Glossier launched in 2014 as an e-commerce, direct-to-consumer makeup and skincare brand aimed at millennial women. From the start, Glossier’s founder Emily Weiss built a strong digital community around the brand. But after the company received its first major round of funding, Glossier was ready to scale up its marketing spending. The challenge: How to do that while also preserving the brand’s all-important authenticity?

In this episode, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jill Avery explains how to think about marketing when scaling a business. Drawing from her business case on Glossier, Avery breaks down how their management team incorporated paid micro-influencers to grow their brand value without undermining their credibility. She also explores how Glossier leveraged their existing community to engage new customers.

Key episode topics include: strategy, growth strategy, marketing, social media, beauty care, startup, scaling, DTC, digital marketing.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original HBR Cold Call episode: Glossier Built a Cult Brand and a Digital Community, but What’s Next? (2020)

· Find more episodes of Cold Call

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

What does it take to succeed as a business while doing well by your employees?

Harvard Business School professor emeritus Michael Beer has studied companies who invest in building long-term social value, and he says they offer some key lessons for other firms.

In this episode, he breaks down how these companies set their strategies for new products and services. As he explains: “One of the key disciplines they have is what we called forging a strategic identity. So what does that mean? It means that they, first of all, start the process of deciding what they’re going to do, what services or products they’re going to offer…what markets they will go into…by first asking themselves, ‘Who are we?’ They start from the inside out…rather than from the outside in.”

Michael Beer is also the coauthor of Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value.

Key episode topics include: strategy, leadership.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: Higher Ambition Leadership (2011)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Looking at business news over the past decade (including a few HBR articles), you might assume that just about every traditional company has fallen — or will soon fall — to competitors from the tech industry.

But London Business School professor Julian Birkinshaw says that story of disruption and destruction is overblown. His research into Fortune 500 and Global 500 organizations shows that many industries haven’t been radically remade, despite the rise of a few tech giants like Amazon and Google.

Birkinshaw outlines the strategies that many incumbents, like J.P. Morgan, Disney, and Proctor & Gamble, are using to survive and thrive. He breaks down the benefits and drawbacks of four key strategies that incumbents typically use to compete with insurgents. And he explains how you can decide which strategy best fits your organization.

Key episode topics include: strategy, disruptive innovation, digital transformation.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: No, Tech Start-ups Aren’t Taking Over the World (2022)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

If you’re a fast-growing company in an emerging economy, you need a strategy for competing in your home market in the short term. But you also need a longer-term strategy that will help you grow beyond that initial market.

John Jullens says the challenge is building both strategies simultaneously. Jullens is a longtime management consultant who specializes in corporate and business unit strategy.

He explains why so many companies in emerging markets make the mistake of focusing on execution and first mover advantage. Instead, he argues that companies need to lay the strategic foundations for long-term success early on or risk flaming out.

Key episode topics include: strategy, international business, asia, growth strategy.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Why So Many Emerging Giants Flame Out (2014)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Khan Academy, the online global education nonprofit, launched in 2006 when founder Sal Khan created a few videos to help his cousin with her math homework. After a decade of growth brought Khan Academy’s user base to more than 15 million monthly visitors, Khan knew he needed expert help to formulate and lead a strategy for the organization’s future growth.

He hired Ginny Lee from Intuit to serve as Khan Academy’s COO and president. Her mandate was to redefine the organization’s priorities, create a focused strategy for growth, and continue scaling the company.

Harvard Business School professor Bill Sahlman studied the company’s growth strategy, and wrote a business case study about it. He explains why it’s so important to build a well-balanced leadership team as part of your growth strategy. He also breaks down how to create processes for everything from budgeting to giving feedback. .

Key episode topics include: strategy, leadership and managing people, operations and supply chain management, digital learning, growth strategy.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original HBR Cold Call episode: Can Khan Academy Scale to Educate Anyone, Anywhere? (2019)

· Find more episodes of Cold Call

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Leadership transitions are challenging for both organizations and the leaders who must directly navigate them. But Michael Watkins says they’re also a time of incredible opportunity — especially for those leaders who understand how to handle this crucial period.

Watkins is a professor of leadership and organizational change at IMD Business School. He shares a framework for selecting a transition strategy that best matches the situation you’re facing — whether you’re building a new operation from scratch or trying to turnaround a business in crisis. Watkins also explains why it’s so important to effectively assess your new leadership context and not to rely only on transition strategies that have worked for you in the past.

Key episode topics include: strategy, strategic planning, leadership transitions.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Picking the Right Transition Strategy (2008)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

In 1992, Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. signed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the global business landscape began transforming.

Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, studies how companies have adjusted their strategies to that disruptive change — from rethinking their supply chains to learning to navigate unpredictable trade policy environments. He discusses how companies can plan for an evolving world of multi-country international supply chains and cross-border information flows.

Key episode topics include: strategy, competitive strategy, business history, globalization, technology and analytics.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: Globalization: Myth and Reality (2017)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Disruptive innovation has proven to be such a powerful idea that the word “innovation” is often equated with the broader idea of market disruption. But that’s not always the case.

INSEAD strategy professor Renée Mauborgne says there is a way to create new markets without destroying jobs, companies, and communities. She calls this idea: “nondisruptive creation.”

Mauborgne explains how some entrepreneurs and companies have been able to grow billion-dollar businesses by creating new markets rather than displacing existing ones. She points to Square, which enables credit card transactions with a mobile phone or tablet, as one prime example.

Mauborgne also breaks down the key operational advantages that come with nondisruptive creation and explains how to spot a nondisruptive market opportunity and evaluate its potential.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, disruptive innovation, growth strategy, entrepreneurs and founders.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: Disruption Isn’t the Only Path to Innovation (2023)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Enel, Italy’s state-owned power company founded in 1962, was one of Europe’s largest coal users and polluters. Now it is recognized as a leader in renewable energy services and has integrated sustainability into its business model and operations.

In this episode, former Harvard Business School senior lecturer Mark Kramer explains how Enel made that enormous strategic change — from its long-range planning to how it tackled the dreaded “innovator’s dilemma.”

Kramer studied the company’s transformation into a renewable energy leader in his case, “Enel: The Future of Energy.”

Key episode topics include: strategy, change management, leadership and managing people.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original Cold Call episode: How a Coal Polluter Became a Renewable Energy Leader (2018)

· Find more episodes of Cold Call

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

Creating value is table stakes for any business. But is your organization also capturing the value you create?

IMD professor Stefan Michel says that many businesses don’t actually know how. “Many companies spend a lot of time on innovating, in a sense that they create more value for customers,” he argues. “What they often miss is to think about how to capture that value.”

Michel studies marketing and strategy at the Switzerland-based business school. Through his research, he created a framework for defining the value of your innovations.

In this episode, he explains how to apply his framework — whether you’re developing new business ideas or formulating a strategy to compete with a new entrant in your market. He also discusses how value-capture works in the real world — drawing on examples from companies like Nespresso and Google.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, value-based pricing, pricing, value capture, Nespresso, Google, new revenue streams, growth strategy.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Focus More on Value Capture (2014)

· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast

· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org