HBR On Leadership

If a company starts to veer off track, whether amid technological change, marketplace conditions, or otherwise, it is daunting to get back on a path to growth. But big turnarounds are possible, provided you have the right team and mindset. When he was president and CEO of Marvel, Peter Cuneo oversaw the resurgence and sale of the media company, but even before that he had a long track record for turning around many types of consumer-facing businesses at brands from Clairol to Black & Decker. He shares the strategies that work best for shaking up organizations and teams and boosting their performance.

Phil Knight, co-founder, former CEO, and Chairman Emeritus of Nike, tells the story of starting the sports apparel and equipment giant after taking an entrepreneurship class at Stanford and teaming up with his former track coach, Bill Bowerman. Together, they changed how running shoes are designed and made. In this conversation from 2017, Knight reflects on the company’s enduring culture of innovation, as well as the company’s succession process for the CEO role.

Jay Barney, a professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, studied leaders who successfully led culture change and found one thing in common: they created and spread authentic and memorable stories. The new stories then emanated throughout the workforce and rewrote the old narrative. Barney explains the six rules leaders need to follow to drive cultural change with storytelling.

Around the world, we’ve become increasingly cynical about other people, public institutions, and corporations. Back in 2022, Edelman’s Trust Barometer found that nearly 60% of respondents across 27 countries reported that their default is to distrust. And that’s bad for business, says Stanford University associate professor of psychology Jamil Zaki. He says that cynics damage trust, and in workplaces they breed toxicity and lead to poor outcomes. He explains how to identify and change this kind of behavior at your organization. Zaki wrote the HBR article, “Don’t Let Cynicism Undermine Your Workplace.”

Companies of every size in every industry and part of the world are basing more of their work around projects. And yet research shows that nearly two-thirds of those efforts fail. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, who has studied projects and project management for decades, explains how we can do better. He offers advice on the right way to frame projects, how to structure organizations around them, and pitfalls to avoid. Nieto-Rodriguez is the author of the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook and author of the article “The Project Economy Has Arrived.”