Harvard Business Review - 5 Years of Must Reads From HBR: 2020 Edition (5 Books)

Contents

Harvard Business Review Press
Boston, Massachusetts

Copyright 2016 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to , or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

First eBook Edition: December 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63369-080-6
eISBN: 978-1-63369-081-3

As our editorial team read through the past years worth of Harvard Business Review to select the articles for this volume, perhaps the most interesting part of the proceeding was seeing how a group of seemingly disparate articles actually overlapped and wove together. Of course some themes were the result of deliberate effort; but accidental commonalities and contrasts perhaps even better represent the interests of our authors and our readers. This year we saw organizations focused on their physical spaces, and weve included two articles from our issue on workplaces. But one of them, tellingly, also addresses the issue of privacy in the virtual world, which dovetails with questions raised by the growing internet of things and its attendant business models. That interplay of digital and physical worlds (not to mention innovative business models) is also embodied in the rise of 3-D printing. Among the other themes that emerged were better collaboration through the breaking down of physical walls and organizational silos (But how much of this openness is too much?); the balance between intuition and rationality; and the (im)balance between corporate profit and human prosperity.

This volume begins by focusing on the critical (if more prosaic) process of assessing performance. In Reinventing Performance Management, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall describe how Deloitte overhauled its performance management system. In a public survey the company conducted, more than half the executive participants indicated that their current method of evaluating employees work neither drove employee engagement nor encouraged high performance: It depended too much on past results and offered no practical look into the future. In the new model, rather than asking for their impressions of a particular individual, the performance system asks managers what they would do with the employee to recognize, capture, and fuel performancebringing agility and constant learning into the center of the organizations culture.

In The Transparency Trap, the Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein takes up the question of performance as well, examining how opennessboth in a physical context and through the use of technology and social platformscan affect a teams creativity and productivity. Companies are increasingly using open environments to encourage idea sharing and accountability. But Bernsteins research shows that too much transparency can stifle experimental behaviors that might benefit the enterprise. Privacy, he finds, is just as essential as transparency for high performance. Bernstein goes on to suggest four types of boundaries to establish zones for private work within transparent organizations.

Shifting away from the individual worker, our next piece focuses on the corporation and how its performance affects the U.S. economy. In his McKinsey Awardwinning call to action, Profits Without Prosperity, William Lazonick, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a codirector of its Center for Industrial Competitiveness, studies the reasons behind the increasing underpaymentand unemploymentof American workers, despite a booming stock market. Lazonick corrals remarkable research to suggest that executives are using massive stock buybacks to manipulate share prices and boost their own allocation of corporate profits. Rather than contribute further to executive compensation, he argues, companies should reinvest profits in their people for future growth.

On the level of individual managerial skills, Outsmart Your Own Biases describes some of the toughest traps leaders fall into as they make hard choicestunnel vision about future scenarios, about objectives, and about optionsand encourages them to broaden their perspective. A variety of methods, from premortems to joint evaluations, can help us overcome the habits that prevent good decision making and move beyond gut instinct to deliberate reasoning.

Another prominent theme this year was how technological advances are changing the way businesses compete. One such advance is 3-D printing. Many have already discussed the changes this technology could potentially bring to the manufacturing sector. But as the Dartmouth strategy professor Richard DAveni asserts in The 3-D Printing Revolution, industrial 3-D printing is no longer just about prototyping or creating trinkets and toys. This transformative technology is gaining momentum, and any companies that sell products will be affectedfrom their internal processes to the competitors they face. DAvenis forward-looking piece considers the changing landscape and explains how to adjust your companys strategy to redesign customer offerings, optimize operations, and evolve your business model to fit this new context.

But even when the strategy is right, whos to say it will be implemented properly? The next piece in our volume views that perennial struggle through a practical lens. In Why Strategy Execution Unravelsand What to Do About It, Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull bust five myths about strategy executionincluding what it looks like, who drives it, and why it often fails. (Hint: Silos are part of the problem.) By understanding whats behind successful execution, leaders can seize opportunities that align with their strategy, pinpoint where efforts are stalling, and translate their ideas into results.

We turn again to individual development with The Authenticity Paradox. Authenticity is quickly becoming a key leadership trait, says the INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra. But for many, remaining authentic is an excuse for sticking with whats comfortablewhich means leaders dont take the risks necessary for growth and development. Instead they should experiment: By trying out a new role or temporarily feeling fake, they can develop a personal style that feels right to them and suits the organizations changing needs as well.

Experimentation isnt just for leaders; its a core component of the innovation process for organizations. But many companies skip rigorous experimentation in favor of intuition, leading (again) to bad decisions. In The Discipline of Business Experimentation, the authors use examples from Kohls, Wawa, and Petco to show how companies can effectively test-drive innovation efforts to improve their operations and products. What makes this article important is not the specific questions it asks (although those are valuable) but that it draws from the authors extensive research and experience to give readers a full understanding of how to try out ideas in the market while minimizing risk.