Strategy in the New Economy: Simple, Fast, and Flexible (HBR OnPoint Collection)

HBR OnPoint collections save you time by synthesizing and distilling the essence of three Harvard Business Review articles that, together, help you meet a specific management challenge. One-page overviews draw out the main points. Annotated bibliographies point you to related resources. Original HBR articles included. Creating and maintaining strategic advantage in the midst of complex, chaotic markets is a daunting challenge. Most companies respond with more complexity--endless rules and systems to guide their decision-making. But this bogs organizations down, restricting their ability to navigate shifting terrain. This collection of articles shows organizations how to ramp up speed and boost flexibility. The overarching approach, "strategy as simple rules," involves selecting a few key, functional processes (e.g., product innovation) that help capture opportunities, and then defining a handful of simple rules to govern them (e.g., develop new products in under three months). Simple rules also make it easier for companies to implement two other strategic processes: Patching (combining, splitting, or exiting businesses) creates "Velcro organizations" that quickly reconfigure themselves to fit changing markets. Coevolving companies use multibusiness teams to exploit synergies--creating temporary collaborative links among strategic units as markets and businesses themselves evolve. The three Harvard Business Review articles in this collection: "Strategy as Simple Rules" by Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Donald N. Sull (HBR reprint R0101G); "Patching: Restitching Business Portfolios in Dynamic Markets" by Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Shona L. Brown (HBR reprint 99302); and "Coevolving: At Last, a Way to Make Synergies Work" by Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and D. Charles Galunic (HBR reprint R00103).