Career Strategy

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.

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.

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

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.

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.

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.

Learn competitive business strategy from the best. According to strategic planning expert Dr. Chuck Bamford, business strategy is a mixture of instinct and instruction. You already have the instinct - let Bamford provide the instruction you need to hone your business and leadership traits, and lead your organization into a bright future. Bamford’s work stands out from other business leadership audiobooks by providing in-depth processes in a practical format that allows the listener to use the material immediately.

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.

Imagine running a business without a strategy. It would be akin to driving blindfolded, to building a house without a blueprint. The concept of strategy changed all that, paving the way for the creation of the modern corporate world. The Lords of Strategy provides listeners with a deeper understanding of the world they compete in, and a sharper eye for what works — and what doesn’t — when forging strategy.

In this book for leaders, thinkers, doers, and creators, Bishop T.D. Jakes illuminates the pathway to encouraging and unleashing disruptive thinking and provides the wisdom and practical skills we need to evolve our most original and potentially transformational ideas from vision to reality. Through his insight into how our minds and emotions work and through his experiences as a pastor, entrepreneur, and creator, Bishop Jakes leads us into a new way of relating to and transforming the world around us for good.

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.

Start making choices now that serve your desired future. Today’s fast-paced and radically shifting business world means that many leaders, even those considered successful, are simply navigating urgent tasks with little to no strategy. In Strategy to Action, award-winning educator and coach Keita Demming of The Covenant Group presents an innovative and deceptively simple tool to help business professionals unite their short-term tactics with their long-term goals.

In Redefining Retail: 10 Guiding Principles for a Post-Digital World, Prof. Philip Kotler and Dr. Giuseppe Stigliano deliver a timely and insightful examination of retail and consumer brand marketing. In the book, you'll find practical and concrete techniques for redefining your organization's internal operations and processes, as well as its business strategy. You'll rethink the entire value chain as you consider the growing importance of sustainability, diversity and inclusion, working policies, and more.

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.

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.

Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world’s most influential company, a brand that likely touches your life every day. As a student of leadership and communication, he learned to elevate the way Amazonians write, collaborate, innovate, pitch, and present. He created a scalable model that grew from a small team in a Seattle garage to one of the world’s largest employers. The Bezos Blueprint by Carmine Gallo reveals the communication strategies that Jeff Bezos pioneered to fuel Amazon’s astonishing growth.

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.

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.

In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.