Career Strategy

For the first time in any modern language, a female scholar and translator reimagines The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s ancient book of strategy and psychology has as much to tell us today as when it was first written 2,500 years ago. In a world forever at odds, his rules for anticipating the motivations and strategies of our competitors never cease to inspire leaders of all kinds.

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.

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.

Dialogue provides practical guidelines for one of the essential elements of true partnership - learning how to talk together in honest and effective ways. It reveals how problems between managers and employees, and between companies or divisions within a larger corporation, stem from an inability to conduct a successful dialogue.

Composed in the 5th century BC, Sun Tzu's Art of War is the earliest-known treatise on military strategy, and is still hugely popular around the world for its perceptive tactical advice to commanders on how to win at war with minimal bloodshed. Aimed at all those who want to study the text in depth, this is the first step-by-step guide to the famous treatise, breaking down the 13 chapters of the original into 200 easily digested lessons, from 'do not press a desperate enemy' to 'control your troops through bond of loyalty' to "when you are weak, beware attack".

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.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

Construction Genius logically breaks down complex concepts into small components so any construction leader understands how to be more effective. Construction Genius covers topics as broad as how to structure a meeting so you reach an agreement on how to solve problems every time, to how to have tough conversations without ruining relationships, to how to build better teams that deliver profitable projects . . . and the one question that will save you $1 million, guaranteed.

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.

In The Innovator's Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. Now with a foreword by innovation expert Scott Anthony, this classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today's hyper-accelerated business environment and will help anyone trying to transform their business right now.

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.

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.

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.

Amid the turbulence of a global pandemic, worldwide social justice movements, and accelerated digital transformation, one thing is clear - work will no longer be the same. The Future of Work: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will provide you with today's most essential thinking about creating a work-from-anywhere organization, harnessing AI as part of your team, creating an inclusive culture, and building a purpose-driven organization.

We are in the midst of an unprecedented degree of technology-driven change at the same time that society faces challenges more complex than our organizations and we as individuals have been prepared to handle. Autonomous Transformation: Creating a More Human Future in the Era of Artificial Intelligence is for leaders who want to create a better future within this context of change and supplies a balance of historical and theoretical context with practical frameworks for beginning to create a more human future today.

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.

Strategic initiatives are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to putting strategy into action, and leading a critical initiative may be the key to propelling your career forward. Yet managing a cross-functional team on a high-profile project can present a multitude of challenges and risks, causing even the most experienced manager to struggle.

In this revised and updated edition of Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share success stories from a host of companies including Twitter, Viacom, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, offering a tested method for leading successful change, which they have developed over a combined fifty years of helping organizations do just that.

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.

This timeless text is required listening for any business person or athlete interested in strategy. It includes a soundtrack entitled "The Mysterious Sound of Wind In the Bamboo", a 43-minute collection of Zen-inspired Japanese music by the Matsu Take Ensemble.