Strategic Planning

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.

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.

Retire-Me-Not-Planning might sound more like you...And you just realized that retirement planning isn’t something you can wait until retirement to do? You’re not alone… Almost half of the American workforce lacks an available retirement plan. When we’re young, it’s impossible to fathom a future in which we’ll be old enough to retire, and as our careers blossom and our lives fill up, it’s easy to let retirement planning slip by the wayside.

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.

An organization's future success depends on their decision makers' ability to anticipate changes and disruptions in the marketplace. This book provides the information you need to anticipate the future, understand tomorrow's market dynamics, and make the necessary decisions to meet the future on your terms. Small Data, Big Disruptions lets you exploit the period between the moment you could know about emerging disruptions and the moment most everybody will know about it. It's the difference between being ahead of the curve and struggling to catch up.

This book explains why meaningful innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency and how large corporations can harness the power of small teams—startups—to drive radical change through systematic experimentation.

I am a master at crafting bullshit, and you, dear listener, will do well to listen to me. I've written millions of words - speeches, strategic plans, articles, and all sorts of marketing lies and spins that I politely call corporate gargle. I've done that for a gaggle of executives who toil for businesses large and small, manufacturers and service providers, technologists, and accountants. I've been practicing this dark, draconian art and teaching others how to follow my lead for 40 years.

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.

Start making choices now that serve your desired future. Today’s fast-paced and radically shifting business world means that many leaders, even those considered successful, are simply navigating urgent tasks with little to no strategy. In Strategy to Action, award-winning educator and coach Keita Demming of The Covenant Group presents an innovative and deceptively simple tool to help business professionals unite their short-term tactics with their long-term goals.

Sales is the oxygen of every organization, whether it be a company, charity or not-for-profit. So it logically follows that "Why should I choose you?" is the single most important question an organization must answer in order to survive and thrive. This book describes a process over 400 leaders have used to define the ONE thing, at their core, that makes them uniquely remarkable–in 7 words or less. This short expression of your organization's root value does a number of critical things for you:

The world is changing drastically before our eyes - will you be prepared for what comes next? A groundbreaking analysis from one of the world's foremost experts on global trends, including analysis on how COVID-19 will amplify and accelerate each of these changes. By 2030: there will be more grandparents than grandchildren; the middle class in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the US and Europe combined; the global economy will be driven by the non-Western consumer for the first time in modern history; and much more....

Based on extensive primary research conducted over more than fifteen years, this book documents the differential contribution of HP's successive CEOs in sustaining the company's integral process of becoming. It uses a comprehensive strategic leadership framework to examine and explain the role of the CEO: (1) defining and executing the key tasks of strategic leadership, and (2) developing four key elements of the company's strategic leadership capability.

Business leaders are continually told they need to embrace digital disruption wholeheartedly to thrive in the 21st century. Legacy companies, we hear, are all doomed to fail unless they double down on the latest digital innovations, and disruptors are ordained to take over the world. Digital innovation is the answer to everything. False! Nothing in life or business is ever that simple.

In today’s world, the acceleration of megatrends – increasing longevity and the explosion of technology among many others – are transforming life as we now know it. In The Perennials, bestselling author of 2030 Mauro Guillén unpacks a sweeping societal shift triggered by demographic and technological transformation. Guillén argues that outmoded terms like Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have long been used to pigeonhole us into rigid categories and life stages, artificially preventing people from reaching their full potential.

After a decade of rapid growth, the world’s most celebrated emerging markets are poised to slow down. Which countries will rise to challenge them? To identify the economic stars of the future, we should abandon the habit of extrapolating from the recent past and lumping wildly diverse countries together. We need to remember that sustained economic success is a rare phenomenon. As an era of easy money and easy growth comes to a close, China in particular will cool down.

Even with the economy feeling a little bit better, there is a real fear that markets will stay down and things won't ever get back to normal. But a few brave voices say that this attitude is just too pessimistic.Capitalism has not failed. And it's not time to just give up - on free markets or a better tomorrow. History shows that every time the economy was thought to be done, worn out, finished, it bounced back. The economy is not as fragile as the pessimists think. In fact, things are already improving.

First introduced in Anne Marie Knott's influential Harvard Business Review article, RQTM (Research Quotient) is a revolutionary new tool that measures a company's R&D capability - its ability to convert investment in R&D into products and services people want to buy or to reduce the cost of producing these.

Contending with the 24/7 news cycle and an endless barrage of choices and information has stymied leadership and decision-making strategies. The broad-based reaction to this chaotic, unmanageable assault has been to retrench, and to focus on immediate, controllable decisions. In the process, we lose sight of the horizon. More dangerous still, is the shift we've seen from value creation to wealth creation, in a transaction-based society in which the "deal" is more important than the value it drives or the relationships it is based on.