HBR On Strategy

It’s an idea that’s a non-starter at many organizations: collaborating with a competitor. But Yale School of Management professor Barry Nalebuff says leaders who refuse to consider teaming up with other companies—even when there are clear mutual benefits—may be leaving value on the table.

In this episode, you’ll learn how companies like Apple, Ford, Google, and others have analyzed and capitalized on what Nalebuff calls “co-opetition” opportunities. You’ll also learn how to think strategically about which tasks work well for these collaborations and how to mitigate your organization’s risk through time-tested tools like contracts, performance guarantees, and conditional penalties.

Key episode topics include: strategy, negotiation strategies, competitive strategies, co-opetition, collaboration.

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 the chair and CEO of Sodexo, the France-based food services and facilities management company, Sophie Bellon leads one of the largest employers in the world, with front-line workers in nearly 50 countries. Managing that workforce—and the supply chains that enable them to do their jobs—is a complex undertaking that involves balancing both global strategy with local execution.

In this episode, Harvard Business Review executive editor Alison Beard sits down with Bellon to discuss her approaches to talent management, environmental sustainability, and supply chain resilience—all while driving future growth.

Key episode topics include: strategy, growth strategy, talent management, operations and supply chain management, supply chain management, environmental sustainability, food and beverage sector.

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.

In early 2015, Microsoft’s senior leaders were facing a set of difficult decisions. The firm had been struggling to innovate and grow as fast as its competitors. Now they were considering new opportunities that would yield higher growth but lower margins — like shifting away from perpetual licensing to focus on subscription sales.

Harvard Business School professor Fritz Foley studied this period of transformative change at Microsoft for a business case study he wrote. In this episode, he shares how Microsoft’s leaders analyzed different options and worked to get both investors and employees on board with new ideas about growth. He also explains how the company’s risk-averse culture evolved in order to execute such a huge transformation.

Key episode topics include: strategy, growth strategy, business models, corporate governance. 

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.

It’s a dilemma facing more and more brands: Should your business sell on Amazon?

It’s the most visited e-commerce platform in the U.S. and the dominant retailer in 28 other countries. But that reach comes at a price. Harvard Business School associate professor Ayelet Israeli says there are downsides for many Amazon sellers, like costs, competition, and the lack of data.

In this episode, Israeli offers a scorecard that can help you decide, step by step, whether or not the Amazon marketplace is right for your business.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, leadership, scaling, Jeff Bezos, long-term thinking, customer focus.

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.

Companies of every size across the world are basing more of their work around projects than at any time in the past. But research shows that nearly two-thirds of those efforts fail.

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, who has studied projects and project management for decades, argues that at least some of the blame for these failures lies with executives who misunderstand the fundamentals of projects and fail to dedicate enough of their time to those they sponsor.

In this episode, Nieto-Rodriguez explains how to get better outcomes from project-based work. He also discusses how to frame projects, structure organizations around them, and avoid common pitfalls.

Key episode topics include: strategy, project management, operations strategy, organizational change.

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.

Booking.com was founded by a Dutch university student in 1996. It grew slowly for almost a decade. By 2011, the company was generating more than a billion dollars in profits annually — making it the most financially successful digital travel market at the time. The secret to that accelerating growth was the company’s use of large-scale testing and experimentation.

In this episode, Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke explains how the company created and sustained a culture of innovation that challenged conventional assumptions about management and process.

Key episode topics include: strategy, experimentation, innovation, travel, digital, platform.

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.

So much has been written about how to future-proof a strategy. But Peter Scoblic says that too many companies still rely on short-sighted strategies that don’t effectively plan for different potential future scenarios.

Scoblic is a co-founder and principal of the consultancy Event Horizon Strategies. In this episode, he explains how thoughtful and ongoing scenario-planning exercises can help organizations decide which investments will allow them to thrive — even in a crisis. He also shares how to balance short-term factors with longer term modeling and why it’s so important to ensure that your planning team is truly diverse. As he says, “This is a case where diversity absolutely matters, in all senses of the word, because what you want is to get people to think outside of the box.  It’s very difficult to do that if you don’t recognize the box that you’re in.”

Key episode topics include: strategy, strategic planning, crisis management, scenario panning, modeling.

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 the CEO of one of the largest energy holding companies in the U.S., Lynn Good is leading Duke Energy’s aggressive transition to renewables and net zero emissions. It’s a complex undertaking that involves short-term planning and long-term advances in technology as well as managing a wide range of stakeholders.

In this episode, HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius sits down with Good to discuss her strategy for Duke’s clean energy transition. They discuss how to make incremental adjustments to strategy as new technologies emerge. Good also explains how and how often she tests her assumptions, and why she nurtures collaborations both within the energy industry and beyond it.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, growth strategy, environmental sustainability, energy and natural resources sector, clean energy, transition, Duke Energy, technology, renewable energy, change management.

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 it comes to solving complicated problems, the default for many organizational leaders is to take their time to work through the issues at hand. Unfortunately, that often leads to patchwork solutions or problems not truly getting resolved.

But Anne Morriss offers a different framework. In this episode, she outlines a five-step process for solving any problem and explains why starting with trust and ending with speed is so important for effective change leadership. As she says, “Let’s get into dialogue with the people who are also impacted by the problem before we start running down the path of solving it.”

Morriss is an entrepreneur and leadership coach. She’s also the coauthor of the book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.

Key episode topics include: strategy, decision making and problem solving, strategy execution, managing people, collaboration and teams, trustworthiness, organizational culture, change leadership, problem solving, 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.

In today’s global economy, what are the factors that go into choosing a production location?

In this episode, Harvard Business School professor Willy Shih draws on his case study about China-based automotive glass maker Fuyao to discuss this core strategic question. The company must decide between two options to fulfill its upcoming contracts: its new Ohio factory or its factory based out of Tianjin, China. Unlike the Ohio factory, the Chinese factory produces below the cost target, but it also incurs extensive shipping costs and requires a far greater amount of inventory holding.

Shih explains how to account for product life cycles and the length of your inventory pipelines when selecting a manufacturing location. He also discusses how to assess other possible risks that could cause delays or increase production costs—like customs delays and labor strikes.

Key episode topics include: strategy, cross-cultural management, global strategy, operations and supply chain management, China, shipping, production planning, inventory pipeline.

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.