Career Strategy

Data analytics offer an incredible opportunity to predict the future, engage with new technological advancements, and gain valuable insights about your business. But unless you're staying on top of the cutting edge of analytics, your company is wasting that potential-and your competitors will be gaining speed while you fall behind. These articles by experts and consultants will help you understand today's essential thinking about what data analytics are capable of and how to adopt their use in your organization.

How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, says management thinker Peter Drucker. In this HBR classic from 1985, he argues that innovation is real work that can and should be managed like any other corporate function. Success is more likely to result from the systematic pursuit of opportunities than from a flash of genius. Indeed, most innovative business ideas arise through the methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity.

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity—you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn't teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers.

In Strategic, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Rich Horwath delivers an incisive roadmap to help leaders at all levels think, plan, and act strategically to navigate every business challenge they face. The book offers business leaders a proven framework—the Strategic Fitness System—containing dozens of tools, techniques, and checklists to confidently master every area of the business, from designing market-winning strategies to shaping the organization's culture.

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

An accessible, light-hearted exploration into game theory. Haim Shapira describes what it is, why it is important, and how it can help us in our daily lives. This audiobook provides many humorous anecdotes and insightful examples of how our daily lives are affected by game theory. Game theory is the mathematical formalization of interactive decision-making - it assumes that each player's goal is to maximize his/her benefit, whatever it may be. Players may be friends, foes, political parties, states, or any entity that behaves interactively, whether collectively or individually.

Bestselling author and futurist Mark Schaefer explains why community is a vastly overlooked marketing opportunity for most organizations. He explains how three major trends are colliding in a way that makes brand communities the future of marketing strategy.

Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.

The Art of War will teach you to conquer your opponents and gain a loyal following. It is one of the oldest books on military strategy in the world. It is the first and one of the most successful works on strategy and has had a huge influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu was the first to recognize the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment.

Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil's Advocate, the 11th-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams - comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors - are used widely in both the public and private sector.

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.

Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland-armed with insights from some of today's top minds in business, tech, and social justice-offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change.

In today's volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing you to stay focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Profiting from the core is crucial, but the danger is that overfocusing on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but risky. Fixating too much on either strategy can cause you to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business.

Your life is serious business, but who says you can’t find joy along the way? As a person with unique gifts to offer, it is your responsibility to use your talents wisely and it is your right to enjoy yourself while doing so. Just as a successful business requires a mission and a plan, so does a fulfilling life. In The Joy of Strategy, Allison Rimm provides a structured, step-by-step program to create a business plan for your life.

In today’s world of rapid, disruptive change, strategy can’t be separate from execution - it has to emerge from execution. You have to continually adjust your strategy to fit new realities. But if your organization isn’t set up to be fast on its feet, you could easily go the way of Blockbuster or Borders. Laura Stack shows you how to quickly drive strategic initiatives and get great results from your team. Stack will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and inspiration to help you hit the ground running!

Informed by interviews with corporate strategists at leading companies around the world, eminent consultants at firms such as Bain, the Boston Consulting Group, and McKinsey & Co., and the internal archives of strategic innovators such as General Electric and Shell, this book provides vivid insights into the trials and tribulations of practice innovation in strategy, and stresses the hard work of the little recognized and sometimes eccentric innovators within the profession.

Due to its raw storytelling style, compelling content, and fast pace, Explosive Growth is a one-of-a-kind business book that transcends the narrow entrepreneurial audience to also appeal to listeners and business students looking to learn about startup life and entrepreneurship. It holds nothing back while detailing the highest highs and lowest lows of what it's really like to run a startup.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is the master key to power and victory and is the most important book ever written on overcoming obstacles and defeating your foes. All of the book’s millennia-old wisdom can be yours in a single sitting. Discover today why The Art of War has guided soldiers, generals, martial artists, and seekers throughout the ages.

Are you a trader who has already mastered trading platform techniques yet is not profiting in trading business? Well, this might mean that there is something you are missing, something your approaches don’t cover. This audiobook focuses mainly on how psychology is related to norms of trading. As trading gained popularity and became easily approachable, the expertise, trading tools, and trading platforms became advanced too. Today, there exists a long list of technical supports and functional resources available on the internet.

What can you learn from the world’s most successful companies? The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history’s most successful movie studios.