The Strategy Bookshelf
Our Recommendations
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
Do you have the right strategy to lead your company into the future? Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy (Vol. 2). This selection has the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company, such as:
- “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy,” by Martin Reeves, Claire Love, and Philipp Tillmanns;
- “Transient Advantage,” by Rita Gunther McGrath;
- “Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy,” by A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin, Jan W. Rivkin, and Nicolaj Siggelkow;
- “Managing Risks: A New Framework,” by Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes;
- “Surviving Disruption,” by Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen;
- “The Great Repeatable Business Model,” by Chris Zook and James Allen;
- ‘Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy,” by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary;
- “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” by Steve Blank;
- “Strategy Needs Creativity,” by Adam Brandenburger;
- “Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy,” by Thomas W. Malnight, Ivy Buche, and Charles Dhanaraj;
- “Creating Shared Value,” by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer.
Advanced consulting requires both expertise and personal qualifications that are distinct from those needed in everyday consulting. Advanced consultants work with high-level executive teams on complex issues such as strategy, organizational design, merger integration, digital disruption, culture change, and system-wide transformation.
There is an art to advanced consulting as well as a science; who you are is as important as what you do. Bill Pasmore draws on his four decades of experience as a consultant and teacher of consultants to show readers how to see possibilities that are not evident, conduct analyses that support the value of more comprehensive work, build relationships that engender deeper trust, adapt to changing circumstances, and empower members of their team to take independent actions while maintaining overall control of an engagement. Illustrated with vivid real-world examples and including a self-assessment to measure your progress, this book equips you to advance to more senior positions in your firm.
With Peter Drucker’s five essential questions and the help of five of today’s thought leaders, this little book will challenge readers to take a close look at the very heart of their organizations and what drives them. A tool for self-assessment and transformation, answering these five questions will fundamentally change the way you work, helping you lead your organization to an exceptional level of performance. Peter Drucker’s five questions are:
1.What is our Mission ? with Jim Collins
2.Who is our Customer ? with Phil Kotler
3.What does the Customer Value ? with Jim Kouzes
4.What are our Results ? with Judith Rodin
5.What is our Plan ? with V. Kasturi Rangan.
Designed for today’s busy professionals, this brief, clear and accessible book will challenge readers to ask these provocative questions and it will stimulate spirited discussions and action within any organization, inspiring positive change and new levels of excellence, helping all to envision the future of theirs’ or any organization.
#1 New York Times Bestseller
Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth–and how it can help any organization thrive.
In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone’s goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.
The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization’s most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.
In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.