Ethan Bernstein
Boston
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Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior @HarvardHBS. In past lives: @CFPB @BCG @Harvard_Law @HBSAlumni @AmherstCollege
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Articles by Ethan Bernstein
Enterprise AI Adoption Framework for Responsible and Scalable Growth - Nate Patel
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming industries, redefining business models, and reshaping how organizations compete in the global economy. From predictive analytics to intelligent automation, AI offers tremendous opportunities for enterprises to innovate, improve operational efficiency, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. However, successfully integrating AI across an organization requires more than simply deploying new technologies.
Stop Wasting Weeks on Idea Validation: A Smarter AI-Driven Approach to Product Discovery
Product teams everywhere face a familiar frustration: weeks spent validating ideas, only to realize — too late — that early assumptions were flawed. In fast-moving markets, slow validation doesn’t just waste time; it drains momentum, resources, and confidence. A recent blog on Product Mastery Now, “Stop Wasting Weeks on Idea Validation: An AI-Driven Approach with Nate Patel”, explores a more effective path forward — one that combines AI-powered insight with disciplined human judgment.
Human Judgment vs. Machine Intelligence in Product Innovation
In today’s fast-moving digital landscape, the debate between human judgment and machine intelligence is no longer theoretical — it’s strategic. Product leaders must understand not just what AI brings to the table, but how it should be integrated with human intuition to drive meaningful innovation. This article explores why human judgment and machine intelligence are not competitors — they are complements — and how product teams can harness both to make better decisions faster.
How AI Digital Transformation Services Will Shape the Future of Business in 2026
By 2026, AI will no longer be a supporting technology — it will be the foundation of digital transformation. Businesses across industries are rapidly moving beyond basic automation toward intelligent, adaptive, and data-driven operations. At the center of this shift are AI Digital Transformation Services, which combine artificial intelligence, data strategy, automation, and governance to reshape how organizations operate, compete, and grow.
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留住优秀员工的秘诀：问他们这四个问题
Ethan Bernstein / Michael B. Horn 现如今留住高绩效员工的策略非常直接：更高的薪水、更体面的头衔、更好的福利以及更强的“目标”感。 问题是什么？这一套不管用。 Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
The Secret to Retaining the Best Employees: Ask Them These Four Questions
Today’s playbook for retaining high-performing employees is pretty straightforward: more money, a fancier title, better benefits and a greater sense of “purpose.” The problem? It isn’t working. Individuals change jobs more than ever before—every 3.9 years, on average, globally, with younger generations moving even more often.Our research shows that their reasons for switching are more complex than the ones people consistently check off on surveys—such as better salaries and titles.
An exploratory analysis of glucagon‐like peptide‐1 (GLP‐1) agonists and biosimilars: A literature review
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Supporting Information Filename Description dom16110-sup-0001-AppendixS1.docxWord 2007 document , 14.4 KB Appendix S1. Supporting Information. REFERENCES 1, , . Diabetes mellitus, the fastest growing global public health concern: early detection should be focused. Health Sci Rep. 2024; 7(3):e2004. doi:10.1002/hsr2.2004 2, , , , . Prevalence of diabetes in India: a review of IDF diabetes atlas 10th edition. Curr Diabetes Rev.
Employee experience: dove sbagliano le aziende
Nuove ricerche offrono risposte sorprendenti Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn, Bob Moesta La cosiddetta guerraper i talenti continua a infuriare. Ma in questa contesa i datori di lavoro continuano ad affidarsi alle stesse strategie che usano da decenni per assumere e trattenere i dipendenti, anche se quegli approcci non funzionano: magari possono riuscire a indurli a rimanere un po’ più a lungo di quanto avrebbero fatto altrimenti, ma alla fine se ne vanno comunque.
If you want to quit your job, here’s how to figure out your next career move
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If you want to quit your job, here’s how to figure out your next career move
In the world of product development, after learning about what kinds of progress customers want to make in their lives, successful designers build prototypes to test their early ideas. They experiment with multiple rough mock-ups that they can change easily. Career choices benefit from experimentation, too. As we say in our book Job Moves, smart job switchers consciously hire their next job so they can make progress in their careers.The point of the prototypes isn’t to find a job at this stage.
Use this genius Pixar hack to get your career back on track
Learn from the world’s biggest business thinkers Excerpted from Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta. Copyright © 2024 by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. In 2011, Emma Coats—a storyboard artist at Pixar—tweeted twenty-two guidelines to make anyone a better storyteller.
Blogging on Business
Here is an excerpt from an article written , , and for Harvard Business Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here. Illustration Credit: Skizzomat * * * Although managers and their HR colleagues are beginning to understand that employee experience matters for hiring and retention, they haven’t reached anything close to a consensus on what it should look like or how to provide it.
Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career|Hardcover
Three innovators offer a road-tested framework for career development that helps anyone make real progress on their path when they switch jobs. Each year, an estimated 1 billion people switch jobs worldwide. A lucky few stumble into the role of their dreams, but hundreds of millions are disappointed. What if, when looking for a job, we could make more informed choices to better select the opportunity we seize?
Femoral Neck Stress Fractures: An Updated Review
close Please confirm that you would like to log out of Medscape. If you log out, you will be required to enter your username and password the next time you visit. Log out Cancel Abstract and Introduction Abstract Femoral neck stress fractures represent a relatively rare spectrum of injuries that most commonly affect military recruits and endurance athletes. If unrecognized and if proper treatment is not initiated, this condition carries potentially devastating consequences.
How Companies Are Using Tech to Give Employees More Autonomy
“They’re Watching You at Work.” “AI Here, There, Everywhere.” “What People Hate About Being Managed by Algorithms.” We are no stranger to headlines conjuring up science fiction images of a future in which human judgment, ingenuity, and initiative are increasingly undermined by machine-based management. The dominant narrative regarding technology at work is that the machines are replacing human judgment and as a result making work more technocratic and controlled.
Uncovering the Mitigating Psychological Response to Monitoring Technologies: Police Body Cameras Not Only Constrain but Also Depolarize
The authors are very grateful to Ethan Burris, Curtis Chan, Laura Huang, David Lazer, Michael Norton, and Amy Wrzesniewski for helpful feedback on previous versions of this manuscript, as well as Lydia Mitzi Gross, Cara Mazzucco, and Max Jordan Williams for their research assistance.
The Implications of Working Without an Office
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The Truth About Open Offices
Idea in Brief The Problem Organizations are turning to open offices and an array of technologies to encourage collaboration. But often it isn’t effective: People don’t necessarily interact more, or they interact in unproductive ways. The Root Cause Individuals decide when and how to engage with others. They become adept at shutting people out and reading signs that their coworkers wish to be left alone. Many companies don’t understand how to achieve the kinds of collaboration they want.
These Harvard researchers say open offices are productivity killers
When open offices came into vogue, they were supposed to promote productivity and collaboration among co-workers. And yet recent research suggests they do just the opposite. In an article published by Royal Society, Harvard researchers outline two recent studies they conducted that mean bad news for all the companies that have opted for an open office plan.
Why Is Micromanagement So Infectious?
Part of the draw of self-managing organizations is their promise to free us from the disease of micromanagement. But they’re not the only cure. Before we get to what works, let’s consider what micromanaging really is and what puts you at risk of doing it. It’s not just a personality or leadership trait that can be blamed on genetic makeup or bad training, as some arguments say. Rather, it’s a breakdown in the fundamentals of delegation.
Find Quiet (and Maybe Even Peace) at Work
My uncle has a farm in Meriwether County, Georgia. When I was a kid, I spent weekends there camping, fishing, and spending time with family and friends. It was my place to wonder and wander. In a time before mobile devices, I could lie in the grass looking up at the stars and experience real solitude and silence. There were no car engines or text message alerts. The silence created space for reflection and imagination.
Can You See the Opportunity Right in Front of You?
Do you find your household thermostat to be endlessly fascinating? How about that smoke alarm installed in your basement — spend much time gazing at it with wonder? Tony Fadell did. The founder of Nest has had a lifelong penchant for looking at mundane everyday household devices and wondering Why hasn’t somebody improved this thing? That tendency led him to reinvent the aforementioned gadgets — and recently resulted in a $3 billion payday, when Nest was acquired earlier this year by Google.
Work Schedules: The False Tradeoff Between Fair and Productive | Commentary
By Ethan Bernstein If the past is any guide, the Schedules that Work Act (S 1772/HR 3071), fair work scheduling legislation introduced in Congress last week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., will ignite debate between employer and employee advocates. Yet solutions favoring employers and those that meet employees’ needs may be closer than you think. The debate masks how much smart labor scheduling can benefit both sides.
The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration
Article | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban Abstract Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes.
How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Significance Many human endeavors—from teams and organizations to crowds and democracies—rely on solving problems collectively. Prior research has shown that when people interact and influence each other while solving complex problems, the average problem-solving performance of the group increases, but the best solution of the group actually decreases in quality. We find that when such influence is intermittent it improves the average while maintaining a high maximum performance.
How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence
Significance Many human endeavors—from teams and organizations to crowds and democracies—rely on solving problems collectively. Prior research has shown that when people interact and influence each other while solving complex problems, the average problem-solving performance of the group increases, but the best solution of the group actually decreases in quality. We find that when such influence is intermittent it improves the average while maintaining a high maximum performance.
The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration
AbstractOrganizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes.
The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration
1. Introduction Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have long captured human interest. Yet even as social scientists continue to study the value of a vast array of boundaries [1], in an era in which the nature of work is changing [2–4], managers and organizational scholars have increasingly framed boundaries as barriers to interaction that ought to be spanned [5–8], permeated [9] or blurred [10] to increase collaboration.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
1. Introduction Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have long captured human interest. Yet even as social scientists continue to study the value of a vast array of boundaries [1], in an era in which the nature of work is changing [2–4], managers and organizational scholars have increasingly framed boundaries as barriers to interaction that ought to be spanned [5–8], permeated [9] or blurred [10] to increase collaboration.
PYMNTS.com
Telling Your Story to the Most Influential Decision Makers in Payments, Commerce and Retail.
How to Manage Scheduling Software Fairly
Starbucks workers recently scored a point against the machine. After a lengthy New York Times story, the company decided to adjust some of their controversial scheduling practices, eliminating “clopening” — when workers are required to close at night and re-open in the morning — and requiring at least a week’s notice of upcoming schedules.
Be careful of the labels we assign our patients
Reducing the essence of a human being to a single sentence is impossible, but in taking care of patients, we doctors do it all the time The one-liner attempts to summarize an individual and an illness into a single, typically run-on, sentence to expedite communication. It is a thesis statement for your diagnosis. Word choice and omission are critical.
Burgers with a side of glomerulonephritis
Kicking off intern year means BBQs, team dinners, and block parties. Every invitation encourages us to bring our significant others, those people who define our existence outside of the hospital. And yet, hot dog and cold drink in hand, it seems we can’t help but alienate our non-medical partners by talking exclusively about the minutiae of our medical lives: our interesting patients, our frustrations, and our philosophies of medicine.
Why Is Micromanagement So Infectious?
Part of the draw of self-managing organizations, like those we explore in our recent HBR article, is their promise to free us from the disease of micromanagement. But they’re not the only cure. Before we get to what works, let’s consider what micromanaging really is and what puts you at risk of doing it. It’s not just a personality or leadership trait that can be blamed on genetic makeup or bad training, as some arguments say. Rather, it’s a breakdown in the fundamentals of delegation.
Beyond the Holacracy Hype
Idea in Brief The Hype Holacracy and other forms of self-organization have been getting a lot of press. Proponents hail them as “flat” environments that foster flexibility, engagement, productivity, and efficiency. Critics say they’re naive, unrealistic experiments. The Reality Neither view is quite right. Although the new forms can help organizations become more adaptable and nimble, most companies shouldn’t adopt their principles wholesale. The Potential A piecemeal approach usually makes sense.
Why the "Personal" is So Important
People have started talking about Personal Data Fusion - the idea that artificial intelligence technology can filter the flood of incoming information and present it in a way we can digest and use. Microsoft's $26B acquisition of LinkedIn was driven in part to feed the company's Personal Data Fusion product, Cortana.
The Organization Lab (o-Lab): How might we create the next iteration of our organizations?
Few would dispute that innovation in technology is a driving force of progress in our society. Innovation in technology also sets our expectations for innovation in other aspects of life: as our smartphones and tablets become more advanced, we expect the same from our classrooms, our government, and even each other. It is therefore puzzling how little attention, relatively speaking, has been paid towards innovating one of the most ubiquitous technologies on earth: the organization.
Case Study: Can an Airline Cut “Turn Times” Without Adding Staff?
Kentaro Hayashi buttoned his uniform shirt and wondered if he could really pull this off. As president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, he’d been under enormous pressure in recent months. Thanks to increased demand for air travel, Rising Sun’s flights were now fuller and more frequent than ever before.
Work Schedules: The False Tradeoff Between Fair and Productive | Commentary
If the past is any guide, the Schedules that Work Act (S 1772/HR 3071), fair work scheduling legislation introduced in Congress last week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., will ignite debate between employer and employee advocates. Yet solutions favoring employers and those that meet employees’ needs may be closer than you think. The debate masks how much smart labor scheduling can benefit both sides.
The Smart Way to Create a Transparent Workplace
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Flat Organizations Like Zappos Need Pockets of Privacy
If you’re a leader in a flat organization, you have an amazing view, right? It’s like looking through a submarine periscope just a few inches above the sea: slightly elevated above everyone and everything else, you can see for miles and miles around. But such oversight comes at a cost. When employees feel exposed, in full view of those evaluating their performance, they’re afraid to experiment and, my research shows, their creativity and productivity suffer.
The Transparency Trap
Reprint: R1410D To promote accountability, productivity, and shared learning, many organizations create open work environments and gather reams of data on how individuals spend their time. A few years ago, HBS professor Ethan Bernstein set out to find empirical evidence that such approaches improve organizational performance. What he discovered is that this kind of transparency often has an unintended consequence: It can leave employees feeling vulnerable and exposed.
Why We Hide Some of Our Best Work
Your employer can track your every move, no matter where you sit in the organization. Often, the impulse is to scrutinize all behavior — through real-time performance data, for instance, and open workspaces — so that nothing unproductive or unethical can lurk in the shadows. But that much transparency can have a dampening effect on performance. Creativity and productivity suffer because the desire for control is so great.
How Being Filmed Changes Employee Behavior
Since Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, more than 154,000 people have signed a “We the People” petition to the White House to “require all state, county, and local police to wear a camera” to curb misconduct. The Ferguson police force was recently given about 50 cameras, following a national trend toward tech-enabled transparency. The public may expect cameras to remove bias from interpretation of police behavior.
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