HBR On Strategy

HBR On Strategy

Business strategy isn’t just a plan, it’s a framework for success. Whether you’re building, innovating, or executing, HBR On Strategy is your destination for insights and inspiration from the world’s top experts on business strategy and innovation. Every Wednesday, the editors at the Harvard Business Review hand-picked case studies and conversations from across HBR podcasts, videos, articles, and beyond to help you unlock new ways of doing business.

Episodes

An Announcement from HBR On Strategy

June 25, 2025 • 1 min
For the last two years, HBR On Strategy has been a collection of  the best conversations and case studies with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. But the time has come for HBR On Strategy to hit pause on new episodes. We think that you deserve the highest-possible quality HBR content. And to do that, we’re going to focus our efforts for now on our sister feed, HBR On Lead...
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The Strategic Advantage of Tapping Freelancers

June 25, 2025 • 30 mins
The rapid pace of technological change is making a big impact on hiring. Some organizations are dynamically securing freelance workers through platform apps like Upwork and Freelancer. Other companies are investing heavily in work enabled by artificial intelligence. John Winsor and Jin Paik say these structural changes call for a reimagining of your talent strategy—one that is open to flexible, project-based work for talent inside ...
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The Promises, Pitfalls, and Trade-offs of the Circular Economy

June 18, 2025 • 20 mins
Most businesses are built on a linear model: take, make, and discard. But that norm is reaching its limits, and leaders are under pressure to find smarter, more sustainable ways to operate. Weslynne Ashton is a systems scientist and professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In her masterclass at HBR’s 2024 Leaders Who Make a Difference conference, she explains how companies can shift to a circular economic strategy. One th...
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Sustainability Is Fueling Innovation at Ferrari

June 11, 2025 • 30 mins
When Ferrari, the Italian luxury sports car manufacturer, committed to achieving carbon neutrality and to electrifying a large part of its car fleet, investors and employees applauded the new strategy. But among the company’s suppliers, the reaction was mixed. Many were nervous about how this shift would affect their bottom lines. Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun and Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna discuss how Ferrari ...
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Stress Test Your Strategy Before It Fails

June 4, 2025 • 26 mins
While many teams and organizations engage in scenario planning, most don’t go far enough. Arjan Singh, consultant and adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University, says a more disciplined approach, borrowed from the military, can help leaders truly test how their strategies, operations, and tactics hold up against competitors, shifting market dynamics, and unexpected events. He’s helped hundreds of companies identify risks an...
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Rethink Your Pricing Strategies Amid Economic Uncertainty

May 28, 2025 • 20 mins
Rafi Mohammed, 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 ...
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AMD’s Lisa Su on Experimenting with AI

May 21, 2025 • 23 mins
HBR editor at large Adi Ignatius speaks with Lisa Su, CEO of leading semiconductor company AMD, about the company’s evolution toward high-performance and adaptive computing, the future of AI use in different sectors, and the importance of responsible risk-taking. She advocates for fast experimentation and implementation while ensuring safety through initiatives like AMD’s Responsible AI Council, active learning within the organizat...
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A Lesson on Balancing Scaling with Stability

May 14, 2025 • 28 mins
In late 2013, Ryan Cohen, cofounder and then-CEO of online pet products retailer Chewy.com, was facing a decision that could determine his company’s future. Should he stay with a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for all of Chewy.com’s e-commerce fulfillment or take that function in house? Cohen worried that the company’s current 3PL may not be able to scale with Chewy.com’s projected growth or maintain the company’s performance...
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The Right Way to Launch an AI Initiative

May 7, 2025 • 25 mins
Unfortunately, you can’t set up your organization’s artificial intelligence projects like just any other IT project. By their nature, AI endeavors are quite different and suffer high failure rates. But there are proven approaches you can take to increase your odds of success. Iavor Bojinov, assistant professor at Harvard Business School and former LinkedIn data scientist, breaks down five critical steps for an AI project to turn in...
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The 6 Forces of Failure—and How to Protect Your Company from Them

April 30, 2025 • 8 mins
What can failures like Harley-Davidson Cologne or Cheetos Lip Balm teach us about success? Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners and founder of the Failure Museum, takes us on a tour of notable product failures, sharing insights into why they failed and the lessons we can learn from them. Discover the six forces of failure and learn how companies can avoid making the same mistakes.
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How to Turn Your Customer Base into a Community

