HBR On Leadership Cultivating an Experimental Mindset in Your Organization
114 snips
Oct 1, 2025 
Stefan Thomke, a Harvard Business School professor and author of *Experimentation Works*, shares insights on the power of business experimentation. He highlights how experiments can reveal value often missed through intuition. Thomke discusses barriers to experimentation, the importance of a supportive culture, and practical strategies for integrating tests into decision-making. He also illustrates successful cases like Kohl's and Booking.com, emphasizing the balance between risk management and learning from failures. Overall, he underscores that an experimental mindset can be a game changer for organizations.
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Bing Experiment That Beat A Manager
- An employee at Microsoft's Bing launched an experiment that the manager had shelved.
- The test generated over $100 million in additional revenue in one year.
Tests Trump Intuition For Customer Behavior
- Managers' intuition often fails when predicting customer behavior.
- Running tests reveals what actually works instead of relying on opinions.
Invest In Experimentation Infrastructure
- Build the infrastructure and tools to run rigorous experiments at scale.
- Invest early so tests are affordable, repeatable, and produce credible results.
