Harvard Business Review Press

Don't fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind.

That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage.

How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today's managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns.

Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.

In the new world of hybrid work and AI, one thing is clear: the war for talent is over—and talent won.

With sparsely populated offices and people working from wherever they are, and with AI emerging everywhere in business and dominating headlines, our work lives have undergone a remarkable transformation, seemingly overnight. But the reality is that for years the ever-growing digital wave has been breaking down organizational boundaries and increasing the adoption of open innovation, including the use of crowdsourcing platforms as a talent solution. Now the imperative is clear: adapt to and leverage this new, digitally enabled world of "open talent"—or get left behind.

In this eye-opening, essential guidebook, John Winsor and Jin Paik, with their work at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, show how the massive reset of the pandemic allowed talented workers everywhere to exit their jobs without leaving the workforce. Now many are freelancing for multiple companies or are starting small businesses, challenging hiring managers as never before amidst a transformed workforce. What's more, talent has more power than ever using platforms such as Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and Upwork, setting their own terms for work: what, where, when, and at what price.

How can companies adapt? The key, the authors argue, is shifting to a more distributed idea and structure of collaborative work. The authors call this a networked organization, where talent is culled from both inside and outside the organization and viewed through a single lens—as a global ecosystem that can be tapped as needed.

With rich stories, keen insights, and an abundance of practical advice, Winsor and Paik provide a new framework and operating model for transforming your organization into a talent-orchestrating, problem-solving machine.

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.

Leaders, don't let AI get the best of you.

The AI transformation is underway, but where are the leaders who will ensure their companies implement AI successfully and responsibly? Up until now, leaders have largely ceded their role in the AI transformation, pushing strategy formulation out to tech teams and leaving investment decisions to groups that don't have a full view of the organization or its goals. Just when responsible leadership is more crucial than ever, leaders are abdicating their role in understanding and executing in the new world of human-machine collaboration. A generation of AI transformation failures awaits if leaders don't connect their use of AI to their strategies.

This book helps leaders take control of the wildly rapid deployment of AI across organizations. Clearly and concisely, it focuses on the nine actions leaders need to take in order to successfully preside over the transition to a more AI-centric future that will lead to growth for all—companies and workers—and avoid the kinds of mistakes that author David De Cremer has seen many early adopters make. What may surprise you is that the nine actions De Cremer focuses on are based on skills that are second nature to successful leaders: creating a vision, communicating well, and executing a strategy. But here he shows you how to apply these skills in the context of AI. This is not a book about mastering machine learning or any of the latest developments in AI technology itself. Rather, it's a clarion call for leaders to take their rightful place at the front of the AI revolution and lead their organizations successfully into the new world.

Self-awareness is the bedrock of emotional intelligence that enables you to see your talents, shortcomings, and potential. But you won't be able to achieve true self-awareness with the usual quarterly feedback and self-reflection alone.

This book will teach you how to understand your thoughts and emotions, how to persuade your colleagues to share what they really think of you, and why self-awareness will spark more productive and rewarding relationships with your employees and bosses.

This volume includes the work of:

• Daniel Goleman
• Robert Steven Kaplan
• Susan David

HOW TO BE HUMAN AT WORK.

The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.

Stop pushing products—and start cultivating relationships with the right customers.

If you read nothing else on marketing that delivers competitive advantage, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you reinvent your marketing by putting it—and your customers—at the center of your business.

Leading experts such as Ted Levitt and Clayton Christensen provide the insights and advice you need to:

• Figure out what business you’re really in
• Create products that perform the jobs people need to get done
• Get a bird’s-eye view of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses
• Tap a market that’s larger than China and India combined
• Deliver superior value to your B2B customers
• End the war between sales and marketing

Come back from every setback stronger and more confident.

If you read nothing else on mental toughness, read this book. We've chosen a new selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles that will help you embrace challenges and adversity, learn from disappointment, and build your emotional strength and resilience.

This book will inspire you to:

• Handle tough criticism and personal attacks
• Let go of your fear of other people's opinions
• Recognize when to push through—and when to quit
• Remain steady and execute in a crisis
• Navigate difficult work and career transitions
• Turn passion and perseverance into top performance

This collection of articles includes "How to Bounce Back from Adversity," by Joshua D. Margolis and Paul G. Stoltz; "How to Overcome Your Fear of the Unknown," by Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr; "How to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You," by Michael Gervais; "Give Yourself a Break: The Power of Self-Compassion," by Serena Chen; "How to Stop Dwelling on Your Stress," by Jenny Taitz; "Building Resilience," by Martin E.P. Seligman; "Do You Know When to Quit?" by André Spicer; "Beating Burnout," by Monique Valcour, "Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People," by Jennifer Moss; "An Antidote to Incivility," by Christine Porath; "Recognizing and Responding to Microaggressions at Work," by Ella F. Washington; "Handling Fierce Criticism and Personal Attacks," by Ruchika T. Malhotra and Patti Neuhold-Ravikumar by Amy Bernstein; "The Making of a Corporate Athlete," by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz; "Why Career Transition Is So Hard," by Herminia Ibarra; and "Organizational Grit," by Thomas H. Lee and Angela L. Duckworth.

HBR's 10 Must Reads are definitive collections of classic ideas, practical advice, and essential thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Exploring topics like disruptive innovation, emotional intelligence, and new technology in our ever-evolving world, these books empower any leader to make bold decisions and inspire others.

This Updated and Expanded edition features new, breakthrough articles, additional short-form pieces, and a detailed discussion guide to give you and your team the tools you need for sustained success.

Life's too short to be unhappy at work

"I'm working harder than I ever have, and I don't know if it's worth it anymore." If you're a manager or leader, these words have probably run through your mind. So many of us are feeling fed up, burned out, and unhappy at work: the constant pressure and stress, the unending changes, the politics--people feel as though they can't give much more, and performance is suffering.

But it's work, after all, right? Should we even expect to be fulfilled and happy at work?

Yes, we should, says Annie McKee, coauthor of the bestselling Primal Leadership. In her new transformative book, she makes the most compelling case yet that happiness--and the full engagement that comes with it--is more important than ever in today's workplace, and she sheds new light on the powerful relationship of happiness to individual, team, and organizational success.

Based on extensive research and decades of experience with leaders, this book reveals that people must have three essential elements in order to be happy at work:

• A sense of purpose and the chance to contribute to something bigger than themselves
• A vision that is powerful and personal, creating a real sense of hope
• Resonant, friendly relationships

With vivid and moving real-life stories, the book shows how leaders can use these powerful pillars to create and sustain happiness even when they're under pressure. By emphasizing purpose, hope, and friendships they can also ensure a healthy, positive climate for their teams and throughout the organization.

How to Be Happy at Work deepens our understanding of what it means to be truly fulfilled and effective at work and provides clear, practical advice and instruction for how to get there--no matter what job you have.

Don't let a fear of numbers hold you back.

Today's business environment brings with it an onslaught of data. Now more than ever, managers must know how to tease insight from data--to understand where the numbers come from, make sense of them, and use them to inform tough decisions. How do you get started?

Whether you're working with data experts or running your own tests, you'll find answers in the HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers. This book describes three key steps in the data analysis process, so you can get the information you need, study the data, and communicate your findings to others.

You'll learn how to:

• Identify the metrics you need to measure
• Run experiments and A/B tests
• Ask the right questions of your data experts
• Understand statistical terms and concepts
• Create effective charts and visualizations
• Avoid common mistakes

This book presents lessons from the famous 'Invention Factories' past and present. Did you know that the incandescent lightbulb first emerged some thirty years before Thomas Edison famously 'turned night into day'? Or that Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line came from an unlikely blend of observations from Singer sewing machines, meatpacking, and Campbell's Soup? In this fascinating study of innovation, engineer and social scientist Andrew Hargadon argues that our romantic notions about innovation as invention are actually undermining our ability to pursue breakthrough innovations. Based on ten years of study into the origins of historic inventions and modern innovations from the lightbulb to the transistor to the Reebok Pump athletic shoe, How Breakthroughs Happen takes us beyond the simple recognition that revolutionary innovations do not result from flashes of brilliance by lone inventors or organizations. In fact, innovation is really about creatively recombining ideas, people, and objects from past technologies in ways that spark new technological revolutions. This process of 'technology brokering' is so powerful, explains Hargadon, because it exploits the networked nature--the social side--of the innovation process. Moving between historical accounts of labs and factory floors where past technological revolutions originated and field studies of similar processes in today's organizations, Hargadon shows how technology brokers create an enduring capacity for breakthrough innovations. Technology brokers simultaneously bridge the gaps in existing networks that separate distant industries, firms, and divisions to see how established ideas can be applied in new ways and places, and build new networks to guide these creative recombinations to mass acceptance. How Breakthroughs Happen identifies three distinct strategies for technology brokering that managers can implement in their organizations. Hargadon suggests that Edison and his counterparts were no smarter than the rest of us-they were simply better at moving through the networked world of their time. Intriguing, practical, and counterintuitive, How Breakthroughs Happen can help managers transform their own firms into modern-day invention factories.

