Strategy: How to Be the Leader Your Business Needs
- How Gucci achieved the most dramatic turnaround in fashion history.
- The danger of contentment and how success can kill your organization.
- Why every single employee—at every level—must know your strategy.
In the past 25 years, thousands of articles have been written about strategy, but virtually none about the leadership vital for doing it well. Strategy has been transformed from an art to a science—but science alone is not enough. Cynthia Montgomery makes the case for bringing people back into the equation. Though you start with ideas, you need leaders to construct a company that brings these ideas to fruition. Leadership is required to define your purpose and form a management model that carries it out.
One exercise Montgomery suggests is to think about death: the death of your business. What would the world be like without it? Would it be the same? If you don't make a difference, nobody will mourn you when you're gone. And if they won't miss you then, how much do they need you now? Knowing what makes you matter to your customers is critical—but even that is not enough. Whatever constitutes strategic advantage today will eventually change. That’s why you can’t outsource strategy. It takes leadership to watch over an organization, make the hard choices, provide clarity and alignment, and keep everyone fired up and moving ahead together.
Cynthia Montgomery - Timken Professor of Business Administration and Director of Research, Harvard University
Cynthia Montgomery is the Timken Professor of Business Administration and Director of Research at Harvard University Business School.
Professor Montgomery's research centers on strategy and corporate governance. Of particular interest are the unique roles leaders play in developing and implementing strategy; the means organizations use to create value across multiple lines of business; and issues related to corporate boards of directors.
She is a top-selling Harvard Business Review author, and her work has appeared in nearly a dozen top-tier managerial and academic outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, American Economic Review, Rand Journal of Economics, Strategic Management Journal, The Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, The Journal of Business, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, and others.
She is the author of The Strategist: Be the Leader your Business Needs (Harper Business, 2012); the co-author of Corporate Strategy: Resources and the Scope of the Firm (with David J. Collis), the editor of Resource-Based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm, and the co-editor of Strategy: Seeking and Securing Competitive Advantage (with Michael E. Porter).
Professor Montgomery received the Harvard Business School’s prestigious Greenhill Award for her contributions to the School’s pedagogical mission.
Prior to Harvard, Montgomery taught at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Michigan and at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management where she was recognized with its Outstanding Teacher of the Year award.
Her dissertation work on corporate level strategy won the General Electric Award for Outstanding Research in Strategic Management.
Montgomery has served on the Board of Directors of two Fortune 500 companies--Newell Rubbermaid, Inc. and UnumProvident--and a number of mutual funds managed by Black Rock, Inc. She has also served on several not-for-profit boards, including Harvard Business Publishing and McLean Hospital.
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