Welcome to the HBR Executive Agenda for Dec. 11, 2025. In this issue: How Zak Brown Led the Revival of McLaren Racing New Masterclass: Unlocking Productive Conflict on Your Executive Team How Zak Brown Led the Revival of McLaren Racing On Monday, the day after McLaren Racing closed out its championship-winning Formula 1 season, I interviewed its CEO, Zak Brown to talk about how he led the impressive turnaround of the storied motor-racing team. Brown, who raced professionally before becoming an executive, took over the reins at McLaren in 2018. The team was underperforming: Morale was low, sponsorship deals were scarce, and McLaren was losing money. Fast forward seven years, and Brown is riding high. McLaren won its second consecutive team championship, and one of its drivers, Lando Norris, secured the individual F1 trophy. McLaren has a huge portfolio of world-class sponsors and is solidly profitable. I asked Brown how he approached the reinvention of what he says had been a “toxic environment.” His approach is as relevant to a traditional business as it was to the motor-racing team. The biggest challenge, he said, was reversing the negative momentum that had infused McLaren. It required a long-running, dedicated effort that he likened to “hand-to-hand combat.” He details the journey in his new book Seven Tenths of a Second: Life, Leadership and Formula 1. The need for change was evident. But Brown faced difficulties opening the staff to new ideas. He said he faced three groups of employees: those who recognized change was needed, those who were more skeptical (particularly after the company went through five different leaders in seven years), and those who were resistant to change. Brown gave the resisters a short runway to come around, but he ended up firing many of the entrenched skeptics. “They’re the ones who probably created the issue…” he says, describing them as “the naysayers, what we call a loser’s mindset.” Brown also overhauled his management team. He realized he couldn’t drive change on his own, so he appointed new executives at the top to help cascade fresh energy and ideas throughout the company. To get deep buy-in, Brown tried to ensure that the unsung contributors in the back office get as much praise as those in the more glamorous roles: the designers, the pit crew, the drivers. “It’s about getting everyone to understand how they contribute to a common mission.” That sense of inclusion is still part of the culture. When a McLaren driver wins an F1 race, the team is allowed to send one person to the podium to celebrate with the driver. Brown rotates people from virtually every corner of the business to represent McLaren at those moments. Success these days also depends on making good use of the large amount of data that Formula 1 generates. With 300 sensors on each car, McLaren can make educated and often real-time decisions related to pit stops, tire rotation, and other aspects of driving strategy. AI is helping teams determine which data points offer valuable insights and which are mere noise. Brown described a particularly interesting AI application. Race engineers communicate with their drivers via radio signals that anyone can pick up. Because the communication isn’t private, there tend to be a lot of coded exchanges—and even misdirection—to keep race strategies secret. Brown says McLaren has begun using AI to judge whether rival drivers are telling the truth as they radio in their intentions. “When people tend to not be telling the truth, sometimes there’s a difference in their tone of voice,” he says. “It’s like having a lie-detector test.” At the end of the day, Brown says, the benefits of AI and data can only go so far. The ultimate differentiator is what he calls the “racer’s instinct.” In that sense, running a race team isn’t that different from leading any other company. “You have all of this data that’s coming in,” he says, “but at the end of the day, the human is still making the decision.” Brown was my guest on this month’s HBR Executive Live. You can watch our full conversation here. And stay tuned for next month’s invite—we’ll be speaking to Michael Lynton, former CEO of Sony Entertainment, and Joshua L. Steiner, private investor and board member at Bloomberg LLP, about how to recover from a high-profile mistake. The two men will talk about how they reckoned with the impact of their own painful mistakes, as well as what they learned from other leaders they spoke to. Unlocking Productive Conflict on Your Executive Team Managing conflict is never easy, but it’s more complex at the executive level, where the stakes are higher and the personalities are stronger. When senior teams avoid difficult conversations, they’re perpetuating a climate where disagreement is risky, real tradeoffs aren’t debated, and tensions simmer under the surface. “When an executive tells me they have a team that never fights, that things run extremely smoothly … that’s one of the biggest red flags,” explains Amy Gallo, author of The HBR Guide to Dealing With Conflict. In this HBR Executive Masterclass, Gallo breaks down the high cost of conflict avoidance and explains how instead of eliminating conflict, the best leaders normalize it and make it productive. Watch now
