California Management Review

The role no one is preparing for - Something significant is happening in organizations right now, mostly below the level of executive conversation. As AI agents begin handling execution, the humans who remain are increasingly being asked to do something that has no job title yet: manage the output of intelligent machines alongside the people who work with the...

Digital playbooks, workflow platforms, and artificial intelligence now make it possible to reproduce procedures across an organization almost instantly. Yet faster replication has not solved an older management problem: a practice can arrive intact while the performance that made it attractive disappears.

Organizations transfer visible routines more easily than the...

Women’s representation has risen markedly in the C-suite—but the leadership pipeline beneath it has not kept pace.

According to McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, women’s share of C-suite roles climbed from 17% to 29% over the past decade.1 Yet despite making up nearly half of the workforce, women still hold only about one-third of mid- and senior-level management positions in ...

A professional services firm we studied was just three weeks away from renewing a six-figure contract for a new enterprise AI assistant. On paper, it looked like an easy win. The vendor’s dashboard glowed green: seat utilization was up quarter over quarter, and weekly active users had crossed 80 percent.

Then a manager asked a simpler question: how many billable h...