The Dangers of Dominant Opinions in Strategy Development

Stefan Thomke, professor at Harvard Business School, says running experiments can give companies tremendous value, but too often business leaders make decisions based on intuition.

While A/B testing on large transaction volumes is common practice at Google, Booking.com, and Netflix, Thomke says even small firms can get a competitive advantage from experiments. He explains how to introduce, run, and learn from them, as well as how to cultivate an experimental mindset at your organization. Thomke is the author of the book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments and the HBR article “Building a Culture of Experimentation.”

Key episode topics include: experimentation, data and analytics, risk management, decision-making, strategy

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

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