Annotated Table of Contents
Adi Ignatius, the editor in chief of HBR, highlights the article on the exceptional career of Taylor Swift, a preview of the book by Kevin Evers, an editor at the magazine.
Idea watch
2. HBR Team, How is your team spending the time saved by generative AI?
A survey by researchers from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland found that AI users and managers self-report a loss of between a quarter and a third of the time saved by using the technology. To reallocate time savings more productively, the authors suggest logging time use per task, followed by intentional re-allocation according to an agreed blueprint and continued monitoring for feed-back and adjustment. Travis Muhlestein, the chief data and analytics officer at GoDaddy, who manages 440 specialists in his department, finds that substantial time savings occur in threat modelling for security practices and understanding customer preferences in greater detail. This has allowed the company to innovate, to serve clients more effectively and to improve internal processes.
3. Thomas Buberl, AXA’s CEO on insurance as a tool to drive positive impact
Buberl has worked in the insurance industry for two decades driven by the conviction that it can help to distribute risk and incentivise companies to prioritise resilience in the face of environmental and other large scale societal risks. For instance, Axa has actively rebalanced its portfolio towards property and casualty, medical insurance and other technical insurance risks within its core markets. To de-risk the climate transition Axa offers insurance for green assets and circular economy assets. It rewards climate conscious property management; it recognises the importance of illness prevention and wellbeing; and encourages the entrepreneurial ethos and socially responsible innovation within its ranks.
Features
4. Darrell Rigby and Zach First, The power of strategic fit
The concept of strategic fit refers to the “the degree of alignment and amount of synergy in a company’s business system” and can be assessed across seven areas: the mental model of how the business works and how it can win; purpose and ambitions; the understanding of the role and contribution of all stakeholders; macro forces in the environment, from demography to legal conditions, economy, culture and technology; product and markets choices; defining competitive advantages; and the operating model. The article illustrates how these elements can provide clear guidance for critical decision-making through an analysis of Self Esteem Brands, a fitness, health and wellness company.
5. Stefanos Zenios and Ken Favaro, Precedents thinking
Innovation is often a matter of ingenious combination of existing ideas, or precedents, and Zenios and Favaro present here a process they teach in entrepreneurship classes at Stanford University on how to achieve it. The approach consists of four practices, starting with a novel way to define the problem and extensive search for precedents, followed by experiments with possible combinations of relevant precedents, and continual refining of these steps during implementation. Examples show how this process was used at DoorDash, a global food company looking to shake off its association with unhealthy products, at Netflix, Sweet Nothings and many more.
6. Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez, How women can win in the workplace
In this preview of a new Harvard Business Review Press book, The Broken Rung, Ellingrud et al. propose that the concept of experience capital, “the on-the-job know-how and skills” that drives 50% of lifetime earnings, is critical for understanding why women fall behind in the workplace and how they can fight back. Women can seek assignments that toughen them up, building up capacities, and leading to accumulations of experience capital over time. The choice of company will be critical: success in competitive strategy, a strong learning culture and positive attitudes towards internal moves and diversity indicate that women have a fighting chance to advance there. Making big bold moves and looking for positions of leadership and responsibility, such as P&L roles, will accelerate a career. Pivoting towards growing occupations and sectors, such as technology, could also open more opportunities.
The article shows that AI-enabled, abundant expertise is expanding rapidly, and costs are falling as many software providers have now incorporated copilots, bots and assistants in their customary offerings. Thus, to safeguard or gain advantage, companies will need to compete across three dimensions that will test how well they can deploy AI: operations, workforce productivity and focus. For operations, workers should be able to optimise discrete tasks, avoiding the need to outsource entire processes. AI also affects the overall productivity of the workforce as formerly weak contributors can be lifted to an at least average level, facilitating faster onboarding and division of tasks, including managerial tasks. Companies will need to focus more sharply on activities and processes where they have a proven lead and use AI-enabled platforms from third parties for non-core processes.
8. Horacio Falcão and Thomas Wiegelmann, The secret of cross-cultural negotiations
Loosely held, cultural stereotypes can contain useful information, but they are unreliable guides to decision-making on their own as individuals may have an idiosyncratic approach to their culture of origin. In addition, Falcão and Wiegelmann recommend close attention to the dynamics in concrete situations to establish whether the other party has an orientation towards win-win solutions based on value commitments, i.e. value negotiation, or towards power-play and a desire to win all. Power-plays may be presented as innocent cultural differences or may be designed to exploit our cultural biases and susceptibilities, but by focusing on the specifics of the matter at hand it is possible to adopt the right response: openness and collaboration or self-protective manoeuvres if necessary. Importantly, cultural differences can be a source of inspiration to design common rituals for building the relationship and for designing innovative deals and agreements.
