Business Strategy

Even a strong leader can flounder without an effective strategy, and the most powerful strategy can fail without the right leader. Only those who master and integrate both skills can effectively navigate the challenges that lay ahead for today's organizations. The Strategic Leader's Roadmap, by Wharton management professors Harbir Singh and Michael Useem, offers a six-point checklist for leading strategically that will help managers strengthen their capacity to develop strategy and to lead its execution.

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.

Total Competition is the most compelling, comprehensive and revealing insight into what it takes to get to the top in Formula One that has ever been published. Across four decades, Ross Brawn was one of the most innovative and successful technical directors and then team principals in Formula One. Leading Benetton, Ferrari, Honda, Brawn and Mercedes, he worked with drivers such as Michael Schumacher, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton to make them world champions.

From the latest applications of AI to blockchain-enabled business models to 5G networks, the most important technological innovations of the past year are reshaping the present and future of business. What should you and your company be doing now to take advantage of the new opportunities they are creating? The Year in Tech, 2021 will help you understand today's most essential thinking on these topics, what the latest tech innovations mean for your organization, and how you can use them to compete and win in the new landscape of business.

Right now, 70 percent of Americans aren’t passionate about their work and are desperately longing for meaning and purpose. They’re sick of “average” and know there’s something better out there, but they just don’t know how to reach it. One basic principle - The Proximity Principle - can change everything you thought you knew about pursuing a career you love.

Construction Genius logically breaks down complex concepts into small components so any construction leader understands how to be more effective. Construction Genius covers topics as broad as how to structure a meeting so you reach an agreement on how to solve problems every time, to how to have tough conversations without ruining relationships, to how to build better teams that deliver profitable projects . . . and the one question that will save you $1 million, guaranteed.

Gary Vaynerchuk—the inspiring and unconventional entrepreneur who introduced us to the concept of crush it—knows how to get things done, have fun, and be massively successful. A marketing and business genius, Gary had the foresight to go beyond traditional methods and use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to reach an untapped audience that continues to grow.

With the onslaught of cloud solutions, consumerization of technology, and increasingly tech-savvy business people, it's time for a manifesto for leaders who recognize - and are nervous about - the demands of the digital age. Whether you're an executive, department head, or IT manager, The New IT provides an action-ready blueprint for building and strengthening the role of IT in your company - and prescribing IT's future.

Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world’s most influential company, a brand that likely touches your life every day. As a student of leadership and communication, he learned to elevate the way Amazonians write, collaborate, innovate, pitch, and present. He created a scalable model that grew from a small team in a Seattle garage to one of the world’s largest employers. The Bezos Blueprint by Carmine Gallo reveals the communication strategies that Jeff Bezos pioneered to fuel Amazon’s astonishing growth.

Phil Town is a very wealthy man, but he wasn’t always. In fact, he was living on a salary of $4,000 a year when some well-timed advice launched him down a highway of investing self-education that revealed what the true “rules” are and how to make them work in one’s favor. Chief among them, of course, is Rule #1: “Don’t lose money.” In this updated edition to the #1 national bestseller, you’ll learn more of Phil’s fresh, think-outside-the-box rules.

I can tell you that there are a plethora of strategy books out there. However, you’ll find many of them arcane, academic, and even confusing. Most were written a long time ago and use out-of-date examples from well before the tech age. Many are no longer relevant. For the past five years, I’ve been obsessed by the idea of creating a strategy operating system, and I’ve spent the past 12 months figuring out how to design one.

Henry Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders—Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher—through the distinctive strategies of statecraft that he believes they embodied. To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and, because he knew each of the subjects and participated in many of the events he describes, personal knowledge.

Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.

In Fusion Strategy, world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkataraman offer a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best-create physical products-with what digitals do best-use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets-to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him.

Imagine running a business without a strategy. It would be akin to driving blindfolded, to building a house without a blueprint. The concept of strategy changed all that, paving the way for the creation of the modern corporate world. The Lords of Strategy provides listeners with a deeper understanding of the world they compete in, and a sharper eye for what works — and what doesn’t — when forging strategy.

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe - and shoot down those we don't.

In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.

In Redefining Retail: 10 Guiding Principles for a Post-Digital World, Prof. Philip Kotler and Dr. Giuseppe Stigliano deliver a timely and insightful examination of retail and consumer brand marketing. In the book, you'll find practical and concrete techniques for redefining your organization's internal operations and processes, as well as its business strategy. You'll rethink the entire value chain as you consider the growing importance of sustainability, diversity and inclusion, working policies, and more.

From Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Investing offers “concrete insights and advice” (Booklist) on when to buy, sell, hold, and cash out; how to make smarter (and safer) investments; and how to build significant wealth over both the short- and long-term. Unlike traditional investment books, Jordan’s lessons, colorful stories, and principles entertain you with the charismatic swagger portrayed so famously on the screen by Leonardo DiCaprio. Belfort teaches you everything you need to know about savvy investing—even if whatever stock you’ve touched has turned to yesterday’s trash.