December 02, 2025
There’s more to work than just grinding. Check out these stories for fresh ideas about communication, leadership, and strategy, as well as practical tips for being more memorable, respected, and creative in the workplace.
Want To Be Memorable? Choose Your Words Carefully.
On this episode of the If/Then podcast, Assistant Professor Ada Aka explains why concrete words, emotionally charged language, and informal vocabulary tend to be more memorable.
Career Advice: Looking Your Best When You’re On-Screen
Shibani Joshi, an MSx and alumni career coach at the Career Management Center provides practical tips on how to improve your visual presence during online meetings and presentations.
Employees Want Their Bosses to Respond to Feedback — But Not Too Quickly
New research by Professor Francis Flynn shows that while employees want their leaders to respond to feedback, rapid changes in behavior may be perceived as inauthentic, leading to an “authenticity penalty.”
How Leaders Can Move From “Chaos to Clarity”
In a new book, lecturer Robert Siegel, MBA ’94, introduces “systems leadership,” a method for navigating the competing complexities that business leaders must learn to juggle.
Class Takeaways — From Startup to Scaleup
Professor of organizational behavior Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao explains that the transition from a startup to a scaleup is fundamentally about reinvention, not merely replication of existing processes.
What Would You Do to Get Ahead? Depends on Why You Want to Get Ahead.
Professors Charles O’Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer found that ambition is a “double-edged sword” because, while it correlates with career success, it is also connected to unethical behavior.
How To: Become a Capable and Caring “Badass”
Alison Fragale, PhD ’04, explains how women can succeed in the workplace by establishing high status through being perceived as both capable and assertive as well as caring and warm.
Making Sense of the Invisible Rules That Shape Our Lives
On this episode of the If/Then podcast, Professor Michele Gelfand talks about the tradeoff between order and openness and why understanding it is vital for effective leadership and negotiation.
How to Turn Old Ideas Into Creative Solutions to Modern Problems
Professors Stefanos Zenios and Kevin Schulman introduce “precedents thinking,” which encourages finding creative solutions by adapting and combining successful innovations from the past.
Class Takeaways — Learning the Language of Business
Professor Ed deHaan shares five essential insights for informed leadership and fluency in “the language of business”: accounting.
Tapping Into the Incomparable Power of a Good Analogy
Professors Glenn Carroll and Jesper Sørensen advocate using analogy as an accessible yet rigorous tool for strategy development, urging leaders to look past common clichés like “the Uber of ____.”
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