Business Strategy Innovation

Imagine starting with a bold mission in 2012: to achieve financial inclusion through a multi-country bank. Within a decade, this vision becomes one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world. Now, picture starting this business in South Africa, a country the IMF ranked as the hardest place to...

You are not alone. Finally, here is a book that gets to the heart of what professional women really want. You have had enough of 60-hour workweeks, the day care dash, and the vacations that never get taken. You want to work, but on your own terms. Women have power. In Womenomics, journalists Shipman and Kay deal in facts. Companies with more women managers are more profitable and report higher levels of employee satisfaction.

"Innovation is an act of love—or at least it should be. Always. It is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being’s devotion to another,” writes Mauro Porcini at the beginning of this extraordinary book. It is in part a memoir by one of the world’s leading designers—the first chief design officer at both 3M and Pepsi. But even more, it is a manifesto for a genuine, authentic, and deeply humanistic approach to design, one that aims to create personal and social value first and financial and economic value afterward.

This audiobook is skilfully and inspiringly read by the author, Damian Hughes. In The Winning Mindset, Professor Damian Hughes, the acclaimed author of Liquid Thinking and How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson, draws on both his lifetime experience and academic background within sport...

Leaders all around the world at organizations of any size and type will benefit by shedding their obsolete notions about strategy and becoming more resilient. Bringing Strategy Back rises to the challenge and presents a new prescriptive model. It introduces four "strategic shock absorbers" that enable leaders to build resilient organizations that can withstand even the most unexpected global turbulence.

In this book, Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in various industries, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways - respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution - for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

Who’s going to write the next chapter in the saga of American business? Who’s going to chronicle the best way to compete, the new way to win? That’s the mission of Mavericks at Work, a book that profiles a network of rebels who are creating a new business model that makes use of fresh principles and captures what it means to be a state-of-the-art organization. Including such pioneering companies as ING Direct, Southwest Airlines, Pixar, HBO, Anthropologie, Craigslist, Netflix, and Commerce Bank, this book is nothing short of a lively new intellectual agenda for business.

How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, says management thinker Peter Drucker. In this HBR classic from 1985, he argues that innovation is real work that can and should be managed like any other corporate function. Success is more likely to result from the systematic pursuit of opportunities than from a flash of genius. Indeed, most innovative business ideas arise through the methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity.

How can great companies do everything right - identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market - and still fail? The sad truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, and then neglect the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners - some visible, some hidden - deliver on their promises, too.

Innovation expert Marion Debruyne explains how to become an outside-in organization by constantly connecting with the market to anticipate changes, converting customer insights into actionable change and collaborating with others where their own capabilities fall short. Packed with real world examples from leading global companies, Customer Innovation provides the framework needed to shift from a product-oriented to a solutions-oriented focus and from a transaction-based to a co-creation-based customer relationship.

John O’Maley’s career in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is anything but conventional. From his early career (West Point, Ranger, Captain) navigating complex military supply chains to leading forward-thinking marketing teams (P&G), he has always approached the industry’s challenges with a unique lens. Now, with AI revolutionizing the very core of how CPG brands operate, O’Maley offers an insider’s perspective spanning four decades that is both timely and transformative.

In a world where healthcare systems are on the brink of a seismic shift, The Visionary Edge is not just a book—it's a leadership playbook for tomorrow. Written by nationally recognized healthcare strategist Sumit Sharma, this groundbreaking work equips forward-thinking leaders with the models, mindsets, and foresight to lead boldly into the future. Blending compelling storytelling with enterprise-level strategy, Sharma takes listeners inside the healthcare systems of 2045, where AI partners with clinicians, decentralized care redefines delivery, and visionary leadership determines success.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland-armed with insights from some of today's top minds in business, tech, and social justice-offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change.

Big Bang Disruptions are new products and services that enter the market better and cheaper than established products, seemingly overnight. Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes offer critical insights and strategies companies are using not just to protect themselves but to create and appropriate disruptive innovations for themselves. The authors detail the four stages of big bang innovation and show leaders how to see disruptions headed their way - and take action before it’s too late.

Here's how you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth, whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job. Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. Through eye-opening stories, A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers.

Informed by interviews with corporate strategists at leading companies around the world, eminent consultants at firms such as Bain, the Boston Consulting Group, and McKinsey & Co., and the internal archives of strategic innovators such as General Electric and Shell, this book provides vivid insights into the trials and tribulations of practice innovation in strategy, and stresses the hard work of the little recognized and sometimes eccentric innovators within the profession.

As an innovator in a large company working hard to drive growth and deliver products consumers love, your size is an advantage—one that you can leverage for incredible results. But when it comes to innovation, you can’t rely on big-company strength alone. Between your company’s capabilities and the entrepreneurial ethos underscoring every successful startup lies the sweet spot for disruptive innovation, and the key to unlocking exponential growth.

Far from slowing down, change and transformation in business seems to come only at a more and more furious rate. The last ten years alone have seen the introduction of groundbreaking new trends that pose new opportunities and challenges for leaders in all industries.

This book triggers you to think and act strategically, shows what you can learn from business models inside and outside your industry, and urges you to apply those learnings to make your own shift.