Business Strategy

Business relationships are still dominated by a narrow perspective—trying to match products to customer needs and making deals. It's a buyer-seller relationship built on a transactional mindset, and it's not how you should be doing business. There's a better way—orchestrating growth—in which suppliers and customers collaborate to build strategies and grow together. Christoph Senn and Mehak Gandhi lay out the Triple Fit Strategy framework, which will help you escape the product-centric mindset and put customers at the heart of your business strategy.

Peter Senge's groundbreaking ideas on building organizations have made him a household name among corporate managers. His theories help businesses to clarify their goals, to defy the odds, to more clearly understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers a marvelously empowering approach to work.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

Business Turnaround can take many different forms. It is actually another name for Change Management after things have gone bad. But it always starts with Management recognizing that improvement is necessary. Sometimes the cash flow dries up, other times, it is the bank insisting on a new Business Plan or worse withholding needed money or mortgage and insisting on a change in Management.

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As the pandemic is exacting its toll on our lives and wreaking havoc in the global economy, forward-looking organizations are moving past crisis management and positioning themselves to leap ahead when the economy turns around. What should you and your business be doing now to stay afloat today - while planning for tomorrow so you can come out of the crisis stronger?

Explore the universe of potential buyers. Learn how to assemble a team of expert advisors to prepare your business for sale. Walk step by step through a typical investment-banker-led midmarket sale process from start to finish. Adam Coffey has spent the last 20 years as CEO of three private-equity-backed national service companies. Through his experience executing a buy-and-build strategy, he has bought and sold more than 100 companies ranging in size from $1 million to $1 billion. Selling your business is an art.

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.

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.

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.

Relationships are the foundation of our long-term business success. The problem is a million things get in the way. But there’s a simple solution to breaking through all this noise: Giving. When you focus on giving, you will remove your own mental roadblocks. You’ll be centered on solving the client’s problems and investing in their success. And you can build a system to consistently integrate the right moves into your busy work life. In Give to Grow, Mo Bunnell shows how to develop the growth mindset that keeps the focus on the relationship.

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.

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.

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.

Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"—a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the typical response was just to apply it again—with greater enthusiasm.

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.

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.

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.

Is your healthcare organization spending too much time on strategy—with too little to show for it? If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones for healthcare professionals to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.

What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.