Operations have always been foundational to competitive advantage, but the nature of this relationship is shifting.

In highly ambiguous and challenging contexts, a random approach to decision-making confers a number of advantages.

We explore and refute five false beliefs about resilience and look at the key steps required to build it and bake it into strategy and operations.

Organizational resilience and personal resilience are rarely considered together, yet building a system that facilitates mutually-reinforcing resilience between organizations and employees opens new possibilities on both levels. We explore the relationship between the two forms of resilience.

COVID was a test of resilience for companies, and it has not only widened competitive spreads but also created new winners and losers. Explore our scoreboard. We identified some of the new winners and the strategies and tactics they employed to come out of the pandemic in a stronger position.

Keep resilience on the transformation agenda. Change programs that prioritize growth, debt reduction, and operational flexibility realize the full value of resilience and build advantage for the next crisis.

Kristin Peck, CEO of Zoetis, and Don Allan, president and CFO of Stanley Black & Decker, discuss what it takes to make a company resilient and how resilience creates advantage.

Making tradeoffs between resilience and efficiency is challenging, as traditional optimization approaches are not well-suited for the task. By adopting alternative principles and strategies, leaders can make more effective tradeoffs between resilience and efficiency.

The coronavirus crisis has brought renewed attention to the value of resilience. Our research shows that resilience has an outsized impact on long-run performance, and companies can take concrete steps to realize it.

In a this HBR.org article, we suggest six ways leaders can revisit their business models to build greater systemic resilience.

Creative destruction — where the old replaces the new — is inevitable in any industry, it’s only a matter of when. Few companies make the transition.

Most leaders agree that imagination in business is crucial for success but they struggle to cultivate this capability. Explore how to harness the power of imagination.

Martin Reeves makes a pitch for embracing play to spark innovative business ideas — and invites you to try out a series of imagination games.

The CEO of Sinovation Ventures shares his thinking and predictions on AI’s potential applications, its social impact, and the regulations required to tame it.

While much has been written about innovation and business models, we don’t have a playbook for what lies upstream of innovation: imagination.

Identifying the next big thing is often treated as an exercise in analyzing trends. But that’s misleading. By the time a trend is established and named, any opportunities it presents have probably been captured by competitors. In a new Harvard Business Review article we explain how to spot, understand and exploit “poignant anomalies” that have the potential to become a business opportunity.

Introducing new management ideas can be a slow process, with plenty of people resisting new ways of working. Christian Stadler suggests four ways to accelerate the generation of new ideas.

Read our interview with Steve Blank drawing on his forthcoming book about innovation, differences between large corporations and startups, strategic ambidexterity, and the disruption and reimagination of companies in the context of the COVID crisis.

Imagination is one of the hardest things to keep alive under pressure (and especially challenging in today’s environment), but the companies that are able to do so can reap significant value. This article explains why we need imagination more than ever.

Companies must increasingly compete on imagination, but we don’t have a clear idea of how imagination works or how to systematically improve it. How could we cultivate imaginative capacity, rather than leaving it to chance, intuition, or processes?

Orchestrating companies collaboratively lead other companies in digital ecosystems but what does it take to lead orchestrating or participating companies? From our research on the factors which drive the strategic and operational success and failure of ecosystems, we propose the traits, mindsets, and behaviors required of ecosystem leaders.

Identifying the guidance from (and gaps in) academic research on business ecosystem strategies for practitioners.

Drawing on the insights gleaned from three years of ecosystem research, we offer a step-by-step framework for developing an incumbent company’s ecosystem strategy.

Ron Adner, a Tuck Professor and ecosystem thought leader, discusses his new book, which deals with the intersection of ecosystems strategy and competitive disruption, with Martin Reeves.

Good governance is essential to the success of both ecosystem orchestrators and their partners. It is essential to put the right rules in place to orchestrate a platform that creates value for all participants - and helps manage risk.

The fifth article in a series of publications offering practical guidance on business ecosystems explores how can contributors succeed in business ecosystems.

In business ecosystems, a dynamic group of largely independent partners work together to deliver integrated products or services. While the health care system meets all requirements of a business ecosystem, it is rarely managed as one.

Paying attention to the right metrics and red flags will help leaders sidestep the most common pitfalls in the four phases of ecosystem development.

Winning companies use a multifaceted framework to build trust into their ecosystem operations from the very outset.

Ecosystem Edge focuses on how to start and manage ecosystems. Listen to Peter J. Williamson, professor of international management at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and Fellow of Jesus College as he discusses insights from the book, including ecosystem strategy and innovation.

Companies working in climate tech have scored highly in recent years' vitality rankings from BCG and Fortune.

The companies on the 2021 list reflect some of the most salient shifts in the business environment, including those triggered by the pandemic.

What have we learned about what it takes to succeed in crises?

The fate of an organization is not predetermined by the industry in which it operates. By fostering the organizational capacity for innovation and reinvention, companies in all sectors can achieve vitality and thrive sustainably.

Change and uncertainty will surely outlast the current crisis. Companies must continue to build and measure their capacity for innovation and reinvention.

