Management Problem Solving

Science confirms the distinction between the biological brain and the conscious mind. Each day, a game of mind versus matter plays out on a field defined by the problems we must solve. Most are routine, and don't demand a more mindful approach. It's when we're faced with more difficult challenges that our thinking becomes vulnerable to brain patterns that can lead us astray.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

A New York Times best-selling author reveals how to find the right words for every situation. Whether you are making a budget request, interviewing for a job, ending a relationship, or talking to children about divorce, the crux of success in those and other crucial situations is planned, effective communication.

In How to Kill a Unicorn, Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm, and offers inside accounts of how they solved their biggest challenges. Embedded in their approach to new ideas are hard-earned lessons about what separates innovations that work from those that don’t.

Moments of Impact is an audiobook on a mission: to eradicate time-sucking, energy-depleting workshops and meetings. In our fast-changing world, organizations have important challenges and opportunities to address - and no time to waste. Moments of Impact delivers the single most useful resource for managers and leaders who need better strategic conversation - now - to shape the future of their organizations.

Customers can be a mystery. Despite the availability of more data than ever before, everyone, from the CEO to salespeople in the field, struggles to understand who their customers really are, what they want, why they lose them, and how to regain them. To crack the case, start thinking like a market detective. David Scott Duncan shows how in his entertaining story of Tazza, a fictional chain of cafes with declining sales and leaders urgently seeking to understand why.

Data. It's the benchmark that informs corporate projections, decision-making, and analysis. But, why do many organizations that see themselves as data-driven fail to thrive? In Leading with AI and Analytics, two renowned experts from the Kellogg School of Management show business leaders how to transform their organization to become evidence-driven, which leads to real, measurable changes that can help propel their companies to the top of their industries.

The traditional hierarchy of business leadership is being proven more and more each year to be unsustainable. In an economy where innovation is king, companies find it much more difficult to create competitive advantages when ideas, solutions, and strategies flow from the top down. In Break Through to Yes, Dave Savage offers 10 steps to heading a company in the right direction.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

Agile project management has grown in popularity over the past several years. Change is occurring so fast that many organizations are unable to keep up with the demands of a changing global world. Your ability to quickly change and adapt to your environment will make or break, not only your career but could be the deciding factor as to whether your company survives in the coming years.

The Innovative Team is an engaging business fable that reveals the impact our underlying work style preferences have on our teams and their results. The authors present a breakthrough thinking process for developing successful teams. They introduce a uniquely effective set of tools built on FourSight, a measure of problem-solving preferences field-tested by top consultants, which can help anyone from professionals to novices solve problems and achieve performance breakthroughs.

La conduite d'une démarche de changement est un exercice difficile. Souvent, elle dure plus longtemps que prévu, coûte plus cher que prévu et est parfois même abandonnée pour revenir vite à l'état initial. Les bonnes intentions et l'engagement des décideurs, la pertinence du but recherché ne sont pas des garanties de succès. Il ne suffit pas d'expliquer que le changement proposé est bon, intelligent, utile, stratégique. Le changement est aussi question de méthode et d'outils.

Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.

In the early 1980s, Harley-Davidson was on the verge of bankruptcy. In the general public's opinion, quality was substandard - of both motorcycles and riders. Harleys leaked oil and were often broken down. Riders were roughnecks, out to raise hell. The Harley-Davidson brand was tarnished. What s more, the charges were true.By the mid-1980s, Harley couldn't produce enough bikes to keep the public happy. Dealers were selling bikes off the showroom floor, struggling to assuage customers frustration.

In no other time in recent history have leaders in every industry and on every continent grappled with so many changes that have independently and simultaneously undermined their ability to lead. The Prepared Leader encapsulates more than two decades of the authors' research to convey how it has positioned them to navigate through the distinct challenges of today and tomorrow. Their insights have implications for every leader in every industry and every worker at every level.

Dr. McKibben guides us through her revolutionary and innovative self-help technique of dropping to the blank screen to learn how to manage triggered feelings and to understand why we feel the way we do. By monitoring neuromuscular signals that indicate unconscious triggered emotions, we can work with the brain rather than against it. She teaches us a practical, self-reliant method to retrain our brains and change our responses to life's stressors.

Research and experience demonstrate two areas with which many new managers are completely unfamiliar: delegating tasks and work and making decisions. Some struggle with this for years. But it doesn't have to be hard. 151 Quick Ideas for Delegating and Decision Making combines 50 years' experience of two managers and the experiences of other managers who have been interviewed and observed. And even if you are already in a supervisory position, this book can help you do a more effective and efficient job at managing people and tasks.

Today, we’ll tackle several skills and abilities you should master before you start or run a business. These are: Communication tools and skills that are typically used in the workplace. Too many problems exist in businesses because of miscommunication, delays, and faulty reasoning. Presentation skills. These will come in handy when selling, getting partners, negotiating, or marketing a product or service. We will go over some tips that can boost your presentation skills.

Should your company pursue global expansion or mine local opportunities? Take risks to grow dramatically or protect your current stability? Seek to maximize sales or the bottom line? We're so often faced with apparent paradoxes: continuity and change, conservatism and progressiveness, predictability and chaos. In business, inherent tensions are mistakenly viewed as problems to be resolved once the "correct" answer is found. But when we consider only one direction - either A or B - we only see part of the picture.

Atteindre le succès en cinq jours, c'est facile ! Chaque jour, les entrepreneurs et les dirigeants font face à la grande question : par quoi faut-il commencer ? Quelle chose est plus importante que les autres ? Comment organiser les réunions et les discussions afin de trouver la solution et de ne pas tomber dans le chaos ? Designer Jake Knapp accompagné par Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky a créé une stratégie novatrice qui a pour but d'aider à trouver la meilleure idée pour votre entreprise. Ils proposent le plan précis de cinq jours.