Career Strategy

Here are three classics that must be in any business person's library: The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Prince by Machiavelli, and A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. This impressive collection is accompanied by one hour of Zen-inspired Japanese music, performed on authentic instruments.

Traditionally, human resources has focused on recruiting good people, preparing them for assignments, motivating them to perform, and retaining them. These functions remain essential. But to be successful in turbulent times like ours, human capital strategy needs to be broader and much more far reaching.

Fluid and elegant, yet rigorous and rule-bound, chess is a game that seduces, confounds, and hooks. Now, world-renowned chess master and Fortune 500 business consultant Bruce Pandolfini shows readers how chess principles can be simply and logically applied to any business or life situation. No specific chess knowledge is needed, but after reading Every Move Must Have a Purpose, you will share with the most astute chess players the secret to thinking on your feet.

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the fifth century BCE). The work, attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (Sunzi), comprises 13 chapters, each devoted to an aspect of warfare and its application to military tactics and strategy. It contains a detailed analysis of the Chinese military, from weapons and strategy to rank and discipline as well as the importance of intelligence and espionage in war.

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.

This book is not about lean. This book is about how to become lean. Lean strategy brings to a company a purpose of existence, belonging, influence, trust, and conscious leadership among its managers. It strengthens the autonomy and responsibility of individual employees and ultimately provides an everyday feeling of collaborative winning. This is my strategic approach to lean. Lean strategy consists of two parts. The first is to help you understand the problem. The second part of the book is a kind of manual.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: Ideas are cheap. Product follow-through is where the money is spent and made. That’s where heroes are forged, and excellent product design sparks what eventually becomes major growth. Today, products need to grow their user bases...from scratch, again and again. This book is a guide to the vital work of shaping a product into its sustaining engine. It’s a design-focused companion to methodologies like product-led growth.

The Guiding Purpose Strategy is a stimulating deep dive into the transformational power of purpose. Looking through the lens of contemporary brand management, The Guiding Purpose Strategy provokes fresh thinking, illustrates through case studies, and offers a hands-on framework to start your very own path toward finding your inner why.

Picture this: You wake up, grab your phone, and open Instagram, tap the plus icon at the bottom of the screen, select a photo, add a filter and a caption, tap "publish", and you call it a day. Thirty minutes later, you get a notification from PayPal: "Someone sent you $500". Would you like your average "workday" to look like this? See, contrary to what you believe, you don’t need to be an artist, a comedian, or a particularly attractive individual to get paid on Instagram.

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.

We all use strategy in our everyday lives—whether in business, sports, games, pursuing a potential partner, politics, arms races, peace negotiations, or even personal disagreements. This book distills twelve years of research, interviews, and analysis into a comprehensive guide on the essence of strategy. It concisely outlines the most critical elements of strategy and presents over 300 real-world examples of strategic and tactical applications.

When Ashton Kutcher first heard about 50 Cent's nine-figure Vitaminwater windfall in 2007, the actor realized he'd been missing out. He soon followed the rapper's formula - seeking equity instead of cash for endorsement deals - but with a twist: as the first person to top one million Twitter followers, Kutcher leveraged his social reach to accumulate stakes in a vast range of user-hungry tech startups. A decade later, Kutcher is perhaps the brightest in a firmament of star investors from Beyoncé and Jay-Z to Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.

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.

Stock market investing has been around for a long time. It has become a matter of controversy, as many individuals and corporate organizations carry different narratives of their experience in trades at some point in time. Given the versatility of the stock exchange market, it is as easy to win big as it is to lose drastically if the market undergoes some bad times. Are you ready to take the risk? Have you prepared yourself in the field of trading options? Be a millionaire now with the guidance of this book!

In today's digital age, creating captivating and influential content is more important than ever. But how do you craft content that resonates with your target audience and drives real results? The answer lies in mastering the art of practical content strategy and marketing, and "Content Chemistry" is your ultimate guide.

Digital Marketing MBA provides a proven solution to business leaders, executives, marketing consultants, and marketing professionals alike. This method works through three phases: market intelligence, strategy development, and guided implementation. Each phase is connected to the next, making one cohesive plan. However, they are divided into two parts each, making it simple to follow and to move along quickly.

In today's tumultuous business environment, managers want guidance in the form of a timely theme, a unique and memorable metaphor, and outside-the-box thinking. That's precisely what Corporate Canaries delivers. The book features five core chapters revealing five common business hazards, and each lesson is accompanied by a story based on the author's grandfather's work in the coal industry, as well as an applicable "canary warning" for each theme.

In "The Consumer's Journey to Purchasing Funeral Services: A Marketing Roadmap for Growing Market Share and Revenue," Bill A Johnston, a leading expert on Facebook ads for the funeral home industry, reveals the strategic marketing insights you need to become the market leader in your area. This comprehensive guide takes you through the consumer's journey from initial awareness to becoming a loyal, retained customer.

Facing organizational silos or resistance to change? Stakeholders pulling in different directions? Can’t align, get real buy-in, or jumpstart implementation? The problem is traditional planning no longer guarantees success. Rapid change, uncertainty, new technologies, and a flatter world call for a new approach. The award-winning Strategy-In-Action tells how companies ended the long-standing divorce between planners and implementers.

At some point, every early-stage start-up needs to stop being a secret and start telling people. As your engineering and development work begins to take shape, building fast attention and strong demand become essential—and just buying ads won't be enough. Matthews provides frameworks, examples, and interviews that reinforce the book’s central thesis: Marketing is a discipline, not just an activity. The book offers practical, jargon-free ideas that seamlessly blend marketing fundamentals with the functional realities of fast-paced, growth-focused start-ups.