HBR's 10 Must Reads On Strategy

This is a great library addition, where one can dive in and find a topic which relates to a current problem.
The pieces on strategy are great and timeless.
Some of the other pieces can feel dated or too generic, such as the article on data analytics.

This collection of HBR's finest articles is second to none. A great investment for any student or professional who has a life long desire to learn from the best. I've been a reader of HBR since I started my MBA and I feel this collection will be referenced throughout my career. In summary, only HBRs best work makes the pages and this reference set will help you immensely throughout your life.

The essays included in this boxed set is of high quality, but the advice is fairly generic. Some themes and topics are repeated quite often across essays. I'd recommend selecting and reading specific essays that interest you rather buying this boxed set.

The first few articles are a bit dry and academic in nature but others are wonderful foundational reading for anyone developing a strategy. This is a solid book for anyone trying to brush up on Strategy theory.

This is another 5-star review of the book that is very well-deserved. Not only does the book lay out the domain clearly, but the collection of articles included are arguably the best of the best in addressing those particular sub-topics. The book is a great refresher for readers who need one, and also provides highly actionable and practical ideas for transitioning from idea to results. A "must read" indeed.

All the articles in the book are really worth readings. These are written by world renown specialists in their respective fields. If you want an overview and yet very solid articles in leadership and management, look no further. The information is very current and relevant - these are essential collections.

It's the best articles of the Harvard Business Review from the last 10-15 years or so. Do you really need another reason to get this and read it? If not, you're either a natural, or you have no idea how to succeed in business (and I'm guessing it's the latter).

I think the product is hyped by marketing it as an essential. The word essential can have different connotation with different people. I too had an impression about an essential reading that it would be something as fundamental to survive etc. but some of the articles have itself been contradicted or at least been provided with an alternative by Harvard new releases.

Perfectly packaged and shipped quickly and professionally, product themselves are basically better than a Master's Degree as they skip through years of schooling and many many thousands of dollars, all while allowing you to get the best advice and learning materials from an assortment of individuals who could all be keynote speakers at Ivy League schools and Fortune 100 companies (and probably are), essentially giving you practical and priceless information to give you an idea where you need to focus on and can then learn as you go. As a new inheritor of a small manufacturing business, with no college degree, it was pretty intimidating to come in and have the confidence that the changes I saw needed were indeed going to be beneficial, and even if I knew they needed to be made, what was the best way to do it? These are helping me to gain the reasons WHY and HOW to WHAT needs to be done, learning as I go along and business is starting to pick up, and a new energy is starting to spark the flames of production at Erie Energy Products INC. We make the worlds finest cellulose insulation, using basically old newspapers that would otherwise be trash, into a safe, non-toxic, non irritating product with superior fire resistance and insulation R-Values than the F word: fiberglass. {{shudders at mental image of falling in attic into the pink death}} =)
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Once I received my book (two weeks after placing the order) it was not it the greatest condition. Every single page was bent and the cover had a large crease through it. This was suppose to be a new book but it was pretty damaged.

The first article, appropriately, is by Michael Porter ('What is Strategy?'). He, in turn, leads off by asserting that 'operational effectiveness is not strategy.' There goes benchmarking, TQM, Kaizen, outsourcing, core competencies, and even positioning (too static - think of Groupon or Starbucks). Actually, not quite - they're necessary, but not sufficient. Few companies have competed successfully on the basis of operational effectiveness over an extended period - thanks to rapid diffusion of best practices. Porter claims that the resulting productivity gains are captured by customers and equipment suppliers, not retained in superior profitability (the store?). Put simply, the more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike and the more they all end up with diminishing returns, and the more an industry tends towards consolidation via buying up rivals.

Competitive strategy is about being operationally and positionally different - eg. SWA, Carmike Cinemas, Bessemer Trust. Trade-offs are involved that choose what NOT to do. Fit is a central component - eg. a sophisticated sales force confers greater advantage when the product embodies premium technology and its marketing approach emphasizes customer assistance and support, a production line with high levels of model variety is more valuable combined with an minimal JIT inventory system. Thus, it can be misleading to explain success by specifying individual strengths or core competencies. It is also harder for a rival to match an array of interlocked activities than merely imitate a specific technology or sales-force approach. Finding a new strategic position is often preferable to being the 2nd or 3rd imitator of an occupied position. On the other hand, frequent positioning shifts are costly - entire systems must be realigned.

Sound strategy is especially undermined by the desire to grow (other than globally), as well as chasing every new technology for its own sake and mistaking 'customer focus' to mean serving all customer needs.

Next is Porter's 'The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy.' In this article he synthesizes the strategist's job as understanding and coping with competition. However, he immediately expands that apparent scope by pointing out the competition for profits goes beyond current direct competitors to also include customers, suppliers, potential entrants (eg. Pepsi entering the bottled water industry, Apple entering the music distribution business), and substitute products (movies vs. TVs, local recreation/entertainment venues; photographic film vs. digital cameras) - in any industry. If the forces are intense (airlines, textiles, hotels), almost no company earns attractive an ROI; if benign (software, soft drinks, and toiletries), many are profitable. Thus, health industry structure should be as much a competitive concern to strategists as positioning within that industry.

Barriers to new entrants are advantages that incumbents have relative to new entrants. These include supply-side economies of scale, demand-side benefits of scale (no one ever got fired for buying from IBM; Facebook's 'network effect'), customer switching costs, capital requirements, proprietary technology, incumbent advantages independent of size (eg. preferential access to raw material, preemption of the most favorable locations, established brand identifies), unequal access to distribution channels, and restrictive government policy. Another - expected retaliation, such as price-cutting, especially when industry growth is slow.

Powerful suppliers (including labor) can capture more of one's potential profits by charging higher prices. Example, per Porter - Microsoft has eroded PC-makers' profitability by raising prices on operating systems (until Google began offering a far cheaper alternative). Supplier groups are more powerful if they're more concentrated than the industry being sold to, the supplier group does not heavily depend on the industry for its revenues, their buyers face switching costs in changing suppliers, or the supplier group can credibly threaten to integrate forward into the industry (eg. Asian manufacturers of U.S.-designed products).

Similarly, powerful customers can capture more value by forcing down prices, demanding better quality/service, and/or playing suppliers off against one another. They are especially likely to be powerful if there are few large buyers, the industry's products are undifferentiated, buyers face few switching costs, or buyers can credibly threaten to integrate backward and produce the product themselves. Continuing, a buyer group is price sensitive if the product it purchases represents a significant fraction of its costs, the buyer group earns low profits, the quality of the buyers' products/services is little affected by the industry's product.

Price competition is most likely to occur if products/services of rivals are nearly identical and there a few switching costs for buyers, fixed costs are high and marginal costs are low, the product is perishable, or capacity must be expanded in large increments to be efficient.

'Blue Ocean Strategy' is another especially useful article within the booklet. The material focuses on Cirque du Soleil and how it quickly became a major player in a world heretofore dominated by Ringling Bros./Barnum & Bailey took over a century to reach - despite the circus business being in long-term decline. PlayStations, sporting events, TV were taking market share away, and animal rights groups attacking from another perspective. Cirque did this, not by stealing customers from Ringling etc., but by creating uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant.

The authors describe this as a 'blue ocean strategy' in which demand is created rather than fought over. Sometimes companies do so via creating a new industry (eBay); usually, however, it is accomplished when a company alters the boundaries of an existing industry. Recent examples include mutual funds, cell phones, biotechnology, discount retailing, and home videos. They, while less frequently represented among new ventures (most are line extensions), have proven more profitable on average.

Leading-edge technology is sometimes involved in the creation of blue oceans, but is not a defining feature - even Ford's revolutionary assembly line can be traced to the meatpacking industry. Perhaps the most important feature of blue ocean strategy is that it rejects the fundamental tenet of conventional strategy - that trade-offs exists between value and cost. Cirque offered people both the fun and thrill of the circus and the intellectual sophistication of the theater. It concluded that the appetite for animal shows was rapidly diminishing because of concerns about the treatment of circus animals, while the costs of training and caring for them were quite high. Cirque also realized that the public no longer thought of circus artists as stars, and did away with three-ring shows as well (expensive, confusing). Cirque focused on clowns (became more sophisticated), the tent, and classic acrobatic acts (added artistic flair). Each show has an original musical score and theme.

Companies that create blue oceans usually reap the benefits without credible challenges for 10 - 15 years - Cirque du Soleil, Home Depot, Federal Express, SWA, and CNN are examples. Body Shop is another - it shuns top models and makes no promises of eternal youth and beauty - for established brands this made imitation difficult because it would invalidate their current images. Finally, the authors also present the Model T as a blue-ocean innovation - there were lots of expensive, hand-crafted, and (unfortunately) hard-to-repair automobiles already in the marketplace. Ford's contribution was bringing standardization, ease of repair, and low costs. Thus, 'blue-ocean strategy' resembles Christensen's industry disruption by low-cost innovators entering the market from the bottom - eg. Toyota.

This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1960 until 2006. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of leadership and management.

More specifically, how to meet the challenges of disruptive change, compete on analytics, manage one's self, understand what all effective leaders share in common, put the balanced scorecard to work, what innovation's "classic traps" are and how to avoid or escape from them, why most transformations fail, what "marketing myopia" is and how/why it limits (if not prevents) success, what strategy is (and isn't) and what it does (and doesn't) do, and how/why the core competencies of the corporation determine the nature and extent of its success or failure.

Each article includes two invaluable reader-friendly devices, "Idea in Brief" and "Idea in Practice" sections, that facilitate, indeed expedite review of key points. Some articles also include mini-essays on even more specific subjects such as "Fitting the Tool to the Task" (Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf), "Going to Bat for the Stats" and "You Know You Compete on Analytics When" (Thomas H. Davenport), "Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?" (Daniel Goleman), "Building a Balanced Scorecard" (Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton), "The Lessons of Innovation" (Rosabeth Moss Kanter), "Japanese Companies Rarely Have Strategies" (Michael Porter), and "Vickers Learns the Value of Strategic Architecture" (C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel).

These ten articles do not - because they obviously cannot - explain everything that one knows to know and understand about these essential business issues. However, I do not know of another single source at this price (currently $16.32 from the store) that provides more and better information, insights, and advice that will help leaders to achieve success in the business dimensions examined in this volume.

The first article, Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change" by Clayton Christensen. He points out that even before the Internet and globalization, big companies' track record for dealing with major, disruptive change was not good. For example, out of hundreds of department stores, only Dayton Hudson became a leader in discount retailers. Not one of the minicomputer companies succeeded in the personal computer business.

Three factors affect what an organization can/can't do - its resources (people, equipment, technologies, cash, product designs, information, brands, relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers), processes (interaction, coordination, communication, product development, manufacturing, budgeting), and values (eg. achieve gross margins of 40%, how big an opportunity must be to be interesting - magnified when M&A suddenly makes it much larger).

Successful companies are good at responding to evolutionary changes in their markets - the problem comes with handling or initiating revolutionary changes. Sustaining innovations are nearly always developed and introduced by established industry leaders, but they never introduce or cope well with disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovations occur so infrequently that no company has a routine process for handling them; they also nearly also promise lower profit margins and are not attractive to the company's best customers. While start-ups lack resources, their values embrace small markets and their cost structures can accommodate low margins.

Christensen suggests that when an organization pursues disruptive innovations it spin out an independent organization and develop within it the new processes and values required. Some organizations create the new capabilities internally - eg. IBM and its disk drives, Eli Lilly for Zyprexa, Chrysler for the minivan, via 'heavyweight teams (Revolutionizing Product Development,' Wheelwright). H-P, for example, was quite successful with laser printers, but its ink-jet business lagged until transferred outside and allowed to compete with the laser group. If new capabilities are being obtained through acquisition one should not integrate the acquisition into the parent. On the other hand, Wall Street may press for integrating the two to cut costs.

The second article, 'Competing on Analytics' by Davenport, identifies 'killer aps' as those that upend customer expectations and transformed technology from a supporting tool into a strategic weapon. the store, Harrah's Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox are examples.

Marriott honed its system for establishing optimal prices for rooms (revenue management), and since expanded it to conference facilities and catering - taking into account the likelihood of frequent customers' defecting to competitors. similarly, analytics competitors use predictive modeling to identify the most profitable customers, those with the greatest profit potential, and the ones most likely to cancel - to establish prices in real time. Capital One conducts over 30,000 experiments/year with different interest rates, incentives, direct-mail, etc. to maximize the likelihood that potential customers will sign up for credit cards and that they will repay those balances. Progressive uses widely available insurance industry data to define narrow groups of customers with no accidents, then sets prices for those cells; it takes the same approach with high-risk customers. (Allstate is now following Progressive's lead.) When UPS data analysis predicts customer defections via usage patterns and complaints, a salesperson contact that customer to review and resolve the problem - dramatically reducing the loss of accounts. Analytics competitors field centralized groups to ensure that critical data are well managed and easily shared, rather than allowing the proliferation of user-developed spreadsheets and the inevitable multiple versions of key indicators and large error rates.

CEOs leading the analytics charge require both an appreciation of and a familiarity with the subject.

The most proficient analytics practitioners also help customers and vendors measure theirs. Wal-Mart insists that suppliers use its Retail Link system to monitor product movement by store and reduce stock-outs.

A third especially valuable contribution is 'The Core Competence of the (Diversified) Corporation,' by C.K. Prahalad. At least three tests can be applied to identify core competencies in a company. 1)It provides potential access to a wide variety of markets - eg. display systems --> calculators, miniature TVs, monitors, auto dashboards. 2)It makes a significant contribution to perceived customer benefits of the end product. 3)Difficult for competitors to imitate. Few companies are likely to build world leadership in more than 5-6 fundamental competencies. These skills cannot be 'rented in' by outsourcing and OEM-supply relationships. Chrysler, for example, is becoming increasingly dependent on Mitsubishi and Hyundai for engines and power trains - something Honda does not do. Another error occurs by forgoing opportunities to establish competencies that are evolving - eg. color televisions. Doing such closed the door on a whole stream of future opportunities reliant on video-based competencies. When an organization is a multiplicity of SBUs, no single business may feel responsible for maintaining a viable position in core products nor able to justify the investment required to build world leadership. Absent such recognition, individual SBUs will pursue only marginal product-line extensions or geographic expansions. Hybrid opportunities like fax machines will emerge only when managers take off their SBU blinkers. Canon appeared to be in the camera business at the time it was preparing to become a world leader in copiers.

Core competencies are corporate resources and my be reallocated by corporate management.

This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1960 until 2006. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of leadership and management.

More specifically, how to meet the challenges of disruptive change, compete on analytics, manage one's self, understand what all effective leaders share in common, put the balanced scorecard to work, what innovation's "classic traps" are and how to avoid or escape from them, why most transformations fail, what "marketing myopia" is and how/why it limits (if not prevents) success, what strategy is (and isn't) and what it does (and doesn't) do, and how/why the core competencies of the corporation determine the nature and extent of its success or failure.

Each article includes two invaluable reader-friendly devices, "Idea in Brief" and "Idea in Practice" sections, that facilitate, indeed expedite review of key points. Some articles also include mini-essays on even more specific subjects such as "Fitting the Tool to the Task" (Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf), "Going to Bat for the Stats" and "You Know You Compete on Analytics When" (Thomas H. Davenport), "Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?" (Daniel Goleman), "Building a Balanced Scorecard" (Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton), "The Lessons of Innovation" (Rosabeth Moss Kanter), "Japanese Companies Rarely Have Strategies" (Michael Porter), and "Vickers Learns the Value of Strategic Architecture" (C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel).

These ten articles do not - because they obviously cannot - explain everything that one knows to know and understand about these essential business issues. However, I do not know of another single source at this price (currently $16.32 from the store) that provides more and better information, insights, and advice that will help leaders to achieve success in the business dimensions examined in this volume.

I called them "Willow Wanna-Be's." Back in my Willow Creek Association days, pastors and church board members would show up, often unannounced, and ask for 10 Easy Bullet Points on Growing a Really Big Church. (Actually, they never had time for 10 points. "Make it three--but give us your best stuff.")

So, we'd talk about Kingdom principles and the church's mission and heart to reach seekers. Later, we talked about strategy--the God-honoring kind. But the Looky Lou's (look it up--a descriptive Chicago traffic term) would ask about plexiglass pulpits, drama scripts, and cool lighting.

Had Ian Morgan Cron's book been written back then, I would have quoted chapter and verse from Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale. Cron's fictional megachurch pastor-in-crisis, reminisces, "I remember telling our architect that I wanted all the technological goodies you'd find in a world-class performing arts center. Looking back, I realize that what I had asked for was `lights, camera, action!' rather than `Father, Son and Holy Ghost.'"

I was reminded of my Willow days (good memories) last week when I re-read the classic Harvard Business Review article, "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter. He writes, "Bit by bit, almost imperceptibly, management tools have taken the place of strategy."

Citing the conventional wisdom over the previous two decades where "managers have been learning to play by a new set of rules," Porter dismisses that corruption with this zinger: "But those beliefs are dangerous half-truths, and they are leading more and more companies down the path of mutually destructive competition."

What is strategy? Porter has five bullet points in his 18-page article:

Number 1: "Operational effectiveness is not strategy." He notes, "The root of the problem is the failure to distinguish between operational effectiveness and strategy."

Number 2: "Strategy rests on unique activities." The poster companies here are Southwest Airlines and Ikea. "Strategic competition can be thought of as the process of perceiving new positions that woo customers from established positions or draw new customers into the market." Strategic positions can have three sources: variety-based positioning, needs-based positioning, and access-based positioning.

Number 3: "A sustainable strategic position requires trade-offs." Porter writes, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do."

Remember Continental Lite, the Southwest Airlines wanna-be? They decided to "straddle" their position as a full-service airline (hubs), while competing in some markets with Southwest (Point A to Point B). They confused their full-service customers and infuriated travel agents. "Trade-offs ultimately grounded Continental Lite. The airline lost millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job." Bottom line: "Continental paid an enormous straddling penalty."

Number 4: "Fit drives both competitive advantage and sustainability." What is Southwest's core competence? Its key success factors? The correct answer is that everything matters. Southwest's strategy involves a whole system of activities, not a collection of parts. Its competitive advantage comes from the way its activities fit and reinforce one another."

And get this, Looky Lou's: "Fit locks out imitators by creating a chain that is as strong as its strongest link." It's not the seeker service drama, or the band, or the spiritual gifts training, or small groups, or pastors in old jeans with no socks--it's the whole, holy enchilada.

Three half-page diagrams, "Mapping Activity Systems," for Ikea, Vanguard and Southwest Airlines deliver the "Aha!" insight on what Porter means by fit--"nests of tightly linked activities." He writes, "Positions built on systems of activities are far more sustainable than those built on individual activities."

"Fit means that poor performance in one activity will degrade the performance in others, so that weaknesses are exposed and more prone to get attention. Conversely, improvements in one activity will pay dividends in others."

With just three pages to go, Porter finally reveals his mega-simple definition: "Strategy is creating fit among a company's activities." He comments, "The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well--not just a few--and integrating among them. If there is no fit among activities, there is no distinctive strategy and little sustainability."

Number 5: "Rediscovering strategy." In his wrap-up, Porter warns about "the failure to choose" and the "growth trap." Churches beware: "Among all other influences, the desire to grow has perhaps the most perverse effect on strategy." He concludes with five soul-searching questions.

My gut: many nonprofits, churches and companies do not have--at their core--a revenue problem or new idea problem; they have a strategy problem. This is a powerful article.

I read that Michael Porter had written an article on the book, and bought it anyways.
My god, how can serious people accept the kind of corporate premisses about strategy that he claims to "prescribe"?
Really, the presence of those articles killed the book, in my opinion. It`s Harvard Business Review! It`s supposed to have dense management concepts, not some Management Drug Prescription. Anyways, as I said: its my fault.

Buy hard copy version. In kindle version, the charts, graphs etc are not clear. Also the Index dosent have page nos so its difficult to move between articles.

* 4 stars in for the content. However 1 star for kindle version*

OK if you want a brief summary of schools and ideas by big names. I found it outdated and a lot of the information was repeatedly used page after page. It's more of a textbook for students, a shortcut, but not useful for current leaders looking for an inspiration.

these books are the reading everyone with no exception must read, whatever your activity or profesion is. here will learn bets ways to improve himself.
It would be good to have this reading in more languages,

I sometimes wonder why things can't just be called by their content rather than attempting to lure me in. Harvard Business Review is a serious publishing house, and I own so many other, just as impressive collections and journal articles they publish or sell.

The cheesy book title aside, these articles are definitely good for keeping and returning to. Do not mistake them for truly being "The essentials" as there are so many other good articles and essays out there that are not less a foundation in business, strategy, marketing, and other aspects of business. But they are certainly worth reading more than once, and personally I would include most of them in a "top 1,000" business articles.

Nice concise read for ANYONE and EVERYONE in business, to learn and reinforce the basics of business strategy. Independent shopkeepers, new business associates, boardroom executives, and everyone in between, should read this compilation to comprehend the meaning of strategy and it's role in creating and sustaining economic value and profitability in any commercial enterprise.

Quite pricey, and frankly a textbook will bring more content than a somewhat impressionist (fragmented) view of strategy. M. Porter is a reference in bringing Industrial Organizations concepts into strategy for non-economists.

I purchased honeywell Model RLV430A last year for my new 4 season porch and I found that I couldn't completely turn it off during the winter night. The lowest temp you can set is 45F and if the night gets cold than that ( most of my winter night around 0F), it will continue to work.After several winter months, i found I was paying a high electrical bills. I bought this one because it has a on/off switch which you can completely cut off the power, which will save you tons money. Two things you need to know:

- Just be aware that the one you may get is a new model (LuxPro) and it is not the one described by this link: [...]. When received and opened the box, I was very upset because I couldn't find the on/off switch. After read the manual, I realized that the new model has moved the on/off switch behind the front panel and you have to snap the front panel off to see the on/off switch. It is not very convenient as previous model and will be difficult for someone. I don't understand why they have to make this design change. I didn't bother to return it considering it still has the function that I want. This is the only reason I give it a 4 star.
- The back part of the stats is relatively deep and make sure you have enough room in your electrical wall box with less wire in it. Definitely use the deep metal box.

Otherwise it is working fine and I don't hear the click sound when it switches on/off the heater (as the old model does mentioned by other reviewers)

Since there are not reviews for this item, I'll give you my brief impression from a very limited time spent reading this. It caught my eye while walking around the business section at Borders a few weeks ago. I enjoyed their case studies while an undergrad and occasionally enjoy their articles posted via Twitter so I picked it up along with a Seth Godin book. Once I saw Michael Porter's name, I knew I had to at least skim a few pages. I actually ended up skipping over Porter's section in favor of Rosabeth's on innovation and I was later pleased I did. It was an interesting read, although hardly groundbreaking (if this is your goal, then this is probably not the book you're looking for).

I found her writing concise(I think nearly every section is more or less 30 pages) and there were specific examples included to help understand the pitfalls she described. Her section specifically dealt with a corporate setting and how innovation can flourish or be smothered under different conditions.

Obviously the minds that contributed to this are nothing short of brilliant, so if you have ever found yourself interested in the topics above or the authors previous work you would probably find this an interesting read. It helped inspire me that night into doing some brainstorming and I plan on finishing it soon.