Career Strategy

What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

Dim Sum Strategy presents a carefully curated selection of proven strategic tools, with insights and anecdotes from three decades working with some of the world’s leading brands at the world’s top agencies. The book is structured to follow the author’s proven Brand Centered Management™ process, with a smattering of different “tools” split into four parts: Discovery, Definition, Direction, and Delivery. Each tool is presented in bite-sized, standalone chunks; you can listen to the book in stepwise fashion or cherry-pick in whatever order you wish—just like a dim sum meal.

Sharing hard-earned insights, advice, and best practices, brand and marketing strategist Karen Tiber Leland helps entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, and executives create a brand by design instead of default, gain greater influence in their industries and companies, and become thought leaders in their fields. The Brand Mapping Strategy uses proven strategies, best practices, and anecdotes from real life brand-building successes to give listeners the tools they need to design, build, and accelerate a successful brand.

Learn competitive business strategy from the best. According to strategic planning expert Dr. Chuck Bamford, business strategy is a mixture of instinct and instruction. You already have the instinct - let Bamford provide the instruction you need to hone your business and leadership traits, and lead your organization into a bright future. Bamford’s work stands out from other business leadership audiobooks by providing in-depth processes in a practical format that allows the listener to use the material immediately.

These days, consumers have real power: they can research companies, compare ratings, and find alternatives with a simple tap. Focusing on customer needs isn't a nice-to-have, it's a strategic imperative. The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (JTBD) helps organizations turn market insight into action. This book shows you techniques to make offerings people want, as well as make people want your offering.

Legendary 17th century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s exposition of sword fighting, strategy and Zen philosophy. Required reading for any martial artist, business person or student of strategy. Includes the one hour Zen inspired soundtrack The Mysterious Sound of Wind in the Bamboo. Performed on authentic Japanese instruments.

This book is for first-time startup founders in the B2B space. Maybe you’re a software engineer, product manager, salesperson, doctor, or lawyer building your first startup. My bet is that although you’re an expert at your technical skill, you yourself recognize that there’s a lot to learn when it comes to building a product, marketing it to a specific audience and overall running a company.

Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world’s most influential company, a brand that likely touches your life every day. As a student of leadership and communication, he learned to elevate the way Amazonians write, collaborate, innovate, pitch, and present. He created a scalable model that grew from a small team in a Seattle garage to one of the world’s largest employers. The Bezos Blueprint by Carmine Gallo reveals the communication strategies that Jeff Bezos pioneered to fuel Amazon’s astonishing growth.

This book triggers you to think and act strategically, shows what you can learn from business models inside and outside your industry, and urges you to apply those learnings to make your own shift.

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.

The seminal book Blue Ocean Strategy has sold over four million copies globally and is in print in forty-six languages. But much of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's work on creating new market spaces was originally published in the pages of Harvard Business Review. This book brings the best of those articles together all in one place.

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.

Compiled more than 2,000 years ago by a mysterious warrior-philosopher, The Art of War is still perhaps the most prestigious and influential book of strategy in the world. As a study of the anatomy of organizations in conflict, The Art of War applies to competition and conflict in general, on every level from the interpersonal to the international.

The world's most successful businesses leaders understand that creating a shared social identity around their products and services is the most efficient path to scaling revenue, differentiating products, promoting customer success and retention, and seizing category ownership. The Business of Belonging is the playbook for doing just that. CMX founder David Spinks offers advice for creating community strategy, aligning it with your business objectives, and launching and managing a community of end users.

The lives of Hannibal and his Roman enemies are the stuff of legend. But these classic stories contain truths with relevance today: The seeds of our successes lie in our failures, and within our successes are the kernels of our failure. Knowing how to recognize these paradoxes will help us to be more effective at work, at school, at home, and with others. A big new idea book that springs from ancient history, Hannibal and Me explores these exciting ideas by analyzing the experiences of Hannibal and others who made their mark on history.

More than 20 years ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the balanced scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the balanced scorecard into action.

Do the leaders in your company work together towards a common goal? Do they trust one another? Are they accountable not only individually but as a team? These are just a few traits found in community-minded leaders, the kind of leaders essential to grow your organization. With his new book, Community of Leaders, New York Times bestselling author Vince Molinaro breaks down why having a strong leadership culture in your organization is critical, how to build it, and how to sustain it for long term success.

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.

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.