Offers you the best practices and ideas for creating and delivering new products and services. This collection of "HBR" articles can help you: decide which ideas are worth pursuing; adapt offerings from the developing world to wealthy markets; plan all-new ventures by testing and tweaking; and make inexpensive products on a vast scale.
NEW from the bestselling HBR’s 10 Must Reads series. To innovate profitably, you need more than just creativity. Do you have what it takes? If you read nothing else on inspiring and executing innovation, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you innovate effectively. Leading experts such as Clayton Christensen, Peter Drucker, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter provide the insights and advice you need to: • Decide which ideas are worth pursuing • Innovate through the front lines—not just from the top • Adapt innovations from the developing world to wealthier markets • Tweak new ventures along the way using discovery-driven planning • Tailor your efforts to meet customers’ most pressing needs • Avoid classic pitfalls such as stifling innovation with rigid processes Looking for more Must Read articles from Harvard Business Review? Check out these titles in the popular series: HBR’s 10 Must Reads: The Essentials HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Communication HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Collaboration HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Teams
If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger. By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking, creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions including: What are the causal relationships at work here? and What are the implied trade-offs? Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.
Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50 Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.
In their first book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, the authors provided a better model for executing disruptive innovation. They laid out a three-part plan for launching high-risk/high-reward innovation efforts: (1) borrow assets from the existing firms, (2) unlearn and unload certain processes and systems that do not serve the new entity, and (3) learn and build all new capabilities and skills. In their study of the Ten Rules in action, Govindarajan and Trimble observed many other kinds of innovation that were less risky but still critical to the company's ongoing success. In case after case, senior executives expected leaders of innovation initiatives to grapple with forces of resistence, namely incentives to keep doing what the company has always done--rather than develop new competence and knowledge. But where to begin? In this book, the authors argue that the most successful everyday innovators break down the process into six manageable steps: 1. Divide the labor 2. Assemble the dedicated team 3. Manage the partnership 4. Formalize the experiment 5. Break down the hypothesis 6. Seek the truth. The Other Side of Innovation codifies this staged approach in a variety of contexts. It delivers a proven step-by-step guide to executing (launching, managing, and measuring) more modest but necessary innovations within large firms without disrupting their bread-and-butter business.
In the spring of 2010, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply his wisdom to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life, which led to this now-classic article. Although Christensen’s thinking is rooted in his deep religious faith, these are strategies anyone can use. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.
The bestselling book, now with a new preface by the authors At once a bold defense and reimagining of capitalism and a blueprint for a new system for doing business, Conscious Capitalism is for anyone hoping to build a more cooperative, humane, and positive future. Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue that both business and capitalism are inherently good, and they use some of today’s best-known and most successful companies to illustrate their point. From Southwest Airlines, UPS, and Tata to Costco, Panera, Google, the Container Store, and Amazon, today’s organizations are creating value for all stakeholders—including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment. Read this book and you’ll better understand how four specific tenets—higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management—can help build strong businesses, move capitalism closer to its highest potential, and foster a more positive environment for all of us.
Rethink how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value--or risk becoming irrelevant. If you read nothing else on business model innovation, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reach new customers and stay ahead of your competitors by reinventing your business model. This book will inspire you to: Assess whether your core business model is going strong or running out of gas Fend off free and discount entrants to your market Reinvigorate growth by adding a second business model Adopt the practices of lean startups Develop a platform around your key products Make business model innovation an ongoing discipline within your organization This collection of articles includes "Why Business Models Matter," by Joan Magretta; "Reinventing Your Business Model," by Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann; "When Your Business Model Is in Trouble," an interview with Rita Gunther McGrath by Sarah Cliffe; "Four Paths to Business Model Innovation," by Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine; "The Transformative Business Model," by Stelios Kavadias, Kostas Ladas, and Christoph Loch; "Competing Against Free," by David J. Bryce, Jeffrey H. Dyer, and Nile W. Hatch; "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything," by Steve Blank; "Finding the Platform in Your Product," by Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth J. Altman; "Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy," by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary; "When One Business Model Isn't Enough," by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Jorge Tarzijan; and "Reaching the Rich World's Poorest Consumers," by Muhammad Yunus, Frederic Dalsace, David Menasce, and Benedicte Faivre-Tavignot. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.
What really sets the best managers above the rest? It’s their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives—consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in The Progress Principle, seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees’ inner work lives. But it’s forward momentum in meaningful work—progress—that creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day. The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: (1) catalysts—events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy—and (2) nourishers—interpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality. Brimming with honest examples from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people’s performance.
Timeless advice from the pages of Harvard Business Review You want the most important ideas on management all in one place. Now you can have them--in a set of HBR's 10 Must Reads. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on strategy, change leadership, managing people, and managing yourself and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your performance. This six-title collection includes only the most critical articles from the world's top management experts, curated from Harvard Business Review's rich archives. We've done the work of selecting them so you won’t have to. These books are packed with enduring advice from the best minds in business such as: Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, Peter Drucker, John Kotter, Daniel Goleman, Jim Collins, Ted Levitt, Gary Hamel, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne and much more. The HBR's 10 Must Reads Boxed Set includes: HBR's 10 Must Reads: The Essentials This book brings together the best thinking from management's most influential experts. Once you've read these definitive articles, you can delve into each core topic the series explores: managing yourself, managing people, leadership, strategy, and change management. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself The path to your professional success starts with a critical look in the mirror. Here's how to stay engaged throughout your 50-year work life, tap into your deepest values, solicit candid feedback, replenish your physical and mental energy, and rebound from tough times. This book includes the bonus article "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People Managing your employees is fraught with challenges, even if you're a seasoned pro. Boost their performance by tailoring your management styles to their temperaments, motivating with responsibility rather than money, and fostering trust through solicited input. This book includes the bonus article "Leadership That Gets Results," by Daniel Goleman. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership Are you an extraordinary leader--or just a good manager? Learn how to motivate others to excel, build your team's confidence, set direction, encourage smart risk-taking, credit others for your success, and draw strength from adversity. This book includes the bonus article "What Makes an Effective Executive," by Peter F. Drucker. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy Is your company spending too much time on strategy development, with too little to show for it? Discover what it takes to distinguish your company from rivals, clarify what it will (and won't) do, create blue oceans of uncontested market space, and make your priorities explicit so employees can realize your vision. This book includes the bonus article "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management Most companies' change initiatives fail--but yours can beat the odds. Learn how to overcome addiction to the status quo, establish a sense of urgency, mobilize commitment and resources, silence naysayers, minimize the pain of change, and motivate change even when business is good. This book includes the bonus article 'Leading Change," by John P. Kotter. About the HBR's 10 Must Reads Series: HBR's 10 Must Reads series is the definitive collection of ideas and best practices for aspiring and experienced leaders alike. These books offer essential reading selected from the pages of Harvard Business Review on topics critical to the success of every manager. Each book is packed with advice and inspiration from the best minds in business.
