On March 1, 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japan-based e-retailer, announced that henceforth English would be the official language of the company’s 10,000 employees.

Anyone who has watched a company go through a change of leadership is keenly aware of how strongly the personality of the chief executive can shape performance. Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, the Raoul ...

With an introduction by Ram Charan. The heart of a company’s business model should be game-changing innovation. This is not just the invention of new products and services, but the ability to ...

Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken. This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which ...

The last few years have brought real change. Balance sheets today have significantly more nontangible assets—intellectual property and digital capability, for example—than ever before. And a series of ...

How often have you heard somebody — a new CEO, a journalist, a management consultant, a leadership guru, a fellow employee — talk about the urgent need to change the culture? They want to make it ...

A large auto manufacturer asked a consulting firm to evaluate its competitive position in relation to ride-sharing startups building autonomous vehicles. Instead of viewing this as a classic strategy ...

In 2021, PwC launched its first study into the role of the chief data officer (CDO)—a position we defined based on seniority, role in the organization, and scope of work, rather than just job title.

A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2020 issue of strategy+business. Senior executives, accustomed to annual performance reviews and 360-degree assessments, can be quick to acknowledge ...

Many would chalk up these differences to culture, the seemingly nebulous and hard-to-control factor that contributes to business success. Our work over the last three decades has centered on culture.

The airline industry is a tough place to make a buck: too many competitors, price-sensitive customers, high capital intensity, boom-or-bust cyclicality, powerful suppliers, and often intransigent ...

A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2018 issue of strategy+business. In December 2014, a year shy of its 30th anniversary and as popular as ever, New York City’s Union Square Cafe faced a ...