Books

Martin is the coauthor of the article “Strategy in a Hyperpolitical World” with Roger L. Martin, which appears in HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy, Updated and Expanded (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025).

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 Haanæs, 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• What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete?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.

We need imagination now more than ever – to find opportunities in adversity, rethink our businesses, and discover new 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 systematically?

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, BCG’s Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller provide a fascinating look into the mechanics of imagination and lay out a six-step process for creating ideas and bringing them to life.

Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of business success. It’s what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to success – 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 by your side.

Too many good leaders make bad decisions. Learn how to make better ones.

If you read nothing else on decision-making, read this book. We’ve chosen a new selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles that will help you gather the data you need, identify cognitive traps that lead you astray, and turn overthinking into action.

This book will inspire you to:

• Balance human judgment with AI insights
• Identify the true owner of every decision
• Step outside of organizational echo chambers
• Overcome the high cost of inconsistent decision-making
• Know when to trust your gut
• Decide and move forward with confidence

This collection of articles includes “How to Tackle Your Toughest Decisions,” by Joseph L. Badaracco; “The Hidden Traps in Decision Making,” by John S. Hammond, Raplh L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa; “Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut,” by Melody Wilding; “Fooled by Experience,” by Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth; “What Makes Strategic Decisions Different,” by Phil Rosenzweig; “Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Decision Making,” by Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser; “The Value of Human Decision-Making in the Age of AI,” by Martin Reeves, Mihnea Moldoveanu, and Adam Job; “Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong,” by Michael Luca and Amy C. Edmondson; “Making Better Decisions with Less Data,” by Tanya Menon and Leigh Thompson; “Who Has the D?: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance,” by Paul Rogers and Marcia W. Blenko; “Beyond the Echo Chamber,” by Alex “Sandy” Pentland; “Five Questions to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions,” by Steven Morris; “Conquering a Culture of Indecision,” by Ram Charan; and “Drive Innovation with Better Decision-Making,” by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swan.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads are definitive collections of classic ideas, practical advice, and essential thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Exploring topics like disruptive innovation, emotional intelligence, and new technology in our ever-evolving world, these books empower any leader to make bold decisions and inspire others.

This Updated and Expanded edition features new, breakthrough articles, additional short-form pieces, and a detailed discussion guide to give you and your team the tools you need for sustained success.

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.

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.

Reimagining business models is a tall order for any management team, and especially so in today’s business landscape of continual disruptive change. Having examined hundreds of businesses over the course of their research, the BCG Henderson Institute has developed a systematic approach for reimagining business models for economic and social sustainability, creating new modes of differentiation and advantage, embedding societal value into products and services, managing new performance measures, and reshaping business ecosystems to support these initiatives.

This book explores the why, what, and how of sustainable business model innovation (SBM-I) – a new method by which corporations can optimize for both business and social value using their core businesses to deliver the financial returns expected by their owners and, in tandem, to help society meet its most significant challenges. It details the SBM-I innovation cycle linking to value creation and scaled transformation, and expands the application of SBM-I to sustainable business ecosystems and corporate lead sustainability alliances.

Sustainable Business Model Innovation offers inspiration and guidance to create more competitive and sustainable companies. Your company’s future, our environment, and society depend on doing so.

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.