Book review: HBR’s 10 Must Reads: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

HBR’s 10 Must Reads: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review 2023 reveals the collected ideas and best practices for experienced and aspiring management leaders, with the specific focus on Harvard Business Review publications.

The editors of this book state that organizations were in the reactive mode in the recent past due to the Covid-19 pandemic, on the premise of a sense of urgency, and currently leaders are setting out on a different paradigm or new future than reacting to situations. At the same time, many organizations are still experimenting with flexible or hybrid practices at work for enhancing employee engagement, job satisfaction and retention. The editors stress upon the established practices of the net promoter system (NPS) and unconscious bias training for an equitable and more purposeful future, new accounting practices for high standards for corporations, when the globe is pressurized with greenhouse gas emissions and efficient supply chains to create sustainability in sync with the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030 (SDG, 2030).

The first article in this book, The Future of Flexibility at Work, by Ellen Ernst Kossek, Patricia Gettings and Kaumudi Misra focuses on flexibility at work. The authors of this article are researchers who study how organizations manage flexibility. Having researched among many leaders in organizations, the authors of this article found variation in the responses related to flexibility questions and opine that flexibility is still vague, though its implementation can differ from department to department and organization to organization. A few organizations approach flexibility as providing employees permission to get work done, or as an ad hoc work-life accommodation that is available upon request. In this arrangement the highlights are to make flexibility available to all the employees, emphasizing the priority for clear structures and policies, empowering employees to create and manage their own flexibilities, metrics for outcomes and equity and also the impact of flexibility on your global workforce. The authors also mention that this kind of flexible culture, and fair policy needs a team charter designing location-based pay equity for fully remote workers who perform the same jobs regardless of where they are located in urban or rural areas, and a flexibility primer with different types of flexibility your organization has planned in terms of policy type, policy examples, bundling options, employee benefits and employer benefits may help bundle flexibility considerations. Thus, a learning curve is imperative for implementing flexibility and leadership matters.

Having set the context for a flexible work model, Article 2, in this book, by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, juxtaposes the potential of eliminating the strategic overload. The discussion starts with the increasingly sophisticated and complicated alignment of strategy today, for organizations, considering the challenges of rapid technological changes, global competition and challenges and ever-evolving consumer base and its challenges. The author sheds light on the simple principles for the elements of value-based strategy, by focusing on how companies must create value for customers by raising their willingness to pay (WTP). The examples cited are Apple and how it creates beautiful products that are easy to use and gets to charge a premium price by raising the WTP, Gucci and its products confers to social status and thus increases the WTP. While WTP is the walk-away point for the customer, the most willing price a customer is ready to pay, and one cent more than the WTP, a customer walks away. Nonetheless, for the intense competitive pressures and challenges, the companies respond by asking more and more of their employees. The approach of leaders can address this problem through simplifying the strategy, and by also taking care to select a few initiatives that can yield a higher impact. Thus, a more value-based strategy enables a holistic view of the activities happening in their organization and can define processes that can be aligned for value creation for customers by raising the WTP, value creation for employees through making work more appealing and value creation for suppliers through reducing the operating costs.

The third article, by Linda, Hill, Emily and Taran, recommends to drive innovation with better decision-making. Many organizations adopt agile and lean methodologies but struggle to innovate since their decision-making approach is inefficient and outdated. The authors worked for about two decades across the globe with innovative companies to learn the key challenges they faced and how they were able to address them. It was found that strengthening and speeding up the creative decision processes by businesses through diverse perspectives, clarity in decision rights, matching decisions to learning and encouraging strong conflict to better the service experience for the end customer is the only way to pay off fast experimentation.

Gino and Coffman in the fourth article focus on unconscious bias training that works in organizations that strive for diversity, equity and inclusivity. They recommend that conventional training to reduce unconscious bias, to convert the culture and environment, to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive isn’t that successful, due to the fact that such kind of conventional training helps only in raising the employee awareness of race or gender biases, and kind of gives a colour that such biases are unavoidable since it is involuntary and widespread. They recommend that organizations must raise awareness but also go beyond that to teach employees to manage those biases and to change behaviour, and also they should collect data on these parameters of diversity, equity and inclusion, employee perceptions, training effectiveness and also introduce behavioural nudges and rethink policies.

The fifth article on why you aren’t getting more from your marketing AI, by Ascarza, Ross and Hardie, explains how with the AI predictions, marketers stormed the at-risk customers with promotions to lure them to stay, and yet why many customers left? The authors narrate that the marketing managers made a fundamental error in asking the algorithm the wrong questions and AI is not to be blamed, since the predictions of AI were good. The fundamental errors made by the managers were alignment failure (to ask the right question), asymmetry failure (to recognize the difference between the value of being right and the costs of being wrong), aggregation failure (to leverage granular predictions) and in addition to that communication and collaboration breakdowns. The authors developed a three-part framework to help on open lines of communication between marketing and data science teams. This framework, authors claim to have applied at several companies to let teams combine their expertise and create a feedback loop between AI predictions and Business.

Reichheld, Darnell and Burns, in the sixth article, Net Promoter 3.0, lead the reader into narrating how the widely popular NPS is misused and misunderstood. The reason they affirm is that firms have corrupted a valuable metric such as the Net Promoter Score, targeting it and reporting unaudited vanity statistics that terribly damaged the credibility and usability of NPS. The authors recommend a solution wherein an accounting-based counterpart for the NPS and earned growth rate provide firms with a clear, data-driven connection between the consumer success, repeat and expanded purchases, recommendations, a positive company culture and business results.

How Chinese Retailers are reinventing the customer journey is revealed by Greeven, Xin and Yip in the seventh article, by highlighting the fact that China is a large and fast-growing retail market and highly digitized. The global challenge as affirmed by the authors is that European and US retailers are far behind China in digital retail. China’s fast-growing retail markets are not only highly digitized but also take advantage of Alibaba, Tencent and the like. The solution for this status recommended by the authors is, to catch up with China, the Western retailers can take home five lessons from China, to create single entry points, to embed digital evaluation in the customer journey, not to think of sales as isolated events, to rethink the logistical fundamentals and to always stay close to the customer.

The eighth article in this book, by Atasu, Dumas and Van Wassenhove, is about the circular business model, or the circular economy of business supply chains that recover or recycle the resources used to create their products. This shrinks the environmental footprints, trims the operational waste and use expensive resources more efficiently. But, the manufacturing companies who get attracted by the circular business models and their promises of recovered, reused or recycled products struggle to make them sustainable. The authors see the problem in which managers too often select circularity strategies that may not align with their resources, constraints or capabilities. The authors recommend that the three basic strategies for creating a circular business model are retaining product ownership, life extension and design for recycling.

Cross, Pryor and Sylvester in the ninth article focus on how to succeed quickly in a new role, whether a promotion or a new move to a new organization or a change in your existing job. They reinstate that employees who transition into new roles, irrespective of whether within their organizations or other ones, often have a hard time doing so successfully and often they underperform. The authors confirm that an analysis of such transitioning employees in 100 diverse organizations revealed that those employees who get up to speed and excel fast are those who know how to use internal networks effectively. The strategies followed by these fast movers are rapid surge into a broad network, energising new connections, identifying options to add value and who can help them fill skill gaps, using the network to expand their impact and prioritising relationships that enhance their workplace experience.

The tenth article by Kaplan and Ramanna focuses on climate change and accountability. The authors describe how the climate change is an existential threat to life and how the progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is at a slow pace. The greenhouse gas protocol they affirm that is used by more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies have accounting problems resulting in misleading scenarios. They recommend that the solution for this is an alternative comprehensive system, based on established accounting practices which in turn helps in measuring and transferring greenhouse gas emissions along the value chain of an entire corporation. The authors further explained their e-liability system and its considerable benefits to society at large.

A bonus article on this book, by Grant, explains about persuading the unpersuadable. The author narrates how Steve Jobs could transform our lives based on his convictions, and his success and his greatness is due to the fact that he is able to bend the world to his vision, and had a great team who helped him do so. It is interesting to read that how the author narrates that personality traits are not necessarily consistent from one situation to the next. This article focuses on how the team was successful to persuade the initial hesitance of Steve Jobs to make a phone. The authors narrate how to melt down the overconfidence or arrogance of know-it-all people.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads is a brilliant compilation of articles to help scale the definitive management ideas beyond a peripheral description. The authors of the article and the editors have carefully and successfully selected the pages from Harvard Business Review on topics critical to leaders or managers and nuanced the details of best practices. This book definitely takes the readers through familiar and unfamiliar terrains for an enhanced understanding of the challenges faced by any organization and its leaders or employees to steer through the evolving global market.