HBR Guides to Building Your Strategic Skills Collection (3 Books)

Book description

If you aren't working with a strategy, you're wasting your time.

Strategy isn't just a set of plans handed down from the C-suite. To grow as a leader, you need to understand your company's strategy and align your thinking, projects, and team with organizational goals and vision. Master these abilities with the HBR Guides to Building Your Strategic Skills Collection. This three-book set, which includes the HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically, the HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives, and the HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy, will help you change the way you think about your work, manage your most important priorities, and craft a strategy for long-term growth.

You'll learn how to:

  • Understand what strategy is--and what it isn't
  • Define a clear strategy, whether you're in a start-up or in an established business
  • Manage a portfolio of strategic projects
  • Embed strategic thinking into your daily tasks and decision making
  • Align your team around key objectives
  • Let go of work that doesn’t add value
  • Communicate strategy throughout your organization

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy
    1. Series Page
    2. Title Page
    3. Copyright
    4. What You’ll Learn
    5. Contents
    6. Introduction: Get the Strategy You Need—Now
    7. Section One: What Is Strategy?
      1. 1. Defining Strategy, Implementation, and Execution
      2. 2. Five Myths About Strategy
      3. 3. Your Strategic Plans Probably Aren’t Strategic, or Even Plans
    8. Section Two: Lay the Foundation
      1. 4. Your Strategy Needs a Strategy
      2. 5. The Different Approaches Firms Use to Set Strategy
      3. 6. Six Tips for Running Offsites That Aren’t a Waste of Time
      4. 7. Stakeholders First, Strategy Second
    9. Section Three: Develop Your Strategy
      1. 8. Strategy Needs Creativity
      2. 9. Five Questions to Build a Strategy
      3. 10. Four Types of Competition That CanThreaten Your Company
      4. 11. How to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist
      5. 12. Ecosystem Businesses Are Changing the Rules of Strategy
      6. 13. Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy
    10. Section Four: Test Your Strategic Choices
      1. 14. Four Ways to Pressure-Test Your Strategy
      2. 15. Which Strategy “Comfort Traps”Are You Falling Into?
      3. 16. Identify the New Capabilities You Need
      4. 17. A Simple Way to Test Your Company’s Strategic Alignment
    11. Section Five: Communicate Your Strategy
      1. 18. Leading Change and Strategic Transitions
      2. 19. Explain Your New Strategy by Emphasizing What It Isn’t
      3. 20. Discussing Strategy Across Cultures
    12. Section Six: Execute the Strategy and Learn from It
      1. 21. Your Strategy Should Be a Hypothesis You Constantly Adjust
      2. 22. Your Strategy Has to Be Flexible—but So Does Your Execution
      3. 23. Stop Letting Quarterly Numbers Dictate Your Strategy
      4. 24. Strategy Is All About Practice
    13. Index
  3. HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives
    1. Harvard Business Review Guides
    2. Title Page
    3. Copyright
    4. What You’ll Learn
    5. Contents
    6. Introduction: Putting Strategy into Action
    7. Section One: From Idea to Pitch
      1. 1. A Guide to Winning Support for Your New Idea or Project
      2. 2. How to Keep Support for Your Project from Evaporating
      3. 3. You’ve Pitched Your Initiative—What’s Next?
    8. Section Two: Evaluating and Prioritizing an Initiative Portfolio
      1. 4. Which Initiatives Should You Implement?
      2. 5. A Better Way to Set Strategic Priorities
      3. 6. Too Many Projects
      4. 7. The Initiative Portfolio Review Process
      5. 8. Rebalance Your Initiative Portfolio
    9. Section Three: Launching and Implementing Initiatives
      1. 9. New Project? Don’t Analyze—Act
      2. 10. Monitoring and Controlling Your Project
      3. 11. Building a Transformative Team
      4. 12. Teamwork on the Fly
      5. 13. Why Good Projects Fail Anyway
    10. Section Four: Maintaining Momentum and Overcoming Challenges
      1. 14. Four Ways to Be More Effective at Execution
      2. 15. Learning in the Thick of It
      3. 16. How to Hand Off an Innovation Project from One Team to Another
      4. 17. Making Process Improvements Stick
      5. 18. Your Initiative Needs an “Exit Champion”
    11. Section Five: Keeping Strategy and Execution Aligned
      1. 19. Good Strategy Execution Requires Balancing Four Tensions
      2. 20. Five Ways the Best Companies Close the Strategy-Execution Gap
      3. 21. Your Strategy Has to Be Flexible—But So Does Your Execution
    12. Index
  4. HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically
    1. Series Page
    2. Title Page
    3. Copyright
    4. What You’ll Learn
    5. Contents
    6. Introduction
    7. Section One: Get Started: Be Strategic in Your Daily Work
      1. 1. Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills
      2. 2. To Be Strategic, Balance Agility and Consistency
      3. 3. Prove You’re Ready for the Next Level by Showing Off Your Strategic Thinking Skills
    8. Section Two: Understand Your Organization’s Strategy
      1. 4. Understanding Your Organization’s Strategy
      2. 5. Strategy Isn’t What You Say, It’s What You Do
      3. 6. Building a Strategic Network
    9. Section Three: Develop a Big-Picture Perspective
      1. 7. Spotting Trends and Patterns That Affect Your Business
      2. 8. Look at Your Company from the Outside In
      3. 9. Thinking Long-Term in a Short-Term Economy
      4. 10. The Future Is Scary. Creative
      5. 11. Zoom In, Zoom Out
    10. Section Four: Align Decisions with Strategic Objectives
      1. 12. Reflect on Your Actions and Choices
      2. 13. Seven Steps for Making Faster, Better Decisions
      3. 14. How to Make Better Decisions with Less Data
    11. Section Five: Set Priorities and Manage Trade-Offs
      1. 15. A Better Way to Set Strategic Priorities
      2. 16. How to Prioritize When Your Manager Is Hands-Off
      3. 17. Identify and Kill Outdated Objectives
      4. 18. What to Do When Strategic Goals Conflict
      5. 19. Assess and Manage Trade-Offs
    12. Section Six: Align Your Team Around Strategic Goals
      1. 20. To Be a Strategic Leader, Ask the Right Questions
      2. 21. An Exercise to Get Your Team Thinking Differently About the Future
      3. 22. Communicating a Corporate Vision to Your Team
    13. Section Seven: Move from Thinking Strategically to Executing the Strategy
      1. 23. Execution Is a People Problem, Not a Strategy Problem
      2. 24. How to Excel at Both Strategy and Execution
      3. 25. How the Most Successful Teams Bridge the Strategy-to-Execution Gap
      4. 26. Get Your Team to Do What It Says It’s Going to Do
    14. Section Eight: Navigate Strategic Thinking Challenges
      1. 27. When You Think the Strategy Is Wrong
      2. 28. When Your Boss Gives You Conflicting Messages
      3. 29. When the Strategy Is Unclear, in Flux, or Always Changing
    15. Appendix A: Questions to Inspire Strategic Thinking
    16. Appendix B: Organizational Strategy: A Primer
    17. Index

Product information

  • Title: HBR Guides to Building Your Strategic Skills Collection (3 Books)
  • Author(s): Harvard Business Review
  • Release date: August 2020
  • Publisher(s): Harvard Business Review Press
  • ISBN: 9781633699304