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HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs
As CEO, you set the tone for your organization. You establish priorities, anticipate and address challenges, champion and lead change efforts, set people up for success, and manage risk. You look at issues and trends to see how they'll affect your company internally, but also externally--in the larger context of your industry, your country, and your company's place in the global marketplace. You maintain a long-term view while simultaneously paying attention to short-term concerns. And though you may have a great senior executive team and a top-flight board, ultimately the responsibility rests on your shoulders.
If you read nothing else for CEOs, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you balance stability with growth, take the short-term view while keeping an eye on long-term issues, and think about talent development, retention, and recruitment.
This book will inspire you to:
Navigate the changing global business environment Attract, engage, and retain the best talent Anticipate and address legislative and regulatory issues Sharpen your awareness of your own tactical and soft skills 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 shareholders256 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 2019
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297 people want to read
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December 4, 2022
Introduction
HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs is a collection of essays originally published in the Harvard Business Review on organizational design and strategy. The target audience is CEOs but having read this book, I can say that the target audience is anyone in business. Each of these articles has been hand-selected to create a collection of impactful readings on building your strategic capacity and strategic decision-making.
When it comes right down to it, everyone in the organization has some degree of responsibility for setting the tone of their departments (organization), establishing priorities, and addressing challenges. This is not just the responsibility of the CEO. The essays within this book are here to help you strengthen these skills, which are skills needed to Navigate the changing global business environment!
Why You Should Read This Book?
Often when you read out business success, there generally is a CEO at the top that gets most of the credit for the strategic direction and results of the business. But the truth of business is most successes are a collaborative team effort from the top to the bottom of your organization. The ten articles within HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs will help facilitate organizational changes that increase your likelihood of success. Most importantly, the tactics in this book will drive a higher level of accountability through your organization which is probably one of the most important characteristics of a successful organization. The following is a quick summary/overview of the ten articles within this book:
Bonus Article:
Your Strategy Needs a Strategy:
Before you set your strategy, you should ask yourself two simple questions:
(1) How predictable is your environment and
(2) How much power do you or others have to change that environment? Based on these answers you adopt a:
• Classical strategy for industries that are predictable but cannot be changed by you
• Adaptive strategy for industries that are unpredictable and cannot be changed by you
• Shaping strategy for industries that are unpredictable but can be changed by you
• Visionary strategy for industries that are predictable and can be changed by you
Summary of Articles in Book:
1. Managing Your Innovation Portfolio: The fact remains that the year-to-year viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate. Striking the right balance between core, adjacent, and transformational products is the key to a well-balanced innovation portfolio. Firms that follow the golden ratio (70% of funds to core, 20% of funds to adjacent, 10% of funds to transformation) outperformed their peer group in P/E ratio by 10% to 20%.
2. Leading Change: Requires that enough real leaders are promoted/hired into senior leader jobs to drive change. Note that change can take five to ten years to sink deeply into a company’s culture.
3. Reinventing Your Business Model: When events dictate a change in business model, look to profitability as the best early indication of whether the new model is viable.
4. Leadership is a Conversation: Top-down communication is no longer viable or even useful for most organizations. Leaders must pivot to an ongoing “organizational conversation.”
5. Strategic Intent: Strategic intent is a sustained long-term obsession with winning at all levels of the organization. Strategic intent gives employees the only goal that is worthy of commitment: to unseat the best or remain the best in the world.
6. When Growth Stalls: The four most common ways that growth stalls are (1) a premium market position backfires (2) innovation management breaks down (3) core business is abandoned (4) the company lacks strong talent bench.
7. The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution: Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by employees acting according to the information they have and their own-self interest
8. The Focused Leader: Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions, and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.
9. Managing Risks: Risk management is more than just compliance and lots of rule-based decisions.
10. 21st-Century Talent Spotting: You need to build your hiring practices around potential which is the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments.
11. How CEOs Can Work with an Active Board: Focus more on getting the board general business environment trend updates, people/talent news, and updates on business development.
What I Will Do Differently As A Result of This Book
“Strategic intent is like a marathon run in 400-meter sprints. No one knows what the terrain will look like at mile 26, so the role of top management is to focus the organization’s attention on the ground to be covered in the next 400 meters.”
When I think about strategy historically, it has always felt a bit “zero-sum” or “all-or-nothing.” What HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs has reconfirmed for me is that the essence of the strategy lies in creating tomorrow’s competitive advantages faster than your competitors can mimic the ones you possess today. Strategic intent has a much more inward focus than outward focus, and while that may seem intuitive, most organizations I have worked for historically have looked toward their competitors during their annual strategic planning. Real competitiveness and strategic intent ultimately depend on the pace at which a company can embed new advantages deep within its organization.
Going forward, my focus will be on:
• Build our defensive capabilities by maximizing my organization’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn new ones
• Don’t let our resources be the constraint on our ability to build competitive capabilities. In other words, match our competitive aspirations to our current resources.
• Try to create a real obsession with performance (winning) at all levels of the organization
• Remember that the primary driver of long-term company performance is profitable revenue growth. All the other metrics that matter are an offshoot of that!
In closing, “All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which great victory is evolved.
Final Thoughts
The goal of HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs is to help people increase their organizational strategic intent. Compiled in an easy-to-digest fashion, the ten essays within this book will help you do just that. It’s a solid read and worth spending some time with especially the 5th essay on “Strategic Intent.”
Easy to Read: (4.5/5) 90%
Deep Content: (3/5) 60%
Overall Rating: (4/5) 80%
HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs is a collection of essays originally published in the Harvard Business Review on organizational design and strategy. The target audience is CEOs but having read this book, I can say that the target audience is anyone in business. Each of these articles has been hand-selected to create a collection of impactful readings on building your strategic capacity and strategic decision-making.
When it comes right down to it, everyone in the organization has some degree of responsibility for setting the tone of their departments (organization), establishing priorities, and addressing challenges. This is not just the responsibility of the CEO. The essays within this book are here to help you strengthen these skills, which are skills needed to Navigate the changing global business environment!
Why You Should Read This Book?
Often when you read out business success, there generally is a CEO at the top that gets most of the credit for the strategic direction and results of the business. But the truth of business is most successes are a collaborative team effort from the top to the bottom of your organization. The ten articles within HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs will help facilitate organizational changes that increase your likelihood of success. Most importantly, the tactics in this book will drive a higher level of accountability through your organization which is probably one of the most important characteristics of a successful organization. The following is a quick summary/overview of the ten articles within this book:
Bonus Article:
Your Strategy Needs a Strategy:
Before you set your strategy, you should ask yourself two simple questions:
(1) How predictable is your environment and
(2) How much power do you or others have to change that environment? Based on these answers you adopt a:
• Classical strategy for industries that are predictable but cannot be changed by you
• Adaptive strategy for industries that are unpredictable and cannot be changed by you
• Shaping strategy for industries that are unpredictable but can be changed by you
• Visionary strategy for industries that are predictable and can be changed by you
Summary of Articles in Book:
1. Managing Your Innovation Portfolio: The fact remains that the year-to-year viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate. Striking the right balance between core, adjacent, and transformational products is the key to a well-balanced innovation portfolio. Firms that follow the golden ratio (70% of funds to core, 20% of funds to adjacent, 10% of funds to transformation) outperformed their peer group in P/E ratio by 10% to 20%.
2. Leading Change: Requires that enough real leaders are promoted/hired into senior leader jobs to drive change. Note that change can take five to ten years to sink deeply into a company’s culture.
3. Reinventing Your Business Model: When events dictate a change in business model, look to profitability as the best early indication of whether the new model is viable.
4. Leadership is a Conversation: Top-down communication is no longer viable or even useful for most organizations. Leaders must pivot to an ongoing “organizational conversation.”
5. Strategic Intent: Strategic intent is a sustained long-term obsession with winning at all levels of the organization. Strategic intent gives employees the only goal that is worthy of commitment: to unseat the best or remain the best in the world.
6. When Growth Stalls: The four most common ways that growth stalls are (1) a premium market position backfires (2) innovation management breaks down (3) core business is abandoned (4) the company lacks strong talent bench.
7. The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution: Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by employees acting according to the information they have and their own-self interest
8. The Focused Leader: Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions, and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.
9. Managing Risks: Risk management is more than just compliance and lots of rule-based decisions.
10. 21st-Century Talent Spotting: You need to build your hiring practices around potential which is the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments.
11. How CEOs Can Work with an Active Board: Focus more on getting the board general business environment trend updates, people/talent news, and updates on business development.
What I Will Do Differently As A Result of This Book
“Strategic intent is like a marathon run in 400-meter sprints. No one knows what the terrain will look like at mile 26, so the role of top management is to focus the organization’s attention on the ground to be covered in the next 400 meters.”
When I think about strategy historically, it has always felt a bit “zero-sum” or “all-or-nothing.” What HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs has reconfirmed for me is that the essence of the strategy lies in creating tomorrow’s competitive advantages faster than your competitors can mimic the ones you possess today. Strategic intent has a much more inward focus than outward focus, and while that may seem intuitive, most organizations I have worked for historically have looked toward their competitors during their annual strategic planning. Real competitiveness and strategic intent ultimately depend on the pace at which a company can embed new advantages deep within its organization.
Going forward, my focus will be on:
• Build our defensive capabilities by maximizing my organization’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn new ones
• Don’t let our resources be the constraint on our ability to build competitive capabilities. In other words, match our competitive aspirations to our current resources.
• Try to create a real obsession with performance (winning) at all levels of the organization
• Remember that the primary driver of long-term company performance is profitable revenue growth. All the other metrics that matter are an offshoot of that!
In closing, “All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which great victory is evolved.
Final Thoughts
The goal of HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs is to help people increase their organizational strategic intent. Compiled in an easy-to-digest fashion, the ten essays within this book will help you do just that. It’s a solid read and worth spending some time with especially the 5th essay on “Strategic Intent.”
Easy to Read: (4.5/5) 90%
Deep Content: (3/5) 60%
Overall Rating: (4/5) 80%
December 24, 2019
This book provides detailed and current industry strategies for managing employees and promote positive change. Some parts of these articles are very dense and sometimes get a lil’ boring; but there are notes and summaries that help you digest the content more easily. Overall a good read for those who are already CEOs. Not so much for start ups or new Entrepreneurs.
July 23, 2025
3/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A classic, yet somewhat dry, management & leadership book.
My favorite articles were "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" by John P. Kotter and "The Focused Leader" by Daniel Goleman.
10 lessons from the book (to revisit when needed):
1. Strategic misalignment is a silent killer.
Most failures originate not from bad strategy, but from applying the wrong strategic style to the context.
2. Don’t over-invest in low-risk ideas.
Core, tested products/services/systems feel safe, but without riskier bets, long-term relevance fades.
3. Be willing to break your own model.
Sticking with a legacy model out of comfort or tradition invites disruption.
4. Storytelling is a strategic leadership tool.
A compelling narrative builds shared understanding and purpose.
5. Big ambition drives big performance.
Stretch goals motivate organizations to build new capabilities and think long-term.
6. Create a sense of competitive obsession.
Strategic intent should rally people around beating the best, not just surviving.
7. Growth stalls are symptoms, not root causes.
Diagnose leadership drift, lack of focus, or structural inertia before revenue collapse sets in.
8. Structure alone won’t fix execution.
The right behavior, culture, and decision-making rights matter more than org charts.
9. Great leaders balance three lenses of focus.
Self-awareness, empathy for others, and systems-level thinking work together to guide sound leadership.
10. Classify risk before managing it.
Know whether you’re dealing with preventable, strategic, or external risks—then act accordingly.
A classic, yet somewhat dry, management & leadership book.
My favorite articles were "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" by John P. Kotter and "The Focused Leader" by Daniel Goleman.
10 lessons from the book (to revisit when needed):
1. Strategic misalignment is a silent killer.
Most failures originate not from bad strategy, but from applying the wrong strategic style to the context.
2. Don’t over-invest in low-risk ideas.
Core, tested products/services/systems feel safe, but without riskier bets, long-term relevance fades.
3. Be willing to break your own model.
Sticking with a legacy model out of comfort or tradition invites disruption.
4. Storytelling is a strategic leadership tool.
A compelling narrative builds shared understanding and purpose.
5. Big ambition drives big performance.
Stretch goals motivate organizations to build new capabilities and think long-term.
6. Create a sense of competitive obsession.
Strategic intent should rally people around beating the best, not just surviving.
7. Growth stalls are symptoms, not root causes.
Diagnose leadership drift, lack of focus, or structural inertia before revenue collapse sets in.
8. Structure alone won’t fix execution.
The right behavior, culture, and decision-making rights matter more than org charts.
9. Great leaders balance three lenses of focus.
Self-awareness, empathy for others, and systems-level thinking work together to guide sound leadership.
10. Classify risk before managing it.
Know whether you’re dealing with preventable, strategic, or external risks—then act accordingly.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews