Harvard Business Review is stepping into new territory this week with its inaugural virtual HBR Strategy Summit, landing on Thursday, February 26, 2026, and the timing feels almost deliberate. Strategy, as a discipline, is being tugged in multiple directions at once, with AI accelerating decision cycles, compressing competitive advantages, and forcing leaders to rethink not just what they do, but how organizations are shaped around that doing. The Summit positions itself right in that tension, bringing together senior executives and some of the most recognizable thinkers in modern strategy to talk less about hype and more about frameworks that actually survive contact with reality. Being virtual lowers the barrier, but the ambition of the program is unmistakably heavyweight.
The speaker lineup reads like a greatest-hits list for anyone who’s followed strategy over the last two decades, but with a clear pivot toward what comes next. Rita McGrath is set to explore inventive strategy and the “unbossed” organization, a theme that feels increasingly relevant as rigid hierarchies collide with AI-driven work. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne return to Blue Ocean Strategy with a future-facing lens, asking how value innovation holds up when algorithms can replicate advantages at scale. Nigel Vaz brings in the practitioner’s angle, arguing that AI transformation without a human core tends to stall, while Andrew McAfee tackles the blunt question many executives are quietly asking: who actually wins with AI, and why. Add perspectives from Tsedal Neeley on radical organizational change, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee leading a case discussion on TikTok’s strategy, and the agenda starts to feel less like a lecture series and more like a pressure test for today’s strategic assumptions.
A notable thread running through the Summit is adaptability as a design principle rather than a buzzword. Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner, executives in residence at Amazon Web Services and co-authors of The Octopus Organization, are set to dig into what it actually takes to build businesses that can flex without breaking. That idea is echoed in the exclusive pre-event panel for HBR Executive subscribers, When AI Challenges Strategy: How Three CSOs Are Responding, featuring Jennifer Moll of DTEX, Maran Nalluswami of Synchrony, and Sherry Sanger of Penske. It’s a rare chance to hear strategy chiefs compare notes in real time, not in polished retrospectives but while decisions are still unfolding.
Cisco’s role as lead sponsor isn’t just logo placement either. The Summit includes a dedicated conversation with Liz Centoni, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco, focusing on how to scale AI in ways that translate into measurable business outcomes. That emphasis on outcomes, not experiments for their own sake, feels like the connective tissue holding the entire program together. The underlying message, if there is one, seems to be that strategy in the AI era isn’t about predicting the future perfectly, but about building organizations that can adjust faster, learn earlier, and stay coherent while doing it. For leaders trying to make sense of that shift, this Summit looks less like a one-off event and more like a checkpoint worth paying attention to.