Janmejaya Sinha

Martin Reeves

Knut Haanaes

What approach does your company use to develop and execute its strategy? We are confronted with a plethora of different approaches and frameworks which purport to answer this questionfrom the classic Michael Porter approach to Kim and Mauborgne's blue ocean strategy to Steve Jobs' build it and they will come” philosophy. The answer? There is no one approach that works for everyonebut there is a best approach for your specific context. And it has never been more important to choose the right one: not only has the number of different approaches proliferated ten-fold over the past 40 years, but the environments in which executives must formulate and execute strategy have become increasingly diverse and complex. The difference between winning and losing has never been greater. And using the right approach pays off: firms that successfully match their approach to their environment realize significantly better returns than those who don't. And, they avoid the common frustrations stemming from lack of perceived relevance and engagement around on the strategy process. How you choose and execute the right approach is the focus of this book. From Global BCG strategy experts Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, Janmejaya Sinha (and based on the bestselling article in Harvard Business Review),Your Strategy Needs a Strategy offers a practical guide to help you to match your approach to strategy to your environment and execute it effectively, to combine different approaches for companies which operate in multiple environments, and to lead your organization in making better strategic choices. Organizing approaches into five strategic archetypesBe Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, Be Viablethe authors explain the conditions under which each is appropriate, when and how to execute each one, and how to avoid common strategy traps. They richly illustrate the idea with interviews with CEOs from different industries from around the globe. For anyone leading a business or charged with developing a winning strategy this book is for you. The world of strategy is thick with opposing ideas and frameworks;Your Strategy Needs a Strategy will help you cut through the noise and find clarity on which approach is your best bet.

How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Jack Fuller

A guide for mining the imagination to find powerful new ways to succeed. We need imagination now more than ever—to find new opportunities, rethink our businesses, and discover paths to growth. Yet too many companies have lost their ability to imagine. What is this mysterious capacity? How does imagination work? And how can organizations keep it alive and harness it in a systematic way? The Imagination Machine answers these questions and more. Drawing on the experience and insights of CEOs across several industries, as well as lessons from neuroscience, computer science, psychology, and philosophy, Martin Reeves of Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute and Jack Fuller, an expert in neuroscience, provide a fascinating look into the mechanics of imagination and lay out a process for creating ideas and bringing them to life: The Seduction: How to open yourself up to surprises The Idea: How to generate new ideas The Collision: How to rethink your idea based on real-world feedback The Epidemic: How to spread an evolving idea to others The New Ordinary: How to turn your novel idea into an accepted reality The Encore: How to repeat the process—again and again. Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of success. It's what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to transformation—especially during a crisis. The Imagination Machine is the guide you need to demystify and operationalize this powerful human capacity, to inject new life into your company, and to head into unknown territory with the right tools at your disposal.

How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company's Future

The Imagination Machine

A guide for mining the imagination to find powerful new ways to succeed We need imagination now more than ever—to find opportunities in adversity, rethink our businesses, and discover new paths to growth. Yet too many companies have lost their ability to imagine. What is this mysterious capacity? How does imagination work? And how can organizations keep it alive and harness it systematically? The Imagination Machine answers these questions and more. Drawing on the experience and insights of CEOs across several industries, as well as lessons from neuroscience, computer science, psychology, and philosophy, BCG's Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller provide a fascinating look into the mechanics of imagination and lay out a six-step process for creating ideas and bringing them to life. These steps are: Trigger: Disrupt existing mental models and put ourselves in a more imaginative mindset Rethink: Focus on "what could be" rather than "what is" Act: Create a feedback loop from the mind to the world and back again Amplify: Spread an evolving idea to others to create collective imagination Codify: Imagine a new organizational "machine" that will capture and exploit a new idea while leaving room for future reimagination Sustain: Keep imagination alive to run and reinvent your company at the same time Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of business success. It's what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to success—especially during a crisis. The Imagination Machine is the guide you need to demystify and operationalize this powerful human capacity, to inject new life into your company, and to head into unknown territory with the right tools by your side.

Harvard Business Review

John P. Kotter

Clairey Lovell

Philipp Tillmanns

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.--

HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs

François Candelon

Artificial intelligence is emerging as a game-changer in the business world, with impacts across all sectors. AI allows business to process massive amounts of data instantaneously, and to scale solutions at almost zero marginal cost, forcing companies to adapt and reimagine their business and operations. The Rise of AI-Powered Companies examines some of the most successful examples of companies using artificial intelligence to their advantage. From AI-enabled countries across the globe that stayed resilient and strong in the face of COVID-19, to Business-to-Consumer businesses that transformed their product development processes thanks to unprecedented amounts of consumer data, increasing their revenues manifold along the way. The book then delves into the critical enablers to becoming AI-powered and the critical steps to activate and integrate them within business organizations. Starting with data strategy, it examines new forms of data sharing and how companies should think about governance and privacy risks. It then focuses on human–AI collaboration and its role in building a stronger team culture. Finally, "Responsible AI" is discussed as well as the impact of AI-powered businesses on society at large. AI-powered companies will become the norm in the years to come. By unpacking and showcasing the major steps of a successful AI transformation, this book will help guide organizations in making the critical leap to become AI-powered—essential to survive and remain competitive in the near future.

The Rise of AI-Powered Companies

Kevin Whitaker

The ranking of the largest exchange-listed companies in the world has changed enormously in recent years. This book explains how this happened and what was the key to success.

A Leadership Agenda for the Next Decade

Winning The 20s

Over the past decade, businesses have faced relentless change on multiple dimensions, and the list of the world’s largest companies has changed enormously. The keys to success are likely to be just as different for the new decade. Winning the ’20s analyzes the new competitive environment that businesses face and outlines what will it take to win in the 2020s. To stay ahead of the trends that are reshaping business, leaders need to rethink existing assumptions and retool their companies. Both traditional incumbents and younger digital giants will face very different but equally critical challenges in the 2020s—and would do well to learn from each other’s strengths. This book discusses the new dimensions of competition that will affect corporate strategy in the next decade and how leaders can reinvent their organizations to be better suited for the new environment. The companies that succeed in the 2020s will look very different than they do today—they will have evolved their businesses to harness new technologies and reshaped their external relationships, organizations, and approaches accordingly. Winning the ’20s will help business professionals as well as academics and students with an interest in strategy and leadership answer this critical question for the start of this decade: How should you prepare your company to avoid being left behind and emerge as a winner in a rapidly evolving business landscape?

Winning the ’20s

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

Martin Reeves

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