Showing titles in Forecasting & Strategic Planning

In the decade since their blockbuster international best seller Winning was published, Jack and Suzy Welch have dug deeper into business, traveling the world; consulting to organizations of every size and in every industry; speaking before hundreds of audiences; working closely with entrepreneurs from Mumbai to Silicon Valley; and, in 2010, starting their own fully accredited online MBA program, which now has approximately 1,000 students enrolled.

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant new reality. But more modest endeavours, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, commonly fail. Why? Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed.

One of the greatest challenges facing business owners globally is that they simply don't charge enough for what they do. And this leads to all kinds of nasty problems. There has never been a better time to put an end to this self-destructive business practice once and for all. Someone Has To Be The Most Expensive, Why Not Make It You? is the culmination of Andrew Griffiths' thirty-five-year entrepreneurial journey.

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.

Whether you're starting a new business or you've been trading for a while, Creating a Business Plan for Dummies covers everything you need to know. Figure out whether your business idea is likely to work, how to identify your strategic advantage, and what you can do to gain an edge on the competition. Discover why a business plan doesn't have to be a 30-page document that takes days to write, but can be a simple process that you do in stages as you work through your business concept.

You know who your competitors are. You keep tabs on them regularly, and can list them calmly, along with their strengths and weaknesses. But your enemies are a whole other matter. They’re the haters and the doubters who said you’d never make it, the ones who stomped on your dreams. When you think about your enemies, you get emotional. You feel like you won’t let anything—or anyone—stop you.

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies - from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history - the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it.

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.

Pattern Breakers had its roots in the time when Mike Maples, a seasoned venture capitalist, was stumped, unable to get a grip on why some businesses he funded—Twitter, Twitch, and Okta, for example—took off, while others, some deemed “most likely to succeed,” shut their doors despite doing everything right. Was it dumb luck that separated gold from dross?

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."

J. J. Sutherland has the solution. In his international best seller Scrum, he introduced a simple, revolutionary tool to turbo-charge the output of every team. Based on decades of research and road-tested at the headquarters of Google and Amazon, the Scrum method transformed how a generation of leaders work - first in Silicon Valley, and then in boardrooms around the world.

Michael Porter’s groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work - competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces - but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that. This book provides an engaging summary of Porter’s ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work....

From the internationally best-selling author of Essentialism comes a guide to making the most important tasks effortless. The intricacy of modern life has created a false dichotomy between things that are 'hard and important' and those that are 'easy and trivial'. Everything has become so much harder than it ought to be. But, Greg McKeown, best-selling author of Essentialism, says, there is a third alternative. In Effortless, he offers practical strategies for making the most vital tasks the easiest ones.

In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.

Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead - and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time.

Every time we choose a route to work, decide whether to go on a second date, or set aside money for a rainy day, we are making a prediction about the future. Yet from the global financial crisis to 9/11 to the Fukushima disaster, we often fail to foresee hugely significant events. In The Signal and the Noise, the New York Times' political forecaster and statistics guru Nate Silver explores the art of prediction, revealing how we can all build a better crystal ball.

We like to think we make decisions based on good reasoning–and that our doctors, judges, politicians, economic forecasters and employers do too. In this groundbreaking book, three world-leading behavioural scientists come together to assess the last great fault in our collective decision-making: noise. We all make bad judgements more than we think. Noise shows us what we can do to make better ones.

In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a handing off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted, and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time.

If you had the opportunity to work where, when, and with whom you wanted - all while getting paid very well - would you take it? Self-made multimillionaire and best-selling author Michael Masterson did, and with Ready, Fire, Aim he'll show you how to do the same.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles (featuring "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.