Harvard Business Review May/June 2025

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Welcome to my ‘Reading Insights‘ series. Here is where I share simple takeaways and personal thoughts from articles, papers, and other readings that caught my attention.

Together, we’ll explore ideas beyond the “Book Notes” series that help us to improve how we think about management, leadership, and personal growth.

So grab a cup of coffee, and let’s dive into some interesting insights!

And what are we reading today?

Today, we will talk about the Harvard Business Review May/June 2025.

It does not matter if you are strengthening your company’s strategy, embracing sustainable innovation, or understanding what truly drives people at work, the right insights can shape better leaders and inform smarter decisions.

That’s the value of Harvard Business Review.

The Harvard Business Review May/June 2025 edition brings together a powerful collection of research-backed ideas from experts in business, strategy, innovation, and leadership.

In this post, I will bring 9 must-read articles, breaking down their core insights into actionable takeaways:

Lean Strategy Making – Michael Mankins
What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety – Amy C. Edmondson & Michaela J. Kerrissey
Are You Missing Growth Opportunities for Your Platform? – David J. Bryce, Jeff Dyer & Marshall W. Van Alstyne
What the Like Button Can Teach Us About Innovation – Martin Reeves & Bob Goodson
Sustainability as a Business Model Transformation – Ivanka Visnjic, Felipe Monteiro & Michael L. Tushman
How Gen AI Is Transforming Market Research – Jeremy Korst, Stefano Puntoni & Olivier Toubia
The Power of Mattering at Work – Zach Mercurio
Leading Global Teams Effectively – David Livermore
Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation – Tomomichi Amano & Tomomi Tanaka

Lean Strategy Making

By Michael Mankins

👉 The Big Idea:
Treating strategy as a consistent routine rather than a one-time event can change everything. When a company builds a shared way of thinking and deciding, people stop guessing and start making better calls, faster.

📌 The Summary:
This article from the Harvard Business Review May/June 2025, made me think about how often strategy feels chaotic.

People in different teams work from different assumptions. Leaders throw around ideas in meetings, then forget them the next week. Michael Mankins offers a much more grounded way: make strategy a habit.

Dell is a great example. They use the same method for every big decision, from rebranding to mergers. It helps them move quicker because no one wastes time starting from scratch.

Amgen does something similar with its performance reviews. They use those moments not just to check the numbers but to figure out what’s working and what’s not. If something’s off, they talk it through, explore the cause, and adjust the plan.

What made this feel practical to me is how normal the process becomes once everyone uses it. No magic. Just structure, clarity, and a habit of reviewing, deciding, and learning again.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Strategy should follow a routine process, not be reinvented each time
✔ Write down decisions and tie them to real commitments
✔ Use reviews to check direction, not just track performance
✔ Keep a backlog of strategic questions and revisit them regularly
✔ Share what’s working, not just what went wrong

Are You Missing Growth Opportunities for Your Platform?

By David J. Bryce, Jeff Dyer, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne – full article

👉 The Big Idea:
This article got me thinking about how many platform businesses get stuck by focusing only on what’s already working. The authors make a strong case that if you’re not experimenting with new partners, new themes, or new sides of the platform, you’re probably missing out on big opportunities sitting right in front of you.

📌 The Summary:
Platform businesses grow when they manage their relationships with others strategically. The authors of this article in the Harvard Business Review May/June 2025, suggest splitting those relationships into three groups: own, partner, and affiliate, depending on how much value and control each one brings.

Tencent did this beautifully. They started small with affiliates like Meituan and Pinduoduo, then brought them closer as those players gained traction. It wasn’t a guess. It was based on a “value curve,” where companies evaluate what creates the most impact and choose how to engage accordingly.

Another smart insight was about defining a clear theme. Meituan focused on “local services” and used that theme to build everything from food delivery to bike rentals. In contrast, Groupon stayed too narrow. The result? Meituan outpaced them in both engagement and value.

The article closes with the idea of super apps, like Gojek or WeChat, that tie everything together in a single place. But none of that happens unless leaders start paying attention to the growth paths they’re not seeing yet.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Use a value curve to decide whether to own, partner, or affiliate
✔ Start with small experiments and promote what works
✔ Define a theme that connects your platform’s interactions

What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety

By Amy C. Edmondson and Michaela J. Kerrissey – full article

👉 The Big Idea:
This piece is an important one about psychological safety and what it really means. It’s not about being nice or making people comfortable. It’s about creating the space where people can say what they really think, even when it’s awkward, unpopular, or hard to hear.

📌 The Summary:
The authors of this article at Harvard Business Review May/June 2025, walk through six common mistakes that trip up leaders trying to build psychologically safe teams. The biggest one? Confusing safety with comfort.

When people avoid hard conversations in the name of “being nice”, teams fall into politeness traps where no one speaks up, even when something is clearly off. Other misconceptions include thinking that psychological safety means your ideas should always win, or that once you declare it a goal, it magically appears.

The article shares real examples that show how leaders built trust by changing how teams talked. They scheduled slower, deeper meetings, asked better questions, and got comfortable with sharing work before it was polished.

Safety comes from how people behave day to day. When a leader asks, “What are we missing?” and truly listens, it sends a stronger signal than any values poster ever could.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Safety is about permission for candor, not protecting comfort
✔ Politeness without honesty creates worse outcomes
✔ Great teams practice hard conversations—not avoid them
✔ Structure matters: regular check-ins and reflection rituals help trust grow

What the Like Button Can Teach Us About Innovation

By Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson

👉 The Big Idea:
This article reminded me that great ideas often come from messy beginnings. The like button, something so common today, didn’t start as a breakthrough. It came from scattered efforts, half-forgotten sketches, and people trying to solve unrelated problems.

📌 The Summary
One of the authors found an old sketch of a thumbs-up icon he made while working at Yelp. That simple drawing sparked a bigger reflection. He and his coauthor began digging into how the like button actually came into the world.

What they found is that no one really invented it. Lots of different teams came up with similar ideas without realizing they were working on something that would become so widely used.

The story shows that innovation is often confusing, slow, and uncertain. The real work happens when people are allowed to test small ideas, notice strange patterns, and stay open to change.

Planning can help, but it won’t replace curiosity or timing. The message is clear: if you try to control everything, you might miss what actually works.

💡 Key Takeaways
✔ Most breakthroughs are the result of many small experiments
✔ You do not need to know the end result before you start
✔ Teams should learn by doing, not just by discussing
✔ Innovation comes from action, not perfection

Sustainability as a Business Model Transformation

By Ivanka Visnjic, Felipe Monteiro, and Michael L. Tushman

👉 The Big Idea
This article helped me see sustainability as a real business transformation, or that it is about rethinking how your company works, who it works with, and what it exists to solve.

📌 The Summary:
The authors of this article from Harvard Business Review May/June 2025, explain that real progress in sustainability means treating it like any other serious innovation challenge.

Companies that make it work build new partnerships, set up new structures, and include everyone in the process.

The companies that move forward are the ones that connect their innovation teams to the business lines, invest in the right ideas, and create spaces for testing and learning. When the whole organization feels part of the mission, sustainability becomes more than a slogan. It becomes how the company grows.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Sustainability needs to be treated as a core innovation goal
✔ Pilots and partnerships must be connected to real business units
✔ Employees need entry points to take part, not just slogans

How Gen AI Is Transforming Market Research

By Jeremy Korst, Stefano Puntoni, and Olivier Toubia

👉 The Big Idea:
This article shows how generative AI is quietly changing how companies understand customers. Not about replacing people, but about using AI to fill in gaps, explore ideas faster, and experiment in ways that would be too slow or expensive with traditional research.

📌 The Summary:
The authors of this article at Harvard Business Review May/June 2025, outline how companies are using AI tools to create synthetic data, build digital twins of customers, and generate fast insights that shape marketing strategies.

Some teams use AI models as research assistants, trained on company data, to help test assumptions or prepare for client meetings. Others go further, creating virtual customers who mimic real behavior so marketers can practice and improve their messages.

Tools like these help brands move faster, especially when time and budget limit traditional surveys. Still, the article doesn’t shy away from the limits. AI can carry hidden biases, and some things, like scent or emotion, are still hard to simulate.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Gen AI can help explore customer ideas without expensive surveys
✔ Digital twins let teams test messages and products before going to market
✔ Some companies use AI-powered assistants to prep for meetings and planning
✔ AI models still struggle with emotional nuance and unusual behavior

The Power of Mattering at Work

By Zach Mercurio

👉 The Big Idea:
What stayed with me from this article is how deeply people need to feel that they matter. It’s about the everyday experience of being seen, heard, and reminded that you make a difference.

📌 The Summary:
The author tells the story of Jane, a university janitor who felt invisible until a supervisor reframed her role as someone who protects and cares for the people in the building. That shift helped her stay in the job for 18 years.

The point is simple but powerful: when people feel they matter, they thrive. The article distinguishes mattering from belonging.

Belonging is being accepted, but mattering is knowing you are important to others. Today, many people feel unseen at work, and that emptiness can show up as burnout, disengagement, or the decision to leave.

The solution isn’t more surveys or programs. It’s what happens in small daily moments.

Leaders need to notice people, ask real questions, give clear feedback, and remind others how their work makes a difference.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Mattering means being valued and knowing your work makes a difference
✔ It starts with noticing people and paying real attention
✔ Questions like “What has your attention today?” create better connections
✔ Leaders should be trained and measured on how they treat people, not just what they deliver
✔ Building a culture of mattering improves retention, engagement, and well-being

Leading Global Teams Effectively

By David Livermore

👉 The Big Idea:
This article reminded me that good leadership in global teams means letting go of what works at home. What builds trust and connection in one country might backfire in another.

📌 The Summary:
Many Western leaders are trained to value autonomy, openness, and individual feedback.

But most of the global workforce operates in cultures that prefer hierarchy, group identity, and subtle communication. That gap creates misunderstandings, even when intentions are good.

David Livermore shows how leaders often fall into four traps: assuming people want full autonomy, forcing too much open disagreement in the name of safety, overemphasizing cultural differences, and pushing a blunt version of transparency that can feel intrusive or awkward.

What’s needed instead is cultural intelligence. That means learning when to step back, when to speak differently, and how to adapt your style based on how others prefer to work and communicate.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ What works in one culture can confuse or even offend in another
✔ Too much focus on differences can make collaboration harder
✔ Some teams want clear direction, not full autonomy
✔ Leadership style needs to shift across contexts to build real trust

Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation

By Tomomichi Amano and Tomomi Tanaka

👉 The Big Idea:
Here, the takeaway is that safety doesn’t have to compete with innovation. It can actually drive it, if we build it into the product from the start, not later when something goes wrong.

📌 The Summary:
The authors introduce a practical model called safety by design, which focuses on building protection into every part of a product, from the first sketch to the latest update.

They show how companies like Pinterest, Uber, Airbnb, and OpenAI are using small changes in product design, like checklists, usage reminders, and built-in nudges, to guide better behavior and reduce risk.

The most important part, though, is that these features don’t slow innovation down. They help it grow in the right direction. When users see that a product cares about their safety, they trust it more and engage more deeply.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Safety should be a design choice, not a last-minute fix
✔ Products should consider the most vulnerable users from the start

These 9 articles from the Harvard Business Review May/June 2025 remind us of a powerful truth: real progress happens when strategy meets clarity, innovation, and human-centered leadership.

The biggest insight?

Organizations don’t win by sticking to what worked yesterday. They succeed by challenging assumptions, building psychological safety, tapping into new technologies, and turning sustainability into strategy.

This edition makes it clear that leaders who stay curious and intentional will build the companies that last.

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