Strategic Management

You're probably aware that generative AI can output quality text and create stunning images in seconds. But smart managers are now using gen AI for high-level work—problem-solving, driving innovation, strategic thinking, and dozens of other applications. Managers who develop their generative AI capabilities will soon be leaping ahead of those who don't. Fortunately, you can start today and see immediate results. The HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers is packed with practical tips, prompts, and case studies to accelerate and improve countless aspects of your work.

Life is full of uncertainty. You don't know what lies ahead. But you can learn to control the controllable by using logic and reason. With the help of this book, you'll discover new ways to think about - and solve - problems more efficiently than ever before. Discover how strategic games model real-life behavior.

Algorithms, machine learning, generative AI. With the latest advancements in technology, data is taking center stage in organizations. But without a clear plan for how you're storing, integrating, and gaining value from that information, your company will be at risk—and fall behind. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on setting a data strategy in your organization, listen to these ten articles.

What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment?

Start making choices now that serve your desired future. Today’s fast-paced and radically shifting business world means that many leaders, even those considered successful, are simply navigating urgent tasks with little to no strategy. In Strategy to Action, award-winning educator and coach Keita Demming of The Covenant Group presents an innovative and deceptively simple tool to help business professionals unite their short-term tactics with their long-term goals.

The new page-turning Stone Barrington novel from the perennially entertaining New York Times bestselling author. Stone Barrington is enjoying his usual dinner at Elaine's when his boss at Woodman & Weld, the law firm where Stone is "of counsel," walks in, sits down, and hands Stone a check for...

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into activities, or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

Every day, there are multiple things vying for our attention - people, businesses, technologies, apps. But many of us don’t realize that our attention is our property. It belongs to us just like any other resource we own. And when we choose what we give our attention to, we can focus fully on our own purpose and on what’s best for us. When you take a step back and think about your thinking, you can take control of your attention, as well as your time and your purpose, rather than allowing others to be in control. It’s up to you.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

If you listen to nothing else on innovation, listen to this book. We've chosen a new selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles that will help you invest in your best innovation bets, learn from setbacks, and bring bold new offerings to market. This book will inspire you to know your customers' "jobs to be done;" harness the benefits of design thinking; bring AI into the innovation process; keep bureaucracy and structure from stifling creativity; build a culture of experimentation; and become the disrupter in your industry.

If you listen to nothing else on AI, listen to this book. We've chosen a new selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles that will help you make sense of the shifting landscape, anticipate opportunities and threats, and develop a strategy that keeps pace with AI. This book will inspire you to capture the potential of gen AI and agentic AI; help people and machines work together better; manage regulation and risk; understand the real value of your organization's data; prepare for skills, jobs, and industries to be transformed; and embed AI at the core of your business.

In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for uninstalling bureaucracy and reinventing management as we know it. In this extensively updated and expanded edition, listeners will find new and compelling case studies, the latest research findings, and a wealth of fresh and provocative insights.

Managing an effective sales organization is key to revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and business results. But whether you're a sales manager or leading a large sales force, it's increasingly challenging to balance success today with driving the digital sales transformation that will position your team for the future. With actionable insights and examples from many industries worldwide, the HBR Sales Management Handbook provides the resources you need to build value for your company, your customers, and your sales teams.

In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage.

We all have activities that irritate us, bore us, and drain our energy. The problem is thinking that this is just a necessary part of life and business. In this book, I show you a simple process to shed those unwanted activities to not only free yourself up to concentrate on what fascinates and motivates you, but to strengthen your team as well.

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

Leading with Strategic Thinking reveals what effective leaders do differently. Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success - whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over 300 leaders from around the world.

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they don't have it. Start-ups shut down if they can't develop it. "It" is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mindset so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage—they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair.

How you compensate people is one of the most important strategic decisions your company will make—but few “get it right and out of sight.” Nail it and you can add hundreds of percentage points to the bottom line while driving up the energy in the organization. Make the wrong call (or piecemeal the decision together), and the results will create needless drama throughout the organization.

Most people’s thinking ability is limited. But there’s a dimension of thinking called Thinking About Your Thinking where you step back and observe your own mind. It’s a subtle mental shift that creates a massive change in perception and possibilities — a shift that Dan Sullivan discovered early in life, which went on to become the basis for every concept and tool in The Strategic Coach® Program.