Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"—a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the typical response was just to apply it again—with greater enthusiasm.

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to - and approach for - overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy”.

What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.

The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses - the art of the entrepreneur - can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and start-up founders.

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the "Hooked Model", a four-step process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive cycles through the hook, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly - without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

You know your product is awesome, but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition, or trying to attract the widest customer base. So, what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech executive, will enlighten you.

Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.

This audiobook was created based on Clayton Christensen's landmark book The Innovator's Dilemma. This was Mr. Christensen's synopsis of his book for the Harvard Business Review. The audio tracks listed here cover the key elements of Mr. Christensen's book. This audiobook emphasizes the Idea in Brief "Does my organization have the right resources, processes, values, and team to innovate?" Then it covers the right structure for your specific type of innovation.

We've all had experiences with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the people around them and always need to be the smartest people in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them.

Harvard Business Review is the foremost destination for smart management thinking. Now, at its 100th anniversary, this commemorative volume brings together the most influential ideas since its inception. With thought leaders including Michael E. Porter, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book puts HBR's greatest concepts at your fingertips. You'll learn how these groundbreaking ideas continue to be relevant in today's business context—and what to keep in mind as you prepare for the future.

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

In The Outsiders, you'll learn the traits and methods striking for their consistency and relentless rationality that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance. Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value.

The Advice Trap is about getting to grips with how to actually change your behavior, so you stay curious a little bit longer. It sounds like it should be easy, but it’s not. To get there, leading coach and trainer Michael Bungay Stanier offers specific coaching strategies, particularly on how to focus on what matters most. The audiobook of The Advice Trap gives you tools to make your conversations, coaching, and otherwise, irresistible.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

For decades, Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country's business and management philosophers" ( Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management - the executive. The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done". This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive.