Business Problem Solving

You have a great idea. Now what? That first mile - where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market - is often plagued by failure. In fact less than 1 percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren't the problem. It's the process. The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden traps snare entrepreneurs, and roadblocks slow innovators inside large companies.

Go ahead, be skeptical about big data. The author was - at first. When the term "big data" first came on the scene, best-selling author Tom Davenport ( Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind. Now, in clear, conversational language, Davenport explains what big data means - and why everyone in business needs to know about it.

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

So how do you build a company that matters? Companies and people that matter have successfully become the obvious choices in the hearts and minds of their customers, their employees, and their communities. They elevate themselves by consistently finding ways to solve the most pressing needs their markets face. The result? They create more value year after year and build sustainable, differentiated organizations.

While everyone is talking about "big data", the truth is that understanding the "little data" - the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on - is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day but has no idea how to interpret it correctly. Everydata explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day.

In this essential and timely book, behavioral scientists Sanders and Hume demonstrate the astonishing reach of our social networks, and why we need to reclaim their power to effect positive change in our professional and private lives. The rise of social media has sent our social instincts into overdrive, and the impact of our networks has never been greater. But what if we could reclaim the positive power that influences our decisions, to behave better and be happier?

While exposing the risks inherent in maintaining a nontransparent relationship with customers, Tactical Transparency provides a methodology that will help your organization create its unique plan to bring greater authenticity to your company and your brands. Drawn largely from interviews with leaders in companies that have achieved measurable success in this arena, authors Shel Holtz and John C. Havens provide step-by-step details on how executives and professional communicators can create a transparency strategy that will keep their organization competitive in the 21st century.

Companies today face a dilemma in marketing. The tried-and-true formulas to create sales and market share behind brands are becoming irrelevant and losing traction with consumers. In this book, Gerzema and LeBar offer credible evidence - drawn from a detailed analysis of a decade's worth of brand and financial data using Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator (BAV), the largest database of brands in the world - that business is riding on yet another bubble that is ready to burst - a brand bubble.

Contending with the 24/7 news cycle and an endless barrage of choices and information has stymied leadership and decision-making strategies. The broad-based reaction to this chaotic, unmanageable assault has been to retrench, and to focus on immediate, controllable decisions. In the process, we lose sight of the horizon. More dangerous still, is the shift we've seen from value creation to wealth creation, in a transaction-based society in which the "deal" is more important than the value it drives or the relationships it is based on.

In this groundbreaking book, T.J. Waters has turned his experience collecting and analyzing competitive intelligence for the CIA into effective strategies for businesses wanting to stay on the leading edge of their industries. The book describes a practical process from planning (identifying competitive threats and determining the resources needed to counter them) through implementation (creating an organizational strategy) to execution (collecting key information and turning it into bottom-line results).

Vous êtes convaincus que certains problèmes sont insolubles ? Vous croyez dur comme fer que des pathologies qui durent depuis longtemps nécessitent des traitements de longue durée ? Vous pensez que tout problème nécessite un retour obligatoire dans le passé ? Vous avez toujours supposé que logique rigoureuse et imagination créatrice ne peuvent faire bon ménage ? Alors ce livre est fait pour vous ! Psychothérapeute mondialement connu, Giorgio Nardone a étudié l'art du stratagème et de la logique non ordinaire pour créer une technologie permettant de trouver des solutions.

An indispensable guide to decision-making and risk-taking for anyone who finds themselves afraid of making a wrong choice in their career. This fresh, new approach comes from one of the most highly regarded and well-respected female tech executives in Silicon Valley, who made many wrong choices in her career, but learned how to turn those down moments into successes.

Our personal experience is key to who we are and what we do. We judge others by their experience and are judged by ours. Society venerates experience. From doctors to teachers to managers to presidents, the more experience the better. It's not surprising then, that we often fall back on experience when making decisions, an easy way to make judgements about the future, a constant teacher that provides clear lessons. Yet, this intuitive reliance on experience is misplaced.

Few businesses can afford to shut down for an extended period of time, regardless of the cause. If the past few years have taught us anything, it's that disaster can strike in any shape, at any time. Be prepared with the time-tested strategies in Business Continuity Management: Building an Effective Incident Management Plan and protect your employees while ensuring your company survives the unimaginable.

A rapid and massively disruptive shift from centralized to distributed organizations has already begun. But current leadership practices were designed for large centralized organizations, making them increasingly obsolete. Bob Johansen, who has been projecting future trends from Silicon Valley since 1968, outlines five literacies leaders need to develop to cope with this brave new world.

Humans often aren't rational. We are animals, and we evolved to mate and to survive, not to compute. Although our intuitive decision-making process served us well in prehistoric times, in modern times we need to think more deliberately in order to avoid our biases. In the first part of Rational Thinking and Investing, hedge fund manager Jaret Wilson examines the science of behavioral economics to show how and why we think irrationally, and how we can do better with a more scientific process.

Cost reduction...productivity improvement...customer retention...these are the promises of the Six Sigma quality management system. The Six Sigma Way reveals how GE, Motorola, and numerous other companies are successfully using Six Sigma to fine-tune products and processes, improve performance, and increase profits. Now you can hear the road map for implementing Six Sigma in your manufacturing or service organization.

Our decisions are expressions of who we are and how we move through the world. Rarely, though, do we examine our decisions or even look inward to consider the psychology of our decision-making. Instead, we often make decisions based on what we call instinct—which relies on cognitive bias, false assumptions, mis-remembering, and mental mistakes. Truthfully, we don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.

Today, the pace of change is so great that no company can afford to wait to respond to new developments. You need nimble and creative problem solving, and the most intelligent and efficient decision-making doesn't come from the top - it comes from your employees on the frontlines who interact with customers and have the ability to see and respond to the shifting landscape before anyone else.

Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the "maximin rule", which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of "Knightian uncertainty", found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes.