HBR On Strategy

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses play an outsize role in disrupting industries. Think of eyeglasses and Warby Parker or mattresses and Casper. But after that initial disruption, industry competitors often adapt.

Harvard Business School professor Len Schlesinger and Matt Higgins, the co-founder and CEO of private investment firm RSE Ventures, studied the teledentistry company SmileDirectClub and wrote a case study about its challenges as it scaled.

In this episode, they break down how SmileDirectClub invested in strategic innovation and ultimately moved beyond DTC channels in order to thrive.

Key episode topics include: strategy, business models, entrepreneurs and founder, strategy execution, scaling, direct-to-consumer, DTC, innovation, dental care, disruption, retail strategy, 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.

Who are your primary customers? Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons says that’s the most important question of your strategy – and the hardest to answer.

Simons says that many firms make the mistake of defining their customers too broadly. To succeed, you have to target your resources at the people who really drive the most value.

“Resources are limited…and the more people we call customers, the more we’re diffusing resources and attention over all kinds of different entities and constituents that are not really at the core of the business,” he explains.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to accurately define your primary customers – using factors like your firm’s culture, your core capabilities, and where you get the most profit. You’ll also learn how to allocate resources for secondary and tertiary customers.

Key episode topics include: strategy, customer experience, competitive strategy, resources, profits, value, core customers.

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.

“That mental model of what an organization is, it’s about power, it’s about control, it’s about clarifying decision rights,” he tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch. “I think that mental model of an organization as a control system has basically got to shift.”

In this episode, Ulrich outlines three key capabilities that these newer companies have developed: monitoring the marketplace, sharing that intelligence company-wide, and innovation.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, business management, market intelligence, Google, Alibaba, technology, uncertainty, flux, agile. 

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.

Wolters Kluwer started in the 1830s as a publishing house. But the Dutch multinational corporation has grown into a global, information services company and now earns more than 90 percent of its revenue from digital products.

“We had to move quickly and we had to do a certain set of strategic things, or the company might not survive,” chair and CEO Nancy McKinstry tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch.

In this episode, McKinstry discusses how she successfully shifted the company’s strategy to focus on digital products through strategic investments in product innovation. She also emphasizes the importance of patience, as consumers slowly adopted new products and services.

Key episode topics include: strategy, leadership, strategy execution, business management, digital transformation, innovation, product development, information services, timing.

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.

OXXO was the dominant convenience store chain in Mexico—until its chief rival doubled in size almost overnight.

In this episode, Harvard Business School professor Tatiana Sandino explains how OXXO CEO Eduardo Padilla responded to this strategic challenge. Instead of opening more stores as quickly as possible, he focused on improving the company’s culture and operations. The company implemented management systems across its locations and then used those systems to gain new economies of scale.

Key episode topics include: strategy, competitive strategy, operations strategy, organizational culture, Mexico, growth, agile, multi-unit organizations.

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.

To many people, strategy is a total mystery. But Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee says strategy doesn’t have to be complicated if you focus on creating value.

“Strategy’s simple. It’s a plan to create value,” he explains. “The way a company plans to create that value, that’s the strategy of the company.”

In this episode, you’ll learn how to focus on two key value drivers: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. You’ll also learn where profits come in and how to visualize the value you create.

Key episode topics include: strategy, competitive strategy, creating value, profit, value stick, willingness to pay, willingness to sell, Best Buy, Hubert Joly, turnaround.

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.

Major strategy shifts need time to play out. Customers have their habits, employees are used to doing things a certain way, and fine-tuning a plan takes time in the market.

But what if you don’t have the luxury of waiting years to know if your strategy really is working?

“The question…is whether the strategy is flawed or whether we just haven’t given it enough time to take hold with customers,” says Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jill Avery, who wrote the fictionalized case study discussed in this episode—loosely based on Ron Johnson’s tenure at JC Penney.

In the case, a fictitious struggling retail chain is attempting to attract younger customers and boost its declining revenue, but early results aren’t good. Now the Board is pressuring the new CEO to walk back his changes, and he’s arguing that short-term losses are necessary to unlock longer term profitability.

“This is a retailer in trouble, as JC Penney was at the time of Ron Johnson’s tenure there. And radical change is probably necessary to turn these retailers around,” Avery notes. “[But] how much leeway do we have both financially and strategically to see our decisions play out over a multi-period time, to see if they’re actually working?”

If you’re struggling to make strategic decisions and accurately assess their success, this episode is for you.

Key episode topics include: strategy, customer experience, pricing strategy, strategy execution, retail and consumer goods, rebranding, experiments, change leadership, Ron Johnson, JC Penney. 

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.

As technology changes everything, how can existing businesses create innovation and change from within?

Harvard Business School fellow Karen Mills studied how one 200-year-old regional bank in the U.S. used intrapreneurship to develop a completely automated small business lending product to compete with online lenders.

Mills breaks down the case study of Eastern Bank’s strategy for innovation—from its early partnership with a fintech entrepreneur to its eventual spinoff of Numerated, the online lending platform it developed in-house.

Mills is the author of Fintech, Small Business and the American Dream.

Key episode topics include: strategy, business management, competitive strategy, operations and supply chain management, financial service sector, fintech, banking, disruptive innovation.

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.

When was the last time you practiced your critical thinking skills? Helen Lee Bouygues, an expert in business transformation, says many business problems are really about simple errors in critical thinking.

“People believe that critical thinking is something that we do every day and it comes very natural,” she tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch. “But in reality, critical thinking is not only extremely important for success in life, but it’s also something that needs to be learned and practiced.”

In this episode you’ll learn how to practice your critical thinking skills. Bouygues outlines three key components of critical thinking: questioning your assumptions, reasoning through logic, and diversifying your thought process.

Key episode topics include: strategy, strategy formulation, decision making and problem solving, managing yourself, critical thinking, managing emotions, strategic decisions.

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.

Innovation is a challenge for large incumbent companies. Their long-term success depends on exploring new innovations that stretch the organization beyond its core businesses. But these new opportunities must draw on the company’s existing strengths and leadership position.

Harvard Business School senior lecturer Derek van Bever and former lecturer Stephen P. Kaufman studied global brewing company Molson Coors, as it prepared to enter the cannabis beverages business in 2019.

“The unknowns were unknowns — they were unknowable,” Kaufman tells Cold Call host Brian Kenny. “You need to have a theory, rather than to look for data. And this is much tougher than what we often see — major companies getting into a market that a startup has already proven exists. This is a place where no market exists.”

Molson Coors initially planned to slowly test a few products in a small market to see if there might be a viable business. But ultimately the company decided to take a more aggressive and expensive strategy, with the aim of seizing first-mover advantage. Kaufman and van Bever explain how Molson Coors formulated that strategy.

Key episode topics include: strategy, global strategy, budgets and budgeting, business ethics, disruptive innovation, joint ventures, food and beverage sector, beer, cannabis, market opportunity, first-mover advantage, incumbent, product development, new markets, managing risk, scope creep, Canada.

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.