Harvard Business Review Press

Are you a good boss—or a great one?

Good bosses can handle the day-to-day work of running a team. Great bosses go beyond that, finding ways to help employees become better versions of themselves as people and professionals. But as a manager, how do you reach that next level?

The HBR Guide to Being a Great Boss contains practical tips and advice to help you become a more well-rounded leader, one who sparks creativity, engagement, collaboration, and growth in your team. You'll learn how to:

• Magnify your people's strengths
• Create a welcoming, inclusive culture
• Communicate effectively—and regularly—with your team
• Challenge your people to grow beyond their current limits
• Recognize and reward good work
• Establish yourself as a trustworthy leader and colleague

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Digital transformation is not about technology--it's about change.

In the rapidly changing digital economy, you can't succeed by merely tweaking management practices that led to past success. And yet, while many leaders and managers recognize the threat from digital--and the potential opportunity--they lack a common language and compelling framework to help them assess it and guide them in responding. They don't know how to think about their digital business model.

In this concise, practical book, MIT digital research leaders Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner provide a powerful yet straightforward framework that has been field-tested globally with dozens of senior management teams. Based on years of study at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), the authors find that digitization is moving companies' business models on two dimensions: from value chains to digital ecosystems, and from a fuzzy understanding of the needs of end customers to a sharper one. Looking at these dimensions in combination results in four distinct business models, each with different capabilities. The book then sets out six driving questions, in separate chapters, that help managers and executives clarify where they are currently in an increasingly digital business landscape and highlight what's needed to move toward a higher-value digital business model.

Filled with straightforward self-assessments, motivating examples, and sharp financial analyses of where profits are made, this smart book will help you tackle the threats, leverage the opportunities, and create winning digital strategies.

"Unleashed is worth an afternoon of your time, whether or not you are already a leader. It is sparkily written and personal, drawing on the experiences of co-authors (and spouses) Frei and Morriss."— Financial Times

Leadership isn't easy. It takes grit, courage, and vision, among other things, that can be hard to come by on your toughest days. When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror and own your natural-born strengths and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss offer a different worldview. They argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: build others up. Leadership isn't about you. It's about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure this impact endures even in your absence. As Frei and Morriss show through inspiring stories from ancient Rome to present-day Silicon Valley, the origins of great leadership are found, paradoxically, not in worrying about your own status and advancement, but in the unrelenting focus on other people's potential.

Unleashed provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create an environment in which other people can excel, Frei and Morriss offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on their work with companies such as Uber, Riot Games, WeWork, and others—along with interviews and stories from their own personal experience, to make these ideas come alive. This book is your indispensable guide for unleashing greatness in other people . . . and, ultimately, in yourself.

To learn more, please visit theleadersguide.com.

AI—including generative AI—is radically transforming business. Are you ready? Accenture technology leaders Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson provide crucial insights and advice to help you meet the challenge.

Look around you. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic notion. It's here right now—in software that senses what we need, supply chains that "think" in real time, and now generative AI that is radically reshaping work and productivity. Twenty-first-century pioneer companies are already using AI to innovate and grow fast. The bottom line is this: Businesses that understand how to harness AI can surge ahead. Those that neglect it will fall behind. Which side are you on?

In this updated and expanded edition of Human + Machine—including a new chapter on gen AI—Accenture technology leaders Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson show that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization, whether related to breakthrough innovation, everyday customer service, or personal productivity habits. As humans and smart machines collaborate ever more closely, work processes become more fluid and adaptive, enabling companies to change them on the fly—or completely reimagine them.

Based on the authors' experience and research with fifteen hundred organizations, the book reveals how companies are using the new rules of AI to leap ahead on innovation and profitability and what you can do to achieve similar results. It describes six entirely new types of hybrid human + machine roles that every company must develop, and it includes a "leader's guide" with the five crucial principles required to become an AI-fueled business.

Human + Machine provides the missing and much-needed management playbook for success in the new age of AI.

Why are your smartest and most successful employees often the worst learners? Likely, they haven't had the opportunities for introspection that failure affords. So when they do fail, instead of critically examining their own behavior, they cast blame outward—on anyone or anything they can. In Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Chris Argyris sheds light on the forces that prevent highly skilled employees for learning from mistakes and offers suggestions for helping talented employees develop more productive responses. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice-many of which still speak to and influence us today. The HBR Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each volume contains a groundbreaking idea that has shaped best practices and inspired countless managers around the world-and will change how you think about the business world today.

Land the job of your dreams.

You're ready to take the next step in your career. But securing the right role can take a lot of work—and a lot of time and energy. How do you move forward without getting overwhelmed by the process?

The HBR Guide to Your Job Search is here to help. Whether you’re new to the workforce or have a well-established career, this book contains practical advice for navigating your job hunt.

You'll learn how to:

• Structure your search strategically
• Translate your strengths into a strong personal story
• Activate your network to find opportunities
• Write a résumé that gets callbacks
• Craft answers to common interview questions
• Set yourself up for success in your new role

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

What does it mean to be yourself at work? As a leader, how do you strike the right balance between vulnerability and authority?

This book explains the role of authenticity in emotionally intelligent leadership. You'll learn how to discover your authentic self, when emotional responses are appropriate, how conforming to specific standards can hurt you, and when you need to feel like a fake.

This volume includes the work of:

• Bill George
• Herminia Ibarra
• Rob Goffee
• Gareth Jones

This collection of articles includes: "Discovering Your Authentic Leadership" by Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean, and Diana Mayer; "The Authenticity Paradox" by Herminia Ibarra; "What Bosses Gain by Being Vulnerable" by Emma Seppala; "Practice Tough Empathy" by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones; "Cracking the Code That Stalls People of Color" by Sylvia Ann Hewitt; "For a Corporate Apology to Work, the CEO Should Look Sad" by Sarah Green Carmichael; and "Are Leaders Getting Too Emotional?" an interview with Gautam Mukunda and Gianpiero Petriglieri by Adi Ignatius and Sarah Green Carmichael.

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.

Make yourself heard.

Having your voice heard at work can be challenging, whether you're confronting a colleague about an inappropriate comment or trying to avoid being talked over by a male peer. But you can find ways to raise issues without raising your voice.

Speak Up, Speak Out provides the research, advice, and practical tips you need to address issues large and small. From talking about sexual harassment to handling microaggressions to breaking through subconsciously gendered conversational patterns, you'll find the insight and sample language you need to be heard.

This book will inspire you to:

• Address and redirect an inappropriate conversation
• Step in when you witness questionable behavior
• Break ingrained conversational habits like apologizing and complimenting
• Deal with interrupters and those who habitually speak over others

The HBR Women at Work Series spotlights the real challenges and opportunities women experience throughout their careers. With interviews from the popular podcast of the same name and related articles, stories, and research, these books provide inspiration and advice for taking on issues at work such as inequity, advancement, and building community. Featuring detailed discussion guides, this series will help you spark important conversations about where we're at and how to move forward.

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.

Pivot your organization toward a more scalable and profitable business model.

ARE YOUR WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WORKING AGAINST YOU?

To achieve your goals and get ahead, you need to rally people behind you and your ideas. But how do you do that when you lack formal authority? Or when you have a boss who gets in your way? Or when you’re juggling others’ needs at the expense of your own?

By managing up, down, and across the organization. Your success depends on it, whether you’re a young professional or an experienced leader.

The HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you:

• Advance your agenda—and your career—with smarter networking
• Build relationships that bring targets and deadlines within reach
• Persuade decision makers to champion your initiatives
• Collaborate more effectively with colleagues
• Deal with new, challenging, or incompetent bosses
• Navigate office politics

Set yourself up for a successful transition.

Retirement is perhaps the greatest and most deeply personal career transition you'll ever make. Will you switch gears, slow down, or stop work entirely? Will you have the money, the good health, and the companionship you need to enjoy it?

The HBR Guide to Designing Your Retirement provides the practical tips, research, stories, and advice you need to take stock of your skills and interests and define retirement for yourself.

You'll learn how to:

• Assess your readiness to make the transition
• Craft a plan to slow your pace—or stop working altogether
• Experiment with possible future selves
• Find new ways to apply old skills
• Communicate your plan to key partners
• Bridge your old identity to your new one
• Stay connected

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

The logical and enduring way to innovate.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage.

This distinctive approach has three key elements:

• It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive.
• The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose.
• Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way.

In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges.

Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.

A competitive advantage just isn't enough.

Get your mind unstuck.

It can be challenging to be mindful when you're trapped in your own head. Overthinking comes in many forms—overanalysis, perfectionism, worry, rumination—and each of these can be harmful to your productivity and well-being at work.

This book will teach you how to understand what type of overthinking you are experiencing, realize when you're cycling in a mental loop, and break free so that you can trust your gut, make a decision, and move forward with confidence.

This volume includes the work of:

• Alice Boyes
• Melody Wilding
• Thomas H. Davenport
• Sian Beilock

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.

Named one of the Best Business Books of 2023 by the Financial Times

Thinkers50 2023 Winner: Talent Award

From MIT professor and pre-eminent voice on Good Jobs comes a leadership guide for choosing excellence and providing good jobs that offer a living wage, dignity, and opportunities for growth.

From healthcare facilities to call centers, fulfillment centers to factories, and restaurants to retail stores, companies are struggling to find or keep workers, because the jobs they offer are low-paying, stressful, and provide little chance for growth and success.

Workers want good jobs, and many leaders want to provide them. But they don't think they can offer higher pay and more motivating work without hurting the bottom line. Most business leaders want to win with customers, but their companies are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover—turnover that's partly driven by low pay.

It is indeed a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton is here to show you the way out: why good jobs combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business. And why, more than ever, in a world with tight labor markets, failing to provide good jobs will catch up with you and threaten your business. As the leading scholar on good jobs and president of the Good Jobs Institute, Ton has helped executives at many companies implement a good jobs system. With expertise drawn from spending time on the front lines with workers and their managers, she knows what's keeping most companies mired in mediocrity and how implementing a good jobs system makes them more competitive, more resilient, and more likely to attract and retain loyal customers and dedicated employees.

Practical, prescriptive, and often provocative, The Case for Good Jobs is essential reading for company leaders who want to—who need to—choose excellence.

The crypto era has arrived, and business will never be the same.

Real applications of crypto technology are growing exponentially: cryptocurrency payments are moving frictionlessly across borders; NFTs are generating real value for creators and consumers alike; and new blockchain-enabled business models are being built around decentralized finance and Web3. What do you and your company need to know and do today to create new opportunities and avoid disruption? Crypto: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will show you how innovative organizations of all kinds are embracing decentralized technology, reinventing themselves, and thriving in the new age of crypto.

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.

The most definitive management ideas of the century, all in one place.

Harvard Business Review is the foremost destination for smart management thinking. Now, at its 100th anniversary, this commemorative volume brings together the most influential ideas since its inception.

With an introduction written by editor in chief Adi Ignatius, HBR at 100 features business publishing's most influential voices on innovative topics, including:

• Michael E. Porter on competitive strategy
• Clayton M. Christensen on disruptive innovation
• Tim Brown on design thinking
• Linda A. Hill on being a first-time manager
• Daniel Goleman on emotional intelligence
• Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee on artificial intelligence
• Robert Livingston on racial equity at work
• Amy C. Edmondson and Mark Mortensen on psychological safety
• Robert B. Cialdini on the science of persuasion
• W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne on blue ocean strategy
• Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad on strategic intent
• Peter F. Drucker on managing yourself

Whether you're a longtime reader or you're picking up an HBR volume for the first time, this book offers all you need to understand the most critical ideas in management.

Put your strategy into action.

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they aren't executed well. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to actually applying it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls apart, initiatives fail, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces.

The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for sharing the strategy with your employees, making the shift toward the right objectives, and seeing your strategy come to fruition.

You'll learn how to:

• Understand the "why" behind your strategy
• Identify the capabilities you have—and the ones you need
• Communicate objectives and priorities effectively to your team
• Prioritize strategic projects and let go of outdated ones
• Encourage cross-silo collaboration toward organizational goals
• Adjust course when necessary

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Five years' worth of management wisdom, all in one place.

Get the latest, most significant thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review in 5 Years of Must Reads: 2020 Edition. Every year, HBR editors examine the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past twelve months to select the definitive articles that have provoked the most conversation, the most inspiration, and the most change. From how you can lead with authenticity by moving past your comfort zone, to engaging customers and employees alike with the help of artificial intelligence, to scaling your agile processes from a handful of teams to hundreds, the articles in this five-book collection will help you manage your daily challenges and meet the changing competitive landscape head-on.

Books in the HBR 10 Must Reads series offer essential reading selected from the pages of Harvard Business Review on topics critical to the success of every manager. Each book is packed with advice and inspiration from leading experts such as Clayton Christensen, Michael Porter, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, Herminia Ibarra, Marcus Buckingham, Roger Martin, Adam Grant, Thomas Davenport, and Katrina Lake. Company examples range from P&G, DHL, and Deloitte to Alibaba, Google, and Stitch Fix. 5 Years of Must Reads: 2020 Edition brings the most current and important business conversations to your fingertips.

Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50

Rethinking How to Build Inclusive Organizations

Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing? How do we build inclusive organizations?

Inspired by and developed in conjunction with the research and programming for Harvard Business School's commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the HBS African American Student Union, this groundbreaking book shines new light on these and other timely questions and illuminates the present-day dynamics of race in the workplace. Contributions from top scholars, researchers, and practitioners in leadership, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and education test the relevance of long-held assumptions and reconsider the research approaches and interventions needed to understand and advance African Americans in work settings and leadership roles.

At a time when--following a peak in 2002--there are fewer African American men and women in corporate leadership roles, Race, Work, and Leadership will stimulate new scholarship and dialogue on the organizational and leadership challenges of African Americans and become the indispensable reference for anyone committed to understanding, studying, and acting on the challenges facing leaders who are building inclusive organizations.

Balance being a leader with being an individual contributor.

Collaborator. Communicator. Creator. Coach. Conduit. The pandemic, and the resultant ever-evolving landscape of hybrid work, highlighted that we're asking more of our mid-level managers than ever. You balance leading your team with maintaining your high-level individual performance. You provide feedback and coaching, support your people through tough times, field requests large and small, and communicate in every direction. Mid-level managers are the key to managing a hybrid workforce, leading innovation, managing talent, and helping your organization—and its people—adapt to our changing world.

If you read nothing else on being an effective mid-level manager, 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 manage up and down, interpret and distill important messages, lobby for time and resources for key projects and players, and lead change—all while getting things done.

This book will inspire you to:

• Build teams and develop talent
• Transform your role from intermediary to innovator
• Encourage critical thinking
• Foster a culture of psychological safety
• Lead change by leveraging internal networks
• Understand the cognitive and emotional drain of having both high and low power
• Form partnerships at every level of the organization

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.

You can be the leader you want to be—today and every day.

Do you find yourself wishing you had more hours in the day? Do you want to do more, yet feel you just can't add another thing to your plate without being overwhelmed by stress or compromising your health, relationships, and integrity?

No doubt, as a leader, there are some days when you feel the flow. You're able to make a difference and achieve big goals. You feel confident and energized. On days like this, you are your best self--the leader you want to be. But on other days, you go down a different, negative path, with pressures and doubts making you feel like a lesser version of yourself.

How can you be the leader you want to be, every day? The answer is more than a time-management system or a silver-bullet solution for changing your routines. Leadership expert and coach Amy Jen Su's powerful new book helps readers discover that the answer lies within. By focusing in specific ways on five key leadership elements—Purpose, Process, People, Presence, and Peace—you can increase your time, capacity, energy, and ultimately your impact, with less stress and more equanimity.

Drawing on rich and instructive stories of clients, leaders, artists, and athletes, as well as on research by experts, the author brings together the best of both Western management thinking and Eastern philosophy to provide a holistic yet hands-on approach.

The Leader You Want to Be is your indispensable guide to tapping into and expanding your leadership capacity so that you can be your best, sustain yourself, and thrive as a leader.

Kids deserve a better digital future. Help them create it.

When it comes to raising children in a digital world, every parent feels underprepared and overwhelmed. We worry that our children will become addicted to online games, be victims of cyberbullying, or get lost down the rabbit hole of social media. We warn them about all the things they shouldn't do online, but we don't do nearly enough to teach them the skills of digital well-being.

It's time to start a new conversation. In Digital for Good, EdTech expert Richard Culatta argues that technology can be a powerful tool for learning, solving humanity's toughest problems, and bringing us closer together. He offers a refreshingly positive framework for preparing kids to be successful in a digital world—one that encourages them to use technology proactively and productively—by outlining five qualities every young person should develop in order to become a thriving, contributing digital citizen:

• Be balanced: understand when and how much tech use is healthy
• Stay informed: discern between true and false information
• Be inclusive: treat others with respect and kindness online
• Be engaged: use tech to strengthen family relationships and community connections
• Stay alert: exercise caution and create safe digital spaces for others

This practical guide will help parents and children discover the path to becoming effective digital citizens, all while making our online world a better place.

How to be resilient in a professional setting.

How do some people bounce back with vigor from daily setbacks, professional crises, or even intense personal trauma?

This book reveals the key traits of those who emerge stronger from challenges, helps you train your brain to withstand the stresses of daily life, and presents an approach to an effective career reboot.

This volume includes the work of:

How a million little things are dragging you down, and what to do about it.

There's a force we encounter every day that we aren't aware of—and it threatens to derail otherwise promising careers and lives: microstress.

This hidden epidemic of small moments of stress has insidiously infiltrated both our work and our personal lives with invisible but devastating effects. Microstress doesn't trigger the normal stress response in our brains to help us deal with it. Instead, it embeds itself in our minds and accumulates daily, one microstress on top of the other. The long-term impact can be debilitating. Unregistered microstress weighs us down, damages our physical and emotional health, and contributes to a decline in our well-being. What's more, microstress is baked into our lives. The source is seldom a classic antagonist, such as a demanding client or a jerk boss. Instead, it comes from the people with whom we are closest: our friends, family, and colleagues.

The good news is that once you understand microstress, you can fight back. Drawing on fresh research, Rob Cross and Karen Dillon explain the science behind the phenomenon. They also share the secrets of a small set of people who've endured their share of microstress but have still managed to cultivate relationships that enable them to thrive both at work and in life. Compelling interviews with these high achievers bring to life best practices that show you how to build resilience against microstress and ultimately how to find purpose—purpose that helps you break free from this quietly invasive force that's stealing your life.

Anyone can think more creatively and unlock innovation.

Creativity is the key to innovation, but too many projects and teams are organized in ways that stifle new ideas. You need to ensure that creativity can thrive—and that you are part of the process.

Fortunately, anyone can use method-driven approaches to teach and learn creativity. The HBR Guide to Unlocking Creativity will show you how to reach your creative potential, manage creative collaboration, and achieve groundbreaking results.

This guide will help you:

• Understand the neuroscience of creativity
• Run better brainstorming sessions—in person or virtually
• Use design thinking to generate new solutions
• Model a mindset of curiosity and experimentation
• Balance creativity with productivity
• Bring breakthrough ideas to life

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Become more confident at work.

You need confidence to inspire trust, communicate effectively, and succeed in your organization. But self-doubt and nerves can undermine your ability to act decisively and persuade others. What can you do to push past these insecurities?

