Page 9 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

Editors’ Note

Every year, as we build each issue of Harvard Business Review, we
examine the most important challenges facing business leaders
today, from technology to people management. Rather than simply
monitoring buzzwords or headlines, this involves a combination
of looking forward to how businesses will need to incorporate new
technologies and contextual realities, and also looking back at lin-
gering management problems to find the ways that researchers and
practitioners are addressing them today. The standout articles of
the year collected here, for example, explain emerging phenomena
like blockchain, dataviz literacy, and algorithms in practical terms.
They also offer new perspectives on long-term issues such as boost-
ing employee engagement, increasing diversity, and fixing the U.S.
health care system. We showcase these and other critical themes
highlighted by our authors from the past year of Harvard Business
Review in this volume.
In today’s crowded and competitive marketplace, companies
often feel pressure to rebrand or expand their offerings to stay alive.
But P&G’s A.G. Lafley and strategy expert and Rotman School of
Management professor Roger L. Martin say companies should focus
their efforts on strengthening customers’ habits, not developing
products or redesigning packaging. In “Customer Loyalty Is Over-
rated,” the authors acknowledge that although it’s hard work to
establish a brand, once you’ve done so, constant reinvention won’t
keep customers coming back. Research suggests that what makes
competitive advantage sustainable is helping consumers avoid
expending the mental energy to make a choice. Customers don’t
want to have to evaluate their options every time they shop; they
just want to buy what they’ve always bought. And each time cus-
tomers pick the same product, they boost its advantage over that of
the products they didn’t choose.
Inconsistent decision making is often a hidden and expensive
problem plaguing companies—not the big, sweeping, strategy-
related choices, but the daily decisions and judgment calls, which
can swing radically from one individual to the next. This problem
affects not just new employees but seasoned people who have been
in the same roles, following the same well-established guidelines.

vii