Career Strategy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.

Successful Leaders Aren't Bullies empowers good leaders to choose leadership and to understand the benefits of leading with healthy behaviors and to intervene and to stop bullying. It will inspire and mobilize bullied victims to overcome and to thrive by presenting examples of resilient and healthy individuals and organizations.

For over 20 years, a select group of Yale undergraduates has been admitted into the year-long "Grand Strategy" seminar team-taught by John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy. Its purpose: to provide a grounding in strategic decision-making in the face of crisis to prepare future American leaders for important work. Now, John Lewis Gaddis has transposed the experience of that course into a wonderfully succinct, lucid and inspirational book, a view from the commanding heights of statesmanship across the landscape of world history from the ancient Greeks to Lincoln, and beyond.

In an era of digital transformation, disruptive innovation, transient competitive advantage, and industry convergence, mergers and acquisitions have become more complex than ever. Winning at the Acquisition Game presents the best materials, insights, and tools which comprise the comprehensive, cross-disciplinary Mergers and Acquisitions course taught in the MBA and Executive MBA programs at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles (featuring "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Complete Strategy Collection, a compilation of ancient and historical philosophies, will increase your knowledge of strategy, conflict, and adversity throughout the ages, giving you valuable insight into the past while opening a window to the future. Although each of the works can be considered a manual or diagram for war or engaging in physical combat, the life skills embodied in each can be adapted to everyday life in modern society. Listen and learn how you, too, can take advantage of the strategies of war.

Build resilience in your company to weather the greatest crises. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the 10 most important ones to help your company prepare for and overcome disruption, social upheaval, and disaster.

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.

Each year, Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of "sell it—do it, sell it—do it" that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.