Latest news with #HBR
Harvard Business Review
3 days ago
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
Rethink Your Pricing Strategies Amid Economic Uncertainty
Details Transcript founder of the consulting firm Culture of Profit, says a crisis or recession is not the time to panic and slash prices. He says leaders should instead reevaluate their pricing strategy—or develop one for the first time—to better respond to customers during the slump and keep them when the economy recovers. Since this conversation took place in 2020, the crisis you'll hear them referring to is—obviously—the Covid-19 pandemic. But these lessons apply well beyond that moment—to any period of economic instability. Mohammed shares examples of companies across a variety of industries that created effective price strategies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Mohammed is the author of The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow and the recent HBR article, ' Setting a Pricing Strategy Amid Ever-Changing Tariffs.' Key episode topics include: pricing strategy, competitive strategy, crisis management, customer strategy, economic downturns, economics, inflation, recessions, risk management, strategy HBR On Strategy curates the best conversations and case studies with the world's top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.
Harvard Business Review
3 days ago
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
Developing employees
Latest Make the value and rewards clear, consistent, and accessible. The HBR Executive Playbook on building an adaptive, future-ready workforce. A minor process change had major ramifications for who got hired—and how managers felt about HR's involvement. How to avoid three common problems when implementing these programs across cultures. Save Share April 29, 2025 A study found that the timing and emotional tenor of a leader's communication can significantly affect their team members' performance. Save Share April 25, 2025 Gen AI can help polish resumes, practice interviews, or refine your leadership—if you know what to ask. Save Share April 15, 2025 Don't forget: the employees are a huge part of what made the company attractive in the first place. Save Share April 03, 2025 A study of UN peacekeepers found that encouraging workers to pivot from lofty goals to smaller, more-focused wins can help them stay engaged. Save Share March 10, 2025 Tips for assigning the right projects and helping them get the recognition they deserve. Save Share January 15, 2025 Research shows that busy schedules can make parents ration their time at work and miss out on building valuable connections. Save Share January 02, 2025 Strong leaders put business transformation in the hands of all employees. Save Share From the January–February 2025 Issue Process management has long been a go-to method for achieving the improvements in operational performance that stakeholders constantly demand. By applying... Save Share Buy Copies January 01, 2025
Harvard Business Review
3 days ago
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
Apply Strategic Thinking to Create a Meaningful Life
An HBR Executive Masterclass with Rainer Strack. In corporate strategy projects, executive leadership teams work through a series of questions to determine how their businesses can succeed. Individuals can use a similar process to figure out how to live a meaningful life.
Harvard Business Review
3 days ago
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
Building Trust with Your Board
The HBR Executive Playbook on forming strong, long-lasting relationships with your directors. by Beth Goody Strategic alignment between a CEO and their board starts with one crucial element: trust. Without trust, the board is more likely to second-guess leadership and slow down momentum. When trust is strong, CEOs are more likely to speak openly about their challenges, and boards are more likely to provide clarity, perspective, and sound judgment, especially in moments of uncertainty.
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
The New Destiny Of Management: Creating Value Faster
Communication technology with global internet network What will it take to attain the Drucker Forum's goal of turning management into a noble calling that helps create a worthy society? We will need more than piecemeal patches added on to current management thinking. Instead, we need to re-conceive management afresh as the art and science of creating value for others faster. In its HBR article of June 2024, the Drucker Forum suggested that 'The Next Management' should include at least seven aspirations: including innovation more than efficiency, ecosystems more than single institutions, long-term, more than short term, focus, human augmentation, more than automation, management as an art, more than a science, reality grounded more than ideology, and self-renewal capacity, more than revolution.[i] There is nothing wrong with these seven 'fixes' in themselves. They will, however, make little difference if the underlying concept of management involves creating value primarily for the firm, its executives and its shareholders. This traditional concept of management has a long and troubled history. It was assumed by Adam Smith in Wealth Of Nations, (1776), by Fredrick Taylor in The Principles of Scientific Management, (1911), by the U.S. Business Round Table (1997), by most articles in leading management journals even today [ii] Meanwhile, a different approach emerges from following Peter Drucker's advice to 'look out the window and note what is visible but not yet seen.' Over the last quarter century, some firms have already begun implementing the converse of merely making money for the company. Now profits are a result, not the goal. As these new firms found ways to have human concerns modify and drive the processes, practices, and methods of management, they have grown much faster and ironically have made exponentially more money than companies focused primarily on making money. They tend to began with the customer and worked backwards, while also giving thought to all the stakeholders. In so doing, they began to live the new destiny of management: creating value for others. Examples of firms that are mostly pursuing this goal and the results they have obtained in terms of long term returns and workplace satisfaction are included below in Figure 1. They include firms of all sizes and in all sectors in the U.S., Europe and Asia. In one sense, this is like rediscovering the wheel. For millennia, the human race has known that when we create value for others, the true spirit of living is alive in us. Whatever our kind of work, whether it is a business, a team, a family, a community or a political movement, when we embody the spirit of creating value for others, we become inventive, searching, daring, and self-expressing. We may disturb and upset, but we often also open the way for better understanding. What led to the change? It wasn't a sudden moral epiphany on the part of business leaders. It's a recognition by businesses that the world itself has changed. The internet (and now AI) gave rise first, to firms, new possibilities for innovation, and then to customers, more choices, and finally to firms again, the potential of new business models that can generate exponential network effects.[iii] The old way of managing can't keep up. Smart managers saw they had to do something different. While each firm is unique and uses its own language, the underlying management patterns have much in common. Thus Apple talks of a different 'culture'. Microsoft speaks about 'mindset', 'empathy' and 'values.' Amazon focuses on 'leadership principles.' Some firms talked of 'mental models' and 'narratives.' The Agile Manifesto spoke of valuing 'individuals and interactions' more than 'processes and tools.' Despite the differences, they are all about putting people ahead of processes. The new breed of firm generally uses subjective concepts to drive their objective business processes. These mindsets, goals, values, and narratives are the very things that traditional management dismissed in principle. The result has been an upheaval in every aspect of business practices. It can be called a paradigm shift in management, although probably no more than 20% of public firms have yet made the transition. Instead of trying to fix individual issues by adding patches to a framework of traditional management, the fastest growing firms have transformed almost every process so as to form an integrated concept of running a company. These multiple but integrated changes require that managers and staff need to think about work differently. How they perceive the organization is different, as is the language they use in the workplace. Methods, processes and tools don't disappear. But in these firms. it is the mindsets, and values that drive and transform the methods and processes, rather than vice versa. The result is a culture where employees can see meaning in what they do. It is not that the fast-growing firms without flaws. They all need to make continued progress towards creating steadily more value for stakeholders. and avoid backsliding towards self-interest. Lessons For Others Understanding how these fast-growing firms are being managed is the first step for those firms that are still being managed by yesterday's methods and processes. Unless they begin making similar shifts, most will not survive, at least in their current form. And read also: How Creating Value For Others Has Become The Key To Business Success How Networks Of Competence Are Crushing Hierarchies Of Authority Figure 1: Public firms with a track record of sustained fast growth. Firms with track records of sustained fast growth [i] Straub, R. Re-framing Management For The 21st Century,' HBR, June 2024. [ii] See for example Michael Mankins 'Lean Strategy Making' HBR, May-June 2025 [iii] Denning, S. 'Understanding How Exponential Network Effects Do—Or Don't—Happen' Aug 4, 2024 [iv] 'The CEO of e.l.f. Beauty on Maintaining a Startup Culture While Scaling.' HBR, Jan 2025
