Harvard Business Review
117 episodes listed below
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Business strategy isn’t just a plan, it’s a framework for success. Whether you’re building, innovating, or executing, HBR On Strategy is your destination for insights and inspiration from the world’s top experts on business strategy and innovation. Every Wednesday, the editors at the Harvard Business Review hand-picked case studies and conversations from across HBR podcasts, videos, articles, and beyond to help you unlock new ways of doing business.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Case-led conversations connect strategic decisions to the capital, regulation, culture, and execution pressures that shape their outcomes.
HBR On Strategy turns broad management questions into bounded decisions with real organizations, clear constraints, and consequences. Its case-led conversations move from middle managers translating an executive plan to Thinx rebuilding process around a promising product,…
Chewy's logistics partner can't keep up; suddenly, your strategy meeting has a pulse.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear case study of a firm learning to adapt without losing its shape.
McKinsey sits at the center of this conversation as both subject and example: a firm built to help clients through disruption has to explain how it handled pressure inside management consulting itself.
A clear case study in scaling without flattening a brand.
Glossier's scaling problem comes through clearly: how can a brand spend more on marketing without dulling the authenticity that helped it grow in the first place?
A plainspoken look at how turnarounds start with culture, not the balance sheet.
Peter Cuneo treats turnarounds as a cultural problem before a financial one, and that is the thread running through the discussion. He says the first move is to find people who know the company, ask what they are hearing, and check whether the value system has slipped.
A practical rehearsal for strategies that need to hold up in the marketplace.
Corporate wargaming comes across as a useful way to pressure-test strategy before it hits the marketplace. Arjun Singh, an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University, lays out how teams collect market information and competitive intelligence, then work through rivals,…
A practical case for treating generative AI as a working partner, with governance kept firmly in view.
Sundar Pichai presents generative AI as a working partner, not a passing novelty, and that framing gives the episode its strongest line. It stays close to the practical stakes for business leaders, regulators, and the people doing the work, with pair programming, financial…
A useful look at how digital entrants can carve out space in a heavily regulated market.
HBR on Strategy looks at a long-settled industry with a clear eye, showing how digital entrants can still find room to move. Lauren Cohen and Brian Kenney use Hippo to show a model built around fewer intermediaries, direct targeting of customers already comfortable online, and…
A practical case for matching skills to work, not just titles.
The conversation makes a solid case for hiring around skills instead of titles, especially in a digital marketplace where work changes faster than org charts do.
A disciplined case study in how a new category gets built and kept sharp.
Ron Shaik treats restaurant innovation as a discipline: define the category, read what guests actually want, shape a distinct offer, and keep the execution tight as the business scales. That gives the episode a clear center.
Architecture talk with business consequences.
Nilay Patel presses tech and media CEOs on how they actually run their companies.
Physician Shoshana Ungerleider pairs TED talks with interviews on aging, drug prices, and menopause.
Food52 hosts break down recipes and food-business origin stories, from sourdough to Salty Pimp cones.
Ron Shaik explains how Panera carved out a new restaurant category between fast food and table service.
Ben Kasnocha and Chris Yeh argue on HBR IdeaCast that the old employer-employee compact of stability and loyalty has been replaced by an alliance built around uncertainty, competition, and mutual value.
Harvard Business School professor Stefan Tomke argues on HBR IdeaCast that businesses should stop relying on intuition and use experiments to make decisions.
Glossier's growth creates a familiar strategic problem.
HBR On Strategy’s "Using New Tech to Compete in an Old Industry" centers on Harvard Business School professor Lauren Cohen and the insurtech company Hippo, which is trying to change how home insurance is bought and sold.
This episode features Chris Zook discussing how businesses can achieve sustainable competitive advantage, highlighting that less than 10% of companies sustain profitable growth over a decade.
Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School and Michael Luca of Johns Hopkins Carey Business School argue that data-driven decisions fail when leaders treat analysis as self-explanatory instead of asking how it fits the actual business problem.
Keith Ferrazzi, founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, says 2,000 executives helped him identify what let companies thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harvard Business School assistant professor Yavor Bozhinov says around 80% of AI projects fail because AI is probabilistic, not deterministic, and because failure can happen at the idea, model, fairness, or adoption stage.
Haier used its open digital supply chain platform, Cosmoplat, to help deliver mobile isolation wards to Wuhan in record time during the 2019 COVID-19 outbreak.
Conversation between Clay Christensen (disruptive innovation theorist) and Dominic Barton (McKinsey managing partner) analyzing how McKinsey recognized and responded to disruption in consulting industry.
Harvard Business School professor Gary Passano discusses sustainable growth strategies, using research on 11,000 public companies to argue that companies must balance market demand with organizational capacity, identifying resource bottlenecks before setting growth targets, rather than pursuing rapid growth that often damages profitability and company culture.
HBR on Strategy centers this conversation on how a large bureaucratic organization can still innovate and take on new technology.
The episode follows the sharp clash between Live Golf and the PGA Tour.
An executive team has announced a new master plan, and the episode follows the mid-level manager who has to make it work.
Sundar Pichai and Adi Ignatius talk about generative AI as something that can work alongside people at work.
Kurt Nickish interviews John Windsor and Jin Paik about their book 'Open Talent' and how companies can build agile organizations through freelance workforce strategies.
Harvard professor Mike Beer discusses how companies that succeed long-term invest in human capital, define clear strategic identities, and balance stakeholder interests.
Harvard Business Review strategy interview with SMU adjunct professor Arjun Singh explores corporate wargaming—a disciplined approach to competitive simulation that helps companies avoid blind spots and test strategies against rival moves.
Peter Cuneo, who led seven successful corporate turnarounds including Marvel (bankruptcy to billion-dollar enterprise), shares the philosophy and tactics behind his consistent success.
HBR on Strategy interviews Harvard professor Jeffrey Rayport about his case study on Ryan Cohen's pivotal 2013 decision to insource Chewy.com's fulfillment operations.
Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automatic (WordPress), discusses how to build sustainable community both internally and with customers.
The simple VC trick that prevents billion-dollar groupthink disasters
How AMD went from $4B to $23B in a decade: the lesson about goals every founder needs to hear.
HBR On Strategy examines how Thinx turned the taboo around menstruation into a business strategy, using period underwear, provocative marketing, and a case study by Harvard Business School professor Rembrandt Koning.
Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna says the company wants to be carbon neutral by 2030 while keeping its identity as a luxury brand, not an automotive company.