Business Strategy

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Ever since strategy gained currency as an organizational concept in the 1960s, there's been confusion about how to define it. Strategy isn't a detailed plan of action. Nor is it a corporate vision or an objective or a mission statement. Strategy is not what to think. It's how to think. Most books on strategy focus on external strategy: competition with rivals in business or overcoming the enemy on the battlefield. This book is different.

The corporate world is a complex game that must be mastered in order to achieve great success and rise up the organizational ladder. There are many rewards for the winners in this game-playing environment, and as with many things in life, the corporate world can be quite brutal for the losers in this competitive ecosystem of complicated relationships and diverse behaviors that must be effectively navigated in the course of playing the strategic game. Ergo, learn to play the game of office politics or suffer the unkind consequences of being destroyed on the corporate battlefield.

The lives of Hannibal and his Roman enemies are the stuff of legend. But these classic stories contain truths with relevance today: The seeds of our successes lie in our failures, and within our successes are the kernels of our failure. Knowing how to recognize these paradoxes will help us to be more effective at work, at school, at home, and with others. A big new idea book that springs from ancient history, Hannibal and Me explores these exciting ideas by analyzing the experiences of Hannibal and others who made their mark on history.

The most common complaint Bill Stinnett hears from his corporate clients is that would-be vendors and suppliers "just don't understand our business" In Think Like Your Customer, Stinnett explains why the key to landing corporate customers is to learn to think about the things executives and business owners think about and understand how they make complex buying decisions.

Informed by meticulous research, field experience, and classroom-tested strategies, Dealmaking offers essential insights for anyone involved in buying or selling everything from cars to corporations. Leading business scholar Guhan Subramanian provides a lively tour of both negotiation and auction theory, then takes an in-depth look at his own hybrid theory, outlining three specific strategies listeners can use in complex dealmaking situations.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed applies a model to business growth, examining the successful strategies that ordinary weeds use to spread, and prosper in almost any situation.

Attitude can make or break you and the people you lead. Good attitudes on a team do not guarantee its success, but bad attitudes guarantee its ruin. So says New York Times best-selling author and leadership expert John C. Maxwell in this highly practical primer, Attitude 101.

Compete in the digital world with pragmatic strategies for success. Digital Sense provides a complete playbook for organizations seeking a more engaged customer experience strategy. By reorganizing sales and marketing to compete in today's digital-first, omni-channel environment, you gain newfound talent and knowledge from the resources already at hand.

Cybersecurity involves people, policy, and technology. Yet most books and academic programs cover only technology. Hence the implementation of cybersecurity as a people powered perpetual innovation and productivity engine is not done. People think they can buy cybersecurity as a product when in fact the discipline is the modern practice of digital business strategy. People also equate cybersecurity with information security or security alone. However, security is a state, while cybersecurity is a process.

For the past 40 years, Richard Koch has wanted to uncover the simple, elemental, elegant and parsimonious principles that are needed to create great new businesses. To qualify, a principle must be so overwhelmingly powerful that anyone can reliably use it towards extraordinary results. Is there any principle that can tell you how to do that consistently and with a high chance of success?

The "Step Up, Step Back" approach suggests leaders need to step up and do more than they typically do in the early stages of the change - in specific ways and at specific times; and then step back and do less than they typically do in the later stages of the change - again, in specific ways, at specific times. The result is not only change that sticks, but empowered, motivated managers who can get on with delivering change, without needing ongoing input or cover from leaders.

Despite what you may hear about Facebook advertisements failing to work, the fact is that all of the top online entrepreneurs and digital marketers use Facebook ads. How, therefore, do you make it work for you? By establishing objectives. Before you launch your first advertising campaign, you need have a clear understanding of your numerous marketing objectives. This will assist you in determining anything from the campaign's objective, to budgeting and bidding.

Entrepreneur’s Guide to Consumer Packaged Goods: The Winning Growth Strategy for a Food & Beverage CPG Startup is a high-level resource for getting started in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. The book analyzes the strategies needed to scale and grow a CPG business. It covers the strategic blunders to avoid and all other relevant topics needed to launch a CPG company.

The authors of the best-selling Competing on Internet Time (a Businessweek top-10 book) analyze the strategies, principles, and skills of three of the most successful and influential figures in business - Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs - offering lessons for all managers and entrepreneurs on leadership, strategy, and execution.

Digital transformation is no longer news - it's a necessity. For more than a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn't. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture.

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

Marcus Samuel, Jr., is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889 John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the US government is wary of challenging the great "anaconda" of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses - that is, until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell.

While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and headed on a road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

In this revised and updated edition of Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share success stories from a host of companies including Twitter, Viacom, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, offering a tested method for leading successful change, which they have developed over a combined fifty years of helping organizations do just that.