HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (February 2020)
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” Thomas Edison
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 focus is on managing strategic initiatives.
As is also true of volumes in other HBR series — notably HBR Essentials, HBR Must Reads, and HBR Management Tips — HBR Guides offer substantial value in cutting-edge thinking from 25-30 sources in a single volume at a price for a fraction of what article reprints would cost. What we have in this paperbound edition are 21 articles previously published by Harvard Business Review. If purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be about $180. Amazon US currently sells this volume for only $19.95.
The material is organized within five sections. The individual essays in each section address specific issues related to a general objective. For example, in Sections One and Two:
o Rebecca Knight explains why persistence is essential to winning support for a new idea or product
o Allison Rimm advises not to rely on personal relationships to sustain support for a project
o Raymond Sheen and Amy Gallo share their thoughts about what to do after pitching an initiative
o Sam Bodley-Scott and Alan P. Brache explain how/why projects must be evaluated rigorously and rationally before deciding which to implement
o Derek Lidow explains why a better way to set strategic priorities does not involve rank ordering options
o Rose Hollister and Michael D. Watkins suggest ways to root out the causes of initiative overload
o Keith Katz and Travis Manzione suggest how to maximize your “return on initiatives” by using the portfolio review process
o Peter LaCasse explains how to rebalance an initiative portfolio by thinking like an investor does when managing risk and maximum performance
Obviously, it would be a fool’s errand to attempt to act upon all or even most of the suggestions and recommendations offered by the authors of these and other HBR articles. Ask questions such as these: What are your organization’s most urgent needs?Where is it most vulnerable to competition? Within the next (let’s say) 12-18 months, what are its best opportunities to achieve profitable growth?
Here is some excellent advice from two other cutting-edge strategic thinkers. First, from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Next, from Michael Porter: “The essence of strategy is choosing what [begin italics] not [end italics] to do.”
If you need to strengthen your own skills as a strategic thinker, I highly recommend checking out a new translation of Sun Tzu’s Art of War by Michael Nylan. Also consider two other volumes in the HBR Guide series: on Thinking Strategically, and, on Making Better Decisions.
The human mind is the best “weapon ” to create and then sustain a decisive competitive advantage but only if it is always sharp and used with surgical skill.