Career Innovation

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

Analogies are far more complex than their SAT stereotype and lie at the very core of human cognition and creativity. Once we become aware of this, we start seeing them everywhere - in ads, apps, political debates, legal arguments, logos, and euphemisms, to name just a few. At their very best, analogies inspire new ways of thinking, enable invention, and motivate people to action. Unfortunately, not every analogy that rings true is true. That's why, at their worst, analogies can deceive, manipulate, or mislead us into disaster.

Confronting Reality will change the way you think about and run your business. It is the first book that shows how to connect the big picture of the new era of business with the nitty-gritty of what to do about it.

In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business.

Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations. Corporate Explorer is a guidebook to the practices that enable these managers to go from idea into action. This actionable and proven framework explains how managers can become successful corporate innovators.

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business-one that is still thriving-while dramatically reinventing it?

With unprecedented access, the veteran New York Times reporter and editorial writer who covered New York City and state politics offers a revealing portrait of one of the richest and famously private public figures in the country: business genius, inventor, innovator, publisher, philanthropist, activist, sly wit, and potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg.

How did Ford Motors use Lean development to pull off one of the most impressive corporate turnarounds in history? Largely by avoiding the mistakes that so many companies make when in a death spiral. They looked beyond manufacturing efficiency to change the very fundamentals of how they developed vehicles. In Designing the Future, Lean product development expert James Morgan and world-renowned Lean guru Jeffrey K. Liker reveal why so many companies have achieved only moderate success with Lean in operations, with a limited impact on their overall business.

Written by world-renowned expert in transformation, best-selling author, and award-winning teacher, scholar, and global advisor Behnam Tabrizi, Going on Offense is a must-listen for any organization looking to stay innovative and competitive in today's rapidly changing market. Armed with this book, a company will be able to go on offense—continually improving its culture, adapting to new environments, and expanding into new territories.

As with any large infrastructure project, the costs and risks involved in a major innovation programme are significant, and how it is led and managed will directly determine its long-term success and sustainability. The secrets of successful digital transformation are usually tightly held by the organisations that achieved them; this new title unlocks the 'how' of transformation through digital innovation.

From Bridgewater Associates to Netflix, some of North America's largest companies admit to being heavily influenced by concepts from pro sports. So what do these companies know that others don't? The answer is simple: People innovation can be a competitive advantage. Through in-depth interviews and meticulous research, Where Others Won't dives deeper than ever before into professional sports from around the world to uncover over 50 easily implementable people strategies to help you win.

How Stella Saved the Farm is a simple parable about making innovation happen. Written by the authors of the New York Times best-selling Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, Win Everywhere, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, the story resonates in organizations of all types - public sector, private sector, and social sector, from mammoth corporations to small organizations employing just a few dozen people.

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

Companies stumble when they imagine that innovation is mostly about ideas. The reality is that ideas are only beginnings. Indeed, even a company with the world’s best idea still faces a devilish challenge: it must build the business of tomorrow without endangering the business of today. Beyond the Idea is an essential book for any business that recognizes that innovation always has been, and always will be, the key to long term growth and vitality.

Highly acclaimed author, trainer, and presenter Paul Sloane demonstrates how the lateral leader develops the vision, culture, and processes that transform a regular business into an innovation hothouse. With a lively, energetic and practical approach, The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills will teach you dynamic, up-to-date techniques to unleash the creative energies of your people and reveal how to put the techniques to work immediately.

Rethink how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value - or risk becoming irrelevant. If you listen to nothing else on business model innovation, listen to these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reach new customers and stay ahead of your competitors by reinventing your business model.

In this book, enterprise architecting experts Deborah Nightingale and Donna Rhodes offer a framework for enterprise transformation. Successful transformation, they believe, starts with a holistic approach, taking into consideration all facets of the enterprise and its environment rather than focusing solely on one factor-information technology, for example, or organizational structure. This is architecting the future enterprise: creating a blueprint for what the enterprise will look like after the transformation.

How can great companies do everything right - identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market - and still fail? The sad truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, and then neglect the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners - some visible, some hidden - deliver on their promises, too.

Innovation may be the hottest discipline around today - in business circles and beyond. And for good reason. Innovation transforms companies and markets. It’s the key to solving vexing social problems. And it makes or breaks professional careers. For all the enthusiasm the topic inspires, however, the practice of innovation remains stubbornly impenetrable. No longer. In The Little Black Book of Innovation, long-time innovation expert Scott D.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.