Strategic Business Management

Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior.

There's a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization's strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they're misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, "What problem are we trying to solve?"

Knowing the concepts of management accounting can have a very positive impact on your business. Through management accounting, you can create forecasts for the future, make smart buying decisions, analyze the rate of return on an investment and much more. Management accountants do a lot when it comes to the management aspect of running a business. Perhaps you are a management accountant, thinking of becoming one, or will be hiring someone who is proficient in the field. If so, this book is for you.

In the second edition of the best-selling Becoming a Strategic Leader, Richard L. Hughes, Katherine Colarelli Beatty, and David L. Dinwoodie draw from the Center for Creative Leadership's (CCL) acclaimed Leading Strategically program to offer executives and managers a comprehensive approach to strategic leadership that reaches leaders at all levels of organizations. This thoroughly revised edition concentrates on practical tools for producing impact right away.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.

Every owner will exit his or her business one day. In this fast-paced, easy read, we explore the critical strategies and tools that pave the way for a successful exit - on your terms, and we help you avoid the pitfalls that can derail your best intentions. Straight Talk will help you set the foundation for your succession, whether you plan to exit in one year, five years, or 15 years.

In this book, Art Kleiner, a strategy expert; Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist; and Josie Thomson, an executive coach, give a transformative explanation of how cutting-edge neuroscience can help business leaders set a course toward better management. Mapping the functions of a manager onto established patterns of mental activity, they identify crucial brain circuits and their parallels in organizational culture. Strategic leaders, they show, play the role of wise advocates: able to go beyond day-to-day transactional behavior to a longer-term, broader perspective....

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.

In "The Modern Machiavelli: Mastering the Art of Strategic Power," you will discover a captivating exploration of Machiavellianism adapted for the contemporary landscape by Godric Hunt. This revolutionary work delves deeply into the core of strategic power, weaving together ethics, empathy, and a profound understanding of human dynamics to present a Machiavellian vision that goes beyond conventional interpretations.

A breakthrough solution is exposed when some unexpected events force Caroline and Paul, a married couple working for their family's retail business, to make a few small changes in the way things are done. A solution that propels the family's regional chain of stores into a very profitable, rapidly growing, international enterprise. If there is a hint of Jonah, from The Goal, reappearing in this novel, it is Henry, the soon-to-retire president and majority owner of the company who logically states that, "if you do not deal directly with the core problem, don't expect significant improvement."

These days, whenever anything spreads, whether it's a YouTube fad or a political rumor, we say it went viral. But how does virality actually work? In The Rules of Contagion, epidemiologist Adam Kucharski explores topics including gun violence, online manipulation, and, of course, outbreaks of disease to show how much we get wrong about contagion, and how astonishing the real science is. Why did the president retweet a Mussolini quote as his own? Why do financial bubbles take off so quickly?

Life is full of uncertainty. You don't know what lies ahead. But you can learn to control the controllable by using logic and reason. With the help of this book, you'll discover new ways to think about - and solve - problems more efficiently than ever before. Discover how strategic games model real-life behavior.

Robert Prechter proposes a new science called socionomics. It's the study of how humans interact and how that interaction determines the course of the economy, culture, and history.

Jim Rogers, whose entertaining accounts of his travels around the world - studying the markets from Russia to Singapore from the ground up - has enthralled investors and Wall Street aficionados for two decades. In his engaging memoir Street Smarts, Rogers offers pithy commentary from a lifetime of adventure, from his early years growing up a naïve kid in Demopolis, Alabama, to his fledgling career on Wall Street, to his cofounding the wildly successful Quantum Fund [omit George Soros], Rogers always had a restless curiosity to experience and understand the world around him.

It is not a massive treatise on everything you should know as a CFO. But the book contains shortcuts a CFO can use to earn credibility and trust. This will help create change within the organization. One of the biggest challenges for a new CFO is often there’s not a job description. It’s usually something vague like “make the CEO look good and help the company succeed”. How do you do that exactly? This book is unlike any other of its kind. We’ve cut to the chase and shared with the CFO what they need to do and how to do it.

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

As globalization creates increasing challenges to established marketing practices, marketing efforts need to reposition and adapt continuously to maintain an organization's ability to reach potential customers. This Very Short Introduction provides a general overview of the function and importance of marketing to modern organizations. Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh discusses how marketing remains central to creating competitive advantage, and why it needs to be forward looking and constantly reinventing itself in line with new developments in the marketplace.

Generative AI, biometrics, spatial computing, electric vehicles—new technologies like these are reshaping organizations at the hybrid office, on factory floors, and in the C-suite. What should you and your company be doing now to take advantage of the new opportunities these technologies are creating—and avoid falling victim to disruption? The Year in Tech 2025 will help you understand what the latest and most important tech innovations mean for your organization and how you can use them to compete and win in today's turbulent business environment.

Your value to your clients extends well beyond the diligent bookkeeping you bring into their business–it’s the intelligence you can provide. It’s the insights that emerge from your experience, your facilitation, and the powerful questions you ask.