HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2016: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (2015)

Ten Plus the McKinsey Award Winner, William Lazonick’s “Profits Without Prosperity”

This is the second volume in what I hope will become an annual series of anthologies of the best articles that appeared in Harvard Business Review during the previous calendar year. Frankly, I am pleased and relieved that I was not among those who were charged with making the selections, each of which is eminently worthy. I commend the Editors on the excellent Introduction. It brilliantly sets the “table” for the intellectual “feast” that follows.

The articles average about 15 pages in length. (Keep in mind that Amazon’s “Look inside” option creates immediate access to the table of contents in all of the anthologies: HBR 10 Must Reads, HBR Guides to, HBR on, etc.) Executives with little (if any) time for reading business books and journals will welcome the material in HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2016: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review. They will receive a briefing on cutting edge thinking about timely topics such as these:

o Why and how performance management needs to be reinvented
o The transparency trap and how to avoid it
o What strategy unravels…and what to do about that
o The authenticity paradox
o The discipline of business experimentation
o What do when senior managers won’t cooperate
o How to establish workplaces that move people
o Ho0w connections, sensors, and data are revolutionizing business

Here in Dallas near the downtown area, we have a Farmer’s Market at which several merchants offer slices of fresh-cut fruit as samples of their wares. In that spirit, I now present three excerpts that are presentative of the high quality of all eleven selections.

“[Employee] ratings are a distillation of the truth — and up until now, one might argue, a necessary one. Yet we want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be compressed into a single number. We now have the technology to go from a small data version of our people to a big data version of them.” Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

“The corporate resource allocation process is America’s source of economic security or insecurity,as the case may be. If Americans want an economy in which corporate profits result in shared prosperity, the buyback and executive compensation binges will have to end. As with any addiction, there will be withdrawal pains. But the best executives may actually get satisfaction out of being paid a reasonable salary for allocating resources in ways that sustain the enterprise, provide higher standards of living to the workers who make it succeed, and generate tax revenues for the governments that provide it with critical inputs.” William Lazonick

“When their companies fail to translate strategy into results, many executives point to a weak performance culture as the root cause. The data tells a different story. It is true that in most companies, the official culture — the core values posted on the companv website, say — does not support execution. However, a company’s true values reveal themselves when managers make hard choices — and here we have found that a focus on performance does shape behavior on a day-to-day basis.” Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull

Given the quality of the articles in this anthology, its price (if purchased from Amazon US, $17.24) is not a bargain, it’s a steal.