The playing field for business has changed significantly in recent decades. The pace of change is accelerating, driven by increased technological progress and shrinking business lifespans. Economic and political uncertainty has risen dramatically and is likely to remain at elevated levels. Industry boundaries are blurring, increasing the potential paths to competitive disruption. Strategy is not dead-in fact, as the gap between winners and losers within industries continues to grow, it is more important than ever. However, the playbook needs to be reinvented for today's business environment. Classical sources of competitive advantage, such as scale and differentiation, have not gone away, but they have been complemented by new dimensions of competition. This book discusses the new role of strategy in a dynamic, unpredictable context. Part 1 of this book revisits classical strategy frameworks and what changes should be made to apply them to the modern era. Part 2 discusses new strategic capabilities companies need today, such as adapting to uncertain environments and shaping new or disrupted ones. Part 3 examines the expanding boundaries of strategy, including new competitive imperatives as well as the wider range of timescales on which businesses must now operate. Drawing on the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years, Dynamic Strategy will help business professionals as well as academics and students with an interest in strategy understand the new competitive challenges that businesses face and develop a playbook to address them.

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?

The Covid-19 crisis caused massive disruptions to businesses around the world. Many were caught unprepared by the pandemic, putting some in danger of collapse. But not all were equally affected-some emerged from the crisis in a position of advantage. Research on corporate performance over decades shows that the dispersion between companies consistently increases in times of crisis. In other words, resilience to unexpected shocks has a disproportionate impact on long-term competitive advantage. Furthermore, ongoing trends are making it harder for businesses to sustain success over time. New offerings are being adopted, matched, and made obsolete faster, and competitive advantage is becoming less durable. In order to survive in the long run, businesses must reinvent themselves regularly-doing the same thing over and over will eventually lead to failure. Many business leaders are now expressing an intention to make their companies more resilient, but there is not yet a well-codified playbook for doing so. This book, drawing on research from the BCG Henderson Institute over many years, provides a set of perspectives on how to thrive under adverse conditions and how to reinvent businesses for the changing context. Overcoming both of these challenges is necessary for leaders to build long-lasting companies.

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 Haanaes, 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.

Leaders and their organizations do not operate in a vacuum but both influence and are influenced by the environment. Today's business organizations are fast moving, uncertain, politicized, sustainability challenged and technologically fluid. This business climate requires new approaches to leadership. Some leaders will rise to the occasion, while others will struggle to adapt. New Leadership Imperatives explores the new challenges of leadership and discusses how leaders can help their organizations to successfully adapt to new conditions. Drawing on lessons from various fields-from military to sports to psychology and neuroscience-this book delves into the challenges leaders face, ranging from social polarization to geopolitical instability. This book aims to guide leaders in making the right choices for their teams, their organizations, their stakeholders, and society as a whole.

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.

As CEO, you set the vision, the strategy, and the tone of your organization.

You establish priorities, anticipate and address challenges, champion and lead change efforts, set people up for success, and manage risk. Though you may have a great senior executive team and a top-flight board, the success of your organization depends on your leadership.

If you read nothing else on being an effective chief executive, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you toggle between long- and short-term views, manage risk and innovation, and cultivate productive relationships with your staff and your board. This book will inspire you to:

- Navigate the changing global business environment

- Customize your company's strategy to the environment you're working in

- Attract, engage, and retain the best talent

- Anticipate and address legislative and regulatory issues

- Sharpen your awareness of the tactical and soft skills you need to lead

- Adopt a founder's mindset and build new offerings, move into new markets, and create next-generation solutions

- Manage and build relationships with your board--and your shareholders

A business ecosystem may be defined as a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution for customers. Business ecosystems are high on the agenda of many business leaders. They are now highly prevalent, frequently disruptive, and all companies should add the required capabilities to their strategy toolbox. Business Ecosystems is based on more than three years of research by the BCG Henderson Institute, their work with dozens of companies on their ecosystem strategies, and hundreds of conversations with academics, managers, investors, entrepreneurs, and government employees. Part I reviews the fundamentals of business ecosystems - definition, design, success factors, governance, strategies. Part II elaborates on special topics, such as trust and data, industry applications, and their potential for sustainability. Ecosystems might not be a solution for all problems, but they are also not a transitory phenomenon. The field is evolving fast and as the success factors for creating, managing and participating in business ecosystems are increasingly accepted and understood, many established and emerging companies have the opportunity to put themselves in a position to unlock great innovation and value creation potential by engaging in ecosystem business models. This book will support business professionals and executives on this journey.

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.

As the business context evolves more rapidly, driven by accelerating technological, political, and social change, an increasing strategic priority for business leaders is how to enact large-scale organizational change. Even companies that are current industry leaders are vulnerable to disruption. Company leaders need to watch over their shoulder for-and transform the company in anticipation of-the next disruption. Mastering the Science of Organizational Change summarizes the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years to develop a more scientific approach to change. Hundreds of companies are analyzed in the book's discussion on how to beat the odds in large-scale change management using an evidence-based approach-a large-scale analysis of what approaches actually work in which circumstances. Part 1 of the book reviews the imperatives for self-disruption. The second part elaborates on how to manage the process of change. Finally, Part 3 discusses how organizations can take change to the next level.

As CEO, you set the vision, the strategy, and the tone of your organization. You establish priorities, anticipate and address challenges, champion and lead change efforts, set people up for success, and manage risk. Though you may have a great senior executive team and a top-flight board, the success of your organization depends on your leadership. If you read nothing else on being an effective chief executive, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you toggle between long- and short-term views, manage risk and innovation, and cultivate productive relationships with your staff and your board. This book will inspire you to: Navigate the changing global business environment Customize your company's strategy to the environment you're working in Attract, engage, and retain the best talent Anticipate and address legislative and regulatory issues Sharpen your awareness of the tactical and soft skills you need to lead Adopt a founder's mindset and build new offerings, move into new markets, and create next-generation solutions Manage and build relationships with your board--and your shareholders This collection of articles includes "Your Strategy Needs a Strategy," by Martin Reeves, Claire Love, and Philipp Tillmanns; "Managing Your Innovation Portfolio," by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff; "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," by John P. Kotter; "Reinventing Your Business Model," by Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann; "Leadership Is a Conversation," by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind; "Strategic Intent," by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad; "When Growth Stalls," by Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever, and Seth Verry; "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution," by Gary L. Neilson, Karla L. Martin, and Elizabeth Powers; "The Focused Leader," by Daniel Goleman; "Managing Risks: A New Framework," by Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes; "21st-Century Talent Spotting," by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz; and "How CEOs Can Work with an Active Board," by Ken Banta and Stephen D. Garrow.