Inspiring the Next Game

A business ecosystem may be defined as a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution for customers. Business ecosystems are high on the agenda of many business leaders. They are now highly prevalent, frequently disruptive, and all companies should add the required capabilities to their strategy toolbox.

Business Ecosystems is based on more than three years of research by the BCG Henderson Institute, their work with dozens of companies on their ecosystem strategies, and hundreds of conversations with academics, managers, investors, entrepreneurs, and government employees. Part I reviews the fundamentals of business ecosystems – definition, design, success factors, governance, strategies. Part II elaborates on special topics, such as trust and data, industry applications, and their potential for sustainability.

Ecosystems might not be a solution for all problems, but they are also not a transitory phenomenon. The field is evolving fast and as the success factors for creating, managing and participating in business ecosystems are increasingly accepted and understood, many established and emerging companies have the opportunity to put themselves in a position to unlock great innovation and value creation potential by engaging in ecosystem business models. This book will support business professionals and executives on this journey.

Leaders and their organizations do not operate in a vacuum but both influence and are influenced by the environment. Today's business organizations are fast moving, uncertain, politicized, sustainability challenged and technologically fluid. This business climate requires new approaches to leadership. Some leaders will rise to the occasion, while others will struggle to adapt.

New Leadership Imperatives explores the new challenges of leadership and discusses how leaders can help their organizations to successfully adapt to new conditions. Drawing on lessons from various fields—from military to sports to psychology and neuroscience—this book delves into the challenges leaders face, ranging from social polarization to geopolitical instability.

This book aims to guide leaders in making the right choices for their teams, their organizations, their stakeholders, and society as a whole.

The playing field for business has changed significantly in recent decades. The pace of change is accelerating, driven by increased technological progress and shrinking business lifespans. Economic and political uncertainty has risen dramatically and is likely to remain at elevated levels. Industry boundaries are blurring, increasing the potential paths to competitive disruption.

Strategy is not dead—in fact, as the gap between winners and losers within industries continues to grow, it is more important than ever. However, the playbook needs to be reinvented for today’s business environment. Classical sources of competitive advantage, such as scale and differentiation, have not gone away, but they have been complemented by new dimensions of competition.　

This book discusses the new role of strategy in a dynamic, unpredictable context. Part 1 of this book revisits classical strategy frameworks and what changes should be made to apply them to the modern era. Part 2 discusses new strategic capabilities companies need today, such as adapting to uncertain environments and shaping new or disrupted ones. Part 3 examines the expanding boundaries of strategy, including new competitive imperatives as well as the wider range of timescales on which businesses must now operate.

Drawing on the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years, Dynamic Strategy will help business professionals as well as academics and students with an interest in strategy understand the new competitive challenges that businesses face and develop a playbook to address them.

Events around the book

Link to a De Gruyter Online Event in which Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, talks about successful business strategies in turbulent times:
https://youtu.be/84YE4DBdQpo

The Covid-19 crisis caused massive disruptions to businesses around the world. Many were caught unprepared by the pandemic, putting some in danger of collapse. But not all were equally affected—some emerged from the crisis in a position of advantage. Research on corporate performance over decades shows that the dispersion between companies consistently increases in times of crisis. In other words, resilience to unexpected shocks has a disproportionate impact on long-term competitive advantage.

Furthermore, ongoing trends are making it harder for businesses to sustain success over time. New offerings are being adopted, matched, and made obsolete faster, and competitive advantage is becoming less durable. In order to survive in the long run, businesses must reinvent themselves regularly—doing the same thing over and over will eventually lead to failure.

Many business leaders are now expressing an intention to make their companies more resilient, but there is not yet a well-codified playbook for doing so. This book, drawing on research from the BCG Henderson Institute over many years, provides a set of perspectives on how to thrive under adverse conditions and how to reinvent businesses for the changing context. Overcoming both of these challenges is necessary for leaders to build long-lasting companies.

