What Really Gets in the Way of Change

In this week’s The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett writes on three new HBR articles for senior leaders. The first highlighted piece identifies why most change initiatives fail: because executive teams mistake politeness for alignment, never explicitly agreeing on why, what, and how they’re changing. The second warns of the “agentic convergence trap,” in which competing companies unwittingly learn their way into identical strategies because of the AI they’re deploying. And finally, the third highlights the middle path for scaling decision-making through “structured empowerment,” an approach that gives frontline employees choices, rather than swinging between centralization and decentralization.