Career Strategy

Strategy is about shaping the future. Thinking strategically is what separates good managers and great leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips.

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.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

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.

Even a strong leader can flounder without an effective strategy, and the most powerful strategy can fail without the right leader. Only those who master and integrate both skills can effectively navigate the challenges that lay ahead for today's organizations. The Strategic Leader's Roadmap, by Wharton management professors Harbir Singh and Michael Useem, offers a six-point checklist for leading strategically that will help managers strengthen their capacity to develop strategy and to lead its execution.

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.

Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were the weapons of choice at Wall Street investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.

Whether you're starting a business from scratch or in an existing company facing new threats, this audiobook offers the direction you need. The HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy provides practical tips and advice that break down the process of crafting strategy so you can identify the areas your company should build on and help it thrive long into the future.

A year's worth of management wisdom, all in one place. We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up to date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Ginni Rometty to Robert I. Sutton and company examples from Maersk to Nvidia, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

What's the right price for your new product? Millionaire maker Dan S. Kennedy and pricing/marketing strategist Jason Marrs empower small business owners to take control of their profits by taking charge of the source: their price.

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.

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.

Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it? Whatever your job–plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon–decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning—school and books—gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.

Objectives and Key Results is the first full-fledged reference guide on Objectives and Key Results, a critical-thinking framework designed to help organizations create value through focus, alignment, and better communication. Written by two leading OKRs consultants and researchers, this audiobook provides a one-stop resource for organizations looking to quantify qualitative goals. You'll learn how OKRs came to be and how leading companies use them every day to help teams and employees stretch their thinking about what's possible.

Bruce Greenwald, one of the nation's leading business professors, presents a new and simplified approach to strategy that cuts through much of the fog that has surrounded the subject. Based on his hugely popular course at Columbia Business School, Greenwald and his co-author, Judd Kahn, offer an easy-to-follow method for understanding the competitive structure of your industry and developing an appropriate strategy for your specific position.

No one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life. Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict, and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure.

The HBR Guide to Leading Through Change provides the practical tips, research, stories, and advice you need to understand, communicate, and implement change effectively, no matter the size or scale of the challenge you're facing. You'll learn how to improve your odds of success; communicate a shared vision; keep going, even amid lags and setbacks; deal with naysayers and roadblocks; build trust and resilience on your team; and make a lasting impact.

Know What You're For details an effective growth strategy for businesses and nonprofits by closing the gap between two simple questions: What do you want to be known for? What are you known for? When the two answers match, organizations gain incredible momentum by unleashing the most powerful marketing force there is: lasting word-of-mouth support.

In Ruthless Consistency, Michael Canic identifies the three surprising reasons most strategic change initiatives fail: Leaders unwittingly send mixed messages that demotivate their people and undermine those initiatives; leaders focus on what they do instead of what their people experience; and leaders are not as committed as they think they are or need to be. The book then introduces an intuitive yet comprehensive model for success.