9. Paul Ingram, Who are you as a leader?
Ingram argues that “our personal identities are partly the result of negotiations with others”; how others see of us in the workplace can be critical and we need to as aware and deliberate about our self-presentation as possible. For facilitate this, Ingram suggests a process to create an identity map, in the form of nested concentric circles, in which to place elements of our identity closer or further from the centre, visualising how important they are to us and their relations with each other. This will create a fuller picture of our manifest and potential identities, suggesting options to amplify or reduce in our self-presentation. The more diverse our commitments and experiences and the more open we are about them the greater the likelihood that we will develop expansive and varied social networks and thus access resources for any project we might conceive or undertake.
10. Kevin Evers, The strategic genius of Taylor Swift
Swift has created an organisation and career on a grand scale, by making shrewd assessments of opportunities and developing extraordinary toughness and consistency in delivery. Evers discusses her ability to target untapped markets, creating sticky connections within the fickle environment of social media and fandom. Despite overall success, she maintained productive paranoia, identifying moments of danger, pivoting creatively through unexpected collaborations, gaining a reputation as a shape shifter whose next major move is eagerly awaited. She has also shown willingness to adapt to radical shifts in technology and the distribution of music, famously remaking and re-distributing four of her first six albums.
11. Timothy M. Gardner, Colin Wong and Rick Butler, How salespeople game the system
Gardner et al. describe several common cheating schemes including manipulating the timing of transactions to meet targets (sandbagging), coaching clients to sign up for services for the free offer period only (partners in profit), upselling despite costs, opportunistic use of customer segments and discretionary allowances to increase incentive payouts, misleading customers, taking credit for deals they did not participate in or creating faux customer accounts. The article then offers a tool for assessing the size of the cheating problem, whether limited or widespread disruptive of nuisance gaming, and suggests a series of steps for revising the incentive plan to prevent cheating behaviours.
12. Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, M.D. Christodoulou and M. Zottoli, The uniqueness trap
Flyvberg and his colleagues suggest that uniqueness bias, the tendency to believe that problems are more unusual than they are, requiring a novel approach, is both common and costly. Complexity, political sensitivity, many unknown variables, shifting requirements and lack of experience tend to encourage a sense of uniqueness. However, it is possible to get past the felt need to invent a completely new or specific approach by engaging outsiders and their views to identify analogues within the organization and beyond. Once analogues are identified, the authors suggest the use of several forecasting and risk assessment methods: reference class forecasting, similarity-based forecasting, premortems and noise audits.
13. Thomas Hout, The secrets of extraordinary low-cost operators
Several very successful companies demonstrate that superior quality can be achieved at consistently low prices. Hout singles out seven ingredients that make the difference, across different levels, including leadership, organization, culture and operations. Examples include Cheese Factory, Trader Joe, Koch Industries, University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, Toyota, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Quadrant Homes, 7-Eleven Japan and others. In each, a powerful strategy or operations idea served as a starting point, around which committed, long-term leaders patiently built capability by tackling barriers and removing obstacles.
Experience
14. Adam D. Galinsky, What sets inspirational leaders apart
Three roles are particularly important for how leaders are seen by their followers and consequently for how effective they are: visionary, exemplar and mentor. There is an expectation that good leaders provide a sense of direction, by articulating an inspiring vision and communicating it well and often. They can model appropriate behaviour: calm, effective, authentically passionate. And they elevate others bringing out and amplifying their potential. Galinsky provides examples of effective behaviours and advice on how to achieve them, through reflection, emulation of the inspiring leaders, intention and commitment, and practice.
An employee at a company producing precision components for medical devices in Minneapolis is offered a major promotion just as a new potential partner comes forward with an ambitious plan to expand and scale up his audio devices company. Which offer should he accept? Could the two commitments be sustained simultaneously into the future? What are the trade-offs of choosing one over the other?
16. Toby Lester, Getting big things done
Lester reviews three recent books that seek to explain the slowdown in large public projects, such as high-speed rail, a new energy infrastructure, or affordable housing in the United States. The books show how the proliferation of local and central government regulations meant to empower multiple groups, has also created multiple veto points that slow down the process of forging workable coalitions for much-needed public works.
17. Alison Beard, Life’s work interview with Laird Hamilton
Laird Hamilton, the big-wave surfing pioneer, coach and entrepreneur talks about his passion to stay young and fit at 61. “Retirement is when you die”, he says, and “Learning, being a student – there is no end to that.” This requires a certain tolerance for failing at first: “Failing and then succeeding is a skill, and the more you do it, the better you get at it.”
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