Strategic Business Management

The breakthrough concepts of Pattern Breakers come from the observations of Mike Maples Jr., a seasoned venture capitalist, who noticed something strange. Start-ups like Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft had achieved extraordinary success despite their disregard for “best practices.” In contrast, other startups deemed highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right. Seeking answers, Maples and coauthor Peter Ziebelman set out to discover the hidden forces that drive extraordinary start-up success.

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.

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.

Never Say Sell explains how to scale individual engagements into long-term business relationships. Cowritten by Tom McMakin, the coauthor of How Clients Buy and expert in account development, and colleague Jacob Parks, this book provides insights into how key rainmakers at firms like Accenture and IBM drive growth from existing relationships. Never Say Sell is a business development guide for professional service providers like consultants, accountants, and lawyers, whether they are sole proprietors or members of account teams tasked with expanding key accounts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Strategic, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Rich Horwath delivers an incisive roadmap to help leaders at all levels think, plan, and act strategically to navigate every business challenge they face. The book offers business leaders a proven framework—the Strategic Fitness System—containing dozens of tools, techniques, and checklists to confidently master every area of the business, from designing market-winning strategies to shaping the organization's culture.

My new series Start up Business can help you to get the healthy balance between business and family life to achieve true wealth and happiness. If you are considering the possibility of launching your own company, I offer encouragement; if you have vision and the willingness to work hard at something about which you are passionate, you too can succeed as an entrepreneur. If you have recently become an entrepreneur, this book will help you to draft a blueprint for your own career.

The Art of Strategic Partnering is a how-to guide for creating and managing successful strategic partnerships. Made for entrepreneurial leaders and executives, this audiobook shows you how to grow a company and achieve game-changing results. Learn tried-and-true lessons from a Silicon Valley industry expert who has successfully negotiated and managed more than 150 strategic partnerships.

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.

Strategic initiatives are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to putting strategy into action, and leading a critical initiative may be the key to propelling your career forward. Yet managing a cross-functional team on a high-profile project can present a multitude of challenges and risks, causing even the most experienced manager to struggle.

A year's worth of management wisdom, all in one place. We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up to date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Ginni Rometty to Robert I. Sutton and company examples from Maersk to Nvidia, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

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.

Everyone complains about time speeding up, so we've done something fast, easy, and simple to solve this problem for entrepreneurs around the world. The 25-Year Framework is a single solution for dozens of the most irritating and energy-draining time pressures that plague the business and personal lives of even the most successful entrepreneurs and their teams. What's even better, the transformation from "time scarcity" to "time abundance" begins to occur in the 60 minutes it will take you to listen to this book.

In Ruthless Consistency, Michael Canic identifies the three surprising reasons most strategic change initiatives fail: Leaders unwittingly send mixed messages that demotivate their people and undermine those initiatives; leaders focus on what they do instead of what their people experience; and leaders are not as committed as they think they are or need to be. The book then introduces an intuitive yet comprehensive model for success.

Every day, there are multiple things vying for our attention - people, businesses, technologies, apps. But many of us don’t realize that our attention is our property. It belongs to us just like any other resource we own. And when we choose what we give our attention to, we can focus fully on our own purpose and on what’s best for us. When you take a step back and think about your thinking, you can take control of your attention, as well as your time and your purpose, rather than allowing others to be in control. It’s up to you.

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.