Business Strategy

Build resilience in your company to weather the greatest crises. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the 10 most important ones to help your company prepare for and overcome disruption, social upheaval, and disaster.

Jordan Cohen started out selling entry-level houses in Southern California over thirty years ago. Always working alone as an individual agent without a partner or a team, he consistently sets new sales records year after year, including 2021 where he closed over $314 million in residential real estate. In The Agent’s Edge, he teaches agents of all levels how to win listings, take advantage of every opportunity and make your fortune in the fast-paced, exciting world of real estate sales.

Management teams and boards are facing disruption on all sides, from morphing customer preferences to the COVID pandemic to climate change. At the same time they are floundering in strategy confusion with too many concepts and not enough clarity. In this book, strategy expert and regular Harvard Business Review author Graham Kenny releases managers and directors from their strategy haze. His simple and effective framework allows managers to navigate the current maze of ideas and approaches and maximize their competitive advantage.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him.

The how-to playbook for start-ups and established companies on a groundbreaking discipline called category design. Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it and dominating it over time. You can't build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you're going to lose.

Balancing the short term and the long term is a perennial struggle, but new developments put boards squarely at the center of this dilemma and in need of guidance. Much of the $14 trillion of assets that firms like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street manage is now held in index funds, creating a huge class of permanent institutional investors. These so-called passive investors (unlike activist investors, passive investors don't have power to exit the fund) own almost 60 percent of the Fortune 500 - and they have found their voice.

Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"—a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the typical response was just to apply it again—with greater enthusiasm.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

Right now, 70 percent of Americans aren’t passionate about their work and are desperately longing for meaning and purpose. They’re sick of “average” and know there’s something better out there, but they just don’t know how to reach it. One basic principle - The Proximity Principle - can change everything you thought you knew about pursuing a career you love.

Phil Town is a very wealthy man, but he wasn’t always. In fact, he was living on a salary of $4,000 a year when some well-timed advice launched him down a highway of investing self-education that revealed what the true “rules” are and how to make them work in one’s favor. Chief among them, of course, is Rule #1: “Don’t lose money.” In this updated edition to the #1 national bestseller, you’ll learn more of Phil’s fresh, think-outside-the-box rules.

Few people know more about developing leaders than John C. Maxwell, the bestselling leadership author in history. In the last twenty-five years, he has grown from equipping a handful of leaders in one organization to developing millions of business, government, and non-profit leaders in every country around the world. In The Ultimate Guide to Developing Leaders, Maxwell teaches everything leaders need to know about how to develop leaders in their team or organization.

What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.

Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don't have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors.

In this updated and expanded edition of Human + Machine—including a new chapter on gen AI—Daugherty and Wilson show that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization, whether related to breakthrough innovation, everyday customer service, or personal productivity habits. As humans and smart machines collaborate ever more closely, work processes become more fluid and adaptive, enabling companies to change them on the fly—or completely reimagine them.

Legendary 17th century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s exposition of sword fighting, strategy and Zen philosophy. Required reading for any martial artist, business person or student of strategy. Includes the one hour Zen inspired soundtrack The Mysterious Sound of Wind in the Bamboo. Performed on authentic Japanese instruments.

To make these big moves happen for your company, you’re going to have to break through inertia, gamesmanship, and risk aversion. You’re going to have to mitigate human biases and manage group dynamics. Eight practical shifts can help you do this, and unlock bigger, bolder, better strategies. This is not another by-the-book approach to strategy. It’s not another trudge through frameworks or small-scale case studies promising a secret formula for success. It’s an irreverent, fact-driven, and humorous take on the real world of strategic decision making.

Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world’s most influential company, a brand that likely touches your life every day. As a student of leadership and communication, he learned to elevate the way Amazonians write, collaborate, innovate, pitch, and present. He created a scalable model that grew from a small team in a Seattle garage to one of the world’s largest employers. The Bezos Blueprint by Carmine Gallo reveals the communication strategies that Jeff Bezos pioneered to fuel Amazon’s astonishing growth.

Is your healthcare organization spending too much time on strategy—with too little to show for it? If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones for healthcare professionals to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.

Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja.