Business strategy isn’t just a plan, it’s a framework for success.
Whether you’re building, innovating, or executing, HBR On Strategy is your destination for insights and inspiration from the world’s top experts on business strategy and innovation.
Every Wednesday, the editors at the Harvard Business Review hand-picked case studies and conversations from across HBR podcasts, videos, articles, and beyond to help you unlock new ways of doing business.
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Direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses play an outsize role in disrupting industries. Think of eyeglasses and Warby Parker or mattresses and Casper. But after that initial disruption, industry competitors often adapt. Harvard Business School professor Len Schlesinger and Matt Higgins , the co-founder and CEO of private investment firm RSE Ventures, studied the teledentistry company SmileDirectClub and wrote a case study about its challenges as it scaled. In this episode, they break down how SmileDi...
Who are your primary customers? Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons says that’s the most important question of your strategy – and the hardest to answer. Simons says that many firms make the mistake of defining their customers too broadly. To succeed, you have to target your resources at the people who really drive the most value. “Resources are limited…and the more people we call customers, the more we’re diffusing resources and attention over all kinds of different entities and con...
“That mental model of what an organization is, it’s about power, it’s about control, it’s about clarifying decision rights,” he tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch . “I think that mental model of an organization as a control system has basically got to shift.” In this episode, Ulrich outlines three key capabilities that these newer companies have developed: monitoring the marketplace, sharing that intelligence company-wide, and innovation. Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, business...
Wolters Kluwer started in the 1830s as a publishing house. But the Dutch multinational corporation has grown into a global, information services company and now earns more than 90 percent of its revenue from digital products. “We had to move quickly and we had to do a certain set of strategic things, or the company might not survive,” chair and CEO Nancy McKinstry tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch . In this episode, McKinstry discusses how she successfully shifted the company’s strategy to focus...
OXXO was the dominant convenience store chain in Mexico—until its chief rival doubled in size almost overnight. In this episode, Harvard Business School professor Tatiana Sandino explains how OXXO CEO Eduardo Padilla responded to this strategic challenge. Instead of opening more stores as quickly as possible, he focused on improving the company’s culture and operations. The company implemented management systems across its locations and then used those systems to gain new economies of scale. Key...
To many people, strategy is a total mystery. But Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee says strategy doesn’t have to be complicated if you focus on creating value. “Strategy’s simple. It’s a plan to create value,” he explains. “The way a company plans to create that value, that’s the strategy of the company.” In this episode, you’ll learn how to focus on two key value drivers: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. You’ll also learn where profits come in and how to vis...
Major strategy shifts need time to play out. Customers have their habits, employees are used to doing things a certain way, and fine-tuning a plan takes time in the market. But what if you don’t have the luxury of waiting years to know if your strategy really is working? “The question…is whether the strategy is flawed or whether we just haven’t given it enough time to take hold with customers,” says Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jill Avery , who wrote the fictionalized case study discu...
As technology changes everything, how can existing businesses create innovation and change from within? Harvard Business School fellow Karen Mills studied how one 200-year-old regional bank in the U.S. used intrapreneurship to develop a completely automated small business lending product to compete with online lenders. Mills breaks down the case study of Eastern Bank’s strategy for innovation—from its early partnership with a fintech entrepreneur to its eventual spinoff of Numerated, the online ...
When was the last time you practiced your critical thinking skills? Helen Lee Bouygues , an expert in business transformation, says many business problems are really about simple errors in critical thinking. “People believe that critical thinking is something that we do every day and it comes very natural,” she tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch . “But in reality, critical thinking is not only extremely important for success in life, but it’s also something that needs to be learned and practiced....
Innovation is a challenge for large incumbent companies. Their long-term success depends on exploring new innovations that stretch the organization beyond its core businesses. But these new opportunities must draw on the company’s existing strengths and leadership position. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Derek van Bever and former lecturer Stephen P. Kaufman studied global brewing company Molson Coors, as it prepared to enter the cannabis beverages business in 2019. “The unknowns were u...
Free products and services are everywhere – from buy-one-get-one-free offers to free office software like Canva and Google docs, and, yes, this very podcast. If your revenue strategy does not include give aways, these free goods and services can put extra pressure on your business. How can you compete? Brigham Young University professor of strategy David Bryce studied give-away strategies across 26 different product markets. He says that companies make two key mistakes when they try to compete w...
In the start-up world, when is it possible to grow too fast? Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann and entrepreneur Lindsey Hyde discuss what led to the failure of Hyde’s pet care start-up, Baroo. “Initially, we had set the expectation that this would be a slow growth company,” Hyde tells Cold Call host Brian Kenny . “I think a lot of it is about how the founder manages their own expectations and their own vision for the company.” They also discuss why it’s important for start-ups to t...
What role does timing play in strategic thinking — for an organization’s growth, but also for you and your career? New York Times best-selling author Daniel Pink says it can play a big part in how successful your strategy will be. “I think people underestimate timing,” he tells Dear HBR hosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn . “We’re very intentional in our lives about what we do. But when it comes to when we do things, we don’t take it seriously enough. We’re not intentional. And it has a material e...
To plan for the future, businesses usually look to their past. But what if your company is in uncharted territory? Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath has a different idea: Design experiments to test your assumptions using “discovery-driven growth.” “The measurement and rewards systems in most companies are antithetical to the kinds of things you need to do to learn. They place a premium on being right. They place a premium on meeting your goals. They place a premium on having lots o...
Since Amazon started as an online retailer in 1994, it has expanded into streaming, cloud computing, content creation, and even groceries. But traditional business strategy tells us that the key to success is focus. So, why does Amazon work? “I think in Amazon’s case, everything is very tightly connected. If you remove one part, the whole becomes less,” says Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta . “That’s the key question: are the pieces fitting together nicely, or they just happen to be...
Imagine you’re trying to solve a problem, but none of your options are all that great. You could just walk away. Or you could try to take the best from two inadequate options to reach a solution. “Integrative thinking is this idea of leveraging the tension of opposing ideas to create a great answer that we can achieve consensus around,” says Jennifer Riel , who teaches at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. She gives examples from the film industry to show how CEOs have put the process t...
How can global businesses best account for local conditions as they grow? Harvard Business School assistant professor Alexander MacKay studied Uber’s strategies as it entered new markets around the world. He wanted to understand how global businesses can scale fast and survive for the long run. He tells Cold Call host Brian Kenny that Uber adjusted its strategies to meet the specific challenges posed by competitors and regulators in six global markets: New York, Bogota, Delhi, Shanghai, Accra, a...
The theory of disruptive innovation, first introduced in a 1995 HBR article , endures as a way to make a complicated and expensive product simpler and more affordable. Think about how Netflix disrupted video rental stores with video streaming. But the originator of disruptive innovation, the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen , argued that disruptive innovation isn’t just about simplifying technology — it also requires a new business model to deliver the solution cost-eff...
Quitting is often associated with failure — whether it’s a project, job, career, or company. But Annie Duke , an author and former professional poker champion, argues that quitting can sometimes be a strategic success. “Grit is great. Sometimes you see something that other people don’t see,” she tells IdeaCast host Alison Beard . “But sometimes when the world is yelling at you to stop and you ignore them, that’s no longer a virtue. Then it’s folly.” Key episode topics include: risk management, d...
Blue ocean strategy is a landmark business idea – first introduced in 2004 in an HBR article . But its co-creator Renée Mauborgne , a professor of strategy and management at INSEAD, tells IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichael that it’s not a guaranteed win. “What we’ve found is that managers’ existing mental models, the assumptions about what works in competing in existing industry space — they often apply to their efforts to create new markets. And that creates the failure,” Mauborgne explains. ...
In an era driven by network effects, smaller players struggle to compete against bigger platforms. The trick to gaining ground on a much larger rival, says Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee , is choosing a strategy that can’t easily be imitated. A good example is TaoBao’s strategy for displacing eBay in China. Back in 2007, eBay was the world’s largest consumer marketplace, and TaoBao was an underdog with bold new ideas about how to build trust with customers who were reluct...
Daniel Lamarre, Executive Vice Chairman of Cirque du Soleil, discusses how creativity remains central to their strategy, highlighting the importance of fostering an innovative environment and meticulously analyzing audience feedback. He shares how Cirque navigated the challenges of global expansion and the COVID-19 crisis, stressing that strong brand values and a commitment to evolution are crucial for any organization's long-term success.
From corporate social responsibility to ESG, an increasing number of for-profit organizations are pursuing positive social impact. But to “do well by doing good,” Jacob Harold (cofounder of Candid; former CEO of Guidestar) tells HBR IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch that you need a good strategy. Otherwise, things can go very wrong. “We have a lot of work to do to figure out: what does it mean to do good in this moment?” Harold cautions. Key topics include: business values, ethics, storytelling, socia...
Planning is comforting but it’s a terrible way to make strategy, says Roger Martin , former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In contrast, setting strategy should push your organization outside its comfort zone – if you’re doing it right. “Plans typically have to do with the resources you’re going to spend. Those are more comfortable because you control them,” Martin explains. “A strategy, on the other hand, specifies a competitive outcome that you wish to ach...
Getting your sales team on board with your strategy shouldn’t be an afterthought, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes argues. After all, the engine of many businesses is a strong sales core. But aligning your strategy with sales isn’t just about communicating your ideas effectively. You have to hire carefully and use smart incentives to guide selling behavior. “The issue is aligning actual selling behaviors. And it is about behaviors. Business is a performance art. It’s not about go...
Subscriptions aren’t new – the business model dates back to trade guilds in the 12th century. But Robbie Kellman Baxter , an expert on the business of subscriptions, says with new billing platforms, remote customer support, and digital services, it’s worth considering how to make subscription business models work for your company. “Predictable revenue is great. So you can manage the money you have and you can plan with confidence for your future,” she tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch . “Most of...
With rapidly changing markets and emerging technologies, setting the right price is harder than ever. But pricing strategy consultant Rafi Mohammed tells HBR IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichael that it’s possible to make better decisions about pricing if you understand how pricing and demand interact in your business and you have good market research to guide you. “The front line really has a lot of intuition on what customers are willing to pay. [They have] a lot of market research that they c...
