Showing titles in Forecasting & Strategic Planning

In this paradigm-shifting book, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and sustainable business guru Andrew Winston provide a model to help leaders build companies that contribute more to the world than they use or take - that is, net positive companies. Net Positive outlines the principles and practices for surviving and thriving based on the experience of one world-leading company, Unilever, and other groundbreaking global organizations.

Most company's change initiatives fail. Yours don't have to.

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.

Not all customers are the same, regardless of how they appear on the surface. The most successful companies, from Amazon to Best Buy, understand their best customers are their most valuable asset, and they tailor their acquisition, development, and retention efforts to those customers. In The Customer Centricity Playbook, Wharton School professor Peter Fader and Wharton Interactive's executive director Sarah Toms help you see your customers as individuals rather than a monolith, so you can stop wasting resources by chasing down product sales to each and every consumer.

In 2011, Tim Cook took on an impossible task - following in the footsteps of one of history's greatest business visionaries, Steve Jobs. Facing worldwide scrutiny, Cook (who was often described as shy, unassuming and unimaginative) defied all expectations. Under Cook's leadership Apple has soared: its stock has nearly tripled to become the world's first trillion-dollar company. From the massive growth of the iPhone to new victories like the Apple Watch, Cook is leading Apple to a new era of success.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the lean start-up approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Start-ups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step customer development process for search and offers insight into what makes some start-ups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.

When we think about the future, it can be difficult to feel that we have any control. We aren't confident that we can take actions and make decisions that help determine what happens next. We want to feel prepared, hopeful and equipped and to face the future with optimism. Or, better yet, change the future. But how do we map out our lives when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year? Jane McGonigal, a renowned future forecaster, reveals that 'unimaginable' events aren't unimaginable before they happen.

Retired four-star general Stan McChrystal has lived a life associated with the deadly risks of combat; he has seen how individuals and organisations, too often and to great cost, fail to mitigate risk. Why? Because they focus on the probability of something happening instead of the interface by which it can be managed. In Risk, McChrystal offers a new system of responding to risk, through 10 dimensions of control we can adjust at any given time: narrative, bias, diversity, action, timing, adaptability, communication, technology, structure and leadership.

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and the general manager of IDEO, the world-famous design firm, illuminates the strategies IDEO used to beat the devil's advocate and drive creativity throughout the organization.

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.

Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems - one crazy idea at a time.

We're in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people's behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

Featuring a foreword by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, this fascinating handbook inspires potential founders and provides essential guidance and advice for people who want to create their own start-up and build a successful company. This audiobook answers the question “how do I get started?” It takes the listener from making the decision to plunge into entrepreneurship, through the process of choosing and developing an idea and team, all the way to raising capital and working with VCs and angel investors.

In The Attacker's Advantage, Charan reveals the upside of uncertainty for those leaders who are nimbly positioned to anticipate the catalysts of disruption and embrace change. He updates and adapts the principles of his previous best sellers to address the current turbulent business environment, cutting through the veil of complexity to concentrate on the new customer needs and expectations and providing the tools for corporate leaders to take their companies to a higher level.

The international best seller - don't compete without it! A major best seller in Japan, Financial Times top-ten book of the year, Book-of-the-Month Club best seller, and required reading at the best business schools, Thinking Strategically is a crash course in outmaneauvering any rival. This entertaining guide builds on scores of case studies taken from business, sports, the movies, politics, and gambling. It outlines the basics of good strategy-making and then shows how you can apply them in any area of your life.

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.

When Fortune 100 corporations are stymied, it's the "McKinsey-ites" whom they call for help. Former McKinsey associate Ethan Rasiel lifts the veil to show you how the secretive McKinsey works its magic, and helps you emulate the firm's well-honed practices in problem solving, communication, and management. Both a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most admired and secretive companies in the business world and a toolkit of problem-solving techniques without peer, The McKinsey Way empowers every business decision maker to become a better strategic player in any organization.

Get inside the minds of 30+ experts, authors, and seasoned entrepreneurs and learn from their hard-earned lessons. Discover the winning patterns of successful businesses and apply them to your own startup. Build a competitive edge and protect your business with a proven formula to scale up, add zeros to your revenue and profits, and crush the competition. Avoid common pitfalls and master the art of hacking your way to growth.

Great ideas are everywhere. You've probably already had one today. But how do you turn it into a huge business? How do you make it into a killer product, develop it with an amazing team, raise cash and smash your way to the top of the market? With solid, proven advice, expert Tom Fairey will guide you through the process so that you can avoid the pitfalls and f--kups that await you.

Seeing What's Next is a framework for predicting industry winners and losers. Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and can lead to costly errors in judgment. Internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth, present this guide for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry.