New research from scholars, consulting teams, and other experts can give you and your organization the knowledge you need to make sharper strategic decisions. We’ve curated a set of counterintuitive insights, adapted from the January-February issue of our magazine that you can apply right away, including: How debate training can help inspire a new generation of leaders. The knowledge companies can glean from copycat products. Why online promotions should require customers to put in a little work. For one of these writeups, we’ve also included a link to an HBR.org article that can help you learn more about how this research might impact your company. Debate Training Helps People Become Leaders Companies spend millions on development programs that often have mixed results when it comes to producing the next generation of leaders. New research found one intervention that may help: debate training. In one experiment, 471 U.S. employees at a Fortune 100 company were randomly assigned to either participate in a nine-week debate course, or not. A year and a half later people who’d taken the training were significantly more likely to have stepped into a leadership position than those who’d not undergone it. In another experiment, 975 participants recruited in the United States were sorted into three-person teams for a 60-minute session. One member from each team was randomly assigned to spend the first 30 minutes in debate training, in cultural training, or enjoying free time, while the two remaining team members also had free time. After the 30 minutes the teams convened and were tasked with creating an itinerary for a college student orientation. The participants who’d had the debate training were significantly more likely to be rated as assertive and leaderlike by their teammates than the participants who’d been given cultural training or had free time. The researchers say that debate training helped employees learn to articulate their views with confidence and respect, defend their positions diplomatically, and advocate for their ideas—key qualities in a good leader in U.S. culture. They note that their study suggests a low-cost, scalable way to improve the skills necessary for reaching leadership positions. Hand Gestures Make You More Persuasive Whether they’re trying to highlight a key idea in a presentation, express frustration to teammates, or explain a concept in a pitch meeting, many people use hand gestures to accompany their message. But does “talking with your hands” actually drive a point home? And does the type of gesture matter? To explore those questions, researchers used video analysis software to examine nearly 200,000 clips from 2,184 TED Talks uploaded to the TED Talk website from 2006 to 2017. They sorted hand movements into three categories: illustrators, which visually represent an object or concept (for example, miming turning gears to describe the process of thinking); highlighters, which emphasize a point (for example, pumping a fist in the air to convey joy); and unrelated gestures, like scratching an itch. The researchers found that indeed, people who used their hands more had more-popular videos. However, when they isolated the gestures by type, they found that not all of them were equally impactful: Only increases in illustrator gestures were associated with greater video “likes.” To determine why illustrators increased a presenter’s popularity, the researchers conducted a follow-up study with 685 U.S. participants, who were shown different versions of a video of an entrepreneur’s pitch for a new skin-care product. The actor and the script in each video remained the same, but the researchers varied which type of gesture the actor used. After viewing the pitch, participants were asked how competent, likable, and comprehensible the entrepreneur was and how likely they were to buy her product. Participants who saw a video in which the entrepreneur used illustrator gestures found her significantly easier to understand and more persuasive. Additionally, those participants were much more likely to say they’d buy her product than the other groups were. The study’s authors say that their findings provide important insight into the ways gestures help us explain complicated concepts and how we can use them to make messages more effective. AI’s Competence Penalty Despite companywide pushes to incorporate AI tools into work—and big promises that they’ll help improve employee performance—many workers resist them. A new study suggests why: Adopting AI can make employees seem less competent to their peers. Researchers partnered with a large global tech company that had recently introduced an AI coding tool to its 28,698 software engineers. Twelve months after its release, only 41% of the engineers were using it, despite incentives to do so, and uptake was even lower among women (31%). To determine why so few people were harnessing the AI, the researchers ran an experiment with 1,026 engineers at the company. In it participants reviewed a segment of code they were told had been written by another engineer, either with the help of AI or without it. In some groups participants were told that the engineer was a woman, and in others that it was a man. When reviewers believed the code was written with the help of AI, they rated the engineer’s competence 9% lower than the unaided engineer’s. Women faced the steepest penalty—they were considered 13% less competent when they used AI. Analyzing the gender dynamics further, the researchers found that male participants who’d said that they didn’t use AI themselves were particularly harsh critics of women who did: They rated them 26% less competent than male engineers who had used an AI tool. In a follow-up survey with 919 participants, the researchers discovered that the engineers were aware of this penalty—and actively avoided using the technology to safeguard their reputations. That helps explain why those who faced the greatest blowback for employing AI (namely, women) were the least likely to use it. “What looks like simple reluctance… actually reflects rational self-preservation,” the authors of the study write. They note that companies must work to dismantle these penalties by determining where they exist in their own organizations, having leaders model and champion AI use, and redesigning evaluations to reward outcomes over methods. Dig deeper: “Research: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work,” by Oguz A. Acar et al. Use Copycats to Your Advantage When a competitor knocks off your product, it can feel as if that company is profiting at your expense. But new research shows that imitators can provide valuable, low-cost insights that strengthen your next offering. A study of the video game industry looked at 438 PlayStation 2 games that had sequels and analyzed the impact of “near clone” replicas released between the original game and its sequel. The imitators copied core features of the original games but introduced small variations—for example, in navigation systems or by offering multiplayer modes. The researchers found that the more imitators there were in the market, the higher the quality of a game’s official sequel became, as measured by an analysis of product reviews. This effect was especially strong when the imitators had a large share of the market. Their prominence made it easier for the original developers to observe and analyze changes in the copycat games and gather richer feedback from customers and experts and more-reliable performance data. As a result, they were able to draw clearer insights from the knockoffs, particularly about which variations to adopt or reject. However, the researchers found that sequels’ quality improved only when the original development team remained intact. If that team had changed because of turnover or restructuring, the learning benefits vanished. The researchers say that retaining the original team’s tacit knowledge is crucial because it helps the company spot which changes are worthwhile. “Innovators may dismiss imitators as copycats with little to offer,” the researchers write. However, their findings provide strong evidence that “failing to study imitation products means missing opportunities for innovation.” Online Promotions Should Require a Little Customer Effort Offering a limited-time discount is a common way to manage inventory, find new buyers, and drive traffic to your website. But a new study shows that these promotions can be even more effective if you ask customers to do a bit of work. To test the impact that different promotion strategies had on online sales, researchers conducted two experiments in collaboration with a U.S.