Business Problem Solving

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

We spend the majority of our lives making decisions, both big and small. Yet, even though our success is largely determined by the choices that we make, very few of us are equipped with useful decision-making skills. Because of this, we often approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving them the time and thought required to put our best foot forward.

If you constantly second-guess yourself, overanalyze small decisions, or feel mentally drained trying to solve problems, this audiobook offers a transformative shift. Designed for busy professionals and thinkers ready to level up their logic, this powerful 10-in-1 guide gives you the clarity and structure you’ve been missing. Through modern examples, proven tools, and timeless mental models, you’ll learn how to think critically under pressure, make confident decisions, and protect yourself from manipulation, bias, and misinformation. This isn’t about learning more—it’s about thinking better.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

Research shows that the human mind is prone to making thinking errors. These errors leave us vulnerable to making decisions based on false beliefs, leading to disastrous consequences for our personal lives, relationships, careers, civic and political engagement, and for our society as a whole. Fortunately, cognitive and behavioral scientists have uncovered many useful strategies for overcoming our mental flaws. This book presents a variety of research-based tools for ensuring that our beliefs are aligned with reality.

A "brilliant, fun, and wise" (Cass R. Sunstein) tour of nine common business decision-making traps - and practical tools for avoiding them - from a professor of strategic thinking.

From terror attacks to the War on Terror, bursting real-estate bubbles to crystal meth epidemics, sexual predators to poisonous toys from China, our list of fears seems to be exploding. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear is running amok, and often with tragic results. In the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive instead of fly - believing they were avoiding risk - road deaths rose by 1,595. Those lives were lost to fear.

With Peter Drucker's five essential questions and the help of five of today's thought leaders, this little book will challenge readers to take a close look at the very heart of their organizations and what drives them. A tool for self-assessment and transformation, answering these five questions will fundamentally change the way you work, helping you lead your organization to an exceptional level of performance.

Um Cisne Negro é um evento que reúne três características principais: é altamente improvável, produz um enorme impacto e, depois que acontece, inventamos uma explicação que o faça parecer menos aleatório e mais previsível do que de fato é. Para Nassim Nicholas Taleb, esse fenômeno está na base de quase tudo que acontece no mundo — da ascensão das religiões aos acontecimentos em nossas próprias vidas. O incrível êxito do Google, por exemplo, foi um Cisne Negro, assim como o Onze de Setembro.

In How to Kill a Unicorn, Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm, and offers inside accounts of how they solved their biggest challenges. Embedded in their approach to new ideas are hard-earned lessons about what separates innovations that work from those that don’t.

Manager 3.0 is the first-ever management guide for Millennials. They will master crucial skills such as dealing with difficult people, delivering constructive feedback, and making tough decisions - while gaining insight into the four generations in the workplace and how they can successfully bring out the best in each. Packed with interviews and examples from companies like Zappos, Groupon, Southwest Airlines, and Google, Manager 3.0 will help these new managers enhance their unique talents while developing a leadership style all their own.

An homage to society's innovators and maintainers, Wicked Problems offers a refreshing vision for listeners of all backgrounds to build a better future and demonstrates how engineering is a cultural choice-one that requires us to restlessly find ways to transform society, but perhaps more critically, to care for the creations that already exist.

Based on extensive multi-year empirical research, The Pragmatic Optimist addresses what it takes to be a leading light in the darkest hours of a business or economic crisis. Using real-world case studies, you will discover how to avoid the common cognitive and behavioral traps to which all leaders are most susceptible in the heat of a crisis. Finally, you will acquire the necessary insights to develop pragmatic optimism—a winning hybrid mindset—and practice its six results-oriented strategies for success even under extreme conditions.

This book adds examples from over twenty years of experience by Dr. Liker in working with companies outside of Toyota. This audiobook treats you as a student who will be actively engaged in developing lean leader skills as you read. It acts as a tutorial for beginning the journey!

Not all heroes wear capes. You might not think of yourself as a hero, but every time you create value for others, you're benefiting people and making life easier or better for them in some way. The question is, "Who do you want to be a hero to?" By identifying the key audience you want to create value for, you focus yourself on the most crucial people in your life, helping them to grow their capabilities - and growing your own as well.

Imagine you’ve just come back to work after a two-week vacation during which you actually relaxed, without calling in or checking e-mail. You discover that there are no pressing issues and that, on the contrary, your team scored a big new customer and fixed a nagging problem during your absence. No red flags or fires to put out. Sadly, for most leaders this scenario is only a dream. They constantly check on what’s happen­ing because they expect the worst (and usually get it).

Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.

This is a book about common sense—what it is, how to make it, and how to put it into practice across all contexts of leadership and life. It's also a book of stories from my leadership journey across continents, cultures, and contexts (e.g., combat, business, and government). In this book, you’ll learn what I learned and what many other common-sense leaders across the ages have learned before us.

Leading with Strategic Thinking reveals what effective leaders do differently. Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success - whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over 300 leaders from around the world.

Experience is a great teacher . . . except when it isn't. In this groundbreaking guide, learn how the past can deceive and limit us -- and how healthy skepticism can build a better world. Our personal experience is key to who we are and what we do. We judge others by their experience and are...