Career Strategy

Almost one in four American working adults has a job that pays less than a living wage. Conventional wisdom says that’s how the world has to work. Bad jobs with low wages, minimal benefits, little training, and chaotic schedules are the only way companies can keep costs down and prices low. If companies were to offer better jobs, customers would have to pay more or companies would have to make less. But in The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, makes the compelling case that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind - with bad jobs - is a choice, not a necessity.

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.

Africa's Business Revolution provides the inside story on business in Africa and its future growth prospects and helps executives understand and seize the opportunities for building profitable, sustainable enterprises.

Strategy decision making and action used to be off limits to all but the select few at the very top of an organization. It was a largely cerebral activity focused on grand long-terms plans made at annual off-site retreats away from the daily challenges of the business. That is no longer the case. The current business environment does not wait for companies to slowly adjust in an annual meeting. The relentless pace of change renders today's long-term future tomorrow's history. Does this mean strategy is no longer useful, or even feasible? No. Good strategists are needed now more than ever.

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.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help your company persevere through economic challenges and continue to grow while your competitors stumble. This book will inspire you to: harness your resources to pull through a pandemic; learn the right lessons from previous recessions; minimize pain while cutting costs and managing risk; foster a healthy culture during anxious times; make smart moves to protect your own job; and seize the opportunity to innovate and reinvent your business.

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female. If the business world had a sex, it would be male. And therein lies the pickle. Women are the engine of the global economy, driving nearly 80 percent of consumer household spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they've got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over.

Unequaled is the client service professional's guide to getting ahead and achieving professional goals. You're smart and hardworking, but guess what - so is everyone else. So how do you stand out? You need to distinguish yourself in order to get ahead, but simply being good at your job is not enough. Moving up is about soft skills, networking, client connections, emotional intelligence, and your personal reputation. This audiobook is a frank and candid guide to what it really takes to succeed in the field.

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.

Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don't have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors.

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.

Winfluence, by award-winning digital strategist Jason Falls, is the authoritative book about influencer marketing from the perspective of businesses and brands. An invaluable guidebook for marketing managers, small business owners, marketing consultants and agencies alike, the book explains how influencers came to be, how they came to be so powerful, why so many brands are counting on influencer marketing for business success, and how anyone who is not, now can.

The how-to playbook for start-ups and established companies on a groundbreaking discipline called category design. Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it and dominating it over time. You can't build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you're going to lose.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Reverse Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan, comes a new, comprehensive playbook for developing your corporate strategy for the future.

In The Rule, legendary trader and hedge fund pioneer Larry Hite recounts his working-class upbringing in Brooklyn as a dyslexic, partially blind kid who was anything but a model student - and how he went on to found and run Mint Investment Management Company, one of the most profitable and largest quantitative hedge funds in the world.

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?

Transforming Project Management takes you beyond envisioning a great strategy and into the realm of implementing it - with skill, care, and expertise. Petersen explains how to break down a strategic plan into key objectives and project portfolios to make sense of all the project "parts" - then successfully lead the execution of the plan.

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.

Today, a large number of companies still don't have a strategic approach to social media. Others fail to calculate how effective they are at social media, one of the critical components of implementing any social media strategy. When companies start spending time and money on their social media efforts, they need to create an internal plan that everyone can understand. Maximize Your Social offers a clear vision of what businesses need to do to create - and execute upon - their social media for business road map.

Shift your strategy downstream. Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors? If you think the answer is your superior products, think again. Products are important, of course. For decades, businesses sought competitive advantage almost exclusively in activities related to new product creation. They won by building bigger factories, by finding cheaper raw materials or labor, or by coming up with more efficient ways to move and store inventory - and by inventing exciting new products that competitors could not replicate.