Career Strategy

No one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life. Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict, and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure.

With The Strategy Activation Playbook, author Aric Wood, CEO of XPLANE, teaches you how to do what he's helped organizations around the world accomplish: align and activate the people in your organization to execute your strategy and realize your vision.

Planning a Profitable Business for Dummies explains how to build a business with profit in mind, using smart pricing techniques and clear-eyed strategic planning. Whether you're just getting started in business or still recovering from lockdown losses, this book points to where extra profits might lie.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

No pre-pandemic strategy is effective anymore. Alan Weiss has developed an original, new approach to strategy which thus far has certified over 100 people globally, delivering this approach to scores of firms of all types in four countries.

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.

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.

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.

How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors.

Influencer marketing can no longer be ignored. Whether it's broad scale celebrity endorsement, or micro-influencers with niche, highly targeted followings, influencer marketing has become a natural extension of content marketing. However, while the opportunities are vast, the very nature of influencer marketing means that a brand must relinquish control of their marketing message to allow the influencer to communicate in their natural style.

The Shibumi Strategy is a little book about a big breakthrough. It tells the story of a hardworking family man who finds himself in crisis when his company closes. Through his struggle, and guidance from unlikely sources, he learns subtle lessons in the form of "personal zen" principles, coming to understand that it is often the involuntary challenge, the setbacks, that harbor the power to transform. When approached as an opportunity - no easy task when simple survival is the first order of business - unforeseen trials can sometimes result in an altogether new lease on life.

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.

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female. If the business world had a sex, it would be male. And therein lies the pickle. Women are the engine of the global economy, driving nearly 80 percent of consumer household spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they've got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over.

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.

I can tell you that there are a plethora of strategy books out there. However, you’ll find many of them arcane, academic, and even confusing. Most were written a long time ago and use out-of-date examples from well before the tech age. Many are no longer relevant. For the past five years, I’ve been obsessed by the idea of creating a strategy operating system, and I’ve spent the past 12 months figuring out how to design one.

Phil Town is now a very wealthy man, but he wasn't always. In fact, he was living on a salary of $4000 a year when some well-timed advice launched him down a highway of investing self-education that revealed what the true "rules" are and how to make them work in one's favor.

Managing complex projects can stretch you to the limits. But with a book full of experts coaching you each step of the way, you'll never be baffled, blocked, or misdirected again. Packed with essays and insights from the field's top professionals, The AMA Handbook of Project Management is the resource professionals and students rely on for its practical guidance and big picture overview of the entire field. Whether you need advice keeping projects on track or help preparing for certification, this new edition explains every principle, process, and development.

Struggling with social media marketing for business? Feeling overwhelmed or don't even know where to begin? This is the book for you! 500 Social Media Marketing Tips is your complete guide to social media success for business, featuring hundreds of the actionable strategies for success on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and more!

This all-time classic is still perhaps the most prestigious and influential book of strategy in the world, as eagerly studied in Asia by modern politicians and executives as it has been by military leaders since ancient times. 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. Its aim is invincibility, victory without battle, and unassailable strength through understanding the physics, politics, and psychology of conflict.

If leaders aren't integrating their digital offerings into a philosophy of customer success, they will be defeated in the next decade because technical excellence and other traditional competitive advantages are becoming too easy to imitate. The Customer Success Economy offers examples and specifics of how companies can transform. It addresses the pains of transforming organizational charts, leadership roles, responsibilities, and strategies so the whole company works together in total service to the customer.