Business Strategy

In today's volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing you to stay focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Profiting from the core is crucial, but the danger is that overfocusing on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but risky. Fixating too much on either strategy can cause you to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business.

This timeless text is required listening for any business person or athlete interested in strategy. It includes a soundtrack entitled "The Mysterious Sound of Wind In the Bamboo", a 43-minute collection of Zen-inspired Japanese music by the Matsu Take Ensemble.

Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it? Whatever your job–plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon–decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning—school and books—gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.

When Carol Loomis first mentioned a little-known Omaha hedge-fund manager in a 1966 Fortune article, she didn’t dream that Warren Buffett would one day be considered the world’s greatest investor - nor that she and Buffett would become close personal friends. Now Loomis has collected and updated the best Buffett articles Fortune published between 1966 and 2012, including thirteen cover stories and a dozen pieces authored by Buffett himself. Loomis has provided commentary about each major arti­cle that supplies context and her own informed point of view.

Voici l'histoire de Jesse Livermore, le plus talentueux spéculateur de la bourse de Wall Street. Sa clairvoyance, son style, ses principes, ses erreurs, ses succès, tout y est relaté. Jesse Livermore. a connu la fortune puis la ruine, et de nouveau la fortune. Comment? Découvrez-le au travers de ce savoureux audiobook, et apprenez auprès d'un des plus grands traders de son époque, voire de toute l'histoire!

"Best practices" may be widespread, but that doesn't mean they're effective. In many instances the opposite is true: Best practices can be outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategist with a keen eye for the absurd, offers the tools to identify these practices and rid them from your organization. And, most of all, he presents a compelling case for how eliminating popular but outworn ideas, processes, and strategies can create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Despite how much is written about strategy, and money spent on it, reports of chronic failures persist. Two causes dominate. Strategy is still not fully defined, and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned view of the world. Change and innovation, however, are not wholly planned but emerge from the myriad interactions of the players involved—some by design, many not. This science of complex adaptive systems must be the bedrock on which strategy is built.

Dim Sum Strategy presents a carefully curated selection of proven strategic tools, with insights and anecdotes from three decades working with some of the world’s leading brands at the world’s top agencies. The book is structured to follow the author’s proven Brand Centered Management™ process, with a smattering of different “tools” split into four parts: Discovery, Definition, Direction, and Delivery. Each tool is presented in bite-sized, standalone chunks; you can listen to the book in stepwise fashion or cherry-pick in whatever order you wish—just like a dim sum meal.

Picture this: You wake up, grab your phone, and open Instagram, tap the plus icon at the bottom of the screen, select a photo, add a filter and a caption, tap "publish", and you call it a day. Thirty minutes later, you get a notification from PayPal: "Someone sent you $500". Would you like your average "workday" to look like this? See, contrary to what you believe, you don’t need to be an artist, a comedian, or a particularly attractive individual to get paid on Instagram.

Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar: Each was a master of war. Each had to look beyond the battlefield to decide whom to fight and why; to know what victory was and when to end the war; to determine how to bring stability to the lands he conquered. Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had to be not only generals but statesmen. And yet each was a battlefield commander, a strategist, a leader of men - in short, a warrior.

The Art of War will teach you to conquer your opponents and gain a loyal following. It is one of the oldest books on military strategy in the world. It is the first and one of the most successful works on strategy and has had a huge influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu was the first to recognize the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment.

Your strategy has seven seconds to captivate its audience, so how are you going to present it? A big wordy document? A lengthy address? Slides full of bullet points? The best way to engage and involve people is through pictures. Strategy Builder tells you how to creatively combine the best strategy frameworks to orient and animate strategy discussion and development in your team. This interactive guide uses real world examples and gives practical tips.

Legendary 17th century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s exposition of sword fighting, strategy and Zen philosophy. Required reading for any martial artist, business person or student of strategy. Includes the one hour Zen inspired soundtrack The Mysterious Sound of Wind in the Bamboo. Performed on authentic Japanese instruments.

When you think of success, what comes to mind? Career, public achievements, diplomas, degrees? We work hard to find a job, gain promotions, and develop skills to become a peak performer. We’re continually striving to win at work. But does winning at work mean we have to lose at home? In all our “winning,” are we neglecting what matters most? Unfortunately, too many leaders achieve career success, only to find they have critically damaged their relationships with the people closest to them. Winning Begins at Home will help you change all that.

Unequaled is the client service professional's guide to getting ahead and achieving professional goals. You're smart and hardworking, but guess what - so is everyone else. So how do you stand out? You need to distinguish yourself in order to get ahead, but simply being good at your job is not enough. Moving up is about soft skills, networking, client connections, emotional intelligence, and your personal reputation. This audiobook is a frank and candid guide to what it really takes to succeed in the field.

This bold, wide-ranging collection brings together some of the most noted military minds, past and present, to examine the crucial role of leadership in combat. Written while Christopher Kolenda was a faculty member in the history department at West Point, it covers both classic and modern concepts of leadership and uses case studies from Alexander the Great through World War II to illustrate principles of leadership in concrete historical contexts.

Agile, say its enthusiasts, can transform your company, catapulting you to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed and indispensable audiobook, Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's growth - the idea that it can reshape your organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work.

Few management ideas have spread so far and so wide as the Net Promoter System (NPS). Created by author and loyalty guru Fred Reichheld, companies across the spectrum have adopted it - from industrial giants such as Mercedes-Benz and Cummins Engine to Silicon Valley sweethearts such as Apple and Google to digital innovators like Warby Parker and Peloton.

Know What You're For details an effective growth strategy for businesses and nonprofits by closing the gap between two simple questions: What do you want to be known for? What are you known for? When the two answers match, organizations gain incredible momentum by unleashing the most powerful marketing force there is: lasting word-of-mouth support.

Since the groundbreaking work of Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, the concept of the Balanced Scorecard has achieved increasing popularity in the business world. In this book, the authors draw on their extensive experience with scorecard projects to provide a step-by-step method for introducing the Balanced Scorecard into an organization. This book will provide senior and operational managers, consultants, and business academics with a comprehensive view of emerging Balanced Scorecard practice supported by both business advice and a theoretical foundation.