April 23, 2025 • 17 mins
”Community” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in the business world. But what does it really mean to build one—and what does it take to make it last? More importantly, how can businesses create communities that drive long-term success? Matt Mullenweg, the cofounder of WordPress and the founder and CEO of Automattic, tackles these questions in this episode. He shares insights on fostering community within a firm—like hirin...
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Great Strategy Starts with Experimentation

April 16, 2025 • 23 mins
Stefan Thomke, professor at Harvard Business School, says running experiments can give companies tremendous value, but too often business leaders make decisions based on intuition. While A/B testing on large transaction volumes is common practice at Google, Booking.com, and Netflix, Thomke says even small firms can get a competitive advantage from experiments. He explains how to introduce, run, and learn from them, as well as how t...
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Bringing Innovation to an Underserved Market

April 9, 2025 • 26 mins
Founded in 2014, Thinx, Inc. makes absorbent underwear that can be worn during menstruation. But the feminine care market had seen virtually no innovation in half a century because of the taboo against discussing the topic of menstruation. As a result, the startup was competing against large incumbents like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson. Harvard Business School Associate Professor Rembrand Koning examines these strategic m...
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To Make Better Decisions, Think Like a Venture Capitalist

April 2, 2025 • 24 mins
Venture capital firms notoriously embrace risk and take big swings, hoping that one startup will become a monster hit that pays for many other failed investments. This VC approach scares established companies, but it shouldn’t. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Ilya Strebulaev says that VC firms have proven best practices that all leaders should apply in their own companies. He explains exactly how VC’s operationalize ...
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How to Lead a Successful Turnaround

March 26, 2025 • 28 mins
When a company, division, or product line has been struggling for some time, it can feel nearly impossible to get things back on track. But big turnarounds are possible, provided you have a team willing to work hard, be creative, and embrace change. When he was president and CEO of Marvel, Peter Cuneo oversaw the resurgence and sale of the media company, but even before that he had a long track record for turning around many types ...
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Alphabet CEO on AI as a Workplace Collaborator

March 19, 2025 • 29 mins
The use of artificial intelligence—specifically generative AI—is growing rapidly, and tech giants like Google have an important role to play in how that technology gets adopted and developed. Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google as well as its parent company Alphabet, which he’s led as an AI-first company for several years. He speaks with HBR Editor at Large Adi Ignatius about shaping Google’s AI strategy, putting safeguards in place...
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How to Push for Change in a Large Organization

March 12, 2025 • 27 mins
Getting a big, bureaucratic organization to innovate or adopt new technologies is hard. That’s why Harvard Business School professor Maria Roche wrote a case study about U.S. Air Force Major Victor “SALSA” Lopez. He helped launch a program that uncovers ways to use AI to strengthen U.S. defense efforts. Professor Roche and Major Lopez talked about the challenges of fostering innovation within a large bureaucracy in a conversation w...
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The Right Way to Make Data-Driven Decisions

March 5, 2025 • 27 mins
Fueled by the promise of concrete insights, organizations are increasingly prioritizing data in their decision-making processes. But that process can easily go wrong. Many leaders don’t understand that their decisions are only as good as how they interpret the data. In this episode, John Hopkins Carey School Professor Michael Luca and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson explain their framework for making better decision...
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To Grow Profitably, Take It Slow

February 26, 2025 • 30 mins
Many companies, especially in the tech world, have come to embrace the idea of growth at all costs. But according to research from Gary Pisano, professor at Harvard Business School, most firms fail to consistently increase revenues and profits over the long term, adjusting for inflation. In this episode, Pisano explains why it’s important for leaders to think more strategically about not just the rate of growth they want to achieve...
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Turn Your Supply Chain into an Innovation Engine

February 19, 2025 • 25 mins
Imagine a company that, in a matter of weeks, can develop, prototype, build, and deliver innovative products. That’s exactly what Haier, one of the world’s largest home appliance manufacturers, achieved in 2019. When the city of Wuhan urgently needed mobile isolation wards to curb the spread of Covid-19, Haier leveraged their open digital supply chain platform. In this episode, Kasra Ferdows, an operations management professor at G...
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