Career Strategy

While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and headed on a road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

In this revealing business advice book, the magic of the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market proves a dynamic example of what a group of people can create when they are aligned and living a powerful vision. Here for the first time, owner John Yokoyama explains in his own words just how he transformed his business into a workplace that is renowned worldwide.

Johnson provides an eminently practical framework for understanding how a business model actually works. Identifying its four fundamental building blocks, he lays out a structured and repeatable process for reinventing an existing business model or creating a new one and then incubating and scaling it into a profitable and thriving enterprise. In a new chapter on digital transformation, he shows how serial transformers like Amazon leverage business model innovation so successfully.

How do you gain an edge in the digital age? In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan, best-selling author and advisor to some of the world's top CEOs, dissects the changing nature of competitive advantage, illustrating what it takes for companies - old and new alike - to compete against digital giants like Amazon, Alibaba, and Google.

The spiritual successor to KPIs (key performance indicators), OKRs, or objectives and key results, are rapidly gaining popularity and helping some of the world's most successful businesses solve their strategic execution problems. However, some companies struggle with their implementation, finding that using OKRs as top-down directives changes little. In OKRs for All, Objectives and Key Results (OKR) expert Vetri Vellore delivers an impactful and actionable guide on how to use OKRs for more than a quarterly, executive-level review tool.

I used to think LinkedIn was a colossal waste of time - until I discovered the simple secrets to success on LinkedIn. If you want to know how to double your leads and sales using LinkedIn beyond what you thought possible...without spending hundreds of dollars on ads...or trying to become a "viral" hit.... Then this will be the most important message you ever read. Here’s why. If you've been on LinkedIn for a while, the scenario I’m about to describe may be familiar to you.... You’ve found great companies on LinkedIn, that need what you have.

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.

In their new book, Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani, both members of the PwC US partnership and the Strategy & Global team, help leaders navigate these profound and historical shifts and provide a road map for reshaping their companies. Building on major new body of research, along with case studies of companies on the vanguard of this major shift, the authors identify the seven imperatives that leaders must follow as the digital age continues to evolve

Cybersecurity involves people, policy, and technology. Yet most books and academic programs cover only technology. Hence the implementation of cybersecurity as a people powered perpetual innovation and productivity engine is not done. People think they can buy cybersecurity as a product when in fact the discipline is the modern practice of digital business strategy. People also equate cybersecurity with information security or security alone. However, security is a state, while cybersecurity is a process.

A quick-and-easy guide to core business and career concepts - no MBA required. The ability to negotiate a deal. Confidence to oversee staff. Complete, accurate monitoring of expenses. In today's business world, these are must-have skills. But all too often, comprehensive business books turn the important details of best practices into tedious listening that would put even a CEO to sleep. From hiring and firing to strategizing and calculating revenues, Negotiating 101 is an easy-to-understand road map of today's complex business world.

After listening to Ignite Your Sales Strategy: A Field Guide to Accelerating Your Pipeline, you’ll be able to think and act strategically, construct a seamless sales pipeline process, understand your customers’ buying factors for each unique sale, proactively manage the key influencers, navigate the competitive landscape, and assess the true value of your solution.

This audiobook outlines how you might use Lean to do more with less within your recruitment process. This audiobook is used to remind ourselves again that the core idea of Lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste.

Best-selling authors and business experts Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O'Connell contend that most companies, both digital and brick-and-mortar, B2B or B2C, are not designed for service - to provide an experience that matches a customer's expectations with every interaction and serves the company's needs. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it's the experience that makes the difference.

The Art of Military Strategy: Lessons from Sun Tzu, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte introduces listeners to the leadership, strategies, and battle exploits of these three great men. With this audiobook, you’ll understand how they influenced their generations and the impact they've had on the history of the world.

Every entrepreneur has a story to tell, whether they’re running seven-figure startups or small personal brands. Your story is the most powerful asset you have at your disposal. It can cut through the noise and connect you with your customers. Content marketing is one of the most affordable and powerful digital marketing tools available to tell your story at scale. The Story Engine provides a clear, concise, and actionable strategy to reap the benefits of inbound marketing.

Marketing Management contains eight manuscripts in one book to help your business grow to new heights with expert marketing techniques.

Partnership marketing is not new; it has existed in many different forms, and under many different names (such as affiliate marketing) for decades. However, thanks to transformative changes in enabling technology and pricing models, as well as a change in both supply and demand, partnership marketing now exists in a more automated, scalable form that few companies have fully leveraged to date. Moving to Outcomes will unlock the keys and show readers how to do so for themselves.

The global coronavirus pandemic has thrown into stark relief how "business as usual" is no longer serving us. The economic, business, and environmental models of the past do not reflect our current realities. And for our economy - for us - to survive, we need nothing less than a seismic shift in the way we do business.

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.

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.