Business Forecasting

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to this book. This selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles will help you understand the dynamics of competition, find new sources of advantage, and create and capture lasting value.

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.

What if strategy could instead be clear, simple, bold, and even actually useful? That’s what No Bullsh*t Strategy is all about. It sweeps away all the garbled corporate nonsense and dry academic theorising to leave you with pure strategic sauce, which can be actioned right away. It’ll make you see your business in a totally new light, and effortlessly unlock insights you didn’t know you had in you. Even better, it makes strategy fun.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you learn the most important ideas in leadership and management, feel confident in your business classes, and be ready to thrive in any role you take on. This book will inspire you to: succeed by playing to your strengths; learn to be more persuasive; give killer presentations; perfect your business-writing skills; find your authentic voice and leadership style; and build a purposeful career.

Business partnerships are wonderfully complex entities. As with all relationships, they are vulnerable and subject to fallibility. If you think the fact that one in every two marriages in the United States ends in divorce (that's one every 36 seconds!) is unbelievable, then consider this: The number is significantly higher for business partnerships; about 70 percent of them fail. As a business partnership relationship coach, my mission is to help flip this fail/succeed ratio.

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.

Strategy is about shaping the future. Thinking strategically is what separates good managers and great leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. Strategy is simple, but simple is complex.

Many companies are stuck with digital transformations that are not moving the needle. There are no quick fixes but there is a playbook. The answer is in rewiring your business so hundreds, thousands, of teams can harness technology to continuously create great customer experiences, lower unit costs, and generate value. It's the capabilities of the organization that win the race. McKinsey Digital's top leaders Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Rodney W. Zemmel provide proven how-to details on what it takes in six comprehensive sections.

An introduction for everyone. Rather than a "how to" for hands-on techies, this book - now in its revised and updated edition - serves lay listeners and experts alike by covering new case studies and the latest state-of-the-art techniques. In this rich, fascinating, and surprisingly accessible introduction, leading expert Eric Siegel reveals how predictive analytics works and how it affects everyone every day.

Tom Howard’s book is a step-by-step explanation of how you close the deal. Tell people how great your company is, not how big your ego is, about making the tough decisions. He chose going into the blue collar trades as a way to make his millions. You have everything to gain by learning from a master. He explains his mistakes as well as his successes, the critical importance of sales plans, empowering your employees, branding

Managing an effective sales organization is key to revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and business results. But whether you're a sales manager or leading a large sales force, it's increasingly challenging to balance success today with driving the digital sales transformation that will position your team for the future. With actionable insights and examples from many industries worldwide, the HBR Sales Management Handbook provides the resources you need to build value for your company, your customers, and your sales teams.

In today's environment of partial attention and isolating remote work, few things are more satisfying than group experiences that produce powerful, meaningful connections and output. But this kind of enlivening, collective work doesn't happen by chance. It must be consciously designed and purposefully activated—in a team, an organization, and a culture. The good news is that making space for this kind of work doesn't have to be hard. There's a technique available to everyone, with no special certification required: gamestorming.

Scale your company and prepare it for exit with the Billion Dollar Bullseye formula, inspired by Jonathan “JCron” Cronstedt's remarkable two-billion-dollar valuation journey as the president of Kajabi. As a visionary entrepreneur, JCron shares his invaluable insights and strategies for scaling businesses to unprecedented heights and how to navigate the resulting options intentionally. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or an aspiring business owner dreaming of your own billion-dollar bullseye, this book provides the blueprint for achieving your goals.

A comprehensive guide to successful event management, this audiobook serves as a valuable resource for both beginners and seasoned professionals, equipping them with the tools needed to plan, execute, and evaluate memorable events. The guide takes listeners through a deep exploration of understanding their audience, conceptualizing resonant events, managing budgets, procuring vendors, effectively marketing, and embracing technology. It also emphasizes the power of networking and the importance of post-event evaluation for continuous improvement.

It's your responsibility as a manager to ensure that your work—and the work of your team—aligns with the overarching objectives of your organization. But when you're faced with competing projects and limited time, it's difficult to keep strategy front of mind. How do you keep your eye on the long term amid a sea of short-term demands? The HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically provides practical advice and tips to help you see the big-picture perspective in every aspect of your daily work, from making decisions to setting team priorities to attacking your own to-do list.

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.

Algorithms, machine learning, generative AI. With the latest advancements in technology, data is taking center stage in organizations. But without a clear plan for how you're storing, integrating, and gaining value from that information, your company will be at risk—and fall behind. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on setting a data strategy in your organization, listen to these ten articles.

With over 50 years of diverse experience as a CEO, founder, president, acquirer, and CFO of companies surpassing $100 million in revenue, C. Joseph Incrocci has established himself as one of Chicago's leading business consultants specializing in leading, growing, and sometimes outright rescuing privately held mid-market firms. Notably, he was an early adopter of Lean Manufacturing, a distinction that led to his inclusion in a prestigious case study conducted by the University of Chicago.

You're probably aware that generative AI can output quality text and create stunning images in seconds. But smart managers are now using gen AI for high-level work—problem-solving, driving innovation, strategic thinking, and dozens of other applications. Managers who develop their generative AI capabilities will soon be leaping ahead of those who don't. Fortunately, you can start today and see immediate results. The HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers is packed with practical tips, prompts, and case studies to accelerate and improve countless aspects of your work.

In The Strategy Dialogues, you will find the answers to these questions. In this transformative book, former US Assistant Secretary of State, accomplished CEO, and award-winning professor Dr. John Hillen invites you to eavesdrop on a series of strategy workshops and conversations, offering a front-row seat to witness the basic tools of strategic thinking applied to real-world organizational challenges.