March–April 2026

Gen AI Won’t Make Your Employees Experts

Generative AI can help workers perform unfamiliar tasks more quickly, but it doesn’t eliminate the performance gap between novices and experts. Researchers explored this dynamic by running a controlled writing experiment with employees at a fintech firm, dividing participants into three groups based on their level of relevant expertise. Each group conceptualized and drafted an article with and without AI assistance. Performance in the conceptualization stage was similar across groups when using AI, indicating that the technology helped people generate solid ideas even without deep experience. During the writing phase, however, differences emerged. The medium-expertise group nearly matched the experts when using AI, but the low-expertise group showed minimal improvement, suggesting that having experience in the task was crucial to interpreting and refining AI’s output. The findings imply that generative AI’s ability to upskill workers depends on the “expertise distance” between the person and the task. Organizations should pair AI tools with structured guidance, baseline training, and redesigned workflows, rather than assuming technology alone can turn novices into experts.

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The HBR Interview with Outgoing Walmart CEO Doug McMillon

Before stepping down as CEO in January, Doug McMillon led Walmart, the world’s biggest company in revenue terms, for nearly 12 years. He delivered substantial growth in sales and earnings and transformed the brick-and-mortar retail giant into a digital powerhouse. In this wide-ranging interview with HBR’s editor at large, McMillon reflects on his decision to retire: “When you see someone who can run the laps ahead better and faster, the right thing to do is to hand them the baton, step aside, and cheer them on.” He talks about leading through uncertainty and staying purpose-driven in the face of profit pressures. He also offers advice to new CEOs, describes why Walmart is so special, and discusses his legacy and next steps.

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Why Gen AI Feels So Threatening to Workers

As generative AI begins to handle more cognitive, creative, and interpersonal tasks, many employees perceive it to be a threat to their competence, autonomy, and sense of belonging at work. These psychological disruptions are producing widespread resistance, disengagement, and even covert opposition to AI initiatives. The challenge for leaders is not just technical integration but emotional and social adaptation.

To meet that challenge, the authors propose the AWARE framework, which helps leaders address the psychological needs of employees: acknowledge employee concerns, watch for adaptive and maladaptive coping behaviors, align support systems with psychological needs, redesign workflows around human-AI synergies, and empower workers through transparency and inclusion. Leaders that apply this framework can ensure that gen AI tools enhance—rather than erode—workers’ motivation and commitment.

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Will Your Investors Support Your Strategic Pivot?

Strategic pivots often fail—not because of poor ideas or execution but because companies misjudge how attached investors are to their existing strategy. Firms actively cultivate shareholders who are aligned with a particular risk profile and narrative; when that narrative shifts, they may resist, creating destabilizing friction. That’s what happened at Danone when CEO Emmanuel Faber set an ambitious agenda to strengthen the company’s sustainability credentials that clashed with many investors’ expectations about margins and near-term results. The tensions led to Faber’s ouster and a major loss in market value.

Leaders need to begin any major pivot by systematically assessing investors’ preferences. By using a scorecard that examines them across five dimensions and following a transition framework, executives can anticipate resistance, manage expectations, and improve the odds that strategic change will succeed.

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Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale

Scaling innovation today demands contributions from multiple partners. Many innovations fail not because of flawed ideas but because teams and organizations struggle to collaborate across boundaries.

What’s needed is a particular kind of leader: the bridger. Bridgers excel at curating the right partners, translating across their differing ways of working, and integrating their efforts to maintain momentum. Bridgers’ effectiveness stems from both emotional intelligence and contextual intelligence. They understand each stakeholder’s environment, pressures, and values and know how to adapt from one context to another. The authors use real-world examples to illustrate how bridgers accelerate innovation. And they describe how firms can identify and develop bridgers of their own.

Adapted from the authors’ book Genius at Scale (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026), this article offers a playbook for building a rare but critical kind of leadership.

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Preparing Your Brand for Agentic AI

AI agents are transforming brand-consumer relationships. The authors explore how brands must adapt to a new retail environment in which consumers increasingly rely on generative AI for product research, recommendations, and purchases. Three modes of agentic interaction exist today: Consumers (1) engage with brand agents, (2) search for products using third-party agents they’ve personalized over time, and (3) empower AI to interact with other AI on their behalf.

Brands must develop a hybrid strategy that balances automation with human shopping preferences. Successful companies rely on proprietary customer and product data to deliver personalized agentic experiences. But the process isn’t as simple as purchasing new software. Ongoing experimentation, prompt-based optimization, and integration with other AI ecosystems are essential steps.

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Why the Digital Product Model Beats Project-Based Approaches

Companies need to make a shift from traditional IT project management to digital product management. Project-based approaches—whether waterfall or agile—have high failure rates, and emerging technologies like AI may make outcomes even less predictable. Typically projects end once a new system or application is delivered, limiting opportunities for learning and improvement. Digital product management, in contrast, relies on permanent, cross-functional teams that focus on long-term outcomes and customer value. The teams’ success is judged by adoption, user retention, and revenue.

To make the switch, companies should start with small wins, define a product vision, empower teams, build lasting infrastructure to support them, and commit to a multiyear journey, as companies like The New York Times, CarMax, and Capital One have all done.

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The Solution to Service-Worker Churn

High turnover among frontline workers is a costly problem in retail and other service industries. Traditional remedies—posting schedules earlier, banning “clopenings,” and offering steadier hours—help, but they don’t address the deeper, location-specific drivers of attrition. New research analyzing 280 million shifts across 20 retail chains shows that turnover depends on a mix of factors, including scheduling predictability, managerial flexibility, fairness, and local workforce conditions. By applying analytics to scheduling records, managers can identify which factors—such as short rest periods, uneven advance notice, or unapproved time-off requests—most strongly predict turnover at each site. Then they can create schedules that balance operational efficiency with employee needs.

Organizations that treat scheduling as a data-driven, continuously improving process can reduce churn, strengthen morale, and boost service quality.

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The Skills Board Chairs Need Now

The role of the board chair has evolved dramatically as stakeholder expectations, regulatory complexity, and geopolitical instability have expanded the scope of corporate governance. Chairs today must mediate increasingly divergent stakeholder demands while guiding boards through technological disruption and societal scrutiny. Traditional leadership traits such as strategic acumen and executive experience now matter less than the ability to synthesize vast amounts of information, reconcile contradictions, and facilitate constructive dialogue.

Today’s effective chairs foster a culture of learning on the board, creating psychological safety and encouraging open, respectful debate among directors. To make sure the board balances expert insight with broad participation, chairs also conduct rigorous skills audits and provide structured feedback to directors. Last, they systematically manage trade-offs among competing interests and actively partner with CEOs to ease their workloads.

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How to Manage an Insecure Leader

Insecure leaders—whether anxious or avoidant—are more common in organizations than most people acknowledge. Their behaviors can distort communication, undermine collaboration, and burden teams. Anxious leaders seek reassurance and may micromanage; avoidant leaders resist feedback and limit openness. In response, the people they work with overaccommodate, withdraw, or confront too directly, which reinforces the insecurity.

The authors offer a three-step framework for working with such leaders: regulate emotional intensity, relate through attuned connection, and reason only once safety is established. This enables clearer dialogue, healthier decision-making, and more-functional partnerships with insecure executives.

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The Founder of Rocket Lab on Competing with Billionaires to Lead in Space

Rocket Lab launches more rockets at a faster pace than any rival and is expanding into satellites and deep-space missions. Four principles underpin its success: (1) Fierce efficiency drives frugal operations, such as building solutions in-house. (2) A “show, don’t tell” approach creates trust by delivering working hardware and successful missions, not just promises. (3) Smart speed means Rocket Lab can streamline decision-making. (4) Vertical integration gives the company control over every stage, ensuring delivery of complete high-quality, cost-effective missions. These tenets allow Rocket Lab to compete with industry giants, significantly impacting how humanity benefits from space.

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Case Study: How Do I Come Back After a Career Break?

A marketing executive who paused his career for a decade to homeschool his neurodiverse daughter contemplates how to reenter the workforce after she leaves for college. Should he join a mission-driven startup that will require him to quickly master new technology and marketing practices, as well as learn to collaborate with much younger bosses and colleagues? Or take a “returnship” with a more traditional company, easing himself into the new world of work alongside similar peers and preparing himself for a more meaningful role in the future?

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Jimmy Wales

The founder of Wikipedia explains why he left finance to start the nonprofit, the importance of crafting your career around your interests, how to ensure trust among unpaid collaborators and quality in crowdsourced content, and what he sees as the building blocks for a better internet.

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