Career Strategy

In this book for leaders, thinkers, doers, and creators, Bishop T.D. Jakes illuminates the pathway to encouraging and unleashing disruptive thinking and provides the wisdom and practical skills we need to evolve our most original and potentially transformational ideas from vision to reality. Through his insight into how our minds and emotions work and through his experiences as a pastor, entrepreneur, and creator, Bishop Jakes leads us into a new way of relating to and transforming the world around us for good.

In this book, Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in various industries, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways - respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution - for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

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.

Companies have different needs and live in vastly different environments. The internal structure of an organization and the market in which it competes is not going to adapt to a digital strategy process; it must find a process and methodology that works best for it. With big data emerging as a standard framework for decision-making, digital strategy and governance have taken on increased importance.

Born over 2,400 years ago, warrior, thinker, and leader Sun Tzu lived during a time of great internecine conflict in China. A classic of Chinese literature, Art of War reveals the strategies, tactics, and insights that lead to success. Mastery of warfare and the maintenance of power are the most important values in Sun's philosophy, without which there can be no peace or life.

Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.

In Go Long, authors Dennis Carey, Brian Dumaine, Michael Useem, and Rodney Zemmel take you behind the scenes to witness the business decisions that are enabling leading organizations to outsmart and outlast the competition.

Every company needs a 3HAG - a three-year highly achievable goal! The 3HAG way is a prescriptive framework that takes the guessing out of your strategy and ensures you and your whole team are confident in where you are going. You’ll find step-by-step instructions to gut out your first 3HAG while building the confidence required to execute with speed toward your goals.

Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja.

Relationships are the foundation of our long-term business success. The problem is a million things get in the way. But there’s a simple solution to breaking through all this noise: Giving. When you focus on giving, you will remove your own mental roadblocks. You’ll be centered on solving the client’s problems and investing in their success. And you can build a system to consistently integrate the right moves into your busy work life. In Give to Grow, Mo Bunnell shows how to develop the growth mindset that keeps the focus on the relationship.

Today, a large number of companies still don't have a strategic approach to social media. Others fail to calculate how effective they are at social media, one of the critical components of implementing any social media strategy. When companies start spending time and money on their social media efforts, they need to create an internal plan that everyone can understand. Maximize Your Social offers a clear vision of what businesses need to do to create - and execute upon - their social media for business road map.

50 Business Classics presents the key ideas from classic texts such as My Years with General Motors and Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited to contemporary business lessons from the rise of tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. It contains revealing biographies of luminaries like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett, as well as lesser-known stories including creation of publishing giant Penguin and Chinese behemoth Alibaba.

Few people know more about developing leaders than John C. Maxwell, the bestselling leadership author in history. In the last twenty-five years, he has grown from equipping a handful of leaders in one organization to developing millions of business, government, and non-profit leaders in every country around the world. In The Ultimate Guide to Developing Leaders, Maxwell teaches everything leaders need to know about how to develop leaders in their team or organization.

Alexander the Great endures as one of the most admired and emulated leaders in world history. In our time, his example of unprecedented and unparalleled success has inspired leaders of business and government, from media mogul Ted Turner (who keeps a bronze bust of Alexander in his office) to Desert Storm commander General Norman Schwarzkopf (who credits Alexander's tactical innovations for his dramatic flanking maneuver against the Iraqi army in the liberation of Kuwait).

If you want to stand out from the crowd, develop a clear and consistent brand voice, and ultimately build a fruitful business - listen to your brand. Stop Listening to the Customer offers insights into how consumers are driving homogeneity in brands and shares the proven strategies you can implement to amplify your own position in the world.

"Best practices" may be widespread, but that doesn't mean they're effective. In many instances the opposite is true: Best practices can be outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategist with a keen eye for the absurd, offers the tools to identify these practices and rid them from your organization. And, most of all, he presents a compelling case for how eliminating popular but outworn ideas, processes, and strategies can create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe - and shoot down those we don't.

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.

In his work consulting to major corporations for more than 30 years, Gerald Kraines consistently hears that 60-70 percent of business organizations' potential effectiveness goes unrealized. He shares how to engage, align, and develop employees in order to leverage and encourage optimal performance and long-lasting results.

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.