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Build Your Bench Strength Without Breaking the Bank

Harvard Business Review

Many social enterprises start small and grow fast. This puts a premium on the need to develop, or recruit, talented people who can take on evolving roles and responsibilities. Leaders plead lack of time and money to make development a priority. How do you develop, or hire, the staff you will need? But it was growing fast.

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Strategic Choices Need to Be Made Simultaneously, Not Sequentially

Harvard Business Review

The CEO of a large Australian company called me to relay a particular strategy development problem his firm was facing, and ask for my advice. Despite what many think, there are not generically great ways to win — e.g., being a first mover or a fast follower or a branded player or a cost leader.

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Sprints Are the Secret to Getting More Done

Harvard Business Review

GV portfolio company Savioke found itself in this same situation: the team had spent months developing a delivery robot for hotels, but felt paralyzed by big questions about the robot’s personality and behavior. Sprints encourage fast follow-up. Sprints force crisp decision-making.

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The New New International Economic Order

Harvard Business Review

This was just one round in a developing fight over the rules and norms that govern the international political economy. Writing in 1979, Roger Hansen (in Beyond the North-South Stalemate ) succinctly characterized the choices faced by developed and developing countries in the face of these demands. In retrospect, not very much.

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Case Study: How Do You Compete with a Goliath?

Harvard Business Review

company’s São Paulo office to help Alejandra figure out how to better position her brand. Together they’d decided to invest a sizable portion of their meager marketing budget to partner with Soledad on developing and testing several marketing messages in key expansion markets, such as the UK. . That just feels good.”