Articles & Blogs

From new thinking on career management and strategy to expert commentary on leadership and innovation, the following articles and multi-media presentations by Harvard Business School faculty and other thought leaders may help guide your professional development or job-search skills. Please check back often as we will update this library regularly.

Career Management

• Four Ways to Attack the Castle—And Get a Job, Get Ahead, Make Change

  Whether you're a job seeker or change agent, from inside or outside, it helps to have multiple ways to attack a seemingly impregnable organizational fortress. Read the article

• Should You Be an Entrepreneur? Take This Test

  Should you join the millions of people every year who take the plunge and start their first ventures? Take two minutes to answer these questions. Read the article

• A Hard Look at the Options Ahead: The Reality of the Changing Workplace-What's in Store for Generation X?

  The nature and availability of work is changing in important ways, ways that will significantly affect the opportunities open to Generation X over the next several decades. Here is a detailed look at changes in immigration, outsourcing, productivity, the nature of the organization, and what that means for Generation X—and what you need to do to take advantage. Read the article

• Five Ways to Bungle a Job Change

  While job moves are just about inevitable today, they are seldom easy and nearly always emotionally fraught—and too often they lead to a noticeable decline in performance, in both the short and the long term. The occasional misstep can be forgiven, but a careful assessment of the risks and realities will help you avoid making too many mistakes or ones that amount to a major setback. Read the article

Change Management

• How to Bounce Back from Adversity

  The challenge in any difficult situation is to turn a negative experience into a productive one—that is, to counter adversity with resilience. Here is how top managers take charge of adversity. Read the article

• The 10 Trends You Have to Watch

  After a year of economic turmoil, many business leaders are struck by a sense that the world has changed: Some trends remain firmly on track, but uncertainties are cropping up around others. And there are signs of new forces emerging. Here's what you need to know. Read the article

• Diversify Your Self

  The first question we ask when we meet people is "what do you do?" We have become our work, our professions. But who am I if you take away my work? That's a question to which we'd better have a solid answer. Fortunately, once we realize this we can do something about it. Read the article

• Navigating Major Career Transitions (video)

  HBS leadership-transition expert Michael Watkins outlines the challenges of on-boarding, promotion, and international moves—for new hires, new colleagues, and their companies — plus tips and insights from his new book, Your Next Move. View the video

  Related Reading: Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions

  Related Reading: The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

Global Business

• Master the Art of Working Remotely

  Working with people in different cities and time zones with minimal face time presents a new set of challenges. While the tools available for working remotely are better than ever, it's how you use them that really counts. Here are some best practices for working remotely online. Read the article

• In Search of Global Leaders

  A global manager is set apart by more than a worn suitcase and a dog-eared passport. Five top executives describe what global leadership takes and how they look for it. Read the article

Innovation

• Find the 15-Minute Competitive Advantage

  Just because this is a time of transformation doesn't mean that it's easy to sell transformational ideas, says HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. To innovate with reduced risk, think long-term trends but short-term steps. Read the article

• Creating an Innovation Mindset (video)

  To create an innovation mindset, managers must bring in fresh voices from outside their company, encourage collaboration, and consider how needs of emerging markets can spur ideas for innovative offerings. Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, offers strategies and insights that recruiters can use to guide their clients. View the video

• Rebuilding Companies as Communities

  Companies must remake themselves into places of engagement, where people are committed to one another and their enterprise. Read the article

Job-Seeking Skills

• Start Networking Right Away (Even If You Hate It)

  Most people don't take to networking naturally. But networking is the best way to acquire crucial information about the job and succeed early. Otherwise, you might lack the facts needed for an important proposal, for example, or might bring up a smart "new" idea that has failed in the past. This "courageous networking" requires recruiting networking targets both inside and outside the firm-even at competitors. Read the article

• 3 Ways to Pitch Yourself in 30 Seconds

  Whether you're interviewing for a job or introducing yourself to new colleagues or investors, craft your personal spiel to win over allies and make an impression on potential advocates. Read the article

• How to Write a Resume That Doesn't Annoy People

  We all know that there are more jobs being lost than created, and that an opening will get dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants. But in our fear to avoid saying anything that might get our resume tossed out of the pile, we end up saying nothing at all. Here's a list of nine things to make your résumé stand a better chance of survival. Read the article

• Ace the Interview

  Through a combination of skill, perseverance, and luck, you've landed a job interview. In short order, you'll be alone in front of a gauntlet of interviewers trying to figure out if you're the right person for their company. Now what? Read the article

Leadership

• Learn to Ask Better Questions

  People who excel at asking good questions have ability to cut to the heart of the matter in a way that opens the door for genuine conversation. And so often, it is not a matter of what you ask, it is how you ask it. Here are some suggestions. Read the article

• How to Get Along with Frenemies

  You've got senior level buy-in, authority, and resources for your project. But a few people in the middle of your organization are making it tough for you to get your job done. Before they become full-fledged enemies, try these tips. Read the article

• Oprah Winfrey and Your Leadership Brand

  Leaders have an identifiable persona that is a reflection of what they do and how others perceive them. And when it comes to cultivating a leadership brand, look no further than Oprah Winfrey. Read the article

• Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis

  When the economy recovers, things won't return to normal — and a different mode of leadership will be required. Read the article

Organizational Behavior

• How to Handle Silence, the Worst Kind of Feedback

  Misunderstandings rarely happen in words, they happen in the gap between the words. So how should we deal with the uncertainty of silence when it would be inadvisable to let go? Try these three steps. View the video

• How to Ask for Help-Without Looking Stupid

  Three quick tips to getting the right answer and looking smart at the same time. Read the article

• The Martial Art of Difficult Conversations

  When you come face-to-face with angry questions, it's best to listen first and understand, then explain yourself. Read the article

• Keys to Working with Alpha Personalities (video)

  Alpha males and females present unique challenges for those who work with them-and for those who hire them. Executive coach and Harvard Business Review columnist Gill Corkindale outlines strategies for understanding and channeling the energies of these unique forces of the business world. Read the article

Recruiter Insights

• How Twitter and Crowdsourcing Are Reshaping Recruiting

  As social media is used inside the company to increase collaboration, communication and innovation, it's become important for recruiters to locate prospective employees who are also users of social media. Using Twitter can level the playing field so that smaller firms can find those people as effectively as the Fortune 500 do. And those companies who have turned toward Twitter have found it an efficient way to identify passive job candidates who might not be scanning job boards. Read the article

• Do Your Stars See a Reason to Stay?

  Career development communication is crucial to retaining talent, and recruiters have this fact in mind when they try to woo your top people. High-performing employees need to know that development opportunities exist within their organizations and that their managers will work with them to make the most of those opportunities. Yet many managers give career development short shrift in their discussions with their high performers. This article features concrete advice from talent-management and retention experts on how to make career development conversations less difficult and more effective. Read the article

• The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad

  This article looks at the most effective way to hire top-level managers, based on research about the relationship between recruiting and long-term corporate performance. The following comprises seven steps, which cover the full recruitment spectrum: anticipating the need for new hires, specifying the job, developing a pool of candidates, assessing the candidates, closing the deal, integrating the newcomer, and reviewing the effectiveness of the hiring process. Read the article

  Related Podcast: Recruiting in Good Times and Bad

Technology

• Should Your Next Job Be CIO?

  There is hardly an enterprise in the world today that doesn't run on IT. The CIO is in many cases the single executive with the most comprehensive view of the enterprise's processes and priorities, not to mention its operational strengths and challenges. As a platform for learning about what makes the enterprise tick, the role is practically without peer. Read the article

  Related Reading: The IT Leader's Hero Quest

• What Does Your Facebook Page Say About You?

  What does your profile on Facebook tell others about you? Research shows most of us have little idea. Read the article

• Six Social Media Trends for 2010

  How businesses utilize and manage the power of social media in the coming year will have a major impact—from marketing to HR. Are you ready? Read the article