Career Strategy

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.

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!

How did Apple rebound from a decade-long slump? By creating a product, the iPod, that transformed not just the company, but the entire music industry. How did Whole Foods turn itself into a supermarket empire? By challenging the sacred cows of the food business. And how did Dove differentiate its line of beauty products? By creating the concept of "real beauty". In Big Think Strategy, Bernd Schmitt shows you how to "think big" by sourcing and implementing bold ideas that change markets.

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.

Green to Gold is an essential guide for forward-thinking business leaders who see the Green Wave coming and want to profit from it. This audio explores what every executive must know to manage the environmental challenges facing society and business. Based on the authors' years of experience and hundreds of interviews with corporate leaders around the world, Green to Gold, shows how companies generate lasting value.

Army leadership is a sophisticated endeavour that has kept pace with societal change and the challenges of the modern world. In the military, exceptional leadership is crucial every day. Drawing on the latest research in military history, sociology, psychology and behavioural science and with compelling illustration from British Army operations across the centuries, Lt Col Langley Sharp MBE goes beyond the latest leadership fads to distil into one peerlessly authoritative work the essence of leading and leadership from one of the world's most revered institutions.

Numbers make or break you. Ask any bankrupt business or successful startup and they’ll both agree, numbers don’t lie. Unfortunately, most teams focus on too many numbers or the wrong numbers, or maybe no numbers at all! Author Lee Benson knows numbers. He grew his business from three employees to 500 with 15 consecutive years of 20 percent compounded average annual growth. Friends and families asked for his secret. He told them it came down to Your Most Important Number.

This bold, wide-ranging collection brings together some of the most noted military minds, past and present, to examine the crucial role of leadership in combat. Written while Christopher Kolenda was a faculty member in the history department at West Point, it covers both classic and modern concepts of leadership and uses case studies from Alexander the Great through World War II to illustrate principles of leadership in concrete historical contexts.

Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change.

The most common complaint Bill Stinnett hears from his corporate clients is that would-be vendors and suppliers "just don't understand our business" In Think Like Your Customer, Stinnett explains why the key to landing corporate customers is to learn to think about the things executives and business owners think about and understand how they make complex buying decisions.

The Engaged Leader addresses why leaders need to master a new way of developing relationships, which begins by stepping out of traditional hierarchies; how to listen at scale, share to shape, and engage to transform; the art of making this transformative mind shift; and the science of applying the right tools to meet your strategic goals. This transformation is not optional. Those who choose not to make this change will be abandoned for those who inspire people to follow them.

The Real Business of Blockchain is one of the first audiobooks on this transformative technology written for business leaders. Authors David Furlonger and Christophe Uzureau - both of Gartner, the world-renowned research and advisory company - will help you: assess how blockchain will impact your business by cutting through the hype and finding the real story; explore the value proposition that blockchain technologies offer; make smart near- and mid-term investments in your blockchain strategy; and position you and your organization in a new competitive landscape in the future.

Since the groundbreaking work of Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, the concept of the Balanced Scorecard has achieved increasing popularity in the business world. In this book, the authors draw on their extensive experience with scorecard projects to provide a step-by-step method for introducing the Balanced Scorecard into an organization. This book will provide senior and operational managers, consultants, and business academics with a comprehensive view of emerging Balanced Scorecard practice supported by both business advice and a theoretical foundation.

In today's fast-moving and competitive business environment, strong leadership, insightful strategy, and effective innovation are critical links to staying ahead of your competition. Getting your business house in order can often be complicated, but does it really have to be? How do you take MBA 101 lessons, great models, and exceptional concepts and put them into play in the real world? Business Strategy: Plan, Execute, Win! strives to answers these questions in an educational and entertaining format.

As a veteran of six successful Kickstarter campaigns (and counting) and the proprietor of the Kickstarter Lessons blog, Jamey Stegmaier knows something about crowdfunding. In this audiobook, he goes beyond the nuts and bolts of how it works to a deeper level - crowdfunding not just as a cool way to raise money but as a better way to build and run a business.

B2B decision-makers are more informed and more inundated with choices than ever before. To succeed in this environment, businesses need to break through the noise, engage prospects on their own terms, and add value every step of the way. Leveraging more than 15 years of marketing success with startups and Fortune 500 companies, Getting Started with Demand Generation provides the foundation for marketing and sales leaders to develop a high-performing, revenue-focused program that fills the marketing funnel and drives qualified sales opportunities.

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.

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

Machiavellians may not get to heaven, but on earth they have a definite edge on the competition. In this pithy and discretely vicious guide, Stanley Bing shows how the Florentine master statesman and political thinker would handle today's myriad corporate challenges, seize the future by the throat, and make it cough up money, power, and superior office space. So, what exactly would Machiavelli do?