Future Business

Today's organizations face two daunting challenges: how to create new sources of competitive advantage to sustain long-term growth, and how to engage leaders at every level of the organization so that they are more proactive and forward-looking in their area of responsibility. The Art of Strategic Leadership uses a unique approach to examine what it means to be a strategic leader.

The world is changing faster and faster because of the internet and technology. The rigid models of leadership and long-standing rules of engagement and power we’ve come to count upon for generations are no longer reliable in this new hyper-connected and digitally-charged world we find ourselves in. This world is being fueled by openness, connection, transparency and shared power. The future of leadership mandates new levels of personal courage, self-awareness, and authenticity. To be blunt, navigating this new world can be incredibly confusing and frustrating.

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise - it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter.

Throughout the history of business, employees had to adapt to managers and managers had to adapt to organizations. In the future, this is reversed with managers and organizations adapting to employees. This means that in order to succeed and thrive, organizations must rethink and challenge everything they know about work. The demographics of employees are changing and so are employee expectations, values, attitudes, and styles of working.

In IRREPLACEABLE, you will discover techniques to boost your career using AI—without losing your job to automation; secrets to unlocking your uniquely human abilities—ones AI can never replicate; counterintuitive methods to raise Future-ready children; strategies to avoid falling into the "AI Obesity" trap; and blueprints for leveraging AI to turn your company into an unstoppable force of innovation.

In How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, veteran journalist Chris Taylor traces the series from the difficult birth of the original film through its sequels, the franchise’s death and rebirth, the prequels, and the preparations for a new trilogy. Taylor provides portraits of the friends, writers, artists, producers, and marketers who labored behind the scenes to turn Lucas’s idea into a legend.

The future of mobility is evolving at an accelerating pace. This is most evident in the automotive retail channel, as both car dealers and automakers are experiencing an enhanced level of change. The Future of Automotive Retail provides a framework for how these changes are impacting both automaker and automotive dealer. The book provides a handy framework to categorize these changes across vehicle production, evolving consumer expectations, vehicle ownership, vehicle power sources, autonomy, connectivity, and servicing of vehicles.

In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected - a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness. Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

In a period of skyrocketing student loan debt without the promise of high-paying employment, and in an economy in desperate need of skilled tradespeople, many are seeking new paths. Ken Rusk, the "million-dollar ditch digger", is here to show you that blue-collar trades are a source of pride and that you can - and will - find your version of happiness by pursuing a good old-fashioned craft. In Blue Collar Cash, Ken shares his insights from more than 30 years working in blue-collar trades as an entrepreneur, mentor, and life coach.

This insightful guide provides a proven process for strategy design combined with The Nine Elements of Organizational Identity framework to align action for success. Whether you're a seasoned executive or a budding entrepreneur, this book is packed with valuable resources.

High-tech innovations are created at a dazzling speed, and it all points to a world that is getting faster at a dizzying pace. Azeem Azhar knows this better than most. Over the last three decades, he has founded companies bought by Amazon and Microsoft, served as the Economist’s first ever internet correspondent, and created a leading international tech newsletter and podcast, the Exponential View. Now, Azhar offers a revelatory new model for understanding how technology is changing the world.

From making faster, better decisions to automating rote work to enabling robots to respond to emotions, AI and machine learning are already reshaping business and society. What should you and your company be doing today to ensure that you're poised for success and keeping up with your competitors in the age of AI? Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on AI and explains how to launch the right initiatives at your company to capitalize on the opportunity of the machine intelligence revolution.

"Middle manager." The term evokes a bygone industrial era in which managers functioned like cogs in a vast machine and bureaucracy ruled. In recent decades, midlevel managers became a favorite target for the chopping block—underappreciated, often considered a superfluous layer of the organization. Not only does this outdated perspective need to change, the future demands it. In Power to the Middle, McKinsey thought leaders Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Field call for a profound reimagining of what middle managers can and must be able to do.

In the past decade, Hollywood has endured a cataclysm on a par with the end of silent film and the demise of the studio system. Stars and directors have seen their power dwindle, while writers and producers lift their best techniques from TV, comic books, and the toy biz. The future of Hollywood is being written by powerful corporate brands like Marvel, Amazon, Netflix, and Lego, as well as censors in China. Ben Fritz chronicles this dramatic shakeup with unmatched skill, bringing equal fluency to both the financial and entertainment aspects of Hollywood.

Since the release of Doug Stephens’ first book, The Retail Revival, change in the global retail sector has accelerated beyond even the boldest forecasts. As predicted, online giants like Amazon and Alibaba.com are growing at a dizzying pace. Hundreds of well-known brick-and-mortar retailers have closed their doors, and brands and retailers across categories are struggling to understand the shifting needs and expectations of a new consumer.

Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they're primed to generate explosive reactions. Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for many successful brands, authors, and musicians, explains the new rules in a book that has become a marketing classic in Silicon Valley and around the world.

What if you created a business that provided amazing client experiences and set a new standard for what it’s like to work with a law firm? What if you slept great at night while traveling abroad for months at a time, knowing your team could run things without you with the help of thoughtful systems and optimized technology? Yes! It’s all possible. The Small Firm Roadmap Revisited will show you how to build something different—a law firm business that is people-centered, effectively managed, and ultimately more valuable.

A start-up comes to market with a new product. Using cost-effective digital marketing, they get their solution in front of those customers. Growth happens exponentially. VCs and the media pile in. Then growth slows. Eventually, the whole thing peters out, usually three years from launch. How do you prevent this from happening to your start-up? Future Demand explores the realities of how start-ups grow beyond their eager early users, providing evidence and insight into how to build your brand among the much larger group of customers who’ll buy from you in the future.

Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018 - but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced 25 years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time.

In their years of working with senior executives around the world, MIT research scientists Stephanie Woerner, Peter Weill, and Ina Sebastian noticed that these leaders knew they had to transform their businesses, but lacked a coherent framework and a common language—a playbook—to guide and motivate their employees and keep everyone focused on a common goal. Future Ready is that playbook.