HBR's 10 Must Reads 2017

most productive contributors often burn out from carrying the weight of their teams.

One of them, Gary Joyal, makes a good living (if his Rolls-Royce is any indication) by connecting buyers and sellers of Dunkin’ Donuts franchises.

Some knowledge workers will step up to even higher levels of cognition; others will step aside and draw on forms of intelligence that machines lack. Some will step in, monitoring and adjusting computers’ decision making; others will step narrowly into highly specialized realms of expertise. Inevitably, some will step forward by creating next-generation machines and finding new ways for them to augment human strengths.

Unless we find as many tasks to give humans as we find to take away from them, all the social and psychological ills of joblessness will grow, from economic recession to youth unemployment to individual crises of identity.

We conduct deep dives into the organization’s financial performance through quarterly operational reviews, and we conduct quarterly talent reviews, where we focus on the

For example, the transactional and administrative work of HR, including managing benefits, could be cordoned off and reassigned, as some companies have begun to do. One option is to give those responsibilities to the CFO.

People should be paid according to how much value they contribute to the company—some combination of the importance of the job and how they handle it.

Many HR processes tend to treat all employees the same way, but in our observation, 2% of the people in a business drive 98% of the impact.

Here are three activities we think are critical: predicting outcomes, diagnosing problems, and prescribing actions on the people side that will add value to the business.

The chief executive must have a clear view of the tremendous contribution the CHRO could be making and spell out those expectations in clear, specific language.