Most companies waste billions of dollars on technology. Don't be one of them. If you need the best practices and ideas for unleashing technology's strategic potential--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are eight inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: - Clarify corporate strategy with your IT department - Fund only IT projects that support your strategy - Transform IT investments into profits - Build one technology platform for your entire organization - Adopt new technologies only when their best practices are established - Use analytics to make smart decisions at all levels of your company - Integrate social media into your business

"The best sales book of the year" — strategy+business magazine That gap between your company’s sales efforts and strategy? It’s real—and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book. In Aligning Strategy and Sales, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes equips you to link your go-to-market initiatives with strategic goals. Cespedes offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth. Without that alignment, leaders will press for better execution when they need a better strategy, or change strategic direction with great cost and turmoil when they should focus on the basics of sales execution. With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization. It will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action and build a sales effort linked to your firm’s unique goals, not a generic selling formula. Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether you’re a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firm’s customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.

Digital transformation is no longer news--it's a necessity. Despite the widespread threat of disruption, many large companies in traditional industries have succeeded at digitizing their businesses in truly transformative ways. The New York Times, formerly a bastion of traditional media, has created a thriving digital product behind a carefully designed paywall. Best Buy has transformed its business in the face of Amazon's threat. John Deere has formed a data-analysis arm to complement its farm-equipment business. And Goldman Sachs and many others are using digital technologies to reimagine their businesses. In Driving Digital Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta provides an actionable framework for following their lead. For over a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn't. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture. Gupta covers each aspect in vivid detail while providing navigation tips and best practices along the way. Filled with rich and illuminating case studies of companies at the forefront of digital transformation, Driving Digital Strategy is the comprehensive guide you need to take full advantage of the limitless opportunities the digital age provides.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

Are analytics and technology a strategic part of your business? Artificial intelligence, platforms, algorithms, machine learning. Most business leaders know the value in advanced technologies. But how do you embed them into your business—and make them a key part of your strategy? HBR's 10 Must Reads Technology and Strategy Collection features innovative ideas to help you understand what new technologies offer, decide what business models are best for your business, and move forward with new innovations. Included in this seven-book set are: HBR's 10 Must Reads on AI, Analytics, and the New Machine Age HBR's 10 Must Reads on Business Model Innovation HBR's 10 Must Reads on Platforms and Ecosystems HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation HBR's 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy, Vol. 2 The collection includes seventy articles selected by HBR's editors from renowned thought leaders including Clayton M. Christensen, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, and Thomas H. Davenport, plus the indispensable article "Why Every Company Needs an Augmented Reality Strategy" by Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann. With HBR's 10 Must Reads Technology and Strategy Collection, you can bridge the divide between your digital and strategic efforts, and ensure your business is on the cutting edge. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

Whether you are a CEO, CFO, board member, or an IT executive, From Business Strategy to Information Technology Roadmap: A Practical Guide for Executives and Board Members lays out a practical, how-to approach to identifying business strategies and creating value-driven technology roadmaps in your organization. Unlike many other books on the subject, you will not find theories or grandiose ideas here. This book uses numerous examples, illustrations, and case studies to show you how to solve the real-world problems that business executives and technology leaders face on a day-to-day basis. Filled with actionable advice you can use immediately, the authors introduce Agile and the Lean mindset in a manner that the people in your business and technology departments can easily understand. Ideal for executives in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors, it includes two case studies: one about a commercial family business that thrived to become a multi-million-dollar company and the other about a nonprofit association based in New York City that fights against child illiteracy.

The one primer you need to launch, lead, and sponsor successful projects. We're now living in the project economy. The number of projects initiated in all sectors has skyrocketed, and project management skills have become essential for every leader and manager. Still, project failure rates remain extremely high. Why? Leaders oversee too many projects and have too little visibility into them. Project managers struggle to translate their hands-on, technical knowledge up to senior management. The result? Worthy projects are starved of time and resources and fail to deliver benefits, while too much investment goes into the wrong projects. To compete in the project economy, you need to close this gap. The HBR Project Management Handbook shows you how. In this comprehensive guide, project management expert Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez presents a new and simple framework that will increase any project's likelihood of success. Packed with case studies from many industries worldwide, it will teach you how to manage your organization's projects, strategic programs, and agile initiatives more effectively and push the best ones ahead to completion. Timeless yet forward-looking, this book will help you win in the project-driven world. In the HBR Project Management Handbook you'll find: Everything you need to know about project management in practical, nontechnical language A definitive taxonomy of project types, from product launches to digital transformations to megaprojects A road map for becoming an effective project leader and executive sponsor A new, simple, and universal project framework, the Project Canvas, that breaks down any project into essential building blocks that can be easily understood by all project stakeholders Original concepts and exclusive case studies from public- and private-sector organizations worldwide You'll learn: A common language for project managers and executives to run successful projects across your organization When to use agile, traditional, or hybrid methods in your projects The twelve principles of successful projects, including purpose, agility, and a focus on outcomes Techniques for selecting and advancing the best projects and managing a strategic and balanced project portfolio How today's projects will help address some of the most pressing global trends, including automation, sustainability, diversity, and crisis management Why project management needed to be reinvented and what the future holds HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, and real-life stories, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack—whatever your role.

The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table. Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful. Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.

The biggest technology and management ideas of the year, all in one place. This collection of the top ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review will keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. The two-book set brings together HBR's 10 Must Reads 2021 and The Year in Tech 2021: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review. The Must Reads volume assembles the definitive articles on topics in including leadership, strategy, and innovation from HBR's vast array of experts. The Insights book will help you understand today's most essential thinking on fast-moving technologies, and they mean for your organization. Together these books will equip you to successfully lead your business today as you prepare to reinvent your company for the future.