HBR's 10 Must Reads Big Business Ideas Collection (2015-2017 plus The Essentials) (4 Books) (HBR's 10 Must Reads)

Contextual Intelligence

by Tarun Khanna

WHETHER AS MANAGERS or as academics, we study business to extract learning, formalize it, and apply it to puzzles we wish to solve. That’s why we go to business school, why we write case studies and develop analytic frameworks, why we read HBR.

I believe deeply in the importance of that work: I’ve spent my career studying business as it is practiced in varied global settings.

But I’ve come to a conclusion that may surprise you: Trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool’s errand, much as we’d like to think otherwise. To be sure, plenty of aspirations enjoy wide if not universal acceptance. Most entrepreneurs and managers agree, for example, that creating value and motivating ...