Editors’ Note
Each year as we pare twelve months’ worth of HBR articles down to a handful of the very best, certain trends and themes emerge. Sometimes the economy, politics, and technology loom largest. Other times new twists on the basics of leadership, strategy, and marketing dominate. This year’s choices are united not by a trend or a theme but by a feeling: the surprise we experience when some long-held truth is gently challenged and is revealed to be different or more complex than we had thought. Educators and psychologists know that novelty reinforces understanding and learning. Indeed, the sense of surprise that distinguishes the pieces in this collection makes them stay with us, tugging at loose threads in our minds, helping us see connections as we seek to improve our organizations and ourselves. It spurs us out of complacency and encourages the mindset needed to learn, grow, and innovate. Embrace that feeling while you read and as you and your business prepare for coming challenges.
Some professionals are trained to ask questions: Think of litigators, journalists, and doctors. But few executives regard questioning as a skill to be honed. That’s a missed opportunity, say Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John. Thoughtful inquiry and the conversational exchange of ideas can yield a kind of magic, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In “The Surprising Power of Questions,” the authors describe several carefully researched techniques that will help you boost your learning, persuade others, and negotiate more effectively.
The traditional analytical tools of strategy may be well suited to understanding an existing business context, but they’re of little value when you need to reinvent your business. To generate a breakthrough strategy, Adam Brandenburger suggests building one with tools explicitly designed to foster creativity. “Strategy Needs Creativity” details approaches for kindling a spark of intuition, making a connection between disparate ways of thinking, or taking a leap into the unexpected that can lead you to a game-changing way of doing business.
“Women lack the desire and ability to negotiate”; “Women are more committed to family than men are.” Statements like these are often proffered to explain why women have failed to gain parity with men in the workplace, but Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely fell them with a few deft strokes. “Science, by and large, does not actually support these claims,” they write. “The sexes are far more similar in their inclinations, attitudes, and skills than popular opinion would have us believe.” The authors show that managers who are advancing gender equity in their firms take an inquisitive approach: They seek an evidence-based understanding of how women experience the workplace, and then create conditions that increase their prospects for success. “What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women” is a clarion call for rejecting the script that encourages women to act more like men and instead fixing the things that undermine women and reinforce gender stereotypes.
Artificial intelligence is becoming good at many “human” jobs—diagnosing disease, translating languages, providing customer service. And it’s improving fast, raising reasonable fears that AI will ultimately replace human workers throughout the economy. Accenture technology leaders H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty argue that that’s not the inevitable, or even the most likely, outcome. In “Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces,” they show that AI has the most significant impact—and companies see the biggest performance gains—when people and smart machines work together, enhancing one another’s strengths. Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers, they say, will miss the full potential of AI.
Stitch Fix demonstrates human and machine collaboration in action. The company has a simple business model: It sends you clothing and accessories it thinks you’ll like; you keep the items you want and send the others back. But behind the curtain is a relentlessly data-driven organization built on the belief that a good person plus a good algorithm is better than either the best person or the best algorithm alone. In “Stitch Fix’s CEO on Selling Personal Style to the Mass Market,” company founder and chief executive Katrina Lake describes overcoming skeptics (one of her business school professors called her idea an “inventory nightmare”) and surmounting the challenges of raising capital for a clothing start-up in the male-dominated VC field.
Is “Strategy for Start-Ups” the beginning of a new paradigm, or is it entrepreneurial heresy? HBR’s most divisive article of the year details how entrepreneurs often run with the first plausible strategy they identify in their haste to get to market. As a result they lose out to second or even third movers with superior strategies. Having worked with and studied hundreds of start-ups over the past 20 years, Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern have developed a framework that helps founders take a practical, clarifying approach to the critical choices they face. The authors delineate four go-to-market strategies for entrepreneurs to consider as they move from idea to launch. Each option offers a distinct way for the venture to create and capture value.
Agile innovation teams are small, entrepreneurial groups designed to stay close to customers and adapt quickly to changing conditions. When implemented correctly, they almost always result in greater productivity, better morale, faster time to market, higher quality, and lower risk than traditional approaches can achieve. In “Agile at Scale,” Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Andy Noble explore how your company can go from a handful of agile teams to hundreds. Making agile the dominant way you operate, they say, means committing all the way to the top: Leaders should adopt agile values, create a taxonomy of opportunities to set priorities, and break the journey of transformation into small steps.
Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are walled off, they are unlikely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the scenes. “Operational Transparency” advocates for the deliberate design of windows into and out of an organization’s processes so that customers can recognize the value being added. Take open kitchens: Research shows that when diners can see who’s making their food, their satisfaction increases—and it’s even greater if the chef can see the diners. Ryan W. Buell describes how managers can bring this sort of transparency to their companies, exploring what to reveal, when to reveal it, and how to avoid going too far.
What does it take for companies to both do well and do good? Many corporations are seeking to dial down their single-minded pursuit of financial gain and pay closer attention to their impact on the environment and society—but the business ecosystem is still motivated above all by shareholder wealth. In “The Dual-Purpose Playbook,” Julie Battilana, Anne-Claire Pache, Metin Sengul, and Marissa Kimsey look at how companies can find a balance. Examining dual-purpose companies around the globe, they find that successful ones build a commitment to both economic and social value into their core organizational activities. The authors outline four key management practices, which range from setting and monitoring dual goals to hiring and socializing employees to embrace them.
Strategy guru Michael E. Porter and Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria teamed up for 12 years to collect 60,000 hours’ worth of data from 27 chief executives, all to better understand what their days consist of. Although CEOs have tremendous resources at their disposal, time remains an area of acute scarcity. “How CEOs Manage Time,” a fine-grained, first-of-a-kind study, reveals similarities in how CEOs structure their schedules (they all attend a lot of meetings) along with differences (some dedicate far more face time to investors and customers than others do). It sheds light on the crucial trade-offs executives must make and describes how any leader can manage his or her calendar more effectively.
It’s often called the silver tsunami: In many countries the population is aging rapidly. In the United States alone about 10,000 people turn 65 each day—and one in five Americans will be 65 or older by 2030. This societal shift will affect every aspect of business, but Paul Irving finds that many corporate leaders have not yet considered its effects. And those who have, he says, typically foresee a looming crisis and miss the potential contributions that older adults—healthier and more active than their predecessors—can make as both workers and consumers. The final piece in this volume, “When No One Retires,” helps companies develop a “longevity strategy” for fostering a vibrant multigenerational workforce.
These standout pieces of the year explore some of the most compelling and important developments in business today. Did anything you just read in these descriptions surprise you? We hope so. Use that feeling to view yourself and your business through a new lens as you seek to improve and grow in the coming year.
—The Editors