HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs

by Harvard Business Review, Martin Reeves, Claire Love

As CEO, you set the tone for your organization. You establish priorities, anticipate and address challenges, champion and lead change efforts, set people up for success, and manage risk. You look at issues and trends to see how they'll affect your company internally, but also externally--in the larger context of your industry, your country, and your company's place in the global marketplace. You maintain a long-term view while simultaneously paying attention to short-term concerns. And though you may have a great senior executive team and a top-flight board, ultimately the responsibility rests on your shoulders.

If you read nothing else for CEOs, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you balance stability with growth, take the short-term view while keeping an eye on long-term issues, and think about talent development, retention, and recruitment.

This book will inspire you to:

Navigate the changing global business environment Attract, engage, and retain the best talent Anticipate and address legislative and regulatory issues Sharpen your awareness of your own tactical and soft skills Adopt a founder's mindset and build new offerings, move into new markets, and create next-generation solutions Manage and build relationships with your board--and your shareholders

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Business Strategy, Audiobook

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 23, 2019

Reviews

[Brian Nwokedi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction
HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs is a collection of essays originally published in the Harvard Business Review on organizational design and strategy. The target audience is CEOs but having read this book, I can say that the target audience is anyone in business. Each of these articles has been hand-selected to create a collection of impactful readings on building your strategic capacity and strategic decision-making.
When it comes right down to it, everyone in the organization has some degree of responsibility for setting the tone of their departments (organization), establishing priorities, and addressing challenges. This is not just the responsibility of the CEO. The essays within this book are here to help you strengthen these skills, which are skills needed to Navigate the changing global business environment!

Why You Should Read This Book?
Often when you read out business success, there generally is a CEO at the top that gets most of the credit for the strategic direction and results of the business. But the truth of business is most successes are a collaborative team effort from the top to the bottom of your organization. The ten articles within HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs will help facilitate organizational changes that increase your likelihood of success. Most importantly, the tactics in this book will drive a higher level of accountability through your organization which is probably one of the most important characteristics of a successful organization. The following is a quick summary/overview of the ten articles within this book:

Bonus Article:
Your Strategy Needs a Strategy:
Before you set your strategy, you should ask yourself two simple questions:
(1) How predictable is your environment and
(2) How much power do you or others have to change that environment? Based on these answers you adopt a:

• Classical strategy for industries that are predictable but cannot be changed by you
• Adaptive strategy for industries that are unpredictable and cannot be changed by you
• Shaping strategy for industries that are unpredictable but can be changed by you
• Visionary strategy for industries that are predictable and can be changed by you

Summary of Articles in Book:
1. Managing Your Innovation Portfolio: The fact remains that the year-to-year viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate. Striking the right balance between core, adjacent, and transformational products is the key to a well-balanced innovation portfolio. Firms that follow the golden ratio (70% of funds to core, 20% of funds to adjacent, 10% of funds to transformation) outperformed their peer group in P/E ratio by 10% to 20%.

2. Leading Change: Requires that enough real leaders are promoted/hired into senior leader jobs to drive change. Note that change can take five to ten years to sink deeply into a company’s culture.

3. Reinventing Your Business Model: When events dictate a change in business model, look to profitability as the best early indication of whether the new model is viable.

4. Leadership is a Conversation: Top-down communication is no longer viable or even useful for most organizations. Leaders must pivot to an ongoing “organizational conversation.”

5. Strategic Intent: Strategic intent is a sustained long-term obsession with winning at all levels of the organization. Strategic intent gives employees the only goal that is worthy of commitment: to unseat the best or remain the best in the world.

6. When Growth Stalls: The four most common ways that growth stalls are (1) a premium market position backfires (2) innovation management breaks down (3) core business is abandoned (4) the company lacks strong talent bench.

7. The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution: Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by employees acting according to the information they have and their own-self interest

8. The Focused Leader: Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions, and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.

