You think you have a winning strategy. But do you?

Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy.

In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch.

Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as:

• What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete?
• When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage?
• How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units?
• How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies?

Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

As CEO, you set the vision, the strategy, and the tone of your organization.

You establish priorities, anticipate and address challenges, champion and lead change efforts, set people up for success, and manage risk. Though you may have a great senior executive team and a top-flight board, the success of your organization depends on your leadership.

If you read nothing else on being an effective chief executive, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you toggle between long- and short-term views, manage risk and innovation, and cultivate productive relationships with your staff and your board. This book will inspire you to:

• Navigate the changing global business environment
• Customize your company's strategy to the environment you're working in
• Attract, engage, and retain the best talent
• Anticipate and address legislative and regulatory issues
• Sharpen your awareness of the tactical and soft skills you need to lead
• Adopt a founder's mindset and build new offerings, move into new markets, and create next-generation solutions
• Manage and build relationships with your board--and your shareholders

This collection of articles includes "Your Strategy Needs a Strategy," by Martin Reeves, Claire Love, and Philipp Tillmanns; "Managing Your Innovation Portfolio," by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff; "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," by John P. Kotter; "Reinventing Your Business Model," by Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann; "Leadership Is a Conversation," by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind; "Strategic Intent," by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad; "When Growth Stalls," by Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever, and Seth Verry; "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution," by Gary L. Neilson, Karla L. Martin, and Elizabeth Powers; "The Focused Leader," by Daniel Goleman; "Managing Risks: A New Framework," by Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes; "21st-Century Talent Spotting," by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz; and "How CEOs Can Work with an Active Board," by Ken Banta and Stephen D. Garrow.

Roar Out of the Covid-19 Recession

You've weathered the shock, the lockdowns, and the slow crawl back. But with a new normal come new risks—and new opportunities. What must you and your business do now to come out of the downturn stronger and better positioned for the future?

Global Recession: Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you find possibilities amid the upheaval and reshape your business to seize advantage in the upswing.

Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind?

Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow.

You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

A guide for mining the imagination to find powerful new ways to succeed.

We need imagination now more than ever—to find new opportunities, rethink our businesses, and discover paths to growth. Yet too many companies have lost their ability to imagine. What is this mysterious capacity? How does imagination work? And how can organizations keep it alive and harness it in a systematic way?

The Imagination Machine answers these questions and more. Drawing on the experience and insights of CEOs across several industries, as well as lessons from neuroscience, computer science, psychology, and philosophy, Martin Reeves of Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute and Jack Fuller, an expert in neuroscience, provide a fascinating look into the mechanics of imagination and lay out a process for creating ideas and bringing them to life:

1. The Seduction: How to open yourself up to surprises
2. The Idea: How to generate new ideas
3. The Collision: How to rethink your idea based on real-world feedback
4. The Epidemic: How to spread an evolving idea to others
5. The New Ordinary: How to turn your novel idea into an accepted reality
6. The Encore: How to repeat the process—again and again.

Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of success. It's what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to transformation—especially during a crisis.

The Imagination Machine is the guide you need to demystify and operationalize this powerful human capacity, to inject new life into your company, and to head into unknown territory with the right tools at your disposal.

A business ecosystem may be defined as a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution for customers. Business ecosystems are high on the agenda of many business leaders. They are now highly prevalent, frequently disruptive, and all companies should add the required capabilities to their strategy toolbox.

Business Ecosystems is based on more than three years of research by the BCG Henderson Institute, their work with dozens of companies on their ecosystem strategies, and hundreds of conversations with academics, managers, investors, entrepreneurs, and government employees. Part I reviews the fundamentals of business ecosystems – definition, design, success factors, governance, strategies. Part II elaborates on special topics, such as trust and data, industry applications, and their potential for sustainability.

Ecosystems might not be a solution for all problems, but they are also not a transitory phenomenon. The field is evolving fast and as the success factors for creating, managing and participating in business ecosystems are increasingly accepted and understood, many established and emerging companies have the opportunity to put themselves in a position to unlock great innovation and value creation potential by engaging in ecosystem business models. This book will support business professionals and executives on this journey.

Leaders and their organizations do not operate in a vacuum but both influence and are influenced by the environment. Today's business organizations are fast moving, uncertain, politicized, sustainability challenged and technologically fluid. This business climate requires new approaches to leadership. Some leaders will rise to the occasion, while others will struggle to adapt.

New Leadership Imperatives explores the new challenges of leadership and discusses how leaders can help their organizations to successfully adapt to new conditions. Drawing on lessons from various fields—from military to sports to psychology and neuroscience—this book delves into the challenges leaders face, ranging from social polarization to geopolitical instability.

This book aims to guide leaders in making the right choices for their teams, their organizations, their stakeholders, and society as a whole.

The Covid-19 crisis caused massive disruptions to businesses around the world. Many were caught unprepared by the pandemic, putting some in danger of collapse. But not all were equally affected—some emerged from the crisis in a position of advantage. Research on corporate performance over decades shows that the dispersion between companies consistently increases in times of crisis. In other words, resilience to unexpected shocks has a disproportionate impact on long-term competitive advantage.

Furthermore, ongoing trends are making it harder for businesses to sustain success over time. New offerings are being adopted, matched, and made obsolete faster, and competitive advantage is becoming less durable. In order to survive in the long run, businesses must reinvent themselves regularly—doing the same thing over and over will eventually lead to failure.

Many business leaders are now expressing an intention to make their companies more resilient, but there is not yet a well-codified playbook for doing so. This book, drawing on research from the BCG Henderson Institute over many years, provides a set of perspectives on how to thrive under adverse conditions and how to reinvent businesses for the changing context. Overcoming both of these challenges is necessary for leaders to build long-lasting companies.

As the business context evolves more rapidly, driven by accelerating technological, political, and social change, an increasing strategic priority for business leaders is how to enact large-scale organizational change. Even companies that are current industry leaders are vulnerable to disruption. Company leaders need to watch over their shoulder for—and transform the company in anticipation of—the next disruption.

Mastering the Science of Organizational Change summarizes the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years to develop a more scientific approach to change. Hundreds of companies are analyzed in the book’s discussion on how to beat the odds in large-scale change management using an evidence-based approach—a large-scale analysis of what approaches actually work in which circumstances.

Part 1 of the book reviews the imperatives for self-disruption. The second part elaborates on how to manage the process of change. Finally, Part 3 discusses how organizations can take change to the next level.

Lead through the crisis and prepare for recovery.

As the Covid-19 pandemic is exacting its toll on the global economy, forward-looking organizations are moving past crisis management and positioning themselves to leap ahead when the worst is over. What should you and your organization be doing now to address today's unprecedented challenges while laying the foundation needed to emerge stronger?

Coronavirus: Leadership and Recovery provides you with essential thinking about managing your company through the pandemic, keeping your employees (and yourself) healthy and productive, and spurring your business to continue innovating and reinventing itself ahead of the recovery.

Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow.

You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.