This book explains how you can use emotional intelligence to become more confident at work. You'll learn how to correct what is holding you back, how to overcome imposter syndrome, and when feeling too self-assured can actually backfire.

This volume includes the work of:

• Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter
• Amy Jen Su
• Peter Bregman

It's not just who you are—it's what you do.

Managing the human side of work

Research by Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and coauthor of Primal Leadership, has shown that emotional intelligence is a more powerful determinant of good leadership than technical competence, IQ, or vision.

Influencing those around us and supporting our own well-being requires us to be self-aware, know when and how to regulate our emotional reactions, and understand the emotional responses of those around us. No wonder emotional intelligence has become one of the crucial criteria in hiring and promotion.

But luckily it’s not just an innate trait: Emotional intelligence is composed of skills that all of us can learn and improve on. In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Determine your emotional intelligence strengths and weaknesses
• Understand and manage your emotional reactions
• Deal with difficult people
• Make smarter decisions
• Bounce back from tough times
• Help your team develop emotional intelligence

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Push through when procrastination calls.

Some days you're on fire at work; other days you're burned out and easily distracted. How can you maintain your drive, make consistent progress, and expend your energy wisely?

This book will help you identify what's behind your flagging engagement and productivity—and provide the expert research and advice on what to do about it.

This volume includes the work of:

• Annie McKee
• Heidi Grant
• Shawn Achor
• Elizabeth Grace Saunders

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.

Find your purpose at work.

In an ideal world, our work lives would be completely fulfilling and intrinsically motivating.

But what if you're stuck in a job and your heart isn't in it anymore? Or what if your company's mission seems unrelated to the work you do day in and day out? This book showcases the power of passion--and how you and your team can find it at work.

This volume includes the work of:

• Morten T. Hansen
• Teresa M. Amabile
• Scott A. Snook
• Nick Craig

This collection of articles includes "Finding Meaning at Work, Even When Your Job Is Dull," by Morten Hansen and Dacher Keltner; "What to Do When Your Heart Isn't in Your Work Anymore," by Andy Molinsky; "You Don’t Find Your Purpose--You Build It," by John Coleman; "How to Find Meaning in a Job That Isn't Your True Calling," by Emily Esfahani Smith; "You're Never Done Finding Purpose at Work," by Dan Pontefract; "From Purpose to Impact," by Nick Craig and Scott A. Snook; "Five Questions to Help Your Employees Find Their Inner Purpose," by Kristi Hedges; "How to Make Work More Meaningful for Your Team," by Lewis Garrad and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic; "The Power of Small Wins," by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer; and "The Founder of TOMS on Reimagining the Company's Mission," by Blake Mycoskie.

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.

Make the connections that will help you succeed—and advance faster.

Networking doesn't stop once you've landed the job. Building a high-quality, diverse network is key to learning and growth, influencing others, and launching your ideas. But how do you move beyond small talk and cold emails to building a network that is strategic and effective, made up of authentic relationships?

The HBR Guide to Smarter Networking will give you the tools you need to connect confidently, get your initiatives off the ground, and move up in your career.

This guide will help you:

• Make great first impressions
• Connect better at conferences—in-person or virtual
• Reach out to find your next job
• Overcome obstacles to building your network
• Avoid networking burnout
• Keep your network healthy over the long haul

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Digital transformation is no longer news--it's a necessity.

Despite the widespread threat of disruption, many large companies in traditional industries have succeeded at digitizing their businesses in truly transformative ways.

The New York Times, formerly a bastion of traditional media, has created a thriving digital product behind a carefully designed paywall. Best Buy has transformed its business in the face of Amazon's threat. John Deere has formed a data-analysis arm to complement its farm-equipment business. And Goldman Sachs and many others are using digital technologies to reimagine their businesses. In Driving Digital Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta provides an actionable framework for following their lead.

For over a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn't. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture. Gupta covers each aspect in vivid detail while providing navigation tips and best practices along the way.

Filled with rich and illuminating case studies of companies at the forefront of digital transformation, Driving Digital Strategy is the comprehensive guide you need to take full advantage of the limitless opportunities the digital age provides.

Learn how to make better; faster decisions.

You make decisions every day--from prioritizing your to-do list to choosing which long-term innovation projects to pursue. But most decisions don't have a clear-cut answer, and assessing the alternatives and the risks involved can be overwhelming.

You need a smarter approach to making the best choice possible. The HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions provides practical tips and advice to help you generate more-creative ideas, evaluate your alternatives fairly, and make the final call with confidence.

You'll learn how to:

• Overcome the cognitive biases that can skew your thinking
• Look at problems in new ways
• Manage the trade-offs between options
• Balance data with your own judgment
• React appropriately when you've made a bad choice
• Communicate your decision--and overcome any resistance

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from a source you trust. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

A year of HBR's essential thinking on tech—all in one place.

Agentic AI, smart health care, advanced sensors, bioengineering—new technologies like these are reshaping organizations at the hybrid office, on factory floors, and in the C-suite. What should you and your company be doing now to take advantage of the new opportunities these technologies are creating—and avoid falling victim to disruption?

The Year in Tech, 2026: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand what the latest and most important tech innovations mean for your organization and how you can use them to compete and win in today's turbulent business environment.

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.

Engage your employees and transform your organization.

If you read nothing else on employee engagement, read this book. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you make your employees feel valued, motivated, and ready to do great things.

This book will inspire you to:

• Invest in a culture of cohesive teams
• Turn employee feedback into action
• Learn why people quit—and how to retain them
• Curb burnout by designing better jobs
• Make HR a champion of employees
• Create a purpose-driven organization

This collection of articles includes "Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization," by Robert E. Quinn and Anjan V. Thakor; "How Customers Can Rally Your Troops," by Adam Grant, "Why Employees Quit," by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta; "The Power of Hidden Teams," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "Do You Tell Your Employees You Appreciate Them?" by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman; "The Case for Good Jobs," by Zeynep Ton; "To Curb Burnout, Design Jobs to Better Match Employees' Needs," by Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach; "HR's New Role," by Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh; "Turn Employee Feedback into Action," by Ethan Burris, Benjamin Thomas, Ketaki Sodhi, and Dawn Klinghoffer; "Beware a Culture of Busyness," by Adam Waytz; "Collaborative Overload," by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant; "Designing the Hybrid Office," by Anne-Laure Fayard, John Weeks, and Mahwesh Khan; and "Blue Ocean Leadership," by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

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.

Although much as been written about how to make better decisions, a decision by itself changes nothing. The big problem facing managers and their organizations today is one of implementation--how to get things done in a timely and effective way. 

Problems of implementation are really issues of how to influence behavior, change the course of events, overcome resistance, and get people to do things they would not otherwise do. In a word, power. Managing With Power provides an in-depth look at the role of power and influence in organizations. Pfeffer shows convincingly that its effective use is an essential component of strong leadership. 

With vivid examples, he makes a compelling case for the necessity of power in mobilizing the political support and resources to get things done in any organization. He provides an intriguing look at the personal attributes—such as flexibility, stamina, and a high tolerance for conflict—and the structural factors—such as control of resources, access to information, and formal authority—that can help managers advance organizational goals and achieve individual success.

Stop juggling and start managing everything you need to do at home and at work.

It used to be simple before kids: Say yes to everything, stay late, turn in flawless work, catch up on sleep later. But now you need a different mindset to succeed at work, as a parent, and as a family member.

Getting It All Done can't teach you to be in two places at once, but it provides you with expert advice as you manage the challenges of succeeding at work while making sure your family is housed, fed, healthy, safe, and educated.

You'll learn to:

• Delegate, enlist the help you need, and say no to taking on more
• Put your management skills to work outside the office
• Get more work done with kids at home
• Move on with resilience when you drop the ball
• Navigate the chaos during the busiest times at work and at home

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.

Featured in Rolling Stone, People Magazine, US Weekly, USA Today, The Financial Times, and more

"Part tell-all book and part how-to guide, The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift offers music fans and Swifties alike a chance to learn from one of the biggest pop stars of all time." — Rolling Stone

Named one of "Thirty books we're excited to read in the first half of 2025" by The Sydney Morning Herald

Named to the Financial Times "What to Read in 2025" list

A smart, page-turning exploration of the business and creative decisions that transformed Taylor Swift into an unprecedented modern cultural phenomenon.

Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teenager to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has blazed a path that is uniquely hers.

But how exactly has she managed to scale her success—multiple times—while dominating an industry that cycles through artists and stars like fashion trends? How has she managed to make and remake herself time and again while remaining true to her artistic vision? And how has she managed to master the constant disruption in the music business that has made it so hard for others to adapt and endure?

In There's Nothing Like This, Kevin Evers, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, answers these questions in riveting detail. With the same thoughtful analysis usually devoted to iconic founders, game-changing innovators, and pioneering brands, Evers chronicles the business and creative decisions that have defined each phase of Swift's career.

Mixing business and art, analysis and narrative, and pulling from research in innovation, creativity, psychology, and strategy, There's Nothing Like This presents Swift as the modern and multidimensional superstar that she is—a songwriting savant and a strategic genius.

Swift's fans will see their icon from a fresh perspective. Others will gain more than a measure of admiration for her ability to stay at the top of her game. And everyone will come away understanding why, even after two decades, Swift keeps winning.

A USA Today Bestseller

In a world where consumers expect more—instantly and seamlessly—personalization is a strategic imperative.

Consumers want personalized experiences, but few companies are rising to the challenge. Those that succeed in personalization build trusted relationships with millions of customers and engage with them at every step throughout their journey. Through the power of AI, they rethink their operations and unleash the creativity of their teams to fine-tune every interaction, delighting customers in the process.

But most companies are not doing personalization well, leading to wasted money, squandered effort, and missed expectations. To be done effectively, personalization must be a critical element of an organization's strategy.

Personalized is a playbook for delivering true personalization at scale. In this book, Boston Consulting Group's Mark Abraham and Harvard Business School's David C. Edelman describe Five Promises of Personalization:

• Empower Me: Understand each customer's needs and how best to meet them.
• Know Me: Win customers' trust and permission to use their data to improve their experience.
• Reach Me: Reach out to the right customer, in the right channel, at the right time.
• Show Me: Tailor unique content to be relevant to each customer, enabled by generative AI.
• Delight Me: Design new ways of working and ensure continuous improvement, so a customer's experience feels magical.

With detailed examples across industries—including retail, health care, banking, technology, and travel—this book will help executives learn how to put personalization at the center of their strategy, accelerate growth, and capture their share of the $2 trillion personalization prize.

Business success begins with trust.

Trust is the basis for all that we do as leaders and as organizations. Employees who trust their employers are more productive and creative. Businesses that earn their customers' trust maintain better relationships and reap better results. Meanwhile, breaches of trust between companies and the public are becoming more frequent—and more costly.

If you read nothing else on trust, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you build, maintain, and repair trust, both as a leader and as a company.

This book will inspire you to:

• Develop trust through competence, legitimacy, and impact
• Understand the neuroscience of trust
• Follow through on your commitments to stakeholders
• Negotiate better with an untrustworthy counterpart
• See your company through the eyes of your customers
• Rebuild relationships after a breakdown of trust

This collection of articles includes "Begin with Trust," by Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss; "The Neuroscience of Trust," by Paul J. Zak; "Dig, Bridge, Collectively Act," by Tina Opie and Beth A. Livingston; "Rethinking Trust," by Roderick M. Kramer; "How to Negotiate with a Liar," by Leslie K. John; "The Enemies of Trust," by Robert M. Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau; "Don't Let Cynicism Undermine Your Workplace," by Jamil Zaki; "The Trust Crisis," by Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta; "Customer Data: Designing for Transparency and Trust," by Timothy Morey, Theodore "Theo" Forbath, and Allison Schoop; "Operational Transparency," by Ryan W. Buell; and "The Organizational Apology," by Maurice E. Schweitzer, Alison Wood Brooks, and Adam D. Galinsky.

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.

OVER 4 MILLION COPIES SOLD
WALL STREET JOURNAL AND BUSINESSWEEK BESTSELLER
RECOGNIZED AS ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC AND IMPACTFUL STRATEGY BOOKS EVER WRITTEN

The global phenomenon that has sold over 4 million copies, is published in a record-breaking 49 languages and is a bestseller across five continents—now updated and expanded with new content. Named by Fast Company as one of the most influential leadership books in its Leadership Hall of Fame. A strategy classic.

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes:

• A new preface by the authors: Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red
• Updates on all cases and examples in the book, bringing their stories up to the present time
• Two new chapters and an expanded third one—Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps—that address the most pressing questions readers have asked over the past 10 years

A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this bestselling book charts a bold new path to winning the future. Consider this your guide to creating uncontested market space—and making the competition irrelevant.

To learn more about the power of BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, visit blueoceanstrategy.com. There you'll find all the resources you need—from ideas in practice and cases from government and private industry, to teaching materials, mobile apps, real-time updates, and tips and tools to help you make your blue ocean journey a success.

What does it mean to be yourself at work? As a leader, how do you strike the right balance between vulnerability and authority?

This book explains the role of authenticity in emotionally intelligent leadership. You'll learn how to discover your authentic self, when emotional responses are appropriate, how conforming to specific standards can hurt you, and when you need to feel like a fake.

This volume includes the work of:

• Bill George
• Herminia Ibarra
• Rob Goffee
• Gareth Jones

This collection of articles includes: "Discovering Your Authentic Leadership" by Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean, and Diana Mayer; "The Authenticity Paradox" by Herminia Ibarra; "What Bosses Gain by Being Vulnerable" by Emma Seppala; "Practice Tough Empathy" by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones; "Cracking the Code That Stalls People of Color" by Sylvia Ann Hewitt; "For a Corporate Apology to Work, the CEO Should Look Sad" by Sarah Green Carmichael; and "Are Leaders Getting Too Emotional?" an interview with Gautam Mukunda and Gianpiero Petriglieri by Adi Ignatius and Sarah Green Carmichael.

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.

A Wall Street Journal bestseller

World-renowned researcher and New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham helps us discover where we're at our best—both at work and in life.

You've long been told to "Do what you love." Sounds simple, but the real challenge is how to do this in a world not set up to help you. Most of us actually don't know the real truth of what we love—what engages us and makes us thrive—and our workplaces, jobs, schools, even our parents, are focused instead on making us conform. Sadly, no person or system is dedicated to discovering the crucial intersection between what you love to do and how you contribute it to others.

In this eye-opening, uplifting book, Buckingham shows you how to break free from this conformity—how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love.

How can you use love to reveal your unique gifts?

How can you pinpoint what makes you stand out from anyone else?

How can you choose roles in which you'll excel?

Love and Work unlocks answers to these questions and others, so you can:

• Choose the right role on the team.
• Describe yourself compellingly in job interviews.
• Mold your existing role so that it calls upon the very best of you.
• Position yourself as a leader in such a way that your followers quickly come to trust in you.
• Make lasting change for your team, your company, your family, or your students.

Love, the most powerful of human emotions, the source of all creativity, collaboration, insight, and excellence, has been systematically drained from our lives—our work, teams, and classrooms.

It's time we brought love back in.

Love and Work shows you how.

Collaborator. Communicator. Connector. Coach.

As a mid-level manager, you're being tasked with more than ever before. You're expected to lead innovation, develop talent, execute on strategy, create an inclusive culture, and help your people adapt to constant change. How can you do it all and be successful?

If you read nothing else on being an effective mid-level manager, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you build buy-in up and down your organization, secure time and resources for key projects, and lead change—all while getting the most important work done.

This book will inspire you to:

• Build winning teams and develop talent
• Transform your role from intermediary to innovator
• Foster a culture of psychological safety
• Balance being a leader with being an individual contributor
• Form partnerships and leverage internal networks
• Lead your organization from the middle

This collection of articles includes "Managers Can't Do It All," by Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton; "The Real Value of Middle Managers," by Zahira Jaser; "In Praise of Middle Managers," by Quy Nguyen Huy; "Managing Your Boss," by John J. Gabarro and John P. Kotter; "Get the Boss to Buy In," by Susan J. Ashford and James Detert; "The Secrets of Great Teamwork," by Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen; "How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams," by Joan C. Williams and Sky Mihaylo; "Making the Hybrid Workplace Fair," by Mark Mortensen and Martine Haas; "Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It," by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull; "The Leader as Coach," by Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular; "Make the Most of Your One-on-One Meetings," by Steven G. Rogelberg; "Learn When to Say No," by Bruce Tulgan; and "Begin with Trust," by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss.

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.

The classic Harvard Business Review articles every manager and aspiring leader should read--and share with their teams--from such bestselling Harvard Business Review authors as Peter Drucker, Clayton Christensen, John Kotter, Daniel Goleman, Jim Collins, Gary Hamel, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, and many more. Each compact book represents the most important ideas on management, leadership, and life. Build your professional library and advance your career with these 16 timeless business classics.

The HBR Classics Boxed Set includes: Peter Drucker's bestselling "Managing Oneself," "What Makes an Effective Executive," and "The Theory of the Business"; Clayton Christensen's inspiring "How Will You Measure Your Life?"; Daniel Goleman's articles on emotional intelligence--"Leadership That Gets Results" and "What Makes a Leader?"; author of Good to Great Jim Collins's "Turning Goals into Results"; W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's "Blue Ocean Leadership" and "Red Ocean Traps"; John Kotter's "Managing Your Boss"; Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith's "The Discipline of Teams"; Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad's "Strategic Intent"; William A. Sahlman's "How to Write a Great Business Plan"; Chris Argyris's "Teaching Smart People How to Learn"; Theodore Levitt's "Marketing Myopia"; Joseph B. Pine's "Do You Want to Keep Your Customers Forever?".

The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

A firsthand, trench-view story of the failure of the modern environmental movement—and an inspiring prescription for change.

Something's gone badly awry with environmentalism. We faithfully separate our waste into different streams, but wonder whether it really makes a difference. Global companies announce their commitment to carbon negativity while simultaneously sponsoring oil conferences. American businesses, communities, and individuals assiduously measure their carbon footprints, then implement voluntary emissions-reduction programs, all while trumpeting their do-gooderism.

The problem is, none of this—whether individual efforts or corporate sustainability tactics—will make a dent in solving the civilizational threat of climate change. We only pretend it will, at our peril.

As sustainability veteran Auden Schendler argues in this provocative, powerful book, we're living a big green lie. The hard truth is that much of the modern environmental road map could have been written by the fossil fuel industry specifically to avoid disrupting the status quo. We have become somehow complicit.

But there is another truth: while ineffective or duplicitous environmentalism has become standard practice, we all have friends and family we love and care about, whose future depends on solving the problem of climate change. Conscience tells us we have an obligation to repair the world. How can our common dreams be so at odds with our daily practice? And how might we meld our spirit and our passion to create a better future?

Schendler meets this profound contradiction head-on—with a bracing critique, moving personal stories of parenthood and service, and innovative, real-world methods to tackle climate change at the corporate, community, and individual levels.

Terrible Beauty is a unique and inspiring call for a new environmentalism, showing us that the key to saving the planet is to tap into our own humanity.

What does it take for women to succeed in a male-dominated world? The Grit Factor.

At age nineteen, Shannon Huffman Polson became the youngest woman ever to climb Denali, the highest mountain in North America. She went on to reach the summits of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Kilimanjaro and spent more than a decade traveling the world. Yet it was during her experience serving as one of the Army's first female attack helicopter pilots, and eventually leading an Apache flight platoon on deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina, that she learned the lessons of leadership that forever changed her life.

Where did these insights come from? From her own crucibles of experience—and from other women. In writing The Grit Factor, Polson made it her mission to connect with an elite pack of tough, impressive female iconoclasts who shared with her their candid stories of combat and career. This slate of decorated leaders includes Heather Penney, one of the first female F-16 pilots, who was put on a suicide mission for 9/11; General Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general in the Army; Amy McGrath, the first female Marine to fly the F/A-18 in combat and a 2020 candidate for the US Senate—and dozens of other unstoppable women who got there first, including Polson herself.

These women led at the highest levels in the most complicated, challenging, and male-dominated organization in the world. Now, when positive role models of women leading are needed as never before, Polson brings these voices together, sharing her own life lessons and theirs with storytelling flair, keen insight, and incisive analysis of current research.

With its gripping narrative and relatable takeaways, The Grit Factor is both inspiring and pragmatic, a book that will energize and enlighten current and aspiring leaders everywhere—whether male or female.

Overworked? Overwhelmed? Protect yourself from burnout.

The amount of work placed on women is often insurmountable. Along with doing what's required for our jobs, we're often asked to manage tasks that don't lead to career growth or promotions. At work and at home we're charged with countless forms of invisible labor that sap our time and energy. We usually rise to the occasion and do all of these things well, but this constant flow of overwork can leave us feeling underappreciated, frustrated, and burned out.

It's time to end the culture of overwork for women. From doing fewer dead-end tasks to delegating effectively, Overcoming Overwork provides practical advice for taking control of your workload so that you can spend your time doing what matters to you.

This book will inspire you to:

• Work smarter, not harder
• Delegate tasks and projects for a more equitable balance of labor
• Ask for help when your workload becomes unmanageable
• Carve out time and space for yourself

The HBR Women at Work series spotlights the real challenges and opportunities women experience throughout their careers. With interviews from the popular podcast of the same name and related articles, stories, and research, these books provide inspiration and advice for taking on topics at work like inequity, advancement, and building community. Featuring detailed discussion guides, this series will help you spark important conversations about where we're at and how to move forward.

There's an 80 percent chance you're poor. Time poor, that is.

Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment.

How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives?

Time Smart is your playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores. Author and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans will give you proven strategies for improving your "time affluence." The techniques Whillans provides will free up seconds, minutes, and hours that, over the long term, become weeks and months that you can reinvest in positive, healthy activities.

Time Smart doesn't stop at telling you what to do. It also shows you how to do it, helping you achieve the mindset shift that will make these activities part of your everyday regimen through assessments, checklists, and activities you can use right away. The strategies Whillans presents will help you make the shift to time-smart living and, in the process, build a happier, more fulfilling life.

Rise faster with quick reads, real-life stories, and expert advice.

It's not easy to navigate the world of work when you're exploring who you are and what you want in life. How do you translate your interests, skills, and education into a career you love? The HBR Work Smart Series features the topics that matter to you most in your early career, including being yourself at work, collaborating with (sometimes difficult) colleagues and bosses, managing your mental health, and weighing major job decisions. Each title includes chapter recaps and links to video, audio, and more. The HBR Work Smart Series books are your practical guides to stepping into your professional life and moving forward with confidence.

This specially priced six-book boxed set, available as a paperback or ebook collection, includes:

• Authenticity, Identity, and Being Yourself at Work
• Bosses, Coworkers, and Building Great Work Relationships
• Boundaries, Priorities, and Finding Work-Life Balance
• Experience, Opportunity, and Developing Your Career
• People, Performance, and Succeeding as a Manager
• Writing, Presenting, and Communicating with Confidence

This classic article shows how to make mass customization and efficient and personal marketing work by putting the producer and consumer in a "learning relationship." Over time, this ongoing relationship allows your company to meet a customer's changing needs over time. Furthermore, as your company develops learning relationships with its customers, it should be able to retain their business virtually forever.

The one primer you need to develop your entrepreneurial skills.

Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground.

Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals--from writing a business plan to getting your first loan. You also need to know the latest thinking on how to create an irresistible pitch deck, mitigate risk through experimentation, and develop unique opportunities through business model innovation.

The HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook addresses these challenges and more with practical advice and wisdom from Harvard Business Review's archive. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your startup's life--and increase your business's odds for success.

In the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook you'll find:

• Step-by-step guidance through the entrepreneurial process
• Concise explanations of the latest research and thinking on entrepreneurship from Harvard Business Review contributors such as Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman
• Time-honed best practices
• Stories of real companies, from Airbnb to eBay

You'll learn:

• Which skills and characteristics make for the best entrepreneurs
• How to gauge potential opportunities
• The basics of business models and competitive strategy
• How to test your assumptions--before you build a whole business
• How to select the right legal structure for your company
• How to navigate funding options, from venture capital and angel investors to accelerators and crowdfunding
• How to develop sales and marketing programs for your venture
• What entrepreneurial leaders must do to build culture and set direction as the business keeps growing

HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, real-life stories, and concise explanations of research published in Harvard Business Review, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack--whatever your role.

Take your business education to the next level—and drive your career forward.

If you read nothing else to stand out in class and prepare for what's next, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you learn the most important ideas in leadership and management, feel confident in your business classes, and be ready to thrive in any role you take on.

This book will inspire you to:

• Succeed by playing to your strengths
• Learn to be more persuasive
• Give killer presentations
• Perfect your business-writing skills
• Find your authentic voice and leadership style
• Build a purposeful career

This collection of articles includes "Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life," by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams, "Harnessing the Science of Persuasion," by Robert B. Cialdini, "How to Give a Killer Presentation," by Chris Anderson, "The Science of Strong Business Writing," by Bill Birchard, "How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety," by Morra Aarons-Mele, "How to Play to Your Strengths," by Laura Morgan Roberts, Gretchen Spreitzer, Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Emily Heaphy, and Brianna Barker Caza, "You're Not Powerless in the Face of Imposter Syndrome," by Keith D. Dorsey, "The Feedback Fallacy," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, "The Authenticity Paradox," by Herminia Ibarra, "The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most," by Raffaella Sadun, Joseph Fuller, Stephen Hansen, and PJ Neal, "Building an Ethical Career," by Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac Smith, and "From Purpose to Impact," by Nick Craig and Scott Snook.

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.

You're only one person—but you're not alone.

As a single parent, you know your life is different from the other working parents around you. With the pressure to perform well at work and no partner to assist with tasks at home (let alone major crises), you likely find yourself pulled in all directions, with many responsibilities and little support.

Doing It All as a Solo Parent offers you the help you need to lighten the load. Drawing on the wisdom of experts and parents alike, it provides practical tips and advice tailored to your unique challenges as a solo parent. Whether you're single, widowed, or have a partner who is unable to help, you'll discover how to do it all—with less stress.

You'll learn to:

• Create a support system of family and friends
• Make time spent with your children more meaningful
• Shape a long-term career despite short-term demands
• Build a childcare backup bench
• Carve out time for yourself

The HBR Working Parents Series provides support 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.

Everyone leads projects. Learn how to manage them more effectively.

If you read nothing else on leading projects large and small, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you manage initiatives that will inspire your people, tackle your biggest challenges using agile, and prepare yourself and your organization for a world driven by projects.

This book will inspire you to:

• Reap benefits from your initiatives more quickly
• Become a better project sponsor
• Kill initiatives that aren't performing
• Navigate the politics of innovation projects
• Keep AI and digital transformation on track
• Prepare for the next generation of project management tools

This collection of articles includes "The Project Economy Has Arrived," by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez; "Too Many Projects," by Rose Hollister and Michael D. Watkins; "Increase Your Return on Failure," by Julian Birkinshaw and Martine Haas; "How to Navigate the Politics of an Innovation Project," by Brian Uzzi; "Cultural Change That Sticks," by Jon R. Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley; "Agile at Scale," by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Andy Noble; "For an Agile Transformation, Choose the Right People," by Rob Cross, Heidi K. Gardner, and Alia Crocker; "Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation," by Rita McGrath and Ryan McManus; "Keep Your AI Projects on Track," by Iavor Bojinov; "A New Approach for Strategic Innovation," by Haijian Si, Christoph Loch, and Stelios Kavadias; "The Rise of the Chief Project Officer," by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez; "Make Megaprojects More Modular," by Bent Flyvbjerg; and "What the Next Generation of Project Management Will Look Like," by Rachel Longhurst and Woojin Choi.

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.

Are you suffering from work-related stress?

Feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and short-tempered at work—and at home? Then you may have too much stress in your life. Stress is a serious problem that impacts not only your mental and physical health, but also your loved ones and your organization. So what can you do to address it?

The HBR Guide to Managing Stress at Work will help you find a sustainable solution. It will help you reach the goal of getting on an even keel—and staying there. You’ll learn how to:

• Harness stress so it spurs, not hinders, productivity
• Create realistic and manageable routines
• Aim for progress, not perfection
• Make the case for a flexible schedule
• Ease the physical tension of spending too much time at your computer
• Renew yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally

A good visualization can communicate the nature and potential impact of ideas more powerfully than any other form of communication.

For a long time, "dataviz" was left to specialists--data scientists and professional designers. No longer. A new generation of tools and massive amounts of available data make it easy for anyone to create visualizations that communicate ideas far more effectively than generic spreadsheet charts ever could. The Harvard Business Review Good Charts Collection brings together two popular books to help you become more sophisticated in understanding and using dataviz to communicate your ideas and advance your career.

In Good Charts, dataviz maven and Harvard Business Review editor Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works and how to use this new language to impress and persuade. He lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping.

In Good Charts Workbook, Berinato extends the usefulness of Good Charts by putting theory into practice. He leads readers step-by-step through several example datasets and basic charts, providing space to practice the Good Charts talk-sketch-prototype process for improving those charts. Examples include a "Discussion Key" showing how to approach the challenge and why. Each challenge focuses on a different, common visualization problem such as simplification, storytelling, creating conceptual charts, and many others.

The Harvard Business Review Good Charts Collection is your go-to resource for turning plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas.

Find success in a workplace dominated by men.

Sexism. Self-doubt. Invisibility. When you're one of the only women in your workplace, it can be difficult to gain your footing. Organizations need to change, but in the meantime, women can find success in these settings—and even flourish in them.

Thriving in a Male-Dominated Workplace provides the advice you need to ensure your professional growth in roles and industries that have traditionally been filled by and controlled by men. From connecting with the right people to growing your confidence to fighting back against bias, you'll be able to establish your credibility and be seen by your colleagues as the expert you are.

This book will inspire you to:

• Find support across the organization
• Overcome impostor syndrome and self-doubt
• Speak up for yourself and your accomplishments
• Build a better culture—once and for all

The HBR Women at Work series spotlights the real challenges and opportunities women experience throughout their careers. With interviews from the popular podcast of the same name and related articles, stories, and research, these books provide inspiration and advice for taking on topics at work like inequity, advancement, and building community. Featuring detailed discussion guides, this series will help you spark important conversations about where we're at and how to move forward.

No data is completely safe.

Cyberattacks on companies and individuals are on the rise and growing not only in number but also in ferocity. And while you may think your company has taken all the precautionary steps to prevent an attack, no individual, company, or country is safe. Cybersecurity can no longer be left exclusively to IT specialists. Improving and increasing data security practices and identifying suspicious activity is everyone's responsibility, from the boardroom to the break room.

Cybersecurity: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on cybersecurity, from outlining the challenges to exploring the solutions, and provides you with the critical information you need to prepare your company for the inevitable hack. The lessons in this book will help you get everyone in your organization on the same page when it comes to protecting your most valuable assets.

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.

Achieve authenticity.

It's time for female leaders to stand out.

Women often aren't seen for their leadership potential. We face a double bind, forced to choose whether to be liked or respected, while neither one alone is enough to secure a seat at the table. It's up to organizations to change, but until then, what's an aspiring female leader to do?

You, the Leader tackles the obstacles you face as you chart your path to the top, from not getting credit for your work to feeling unseen to being subjected to unfair biases and expectations. Filled with advice, tips, and relatable conversations, this book will help you better understand how you can remain authentic while showing yourself as a valued leader in your organization.

This book will inspire you to:

• See yourself as a leader
• Develop an executive voice
• Advocate for yourself and your work
• Support the women around you

The HBR Women at Work series spotlights the real challenges and opportunities women experience throughout their careers. With interviews from the popular podcast of the same name and related articles, stories, and research, these books provide inspiration and advice for taking on topics at work like inequity, advancement, and building community. Featuring detailed discussion guides, this series will help you spark important conversations about where we're at and how to move forward.