Tips, stories, and strategies for the job that never ends.

When it comes to being a working parent, there are no right answers to the tough questions you grapple with, from how to get your toddler out the door to supporting your teen through struggles with their peers to whether or not to accept that big promotion—and the extensive travel and long hours that come with it. But there are answers that are right for you and your family. The HBR Working Parents Series Collection assembles the ideas and strategies you need to help you get ahead—and get through the day. Included in this set are Managing Your Career, Getting It All Done, and Taking Care of Yourself. This compilation offers insights and practical advice from world-class experts on the topics that matter most to working parents including making decisions at home and at work that align with your priorities; navigating tradeoffs—and managing the feelings that come with them; developing strategies for managing both the details of your day and the long-term view of your career; finding time for personal development; and making career choices that work for you—and your family.

The HBR Working Parents Series with Daisy Dowling, Series Editor, supports readers as you anticipate challenges, learn how to advocate for yourself more effectively, juggle your impossible schedule, and find fulfillment at home and at work. Whether you're up with a newborn or planning the future with your teen, you'll find the practical tips, strategies, and research you need to make working parenthood work for you.

Invest in your most valuable resource: your people.

Top talent is hard to come by. And seeing your stars walk out the door is painful—and expensive. You need to take steps to ensure that you attract, develop, and retain your best people.

If you read nothing else on managing talent in your organization, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you boost the engagement, skills, and commitment of your highest performers.

This book will inspire you to:

• Build a winning talent strategy
• Recruit and hire the best candidates
• Identify and develop high-potential employees
• Foster a just and inclusive workplace
• Overcome the challenges of hybrid work
• Prepare your workforce for the future

This collection of articles includes "Building a Game-Changing Talent Strategy," by Douglas A. Ready, Linda A. Hill, and Robert J. Thomas; "Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong," by Peter Cappelli; "'A Players’ or 'A Positions'?: The Strategic Logic of Workforce Management,” by Mark A. Huselid, Richard W. Beatty, and Brian E. Becker; "Turning Potential into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development," by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, Andrew Roscoe, and Kentaro Aramaki; "Making Business Personal," by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller; "The Power of Hidden Teams," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "The Performance Management Revolution," by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis; "People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO," by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey; "Toward a Racially Just Workplace," by Lauren Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo; "How to Do Hybrid Right," by Lynda Gratton; and "Your Workforce Is More Adaptable Than You Think," by Joseph Fuller, Judith K. Wallenstein, Manjari Raman, and Alice de Chalendar.

HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

Recently, some bestselling management books have focused on providing a recipe for greatness, while others have sought to unlock the secrets of long-term success. But a detailed analysis at the intersection of the two, one that explains how some companies manage to achieve repeated peaks of business performance, has been missing--until now.

Accenture’s Paul Nunes and Tim Breene have found that what matters is not just climbing your current S-curve, which is what you do to reach the top of a single successful business. Instead, they emphasize the equal importance of the moves you must make on the way to your next business; that is, making the jump to your future S-curve.

Jumping the S-Curve reveals crucial insights for making such transitions, including:

• Why traditional strategic planning won't allow you to find the "big-enough" market insights that are critical to superior performance
• Why your top team must be refreshed before performance starts to wane
• Why you need much more talent than you think, especially "serious talent" that will find you worthy of their time

Filled with original practical advice, Jumping the S-Curve demystifies how companies can thrive with one successful business after another, through both good times and bad.

A fascinating guide to the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence and how this powerful technology will impact our lives, our careers, and our world.

Artificial intelligence is driving workforce disruption on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

In schools and universities AI technology has forced a reevaluation of the way students are taught and assessed. Meanwhile, ChatGPT has become a cultural phenomenon, reaching a hundred million users and attracting a reputed $1 trillion investor interest in its parent company, OpenAI.

The race to dominate the generative AI market is accelerating at breakneck speed, inspiring breathless headlines and immense public interest.

Welcome to AI provides a rare view into a frontier area of computer science that will change everything about how you live and work. Read this book and better understand how to succeed in the AI-enabled future.

A Wall Street Journal and Washington Post Bestseller

A playbook for creating your company's winning strategy.

Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies.

Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.

A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win.

The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are:

• What is our winning aspiration?
• Where will we play?
• How will we win?
• What capabilities must we have in place to win?
• What management systems are required to support our choices?

The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the right choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.