Business Strategy

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity—you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn't teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers.

Leaders already know that the classic approach to strategy - analyze, plan, execute - is losing relevance. But they don't yet know what replaces it. As everyone and everything becomes more interconnected and digitized, how do you operate, compete, and win? Ming Zeng, the former chief of staff and strategy adviser to Alibaba Group's founder, Jack Ma, explains how the latest technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the mobile internet, and cloud computing, are redefining how value is created.

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea - that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Execution Excellence is the practitioner's guide to real-world implementation. Designed by a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) thought leader with 30 years of experience, this guide gives you a hands-on framework for putting the BSC methodology into action. Clear, and concise, this audiobook skips the theoretical exposition to get right to the point - how can companies use BSC to effectively deploy strategy and drive individual and enterprise performance? You'll find the answers here.

Bruce Greenwald, one of the nation's leading business professors, presents a new and simplified approach to strategy that cuts through much of the fog that has surrounded the subject. Based on his hugely popular course at Columbia Business School, Greenwald and his co-author, Judd Kahn, offer an easy-to-follow method for understanding the competitive structure of your industry and developing an appropriate strategy for your specific position.

Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post best seller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization how to guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business successwhere to play and how to win.

Balanced scorecards and operational dashboards measure organizational performance, and Microsoft Excel is the tool used worldwide to create these scorecards and dashboards. This book covers time-proven step-by-step processes on how to guide executive teams and managers in creating scorecards and dashboards. It then teaches Excel developers how to create those scorecards and dashboards. This is the only book that converts theory into practice.

Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into 19 languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.

In Go Long, authors Dennis Carey, Brian Dumaine, Michael Useem, and Rodney Zemmel take you behind the scenes to witness the business decisions that are enabling leading organizations to outsmart and outlast the competition.

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.

As Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli implied, you're either predator or prey, and the animal you most resemble determines your position on the food chain. In The Wolf in CIO's Clothing Gartner analyst and author Tina Nunno expands on Machiavelli's metaphor, examining seven animal types and the leadership attributes of each. Nunno posits the wolf - a social animal with strong predatory instincts - as the ideal example of how a leader can adapt and thrive.

The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet the methods managers have used to strengthen their companies—total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds—routinely fall short. In Leading Change, Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail.

In 30 years of working in corporations, Michael Beer has witnessed how organizational silence has derailed many a strategic objective. When lower-level employees in the organization can't speak truth to power, senior leaders don't hear what they need to hear about their firm's fitness to compete. Employees lose trust in higher-ups and become more resistant to change. In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence - an innovative and highly effective process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization.

From the world’s foremost expert on power and strategy comes a daily devotional designed to help you seize your destiny.

What if strategy could instead be clear, simple, bold, and even actually useful? That’s what No Bullsh*t Strategy is all about. It sweeps away all the garbled corporate nonsense and dry academic theorising to leave you with pure strategic sauce, which can be actioned right away. It’ll make you see your business in a totally new light, and effortlessly unlock insights you didn’t know you had in you. Even better, it makes strategy fun.

The incredible true story of the card-counting mathematics professor who taught the world how to beat the dealer and, as the first of the great quantitative investors, ushered in a revolution on Wall Street.

Customer Data and Privacy: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand the tangled interdependencies and complexities and develop strategies that allow your company to be good stewards, collecting, using, and storing customer data responsibly.

Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career.

Transforming Project Management takes you beyond envisioning a great strategy and into the realm of implementing it - with skill, care, and expertise. Petersen explains how to break down a strategic plan into key objectives and project portfolios to make sense of all the project "parts" - then successfully lead the execution of the plan.

Amid the turbulence of a global pandemic, worldwide social justice movements, and accelerated digital transformation, one thing is clear - work will no longer be the same. The Future of Work: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will provide you with today's most essential thinking about creating a work-from-anywhere organization, harnessing AI as part of your team, creating an inclusive culture, and building a purpose-driven organization.