Books published by Harvard Business Review Press

Great leaders embrace a higher purpose to win. The NetPromoter System shines as their guiding star.Fewmanagement ideas have spread so far and wide as the Net Promoter System (NPS).Since its conception almost two decades ago by customer loyalty guru FredReichheld, thousands of companies around the world have adopteditfrom industrial titans such as Mercedes-Benz and Cummins to techgiants like Apple and Amazon to digital innovators such as Warby Parker andPeloton.Now, Reichheld has raised the bar yet again. InWinning on Purpose, he demonstrates that the primary purposeof a business should be to enrich the lives of its customers. Why? Because whencustomers feel this love, they come back for more and bring their friendsgeneratinggood profits. This is NPS 3.0 and it puts a new take on the age-old GoldenRuletreat customers the way you would want a loved onetreatedat the heart of enduring business success. As the compellingexamples in this book illustrate, companies with superior NPS consistentlydeliver higher returns to shareholders across a wide array ofindustries.But winning on purpose isn't easy. Reichheld alsoexplains why many NPS practitioners achieve just a small fraction of the system'sfull potential, and he presents the newest thinking and best practices fordoing NPS right. He unveils the Earned Growth Rate (EGR): the first reliable,complementary accounting measure that can truly leverage the power ofNPS.With keen insight and moving personal stories, Reichheldadvances the thinking and practice of NPS. Winning onPurpose is your indispensable guide for inspiring customer lovewithin your own teams and using Net Promoter to achieve both personal and businesssuccess.

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service but didnt take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your companyperhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you havent known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovators methoda set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined, and brought to market. To date these tools have helped entrepreneurs, designers, and software developers manage uncertaintythrough cheap and rapid experiments that systematically lower failure rates and risk. But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice. Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovators DNAwhich Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideasthis book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success.Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovators method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the howhow to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Whether youre launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

In the bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma, the author exposed the Achilles' heel of many companies: by ignoring the disruptive technologies that evolve to displace them, they help initiate their own demise. In this book, he takes the idea of disruption one step further - explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves.

"The new M&A bible. Few other actions can change the value of a company-and its competitive future-as quickly and dramatically as an acquisition. Yet most companies fail to create shareholder value from these deals, and in many cases they destroy it. It doesn't have to be this way. The Synergy Solution will change how companies think about and approach their M&A strategies and realize the performance promises they make to their shareholders. Beginning with a clear and well-accepted foundation of the economics of the M&A performance problem, Deloitte's Mark Sirower and Jeff Weirens show acquirers how to develop and execute an M&A strategy-end-to-end-that not only avoids the pitfalls that so many companies fall into but also creates real, long-term shareholder value. This includes: how to develop an M&A strategy and a pipeline of deals, how to test the investment thesis of a deal, how to decide what premium to pay, how to plan for a successful Announcement Day, how to properly communicate performance promises to stakeholders and shareholders, how to realize those promised synergies through integration planning and post-close execution, how to build a new, combined organization, how to anticipate the questions of an informed board, how to sustain long-term shareholder value. Sirower and Weirens provide invaluable background to those considering M&A, laying out the issues they have to consider, how to analyze them, and how to plan and execute the deal effectively. They also show those who have already started the process of M&A how to maximize their chances of success. There is an art and a science to getting mergers and acquisitions right, and this powerful resource provides the insights and strategies acquirers need to find success at every stage of this often complex and perilous process"--

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller"e;...this guide provides readers with much more than just early careers advice; it can help everyone from interns to CEOs."e; — a Financial Times top titleYou've landed a job. Now what?No one tells you how to navigate your first day in a new role. No one tells you how to take ownership, manage expectations, or handle workplace politics. No one tells you how to get promoted.The answers to these professional unknowns lie in the unspoken rules—the certain ways of doing things that managers expect but don't explain and that top performers do but don't realize.The problem is, these rules aren't taught in school. Instead, they get passed down over dinner or from mentor to mentee, making for an unlevel playing field, with the insiders getting ahead and the outsiders stumbling along through trial and error.Until now.In this practical guide, Gorick Ng, a first-generation college student and Harvard career adviser, demystifies the unspoken rules of work. Ng distills the wisdom he has gathered from over five hundred interviews with professionals across industries and job types about the biggest mistakes people make at work. Loaded with frameworks, checklists, and talking points, the book provides concrete strategies you can apply immediately to your own situation and will help you navigate inevitable questions, such as:How do I manage my time in the face of conflicting priorities?How do I build relationships when I'm working remotely?How do I ask for help without looking incompetent or lazy?The Unspoken Rules is the only book you need to perform your best, stand out from your peers, and set yourself up for a fulfilling career.

New managers must learn how to lead others rather than do the work themselves, to win trust and respect, to motivate, and to strike the right balance between delegation and control. It is a transition many fail to make. This book traces the experiences of nineteen new managers over the course of their first year in a managerial capacity. Reveals the complexity of the transition and analyzes the expectations of the managers, their subordinates, and their superiors. New managers describe how they reframed their understanding of their roles and responsibilities, how they learned to build effective work relationships, how and when they used individual and organizational resources, and how they learned to cope with the inevitable stresses of the transformation. They describe what it was like to take on a new identity. Two themes emerge: first the transition from individual contributor to manager is a profound psychological adjustment--a transformation; second, the process of becoming a manager is primarily one of learning from experience. Through trial and error, observation and interpretation, the new managers learned what it took to become effective business leaders.

Business Models for Transforming Customer RelationshipsWhat if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost?This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency.In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you:Reshape your connections with your customersFind new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacityCreate the right revenue modelMake the best technology choices to support your strategyIntegrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.

Datavizthe new language of businessA good visualization can communicate the nature and potential impact of information and ideas more powerfully than any other form of communication.For a long time dataviz was left to specialistsdata 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.Whats more, building good charts is quickly becoming a need-to-have skill for managers. If youre not doing it, other managers are, and theyre getting noticed for it and getting credit for contributing to your companys success.In Good Charts, dataviz maven Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works and how to use this new language to impress and persuade. Dataviz today is where spreadsheets and word processors were in the early 1980son the cusp of changing how we work. Berinato lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping.This book is much more than a set of static rules for making visualizations. It taps into both well-established and cutting-edge research in visual perception and neuroscience, as well as the emerging field of visualization science, to explore why good charts (and bad ones) create feelings behind our eyes. Along the way, Berinato also includes many engaging vignettes of dataviz pros, illustrating the ideas in practice.Good Charts will help you turn plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas.

The Groundbreaking Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths RevolutionIn the years since the publication of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, millions have come to the simple but powerful realization that to get the most out of people, you must build on their strengths. And yet, as Marcus Buckingham astutely points out, though the strengths-based approach is now conventional wisdom, the tools and systems inside organizationsperformance appraisals, training programs, and succession planning systemsremain stubbornly remedial and exclusively focused on measuring skills, finding gaps, and attempting to plug them. Its a crisis for individuals and organizations, with management ideas and everyday practice utterly out of sync.Thats about to change. StandOut 2.0 is a revolutionary book and tool that enables you to identify your strengths, and those of your team, and act on them. The original edition of StandOut provided top-notch insights from one of the worlds foremost authorities on strengths, as well as access to a powerful, cutting-edge online assessment tool. StandOut 2.0 also includes the assessment and a robust report on your most dominant strengths. The report is easily exported so you can use it to present the very best of yourself to your team and your company.StandOut 2.0 is your indispensable guide for building on your strengths to further your careerand help your team and organization win.

Become a Digital MasterNo Matter What Business Youre In If you think the phrase going digital is only relevant for industries like tech, media, and entertainmentthink again. In fact, mobile, analytics, social media, sensors, and cloud computing have already fundamentally changed the entire business landscape as we know itincluding your industry. The problem is that most accounts of digital in business focus on Silicon Valley stars and tech start-ups. But what about the other 90-plus percent of the economy? In Leading Digital, authors George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee highlight how large companies in traditional industriesfrom finance to manufacturing to pharmaceuticalsare using digital to gain strategic advantage. They illuminate the principles and practices that lead to successful digital transformation. Based on a study of more than four hundred global firms, including Asian Paints, Burberry, Caesars Entertainment, Codelco, Lloyds Banking Group, Nike, and Pernod Ricard, the book shows what it takes to become a Digital Master. It explains successful transformation in a clear, two-part framework: where to invest in digital capabilities, and how to lead the transformation. Within these parts, youll learn: How to engage better with your customers How to digitally enhance operations How to create a digital vision How to govern your digital activitiesThe book also includes an extensive step-by-step transformation playbook for leaders to follow.Leading Digital is the must-have guide to help your organization survive and thrive in the new, digitally powered, global economy.

Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a gamechanging innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovativethey spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to anotherfrom mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies.Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands--they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America's most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create "e;identity myths"e; that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can't be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty--and outlines a distinctive set of "e;cultural branding"e; principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

An insightful and inspiring book on using both/and thinking to make more creative, flexible, and impactful decisions in a world of competing demands.Life is full of paradoxes. How can we each express our individuality while also being a team player? How do we balance work and life? How can we improve diversity while promoting opportunities for all? How can we manage the core business while innovating for the future?For many of us, these competing and interwoven demands are a source of conflict. Since our brains love to make either-or choices, we choose one option over the other. We deal with the uncertainty by asserting certainty.There's a better way.In Both/And Thinking, Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis help readers cope with multiple, knotted tensions at the same time. Drawing from more than twenty years of pioneering research, they provide tools and lessons for transforming these tensions into opportunities for innovation and personal growth.Filled with practical advice and fascinating storiesincluding firsthand tales from IBM, LEGO, and Unilever, as well as from startups, nonprofits, and even an inn at one of the four corners of the worldBoth/And Thinking will change the way you approach your most vexing problems.

Named one of the Best Business Books of 2021 by The Wall Street JournalIn Japan it's called the Ghosn Shockthe stunning arrest of Carlos Ghosn, the jet-setting CEO who saved Nissan and made it part of a global automotive empire.Even more shocking was his daring escape from Japan, packed into a box and put on a private jet to Lebanon after months spent in a Japanese detention center, subsisting on rice gruel.This is the saga of what led to the Ghosn Shock and what was left in its wake. Ghosn spent two decades building a colossal partnership between Nissan and Renault that looked like a new model for a global business, but the alliance's shiny image fronted an unsteady, tense operation. Culture clashes, infighting among executives and engineers, dueling corporate traditions, and government maneuvering constantly threatened the venture.Journalists Hans Greimel and William Sposato have followed the story up close, with access to key players, including Ghosn himself. Veteran Tokyo-based reporters, they have witnessed the end of Japan's bubble economy and attempts at opening Japan Inc. to the world. They've seen the fraying of keiretsu, Japan's traditional skein of business relationships, and covered numerous corporate scandals, of which the Ghosn Shock and Ghosn's subsequent escape stand above all.Expertly reported, Collision Course explores the complex suspicions around what and who was really responsible for Ghosn's ouster and why one of the top executives in the world would risk everything to escape the country. It explains how economics, history, national interests, cultural politics, and hubris collided, crumpling the legacy of arguably the most important foreign businessman ever to set foot in Japan.This gripping, unforgettable narrative, full of fascinating characters, serves as part cautionary tale, part object lesson, and part forewarning of the increasing complexity of doing global business in a nationalistic world.