5 Years of Must Reads from HBR: 2021 Edition (5 Books)

Harvard Business Review, Michael E. Porter, Joan C. Williams, Adam Grant, Marcus Buckingham

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781647820213
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

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: 2021 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 understanding how blockchain will affect your industry, to creating a workplace where gender equity can thrive, 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, Joan C. Williams, Roger Martin, Adam Grant, and Katrina Lake. Company examples range from Pepsico, DHL, and Deloitte to Alibaba, Adobe, and Stitch Fix. 5 Years of Must Reads: 2021 Edition brings the most current and important business conversations to your fingertips.

The
Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

2021

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

Boston, Massachusetts

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First eBook Edition: June 2020

ISBN: 978-1-64782-003-9
eISBN: 978-1-64782-004-6

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Editors’ Note

BONUS ARTICLE
The Feedback Fallacy

by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

Cross-Silo Leadership

by Tiziana Casciaro, Amy C. Edmondson, and Sujin Jang

Toward a Racially Just Workplace

by Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo

The Age of Continuous Connection

by Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch

The Hard Truth about Innovative Cultures

by Gary P. Pisano

Creating a Trans-Inclusive Workplace

by Christian N. Thoroughgood, Katina B. Sawyer, and Jennica R. Webster

When Data Creates Competitive Advantage

by Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright

Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong

by Peter Cappelli

How Dual-Career Couples Make It Work

by Jennifer Petriglieri

Building the AI-Powered Organization

by Tim Fountaine, Brian McCarthy, and Tamim Saleh

Leading a New Era of Climate Action

by Andrew Winston

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

by Scott Berinato

About the Contributors

Index

Editors’ Note

Every year when our editorial group meets to assemble this collection, a few notable themes emerge. As we made our final selections, late last winter, the most prominent was the strange pace of change. Companies are adapting now to climate change—a threat that is both new and decades in the making, a danger to business and society that is already having direct consequences but whose ultimate effects have barely been felt. Similarly, the emergence of AI in business has been dizzying—but the changes it has wrought over the past half-decade may turn out to be minor compared with the tsunami of automation on the horizon. Inclusivity in the workplace has made great steps forward—companies are now considering how to provide a supportive environment for transgender people at work—even as the advancement of African-American leaders remains painfully slow. How are we to make sense of these swirling, contradictory changes? Is the practice of management improving faster than ever, or is it stuck in neutral?

A few weeks after we met, the coronavirus went worldwide. In what felt like an instant, all our notions about the pace of change and our predictions for the year 2021 were obliterated.

As of this writing, the world is many weeks into the first global pandemic lockdown. It’s uncertain how much of this newly remote way of life is a passing moment and how much is the beginning of a new normal. Today parts of China, Europe, and the United States are beginning to ease restrictions, and we’re looking ahead to the coming days with a mix of hope and fear.

Throughout, HBR’s role has held steady. Our mission, “to improve the practice of management in a changing world,” remains urgent. In recent weeks some forward-looking companies have shifted away from immediate crisis management and begun to reorganize for resilience and innovation in a time dominated by a desolate economic outlook, new habits, and employees who are hurting deeply. Effective management is needed more than ever to balance the existential imperatives of today with leadership for the long term.

Many pieces in this collection take on new meaning when seen through the lens of the pandemic. Cross-silo collaboration will be necessary not just to reinvent your own company but to lead the promising and innovative projects that will help the world rebound. Effective feedback and coaching become more challenging when workers are remote, lonely, and on the verge of burnout. Diversity and inclusion, along with fair hiring practices, are all the more pressing when so many jobs are at risk. The challenges faced by dual-career couples and working parents become clearer every time a video meeting is interrupted by a Zoom-bombing toddler.

Meanwhile, the other starkly urgent issue of our time—climate change—looms larger than ever. If the pandemic has one positive outcome, it’s the growth of our capacity to imagine what a collective disaster looks like. The veneer of invincibility on industry and humanity has dissolved. Covid-19 has put the consequences of inaction in plain sight and demonstrated that preventable yet irreparable damage can occur in days. We hope that business will be inspired to take brave action now on climate.

This book, our final selection of articles from the prepandemic era, points to a world ready for great change yet stuck in old habits and paradigms. The best HBR articles are enduring; as you read through them, look for practices that will help your business survive the crisis and reach new heights tomorrow.

For years managers have been encouraged to give candid feedback on just about everything workers do. But, as Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue in “The Feedback Fallacy,” that doesn’t actually help employees thrive, because identifying failure and telling people how to correct it will never produce great performance. Instead, when managers see a great outcome, they should acknowledge the person who created it and share their impression of why it was a success. That fosters learning by showing what we’re doing well. This was one of HBR’s most popular—and widely debated—articles in many years.

Promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must get people working together across boundaries, but that’s a challenge for many leaders. “Cross-Silo Leadership,” by Tiziana Casciaro, Amy C. Edmondson, and Sujin Jang, explores the activities leaders can support to promote horizontal teamwork in their companies and help employees connect with and learn from people who think very differently from them.

At most large U.S. and multinational enterprises, diversity and inclusion have become imperatives, but the progress of African Americans remains slow. In “Toward a Racially Just Workplace,” Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo argue that companies can take specific steps to achieve racial fairness. They can shift their focus from the most lucrative thing to the right thing, encourage open conversations about race, revamp diversity and inclusion programs to clarify goals and focus on proactive steps, and manage development across all career stages.

Thanks to technologies that enable constant, customized interactions, companies are building deeper ties with their customers. They can now address customer needs the moment they arise—sometimes even earlier—and dramatically improve their customers’ experiences, boost their own operational efficiencies, and gain competitive advantage. In “The Age of Continuous Connection,” Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch identify four effective and connected strategies: filling customers’ requests quickly and seamlessly; presenting individually tailored recommendations; reminding people of their needs and goals and nudging them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2017
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2018
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2019
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2020
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2021