...

Some of the best advice we have all got — be it while making big personal decisions or making critical business decisions — is the same: Follow your inner voice. Most of us have heeded that counsel, yet if we were asked to list the elements that enable better decision-making, we would cite experience, research, data, even polls — but never our inner voices. Logic precedes sixth sense...

Unhappily shocked by Sputnik's unexpected 1957 success, President Eisenhower quickly pushed the Pentagon to establish the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its ostensible mission: "to prevent technological surprise to the U.S. military, and to create surprises of its own." Anticipating and enabling "technological surprise" has become even more challenging, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar recently told an MIT audience, because more people in more places have more access...

Years ago, as a family physician in Louisiana, I made house calls. Certain patients were too sick or too hurt to get to my office. Sometimes a condition or injury had worsened, requiring my evaluation bedside. I would visit patients at home for the simplest of reasons: home was where they needed care. By the mid-1980s, the pressures of time and money prevented most physicians from making house...

More than 50 years ago, U.S. President John F. Kennedy captured the world's imagination when he said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." And thus, the term moonshot entered the lexicon as shorthand for "a difficult or expensive task, the outcome of which is expected to...

Much like newspapers, conventional advertising agencies are becoming irrelevant. When one person with a wireless connection can be an agency, a media company, or even a manufacturer, traditional advertising organizations have to change their culture, processes, structure, talent policies, resources, and even their business and revenue models in order to embrace the power of open systems being fueled by digital connectivity. The old agency businesses may still have...

Overcoming people's past perceptions of you isn't easy. When I launched my consulting business seven years ago, I was astonished to find — years later — that acquaintances and even friends hadn't kept up with my career transition. They'd ask about my past work in politics or nonprofit advocacy, oblivious to the changes that had been consuming my life. It wasn't their fault, however. These days, we all...

For millennia people have run by feel, an "art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain," says Christopher McDougall in his anthropological study of the topic. Many of us still run this way, of course, but for how much longer? Now we can lace up a pair of "smart" sneakers and instantly shift from running by feel to running by metrics....

Check out these new and forthcoming books from HBR Press: What You're Really Meant to Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential By Robert Steven Kaplan How do you create your own definition of success — and reach your unique potential? Building a fulfilling life and career can be a daunting challenge. It takes courage and hard work. Too often, we charge down a path leading...

A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers. I marveled at these courageous men and women who woke before dawn, endured freezing water, paddled through barreling waves, and even risked shark attacks, all for the sake of, maybe, catching an epic ride. After about 15 minutes, it was easy to tell the surfers apart...