HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers
Elisa Farri and Gabriele Rosani
Harvard Business Review Press (February 2025)
How to leverage gen AI in order to save time, innovate faster, and lead more effectively
According to Harvard Information Technology, “Generative AI (gen AI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from — and mimic — large amounts of data to create content such as text, images, music, videos, code, and more, based on inputs or prompts.” We are beginning to understand and appreciate what we can learn from AI. It is also important to understand and appreciate what AI can learn from other sources…including AI as well as humans.
As you probably know already, most of the volumes in the “HBR Guide to” series are anthologies of articles previously published in Harvard Business Review in which various contributors share their insights concerning a major business subject such as Better Business Writing, Getting the Right Work Done, and Project Management.
In this instance, the subject is generative AI for managers. More specifically, co-authors Elisa Farri and Gabriele Rosani offer “practical tips, pitfalls to out for, and straightforward instructions derived from research, interviews with pioneers, and experiments. It will guide you in applying novel concepts and tools to your work, with hands-on advice, templates, and examples for an immersive learning experience. Each chapter concludes with a summary of key points to help you put the ideas into practice.”
If each of the 22 chapters and the Epilogue (“Beyond Tasks: Generative AI’s Impact on Ways of Working,” Pages 229-245) were viewed as separate HBR articles and you were to purchase all of them as individual reprints, the total cost would be about $275.
The material is carefully organized within five Sections and brilliantly edited by the HBR editors:
The Introduction, a “must read,” then
1. Generative AI-Enabled Management: The Essentials
2. Managing Yourself with Generative AI
3. Managing Teams with Generative AI
4. Managing Business with Generative AI
5. Managing Change with Generative AI
You’ll learn HOW TO
o Conduct smart experiments
o Increase your productivity
o Determine the right collaboration mode: a Co-Pilot or a Co-Thinker
o Communicate better with AI to improve decision-making
o Be aware of the risks and avoid traps
o Capitalize on your gen AI-enabled mindset
Also:
o Devote less time and energy to what machines can do faster and better than you can (e.g. obtain, process, and correlate immense volumes of data from soiurces sources), and, devote more time and energy to what you do better than machines can (e.g. strengthening so-called “soft skills” of others, especially direct reports).
Here are two suggestions while you are reading HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers: First, highlight key passages. Also, perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to “Tips, aforementioned end-of-chapter “Recaps,” and mini-commentaries that are strategically inserted throughout the book.
These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.
For some executives, this may well be the most valuable volume in HBR’s “Guide to” series. That is certainly true of C-level executives as well as of their direct reports and also of managers who report to them.