Book Review: HBR's 10 Must Reads 2026
A few weeks ago I was in Gatwick Airport killing time and looking for inspiration so I picked up a copy of HBR's 10 Must Reads 2026. Here’s my top take-aways in the form of three techniques featured in the book.
Each of the articles in the book is a reprint from the HBR magazine and website so I’ve included links below. Some articles are behind a paywall.
Questionstorm
The Art of Asking Smarter Questions by Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux, is a reminder that questions can be just as powerful, if not more powerful, than answers. The authors argue in our current age of uncertainty, questions are a particularly useful tool for problem solving in a team or organisational context. I was reminded of Brene Brown’s idea that leadership is about getting it right, not being right. Shifting one’s mindset from answers to questions is hard. Personally training as a coach helped me to flex my question asking muscle, but even so in a meeting or workshop I find there’s a strong temptation to offer an answer, advice or a solution. One way to overcome this is the questionstorm. It’s a technique that I love so I was really pleased to see Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux mention it. A questionstorm is really simple: a group is tasked to come up with as many questions on a topic within a given amount of time. Maybe 3, 5 or 10 minutes. As a workshop facilitator I often ask participants to do this individually and in silence to overcome any group think and really maximise the power of questions. Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux group strategic questions into what they call “five domains”: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretative and subjective. The Art of Asking Smarter Questions is well worth a read before your next meeting.
Pre Mortem
The Uniqueness Trap by Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, M.D. Christodoulou and M. Zottol is an excellent reminder that there’s no such thing as a new idea. I’m paraphrasing but that’s more or less the point. Thinking of a new project as a “first” can add to the excitement but by doing so you risk falling into the trap of thinking that there’s nothing to learn from projects that have happened before. In reality there’s always a benchmark or case study that’s sufficiently analogous to make it useful. Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, M.D. Christodoulou and M. Zottol’s lesson is to seek out an outside perspective at the start of any project. They also recommend surfacing potential problems when a project is initiated using the premortem tool. A premortem is really simple. You imagine it’s sometime in the future when the project has been completed, but failed. Then ask questions like: what happened? What caused the project to fail? What went wrong? In doing so you’ll be able to identify potential problems, risks and vulnerabilities meaning you’re better able to address them from the start.
Dilemma Test
Company values articulated as a list of generic words are a real bugbear of mine. I’ve included a few thoughts on good brand strategy more generally in this blog. Erin Meyer’s excellent article Build a Company Culture that Works is all about how to communicate the principles of company culture, or values, in ways that really influence employee behaviour. But before you get to this point, how do you know if your values are the right ones? Erin Meyer recommends running a dilemma test. This involves coming up with a tough, real life scenario. The kind of thing your team might actually face. Then offer two credible solutions rooted in different values. This is the dilemma. Worth through the potential responses as a group and use this exercise to write action-orientated value statements. The key is for the resulting value statements to be rooted in behaviour so that they are, as Erin Meyer says, “ actionable enough to be useful in real decision-making situations.”
