Harvard Business Review - HBRs 10 Must Reads 2020: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review (with bonus article How CEOs Manage Time by Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria)

HBRs 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.

Titles include:

HBRs 10 Must Reads 2015

HBRs 10 Must Reads 2016

HBRs 10 Must Reads 2017

HBRs 10 Must Reads 2018

HBRs 10 Must Reads 2019

HBRs 10 Must Reads 2020

HBRs 10 Must Reads for CEOs

HBRs 10 Must Reads for New Managers

HBRs 10 Must Reads on AI, Analytics, and the New Machine Age

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Business Model Innovation

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Change Management

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Collaboration

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Communication

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Diversity

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Startups

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Innovation

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership for Healthcare

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons from Sports

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing People

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Mental Toughness

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Negotiation

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Nonprofits and the Social Sectors

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Reinventing HR

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Sales

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Strategy

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Strategy for Healthcare

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Teams

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Women and Leadership

HBRs 10 Must Reads: The Essentials

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First eBook Edition: Oct 2019

ISBN: 978-1-63369-812-3
eISBN: 978-1-63369-813-0

Editors Note

Each year as we pare twelve months worth of HBR articles down to a handful of the very best, certain trends and themes emerge. Sometimes the economy, politics, and technology loom largest. Other times new twists on the basics of leadership, strategy, and marketing dominate. This years choices are united not by a trend or a theme but by a feeling: the surprise we experience when some long-held truth is gently challenged and is revealed to be different or more complex than we had thought. Educators and psychologists know that novelty reinforces understanding and learning. Indeed, the sense of surprise that distinguishes the pieces in this collection makes them stay with us, tugging at loose threads in our minds, helping us see connections as we seek to improve our organizations and ourselves. It spurs us out of complacency and encourages the mindset needed to learn, grow, and innovate. Embrace that feeling while you read and as you and your business prepare for coming challenges.

Some professionals are trained to ask questions: Think of litigators, journalists, and doctors. But few executives regard questioning as a skill to be honed. Thats a missed opportunity, say Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John. Thoughtful inquiry and the conversational exchange of ideas can yield a kind of magic, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In , the authors describe several carefully researched techniques that will help you boost your learning, persuade others, and negotiate more effectively.

The traditional analytical tools of strategy may be well suited to understanding an existing business context, but theyre of little value when you need to reinvent your business. To generate a breakthrough strategy, Adam Brandenburger suggests building one with tools explicitly designed to foster creativity. details approaches for kindling a spark of intuition, making a connection between disparate ways of thinking, or taking a leap into the unexpected that can lead you to a game-changing way of doing business.

Women lack the desire and ability to negotiate; Women are more committed to family than men are. Statements like these is a clarion call for rejecting the script that encourages women to act more like men and instead fixing the things that undermine women and reinforce gender stereotypes.

Artificial intelligence is becoming good at many human jobsdiagnosing disease, translating languages, providing customer service. And its improving fast, raising reasonable fears that AI will ultimately replace human workers throughout the economy. Accenture technology leaders H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty argue that thats not the inevitable, or even the most likely, outcome. In , they show that AI has the most significant impactand companies see the biggest performance gainswhen people and smart machines work together, enhancing one anothers strengths. Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers, they say, will miss the full potential of AI.

Stitch Fix demonstrates human and machine collaboration in action. The company has a simple business model: It sends you clothing and accessories it thinks youll like; you keep the items you want and send the others back. But behind the curtain is a relentlessly data-driven organization built on the belief that a good person plus a good algorithm is better than either the best person or the best algorithm alone. In the challenges of raising capital for a clothing start-up in the male-dominated VC field.

Is the beginning of a new paradigm, or is it entrepreneurial heresy? HBRs most divisive article of the year details how entrepreneurs often run with the first plausible strategy they identify in their haste to get to market. As a result they lose out to second or even third movers with superior strategies. Having worked with and studied hundreds of start-ups over the past 20 years, Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern have developed a framework that helps founders take a practical, clarifying approach to the critical choices they face. The authors delineate four go-to-market strategies for entrepreneurs to consider as they move from idea to launch. Each option offers a distinct way for the venture to create and capture value.

Agile innovation teams are small, entrepreneurial groups designed to stay close to customers and adapt quickly to changing conditions. When implemented correctly, they almost always result in greater productivity, better morale, faster time to market, higher quality, and lower risk than traditional approaches can achieve. In , Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Andy Noble explore how your company can go from a handful of agile teams to hundreds. Making agile the dominant way you operate, they say, means committing all the way to the top: Leaders should adopt agile values, create a taxonomy of opportunities to set priorities, and break the journey of transformation into small steps.