9. Managing Risks: Risk management is more than just compliance and lots of rule-based decisions.

10. 21st-Century Talent Spotting: You need to build your hiring practices around potential which is the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments.

11. How CEOs Can Work with an Active Board: Focus more on getting the board general business environment trend updates, people/talent news, and updates on business development.

What I Will Do Differently As A Result of This Book
“Strategic intent is like a marathon run in 400-meter sprints. No one knows what the terrain will look like at mile 26, so the role of top management is to focus the organization’s attention on the ground to be covered in the next 400 meters.”

When I think about strategy historically, it has always felt a bit “zero-sum” or “all-or-nothing.” What HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs has reconfirmed for me is that the essence of the strategy lies in creating tomorrow’s competitive advantages faster than your competitors can mimic the ones you possess today. Strategic intent has a much more inward focus than outward focus, and while that may seem intuitive, most organizations I have worked for historically have looked toward their competitors during their annual strategic planning. Real competitiveness and strategic intent ultimately depend on the pace at which a company can embed new advantages deep within its organization.

Going forward, my focus will be on:
• Build our defensive capabilities by maximizing my organization’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn new ones

• Don’t let our resources be the constraint on our ability to build competitive capabilities. In other words, match our competitive aspirations to our current resources.

• Try to create a real obsession with performance (winning) at all levels of the organization

• Remember that the primary driver of long-term company performance is profitable revenue growth. All the other metrics that matter are an offshoot of that!

In closing, “All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which great victory is evolved.

Final Thoughts
The goal of HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs is to help people increase their organizational strategic intent. Compiled in an easy-to-digest fashion, the ten essays within this book will help you do just that. It’s a solid read and worth spending some time with especially the 5th essay on “Strategic Intent.”

Easy to Read: (4.5/5) 90%
Deep Content: (3/5) 60%
Overall Rating: (4/5) 80%

[Hollywood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book as the title says is more for CEOs than general leadership knowledge.

“Being more thoughtful about metrics is also helpful. Although companies put a great deal of energy into making predictions year after year, it is surprising how rarely they check to see if the predictions they made in the prior year actually panned out.”

“The year-to-year viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate.”

“In every successful transformation effort that I have seen, the guiding coalition develops a picture of the future that is relatively easy to communicate and appeals to customers, stockholders, and employees. A vision always goes beyond the numbers that are typically found in five-year plans. A vison says something that helps clarify the direction in which an organization needs to move.”

“A useful rule of thumb: if you cant communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that dignifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done with this phase of the transformation process.”

“After a few years of hard work, managers may be tempted to declare victory with the first clear performance improvement. While celebrating a win is fine, declaring the war won can be catastrophic. Until changes sink in deeply into a company’s culture, a process that can take five to ten years, new approaches are fragile and subject to regression.”

“In 2003, Apple introduced the iPod with the iTunes store, revolutionizing portable entertainment, creating a new market, and transforming the company. In just three years, the iPod/iTunes combination became nearly $10 billion product, accounting for almost 50% of Apple’s revenue. Apple’s market capitalization catapulted from around $1 billion in early 2003 to over $150 billion in late 2007.”

“Customer Value Proposition – A successful company is one that has found a way to create value for customers – that is, a way to help customers get an important job done. By job we mean a fundamental problem in a given situation that needs a solution.”

“The more important the job is to the customer, the lower the level of customer satisfaction with current options for getting the job done, and the better your solution is that existing alternatives at getting the job done (and, of course, the lower the price), the greater the CVP.”

“One-way top down communication between leaders and their employees is not no longer useful or even realistic. Today’s leaders achieve far more engagement and credibility when they take part in genuine conversation with the people who work for and with them.”

“By talking with employees, rather than simply issuing orders, leaders can retain or recapture some of the qualities – operational flexibility, higher levels of employee engagement, tight strategic alignment – that enables start-ups to outperform better-established rivals.”

“Conversationally adept leaders step down from their corporate perches and then step up to the challenge of communicating personally and transparently with their people.”

