Harvard Business Review - HBRs 10 Must Reads 2023

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 2021

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 Boards

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Business Model Innovation

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Career Resilience

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Change Management (Volumes )

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Collaboration

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Communication (Volumes )

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Creativity

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Diversity

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Start-Ups

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Innovation

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership (Volumes )

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership for Healthcare

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons from Sports

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Lifelong Learning

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing in a Downturn, Expanded Edition

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Volumes )

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing Risk

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself (Volumes )

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 Organizational Resilience

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Platforms and Ecosystems

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Public Speaking and Presenting

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 (Volumes )

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

Editors Note

When our editorial team metsome members on-screen, and some gathered around a conference tableto discuss the past years issues of Harvard Business Review, we were still adjusting to what we could only assume was the new normal. During the past few years many organizations were in reactive mode, shifting how they worked as the changing environmentand the Covid-19 pandemicdictated, for reasons of safety or out of a sense of urgency. But now leaders, managers, and individuals alike have an opportunity to define a different path, not by reacting to the present but by creating a new future. The 11 articles weve selected for this volume reflect that.

Organizations are experimenting with and adopting flexible work practices that increase employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction, and reassessing their strategies to create greater value for customers, employees, and suppliers. In this volume we see that employees want to get up to speed faster in new roles, not just for their own sake but for the betterment of their organizations and networks. We look across geographic borders to learn how new technologies can create better customer experiences. We reevaluate two established practicesthe Net Promoter System and unconscious bias trainingto make them applicable in a more purposeful and equitable future. And as pressure grows to fight greenhouse gas emissions and create sustainableand efficientsupply chains, we spotlight new accounting practices to hold corporations to high standards and rethink product life cycles.

We start with The Future of Flexibility at Work, which asks, What does flexibility at work look like in practice? Most organizations approach it in one of two ways: as an ad hoc work-life accommodation available on request, or as giving people permission to get their work done on their own scheduleas long as theyre available 24/7 to answer emails or put out fires. Neither approach is sustainable over the long term. Ellen Ernst Kossek, Patricia Gettings, and Kaumudi Misra, researchers who have been studying workplace flexibility for years, advocate an approach to more equally balance employer and employee needs. In this article they outline the tenets that organizations should follow as they develop their own flexible programs and policies.

At any given time your company is focused on more than a handful of strategies at once marketing, social, and global, among many othersbut companies have little to show for an uptick in initiatives. In Eliminate Strategic Overload, Felix Oberholzer-Gee argues that managers face an attractive, back-to-basics opportunity. He explains that a strategic initiative is worthwhile only if it creates value for customers, employees, or suppliers. And as companies increase the total amount of value created, they position themselves for enduring financial success. Oberholzer-Gee offers advice on how to select fewer initiatives with greater impact so that companies can make their strategies more powerful.

One area that often derails strategy execution is innovation. In Drive Innovation with Better Decision-Making, Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swan declare that todays discovery-driven innovation processes are an outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making. Those processes involve an unprecedented number of choices, leading to slow decisions that are informed by obsolete information and narrow perspectives. Drawing on the transformation at Pfizers Global Clinical Supply, which went on to play a critical role in supporting the rapid development of the pharma giants Covid-19 vaccine, the authors explain how organizations can apply agile and lean principles to decision-making to make rapid experimentation pay off.

Becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive has become a common goal in organizations, and to live up to that objective, many companies have turned to unconscious bias (UB) training. But according to research by Francesca Gino and Katherine Coffman, most UB training is ineffective. To get results, it must teach attendees to manage their biases, practice new behaviors, and track their progress. Whats more, proper training entails a long journey and structural organizational changes. In Unconscious Bias Training That Works, Gino and Coffman use examples from Microsoft and Starbucks to offer advice on implementing a rigorous UB program that will help employees overcome denial and act on their awareness, develop the empathy that combats bias, diversify their networks, and commit to improvement.

Fewer than 40% of companies that invest in AI see gains from it, usually owing to one or more of these errors: They ask the wrong questions, leading AI to solve the wrong problem. They assume that all prediction mistakes are equivalent, not seeing the difference between the value of being right and the costs of being wrong. Or they stick with outdated practices and dont leverage AIs ability to make far more frequent and granular decisions. In Why You Arent Getting More from Your Marketing AI, Eva Ascarza, Michael Ross, and Bruce G. S. Hardie suggest ways for marketers and data science teams to communicate better among themselves and to avoid those pitfalls, getting much higher returns on their AI efforts.