Over the past decade, businesses have faced relentless change on multiple dimensions, and the list of the world’s largest companies has changed enormously. The keys to success are likely to be just as different for the new decade. Winning the ’20s analyzes the new competitive environment that businesses face and outlines what will it take to win in the 2020s.

To stay ahead of the trends that are reshaping business, leaders need to rethink existing assumptions and retool their companies. Both traditional incumbents and younger digital giants will face very different but equally critical challenges in the 2020s—and would do well to learn from each other’s strengths.

This book discusses the new dimensions of competition that will affect corporate strategy in the next decade and how leaders can reinvent their organizations to be better suited for the new environment. The companies that succeed in the 2020s will look very different than they do today—they will have evolved their businesses to harness new technologies and reshaped their external relationships, organizations, and approaches accordingly.

Winning the ’20s will help business professionals as well as academics and students with an interest in strategy and leadership answer this critical question for the start of this decade: How should you prepare your company to avoid being left behind and emerge as a winner in a rapidly evolving business landscape?

As the business context evolves more rapidly, driven by accelerating technological, political, and social change, an increasing strategic priority for business leaders is how to enact large-scale organizational change. Even companies that are current industry leaders are vulnerable to disruption. Company leaders need to watch over their shoulder for—and transform the company in anticipation of—the next disruption.

Mastering the Science of Organizational Change summarizes the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years to develop a more scientific approach to change. Hundreds of companies are analyzed in the book’s discussion on how to beat the odds in large-scale change management using an evidence-based approach—a large-scale analysis of what approaches actually work in which circumstances.

Part 1 of the book reviews the imperatives for self-disruption. The second part elaborates on how to manage the process of change. Finally, Part 3 discusses how organizations can take change to the next level.

Events around the book

Link to a De Gruyter online event in which, Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, will share lessons on how to develop a more scientific approach to change including how to self disrupt, how to manage the process of change, and how organizations can take change to the next level:
https://youtu.be/TfzFllmL4Cg

Organizations often declare that their biggest asset is their people. As such, business leaders make constant efforts to hire the best talent – and to get the best out of their workers. But a confluence of forces is reshaping all aspects of talent management. A war for talent rages and will be exacerbated in the long-term by demographic aging; the half-life of skills is decreasing as AI powers more parts of business workflows; flexible and hybrid work models are becoming commonplace; and management methods focused on measurement and efficiency are not sufficient for engaging a purpose-seeking generation.

In these turbulent times, CEOs and their entire teams – not just HR – need to rethink how they can create a people advantage, going beyond traditional approaches to organization, performance management, and compensation. This book – a collection of recent essays written by researchers at the BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s think tank – aims to help leaders to reinvent work by providing a forward-looking perspective on all aspects of talent management.

Across five chapters, the book discusses

• How to attract the talent of the future
• How to shape the workforce in an evolving context
• How to embrace new models of work
• How to build the workplace of the future
• How to establish new models of leadership and culture

By providing a combination of new ideas, real-world examples, and concrete recommendations, Reinventing Work serves as a guide for leaders to effectively navigate the changing nature of work.

Reimagining business models is a tall order for any management team, and especially so in today’s business landscape of continual disruptive change. Having examined hundreds of businesses over the course of their research, the BCG Henderson Institute has developed a systematic approach for reimagining business models for economic and social sustainability, creating new modes of differentiation and advantage, embedding societal value into products and services, managing new performance measures, and reshaping business ecosystems to support these initiatives.

This book explores the why, what, and how of sustainable business model innovation (SBM-I) – a new method by which corporations can optimize for both business and social value using their core businesses to deliver the financial returns expected by their owners and, in tandem, to help society meet its most significant challenges. It details the SBM-I innovation cycle linking to value creation and scaled transformation, and expands the application of SBM-I to sustainable business ecosystems and corporate lead sustainability alliances.

Sustainable Business Model Innovation offers inspiration and guidance to create more competitive and sustainable companies. Your company's future, our environment, and society depend on doing so.