“At the crux of Cisco’s communication culture is its CEO, John Chambers, who holds various forums to keep in touch with employees. About every other month, for instance, he leads a birthday chat, open to an Cisco employee whose birthday falls in their relevant two-month period.”

“Ask CEOs of many American companies how they measure their contributions to their companies’ success, and you are likely to get an answer expressed in terms of shareholder wealth. In a company that possesses a strategic intent, top management is more likely to talk in terms of global market leadership. Market share leadership typically yields shareholder wealth, to be sure. But two goals do not have the same motivation impact. It is hard to imagine middle managers, let alone blue-collar employees, waking up each day with the sole thought of creating more shareholder wealth. But mightn’t they feel different given the challenge to beat Benz – the rallying cry at one Japanese auto producer? Strategic intent gives employees the only goal that is worthy of commitment: to unseat the best or remain the best, worldwide.”

“An organization’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn new ones os the most defensible competitive advantage of all.”

“Financial targets and vague mission statements just cannot provide the consistent direction that is a prerequisite for winning a global competitive war.”

“Internal skills gaps are often self-inflicted wounds, the unintended consequences of promote-from-within polices that have been too strictly applied. Such policies, often most fervent in organizations with strong cultures, can accelerate growth in the heady early days of executing a successful business model. But when the external environment presents novel challenges, or competition intensifies, these policies may be a severe drag on progress.”

“Our analysis of company growth rates and senior leaders’ backgrounds suggests that the sweet spot for external talent is somewhere between 10% and 30% of senior management.”

“Attention is a mental muscle; like any other muscle, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise. The fundamental rep for building deliberate attention is simple: When you mind wanders, notice that it has wandered, bring it back to your desired point of focus, and keep it there as long as you can. That basic exercise is at the root of virtually every kind of meditation. Meditation builds concentration and calmness and facilitates recovery from the agitation of stress.”

“When Tony Hayward became CEO of BP, in 2007, he vowed to make safety his top priority. Among the new rules he instituted were the requirements that all employees use lids on coffee cups while walking and refrain from texting while driving.”

“Despite all the rhetoric and money invested in it, risk management is too often treated as a compliance issue that can be solved by drawing up lots of rules and making sure that all employees follow them.”

[Lee Tsao · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides detailed and current industry strategies for managing employees and promote positive change. Some parts of these articles are very dense and sometimes get a lil’ boring; but there are notes and summaries that help you digest the content more easily. Overall a good read for those who are already CEOs. Not so much for start ups or new Entrepreneurs.

[Simona · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A classic, yet somewhat dry, management & leadership book.

My favorite articles were "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" by John P. Kotter and "The Focused Leader" by Daniel Goleman.

10 lessons from the book (to revisit when needed):

1. Strategic misalignment is a silent killer.
Most failures originate not from bad strategy, but from applying the wrong strategic style to the context.

2. Don’t over-invest in low-risk ideas.
Core, tested products/services/systems feel safe, but without riskier bets, long-term relevance fades.

3. Be willing to break your own model.
Sticking with a legacy model out of comfort or tradition invites disruption.

4. Storytelling is a strategic leadership tool.
A compelling narrative builds shared understanding and purpose.

5. Big ambition drives big performance.
Stretch goals motivate organizations to build new capabilities and think long-term.

6. Create a sense of competitive obsession.
Strategic intent should rally people around beating the best, not just surviving.

7. Growth stalls are symptoms, not root causes.
Diagnose leadership drift, lack of focus, or structural inertia before revenue collapse sets in.

8. Structure alone won’t fix execution.
The right behavior, culture, and decision-making rights matter more than org charts.

9. Great leaders balance three lenses of focus.
Self-awareness, empathy for others, and systems-level thinking work together to guide sound leadership.

10. Classify risk before managing it.
Know whether you’re dealing with preventable, strategic, or external risks—then act accordingly.