5 Years of Must Reads from HBR: 2019 Edition

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

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781633698550
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Management

Get five years of the latest, most significant thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review in one library set. Every year, HBR editors examine the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past twelve months to select the articles that have provoked the most conversation, the most inspiration, and the most change. From how companies can proactively evolve their business models to stay ahead of the digital revolution to understanding why your strategy execution isn't working--and how to fix it--the articles in these volumes 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 from 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, Herminia Ibarra, Daniel Goleman, Marcus Buckingham, Roger Martin, Adam Grant, Thomas Davenport, and Patty McCord. Company examples range from Unilever, Deloitte, and DHL to Facebook, Netflix, Google, and Uber. 5 Years of Must Reads: 2019 Edition brings the most current and important business conversations of the past few years to your fingertips.

The definitive management ideas of the year from
Harvard Business Review.

2017

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

Boston, Massachusetts

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Contents

Copyright

Editors’ Note

Collaborative Overload

by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant

Algorithms Need Managers, Too

by Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg, and Sendhil Mullainathan

Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy

by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary

What Is Disruptive Innovation?

by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Rory McDonald

How Indra Nooyi Turned Design Thinking into Strategy

An interview with Indra Nooyi by Adi Ignatius

Engineering Reverse Innovations

by Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan

The Employer-Led Health Care Revolution

by Patricia A. McDonald, Robert S. Mecklenburg, MD, and Lindsay A. Martin

Getting to Sí, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da

by Erin Meyer

The Limits of Empathy

by Adam Waytz

People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO

by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey

Beyond Automation

by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby

About the Contributors

Index

Editors’ Note

“People are the ultimate source of sustainable competitive differentiation,” write Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey in their article “People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO.” But it may not always be so. Take the growing tension between man and machine: To what extent will knowledge workers’ jobs be replaced by smart products? What is the role of a human professional in a world of big data and predictive algorithms?

In this volume we showcase this and other critical themes highlighted by our authors from the past year of Harvard Business Review. Many of these articles stress the continued need to elevate employees’ work to new levels and unleash their innovative energy. Our authors explore big trends in business—like the increased focus on collaboration and empathy—that emphasize distinctly human skills. Executives and academics alike reengage with design thinking, explaining how to build products, processes, and platforms around users’ experiences. Other authors highlight the need to retool models and metrics for a world where human interactions have become the major source of value. All these ideas highlight that even as technology marches forward, human knowledge and expertise remain critical to strategy and performance.

We begin this collection with a piece that studies how individuals work together. Collaboration has become a hot topic in recent years, and indeed it offers organizations a host of benefits. But it also poses risks: The most productive contributors often burn out from carrying the weight of their teams. In “Collaborative Overload,” professors and researchers Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant present practical ways to manage collaboration effectively—by redistributing work evenly and rewarding efficient efforts—for high performance without exhaustion.

Like collaboration, big data provides organizations with tremendous opportunity—but also has its limitations. In “Algorithms Need Managers, Too,” professors Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg, and Sendhil Mullainathan explain what questions algorithms can—and can’t—answer, so companies will be able to use them more effectively. While algorithms can identify patterns in data and generate insights at incredible speed and scale, the authors illustrate, through examples from Netflix movie recommendations to Google ads, how algorithms can also produce unintended consequences if designed too literally or without accounting for all critical goals. It takes managerial know-how to clarify cause and effect, identify risks, and make important decisions.

Our next piece, “Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy,” redefines strategic advantage. For years managers have relied on Michael Porter’s five forces model of competition. But with platform businesses such as Uber and Alibaba, the distinctions among the forces are less clear, and new competitive factors come into play. It’s now imperative to understand “network effects”—to facilitate interactions between consumers and producers, and to incorporate those interactions into metrics of success. In this article professors Marshall W. Van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker and executive adviser Sangeet Paul Choudary explain the new keys to competitive advantage and how traditional pipeline companies can develop the core competencies to survive in a platform world.

Porter’s five forces isn’t the only classic management concept to be reexamined in HBR this year. Two decades ago Clayton M. Christensen introduced the theory of disruptive innovation, but since then, journalists, researchers, and business practitioners have misinterpreted its concepts and misapplied its principles. Uber, for instance, has been highlighted as a shining star of disruption, but does it truly fit the definition? In “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” Christensen and his coauthors, Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald, provide a primer on the theory, explain how it has evolved, and correct common misperceptions. Their article will help managers to understand how firms innovate successfully and to predict which new models will succeed.

The next piece is an interview with a top business leader: “How Indra Nooyi Turned Design Thinking into Strategy.” HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius asks the CEO of PepsiCo hard-hitting questions about how the company is using design to improve products and customer experiences. Moving beyond the basics of color choice on labels, Pepsi has examined how different segments of its customer base are responding to and using its products. Nooyi’s story is less of a tale of product design, however, and more about managing change in an organization while creating a platform that encourages customer interaction.

Identifying and understanding the needs of customers—this time, consumers in the developing world—is a key element of Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan’s McKinsey Award–winning article, “Engineering Reverse Innovations.” In 2009, Govindarajan first described the concept of “reverse innovation,” in which Western multinationals create products and services for emerging markets first and then export them to developed countries. This article explains how to escape the five traps companies often fall into while attempting to innovate for the developing world, drawing on the experiences of a team that built a successful low-priced wheelchair.

The cost of goods may be a major concern in poorer countries, but for companies in the United States, the amount spent on health care is even more challenging. “The Employer-Led Health Care Revolution,” by Patricia A. McDonald, Robert S. Mecklenburg, and Lindsay A. Martin, describes how Intel and a health care institution teamed up to transform the local health care system. By using its purchasing power and working directly with care providers, health plan administrators, insurers, and other employers, Intel was able to streamline health care operations, creating low-cost options for both employers and patients. In this article the authors identify the ingredients of this successful experiment, in the hope that other large employers can follow its example.

Negotiations are an everyday event in business, whether they’re about prices from a vendor or schedules for clients. But when they take place between people from different cultures, the dynamics become much more complex and miscommunication is more common. It’s all too easy to damage relationships irreversibly. Our next piece, “Getting to Sí, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da” by INSEAD professor Erin Meyer, provides five rules of thumb for negotiating across cultures. From building trust with your counterpart to understanding the subtle messages in emotional outbursts, Meyer’s advice illuminates how to strike the right balance and reach that final agreement—and make it stick.

Empathy—the art of understanding others’ needs and responding with compassion—is essential to motivating colleagues, calming upset customers, and designing innovative products. But frequent demands for empathy can exhaust your workers—and even cause them to make unethical decisions. In “The Limits of Empathy,” Adam Waytz of the Kellogg School of Management suggests simple strategies to encourage your team to empathize in a more healthy, sustainable way.

“Businesses don’t create value; people do” is a popular adage among CEOs—but often those same CEOs are dissatisfied with the human resource officers who manage the organization’s workforce. In “People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO,” business advisers Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey argue for a new C-level leader whose sole responsibility is to think strategically about an organization’s talent—from identifying and creatively engaging high potentials to developing new performance metrics that better support business goals. This piece provides practical ideas on how to implement this change and ensure that people remain the ultimate source of competitive advantage.

The last article in this volume takes us back to the tension between man and machine. “Beyond Automation,” by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby, taps into the fear many white-collar employees feel as new technologies make more jobs obsolete. The authors assert that human employees will still be necessary in the future—but they’ll have to find ways to proactively partner with machines. The article identifies five ways humans can thrive at work in the future.

Despite all the amazing advances new digital tools have brought, people still matter. Businesses need individuals who can exercise intuition and judgment, who can see the gaps in data, who can assess new ideas. Most of all, they need leaders who can inspire employees and set them up for success. Competitive advantage lies not in the latest smart devices but in the way we effectively combine the potential of both technology and people.

—The Editors

Collaborative Overload

by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant

COLLABORATION IS TAKING OVER the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. According to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.

Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments. However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks.

What’s more, research we’ve done across more than 300 organizations shows that the distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. As people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance. Their giving mindset and desire to help others quickly enhances their performance and reputation. As a recent study led by Ning Li, of the University of Iowa, shows, a single “extra miler”—an employee who frequently contributes beyond the scope of his or her role—can drive team performance more than all the other members combined.

But this “escalating citizenship,” as the University of Oklahoma professor Mark Bolino calls it, only further fuels the demands placed on top collaborators. We find that what starts as a virtuous cycle soon turns vicious. Soon helpful employees become institutional bottlenecks: Work doesn’t progress until they’ve weighed in. Worse, they are so overtaxed that they’re no longer personally effective. And more often than not, the volume and diversity of work they do to benefit others goes unnoticed, because the requests are coming from other units, varied offices, or even multiple companies. In fact, when we use network analysis to identify the strongest collaborators in organizations, leaders are typically surprised by at least half the names on their lists. In our quest to reap the rewards of collaboration, we have inadvertently created open markets for it without recognizing the costs. What can leaders do to manage these demands more effectively?

Precious Personal Resources

First, it’s important to distinguish among the three types of “collaborative resources” that individual employees invest in others to create value: informational, social, and personal. Informational resources are knowledge and skills—expertise that can be recorded and passed on. Social resources involve one’s awareness, access, and position in a network, which can be used to help colleagues better collaborate with one another. Personal resources include one’s own time and energy.

These three resource types are not equally efficient. Informational and social resources can be shared—often in a single exchange—without depleting the collaborator’s supply. That is, when I offer you knowledge or network awareness, I also retain it for my own use. But an individual employee’s time and energy are finite, so each request to participate in or approve decisions for a project leaves less available for that person’s own work.

Idea in Brief

The Situation

Over the past two decades, the amount of time managers and employees spend on collaborative work has ballooned. At many companies people now spend about 80% of their time in meetings or answering colleagues’ requests.

The Problem

Although the benefits of collaboration are well documented, the costs often go unrecognized. When demands for collaboration run too high or aren’t spread evenly through the organization, workflow bottlenecks and employee burnout result.

The Solution

Leaders must learn to better manage collaboration in their companies by mapping supply and demand, eliminating or redistributing work, and incentivizing people to collaborate more efficiently.

Unfortunately, personal resources are often the default demand when people want to collaborate. Instead of asking for specific informational or social resources—or better yet, searching in existing repositories such as reports or knowledge libraries—people ask for hands-on assistance they may not even need. An exchange that might have taken five minutes or less turns into a 30-minute calendar invite that strains personal resources on both sides of the request.

Consider a case study from a blue-chip professional services firm. When we helped the organization map the demands facing a group of its key employees, we found that the top collaborator—let’s call him Vernell—had 95 connections based on incoming requests. But only 18% of the requesters said they needed more personal access to him to achieve their business goals; the rest were content with the informational and social resources he was providing. The second most connected person was Sharon, with 89 people in her network, but her situation was markedly different, and more dangerous, because 40% of them wanted more time with her—a significantly greater draw on her personal resources.

We find that as the percentage of requesters seeking more access moves beyond about 25, it hinders the performance of both the individual and the group and becomes a strong predictor of voluntary turnover. As well-regarded collaborators are overloaded with demands, they may find that no good deed goes unpunished.

The exhibit “In demand, yet disengaged,” reflecting data on business unit line leaders across a sample of 20 organizations, illustrates the problem. People at the top center and right of the chart—that is, those seen as the best sources of information and in highest demand as collaborators in their companies—have the lowest engagement and career satisfaction scores, as represente...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads: 2019
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads: 2018
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads: 2017
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads: 2015