Strategic Business Management

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

In their eagerly awaited book, Kim and Spear bring to light a new theory of high-achieving organizations. They examine how companies solve the most important problems better, faster, and easier than their competitors by quickly and regularly closing the gap between aspirations and real-world success. This book teaches companies that are struggling to perform how to achieve the continual greatness seen in the best of the best.

Our companies, our communities, and our planet are facing unprecedented challenges - challenges that will not be solved by a small group of people from a single entity. Today's leaders need a set of tools specifically designed to harness the power of collaborative networks. Strategic Doing introduces you to the new disciplines of agile strategy and collaborative leadership. You'll learn how to design and guide complex collaborations by following a discipline of simple rules that you won't find anywhere else.

7 Powers breaks fresh ground by constructing a comprehensive strategy toolset that is easy for you to learn, communicate, and quickly apply. Drawing on his decades of experience as a business strategy adviser, active equity investor and Stanford University teacher Hamilton Helmer develops from first principles a practical theory of strategy rooted in the notion of power, those conditions which create the potential for persistent differential returns. Using rich real-world examples, Helmer rigorously characterizes exactly what your business must achieve to create power.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional, an aspiring entrepreneur, or simply someone seeking to amplify your impact in the world, Do More, More Naturally offers you practical strategies and immediately actionable advice to propel you toward your goals.

Are you a Simplifier or a Multiplier? Every great entrepreneur is primarily one or the other, and identifying which you are adds deeper insight and meaning to the way you instinctively create value. Once you know who you are, you can find the perfect collaborator: your opposite. Simplier-Multiplier collaborations lead to unprecedented breakthroughs and results, and give you the freedom to focus exclusively on what you do best.

The economic ground is shifting beneath our feet. The world is becoming more volatile, and people are understandably worried about their financial futures. In this urgent and accessible guide to the crises and opportunities that lie ahead, economist and former Governor of the Bank of Canada Stephen Poloz maps out the powerful tectonic forces that are shaping our future, and the ideas that will allow us to master them.

Not all heroes wear capes. You might not think of yourself as a hero, but every time you create value for others, you're benefiting people and making life easier or better for them in some way. The question is, "Who do you want to be a hero to?" By identifying the key audience you want to create value for, you focus yourself on the most crucial people in your life, helping them to grow their capabilities - and growing your own as well.

Every leader and team can use Building Strategic Organizations to deepen their understanding of essential strategy topics. You can also use these five tools to quickly develop a robust strategic plan that aligns your on-the-ground work with your strategy, priorities, and vision. Build the strategic capacity and employee engagement of your entire workforce by making sure they know why they come to work, what is most important, and what progress is being made.

While most business thinkers focus on the endgame, Snider demonstrates that your successful exit is based on what you do now to unlock the value trapped in your business. His value acceleration methodology will give you the steps to accomplish the exit planning necessary to make you five to ten times wealthier.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution provides a simple, proven formula for achieving the goals that every individual or organization needs to reach. From Marriott to the U.S. Navy, Covey and his team have worked with more than 200,000 people in hundreds of organizations to improve performance, identifying and honing four secrets of perfect execution: Focus on the Wildly Important; Act on the Lead Measures; Keep a Compelling Scoreboard; and Create a Cadence of Accountability.

Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into 19 languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into activities, or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

In their book Abundance, best-selling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the best-selling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next 10 years of rapid technological disruption.

Companies market to a younger audience because they believe that’s where the money and the excitement are. But are they wrong? Perhaps very wrong? This is only one of the counterintuitive arguments that Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, a world leader in opinion polling, tackles in his groundbreaking new book, Next. Not since Boom, Bust & Echo has a Canadian expert in what Canadians will want and need distilled the growing trends based on real and extensive demographic data and dared to forecast what will come next.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

In today's connection economy, the most successful leaders inspire their people with purpose and meaning. Powerful corporate storytelling can mobilise people around an organisational objective in a way that a focus on market share never will. Be it a digital transformation or a diversity and inclusion initiative, corporate change needs the support of the people in that organisation in order to stick. Yet, while all stories can move people to take action, storytelling isn't a one size fits all.

Even a strong leader can flounder without an effective strategy, and the most powerful strategy can fail without the right leader. Only those who master and integrate both skills can effectively navigate the challenges that lay ahead for today's organizations. The Strategic Leader's Roadmap, by Wharton management professors Harbir Singh and Michael Useem, offers a six-point checklist for leading strategically that will help managers strengthen their capacity to develop strategy and to lead its execution.

How you compensate people is one of the most important strategic decisions your company will make—but few “get it right and out of sight.” Nail it and you can add hundreds of percentage points to the bottom line while driving up the energy in the organization. Make the wrong call (or piecemeal the decision together), and the results will create needless drama throughout the organization.

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.