Strategic Planning

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?"

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."

Transforming Project Management takes you beyond envisioning a great strategy and into the realm of implementing it - with skill, care, and expertise. Petersen explains how to break down a strategic plan into key objectives and project portfolios to make sense of all the project "parts" - then successfully lead the execution of the plan.

Africa's Business Revolution provides the inside story on business in Africa and its future growth prospects and helps executives understand and seize the opportunities for building profitable, sustainable enterprises.

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.

Would you like to have better solutions to your problems? Struggling to understand why things went wrong when you did everything right? The Art of Thinking in Systems can help you with these problems. You think systems thinking is for politicians, and powerful CEO's? Let me tell you this: a small business is a system, your class at school is a system, your family is a system. You are the element of larger systems - your town, your country, the world. These systems have a different dynamic. The more you know about their nature, the more optimal solutions you'll find to problems.

Having a plan is an essential part of life, no matter what you want - whether you are simply going to the shops and need to plan a route and things you want to buy or looking at a long-term future goals for finances or your career. In Strategic Planning: The Ultimate Guide to Be Unstoppable, Achieve Your Goals and Get Everything You Want, you will find all the information you will need to become an expert planner.

Whether you want to (1) blow the competition out of the water, (2) boost your confidence, or just (3) start winning more often, this audiobook will get you there. You will learn how to identify and remove any hindrances that may stand in your way and how to stride into each challenge, head up, with confidence and a strong desire to compete at your highest level.

Apply systems thinking in your problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without the need to become a technical professional. Think in Systems is a concise information manual offering high-level problem-solving methods for personal and global issues. The guide presents the main features of systems thinking in an understandable and everyday manner, helping you to develop this skill top analysts and world leaders use.

Digital transformation is much more than building a digital infrastructure to gather and process data. It is about understanding how digital technologies enable the creation of innovative services and products. It is about identifying new competitive positions and business models and thinking critically about how to both create and capture value. Strategy in the Digital Age directly engages these concerns and provides a comprehensive roadmap for planning a successful digital strategy and executing a digital transformation in organizations.

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This insightful guide provides a proven process for strategy design combined with The Nine Elements of Organizational Identity framework to align action for success. Whether you're a seasoned executive or a budding entrepreneur, this book is packed with valuable resources.