- based coffee chain. In one, 6,623 recent customers were emailed a limited-time offer for a new coffee blend. Half the customers were told they would receive 15% off their purchase if they entered a promotion code; the other half were told that a 15% discount would be automatically applied at checkout. The researchers found that customers were significantly more likely to make a purchase (tracked via a link in the email) if they were prompted to enter a promo code. That finding also held true in a second experiment involving social media advertisements: People were more likely to click through when an ad offered a promo code rather than an automatic discount. In follow-up experiments with hundreds of participants from the United States and Singapore, the researchers got the same results, finding that low-effort promotions (like entering a promo code or a CAPTCHA to receive a discount) were more effective at driving sales than no-effort promotions (like automatic discounts) and high-effort ones (like entering a series of CAPTCHAs). The researchers say that this is because consumers who were asked to do a small amount of work felt that they had personally earned a great return on low effort—and they didn’t want to squander it. People in this group were more likely to consider themselves “smart shoppers” when they made a discounted purchase compared with those who were asked to do no or a great deal of effort to receive a discount. The studies’ authors write that although previous research has shown that small discounts aren’t supereffective at boosting sales, their work suggests that requiring light effort could be a low-cost way to improve the results of online promotions while keeping discounts low. To Crush the Pitch, Skip the Suit When you’re giving a big presentation, you may think you should dress to impress. But new research shows that for startup founders, keeping it casual could help earn investors’ trust—and funding. Researchers examined 774 pitches delivered on the U.S. TV series Shark Tank from 2009 to 2019. On the show contestants try to persuade a panel of prominent businesspeople (the “sharks”) to invest in their fledgling companies. The researchers used linguistic software to analyze the sharks’ discussions after each pitch— including their take on how authentic, powerful, and certain the entrepreneurs seemed—and whether it resulted in an investment. When they compared that data against the formality of the lead founder’s attire, they discovered that entrepreneurs who dressed casually were 32% more likely to be funded and were more likely to be described as authentic by the sharks. That held true even after controlling for the entrepreneur’s education, age, and gender, and the startup’s industry. In a similar study on 101 investments made by a European angel-investment group from 2012 to 2024 and in an online experiment with 714 U.S. equity investors, the researchers replicated those results. Those studies uncovered an interesting correlation between dressing casually and the attention that investors paid to details revealed in the pitch, like past experience. If an entrepreneur was dressed casually, investors gave less weight to that person’s relevant past experience when deciding whether to invest. Their first impression—that the entrepreneur fit their expectations of what a company founder should look like—seemed to crowd out other considerations, the studies’ authors write. The researchers say that their findings highlight a bias that investors should look out for—and a strategy that entrepreneurs might employ to gain support. Well-Connected Employees Can Boost Firm Performance Knowing the right people can help you land a job. It can also make you especially valuable to your company. That was the conclusion of researchers who analyzed the 12 million connections of 2 million employees on a large Korean professional networking app from 2014 to 2018. On the app users upload an image of a connection’s business card after meeting. Connections were matched against 1,553 public Korean firms so that the researchers could compare employees’ social capital against firm data like return on assets (ROA), sales growth, and other metrics. The researchers found that companies with well-connected employees logged stronger firm performance, year over year, than firms with less connected workers did. Because of the nature of the app (one-directional uploading), the researchers were also able to determine who mattered more: employees who uploaded many cards, or employees whose cards were uploaded frequently by others. They found that firms that had above-average numbers of employees whose cards were often uploaded saw a 0.9-percentage-point boost in ROA and four-percentage-point boost in sales growth, year over year. Having above average numbers of employees who uploaded many cards, by contrast, had little impact on firm performance. Those results held true after controlling for firm size, age, stock return volatility, and head count, as well as employee satisfaction and skill level. The researchers say employees that many people add to their networks lower coordination costs (their calls get returned, and they get information faster), and their visibility elevates the reputation of the firm. A follow-up study found that companies with those employees also secured more government contracts and experienced wider and more-favorable media coverage. In other words their connections paid off in tangible ways for their employers. Is the American Dream Fading? In a survey of 1,527 adults in the United States conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NORC, 69% of respondents said that they no longer (or never) believed that working hard would help them get ahead financially. This is up from 63% in 2023 and 66% in 2024. The percentage of respondents who said that the American Dream was never true, in particular, has grown dramatically—from 6% in 2011 to 23% in 2025. Wall Street Journal/NORC poll, July 2025. Firms Are Investing in Worker Safety While some organizations may be scaling back their socially responsible programs, commitment to worker health and safety is gaining traction. In a survey of 526 C-suite leaders and environmental, health, and safety (EHS) executives across 34 countries, 78% of respondents said that their companies planned to increase spending on EHS initiatives within the next three years. “Global EHS Maturity Study, August 2025,” by EY.
