Tim Cook performed brilliantly in front of Congress today. He was authoritative, in breathtaking command of his facts, as he always is, and brought a unique perspective to each response. Senator Levin was out for blood, but "No one laid a glove on him," as Phillip Emer DeWitt wrote for Fortune. He put his questioners to shame. His response to the question of whether Apple was violating basic...

The annual 10-K report that JPMorgan Chase filed with the SEC in February includes a 13-page section on "Risk Factors." It's a lawyerly, exhaustive, exhausting rundown of all the things that could possibly weigh on the earnings of a giant global bank, from regulatory changes to loans going bad to a liquidity crisis to the possibility that "one or more of its employees causes a significant operational breakdown...

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 your company is already well established and has smart management, it is likely that it will become a hybrid in the next ten years, blending its legacy business with a new business model that is rising to threaten it. Take Walmart, for example. After suffering several years of Amazon's online hegemony, Walmart responded with a hybrid approach. Merchandise ordered online can now be drop-shipped for same-day pickup...

In an impressively short time, Kickstarter has quickly become the go-to high-impact mashup of crowdsourcing sensibility and entrepreneurial endeavor. If you've got a genuinely creative idea — or even a "me, too with a twist" — Kickstarter's "crowd funding" platform offers a genuinely innovative way to finance creativity and innovation. Since its 2009 launch, Kickstarter claims that more than 4.1 million people have pledged over $619 million to...

The death of over 800 people in the collapse of Rana Plaza, a building with garment factories in Bangladesh, spurred widespread outrage over working conditions in offshore factories. In the search for blame, many commentators point to the absence of building codes, lack of workplace safety rules, and the greed of US corporations. Many of the solutions proposed are around paying people more to manufacture in the USA....

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...

In this time of hope and decorative mortarboards, we reached out to some of our favorite writers, asking them: What do graduates really need to know about the world of work? Their answers are below. Heidi Grant Halvorson Associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. There will be obstacles, setbacks, challenges. Many things...

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...