Focusing on long-term growth and reinvention is critical even in the face of short-term adversity. The 2019 Fortune Future index, developed in partnership with BCG, shows which companies are positioned to thrive.

As leaders start to plan for the next decade, maintaining vitality — the capacity to explore new opportunities, renew strategy, and grow sustainably — is more important than ever.

How can legacy leaders remain vital—to preserve and develop their capacity for growth, risk taking, innovation, and long-term success?

Established companies are increasingly vulnerable because of declining vitality — the capacity to explore new options, renew strategy, and grow sustainably.

In this sequel to our work on mastering the science of organizational change, we delve into the realm of moviemaking—an industry relatively successful at repeatedly delivering complex projects—to uncover unique practices that help improve the odds of success in corporate transformations.

We attempt to distill the lessons from two truly ambitious projects—NASA’s Apollo program and Pfizer’s Lightspeed project—and show how, to succeed, projects and organizations must resolve the tensions between ingenuity and control.

Instead of defaulting to the standard change management methods, leaders should adopt strategies of change that respond appropriately to the specific characteristics of their change context.

Keep resilience on the transformation agenda. Change programs that prioritize growth, debt reduction, and operational flexibility realize the full value of resilience and build advantage for the next crisis.

The technology agenda fits with a broader strategic agenda to embrace and thrive amid uncertainty and complexity, instead of trying to engineer them away.

Only 27% of transformations lead to growth. How can your organization beat the odds? We found seven factors that increase the chance of a successful growth and value creating transformation.

For leaders with strong transformation experience, a slowing economy can be an opportunity to buy troubled assets at a discount and create value by turning them around.

There’s no recipe to follow when it comes to transformation. But data and analytics make it possible to decode what works, and emerging science offers lessons that can help business leaders turn change into an opportunity.

Should business leaders engage in transformation preemptively or wait for a degradation of performance to trigger change?

General advice on ‘how to do transformation well’ risks ignoring this variety of potential change strategies. A better approach is to de-average transformation into its different components and ask, what does it take to succeed in each?

Leaders now need to refocus on the long term and attend to five key imperatives.

As the post-COVID vista emerges, leaders must shift their attention back to broader and longer-term challenges. By addressing three key themes, they can put their businesses in position to succeed in and shape the new reality.

COVID-19 requires leaders to respond to a new environment, a new customer, and heightened societal expectations. To address these altered short- and medium-term priorities, we share five leadership imperatives in a new piece.

How has COVID-19 changed the priorities for leadership? Rich Lesser, CEO of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Martin Reeves, Chairman of BCG Henderson Institute examine short, medium, and long-term implications for strategy, organization, and leadership.

Business leaders accustomed to a world of clear boundaries, familiar competitive arenas, and traditional strategic planning must master new dimensions of competition to succeed in the coming decade.

The winners in business have shifted markedly in the last decade. What will it take to win the 2020s?

A one-size-fits-all approach to strategy doesn’t work. Use games and neuroscience theories to assess, develop, and deploy the skills each business environment requires.

The process of developing and realizing strategy within a company has remained essentially the same: strategic planning. Leaders need a new toolkit.

By traditional performance metrics, large businesses are in a more comfortable position now than they have been for several decades but it is important to not get too comfortable.

A common view of strategy execution holds it’s distinct from strategy, harder to pull off, and more critical to success but such a simplistic view can be misleading.

To succeed over the long run, leaders must learn a “biological” approach to management, which acknowledges the uncertainty and complexity of business problems.

If you want to build a business that lasts, there may be no better place to look for inspiration than your own immune system.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were an algorithm that could tell you when to develop a new business model or enter an emerging market? Unfortunately, one doesn’t exist. However, it is possible to use the principles behind algorithms to continually retune your strategy and your organization.

In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy.

To better understand the problem of managing on multiple timescales, we assembled a dozen experts from different fields to discuss examples of multi-timescale problems, common challenges and possible solutions.

Companies may be scrambling to deal with rapid global changes, but gradual shifts can also be difficult to navigate. Learn how to think and operate on multiple timescales.

Companies and governments need to operate on multiple timescales to respond to the biological and economic threat posed by the coronavirus. They need to consider all levels of strategic response—reaction, recession, rebound, and re-imagination—simultaneously. In this piece, we offer the key principles for a multi-timescale strategy.

Traditional strategy processes are incompatible with agile ways of working. How can organizations balance autonomy with alignment?

To compete on the ability to learn, leaders must reinvent their organizations to leverage both human and machine capabilities synergistically to facilitate learning on all timescales.

Breaking the inherent trade-off between search and execution will require new approaches. We describe one such approach, “co-ambidexterity,” which interweaves firms’ and customers’ search and execution processes.

Very few companies can excel at innovation and efficiency at the same time. Of the 2,500 public companies we analyzed, just 2% consistently outperform their peers on both growth and profitability during good and bad times.

It’s harder to stay on top than to get there. How can you avoid the seemingly inevitable and become an “evergreen” corporation?

In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy.