Career Planning

Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.

What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment?

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Research. Together, they outline an innovative plan that urges businesses to create disruption rather than fleeing from it. Named one of 2003's Best Business Books by Business Week, this book is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best seller.

With more than 1 million copies in circulation, it remains the best-selling family business book of all time. Much of its success is owed to the deeply original message about the dangers of gifting an operating business to family. It offers business owners and their family a proven process for building wealth and protecting family relationships by exploring whether the business should be sold inside or outside the family. Every Family's Business includes 12 questions to help guide this emotional transition.

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.

From the founder of Money with Katie, a leveled-up finance guide for ambitious women everywhere—and a rallying cry for a new money movement Women experience money differently than men do. In the United States, women have only 55 cents for every dollar of wealth held by men, are more likely to...

Tired of hearing “just pick something” when it comes to your future? This interactive guide helps teens and young adults explore who they are, what they care about, and how to build a career around it. Packed with real stories, self-discovery tools, and practical tips—from exploring dream jobs to understanding modern education paths—Future Ready shows you how to align your passions with purpose. You’ll learn how to build career confidence, gain experience, and avoid the trap of working in a job you dread.

Planning a Profitable Business for Dummies explains how to build a business with profit in mind, using smart pricing techniques and clear-eyed strategic planning. Whether you're just getting started in business or still recovering from lockdown losses, this book points to where extra profits might lie.

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.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe - and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest. This is one of the biggest debates in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew W. Lo cuts through this debate with a new framework.

When disruption strikes, most leaders freeze. The best ones become fluent. In 2035, tech giant Artemis loses 300 million users overnight to a quantum-powered competitor. VP of Product Lee faces an extinction-level crisis that forces him to question everything he knows about innovation and change. Through Lee’s transformative journey—and real-world case studies from Spotify’s radio disruption to Nintendo’s pivot from cards to consoles—innovation strategist Jay Kiew reveals nine principles that separate leaders who merely survive disruption from those who drive it.

If you listen to nothing else on innovation, listen to this book. We've chosen a new selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles that will help you invest in your best innovation bets, learn from setbacks, and bring bold new offerings to market. This book will inspire you to know your customers' "jobs to be done;" harness the benefits of design thinking; bring AI into the innovation process; keep bureaucracy and structure from stifling creativity; build a culture of experimentation; and become the disrupter in your industry.

YouTube powerhouse and self-made millionaire Rose Han shares the practical tools to overcome financial struggle and watch your net worth grow—one zero at a time There's no doubt about it: the financial struggle is real, especially in a world that isn’t designed to help you get ahead. But...

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Like the best advice from a therapist, career counselor, and savvy best friend, this practical resource details dozens of concrete ways to improve work life in any kind of job or entrepreneurial setting. As Minda Zetlin shows, basic self-care principles are the key, and they apply in both tranquil and turbulent times. Her prescriptions are action-ready and available to all.

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.

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.

In this book, you will learn how to put on a successful event series that can generate revenue, and become either your main business, or generate leads and exposure to your main business. The book covers event planning and management fundamentals and explains how you can grow attendance and revenue significantly. Recently updated, the book now includes strategies for boosting event attendance, building buzz around the event as it occurs, and ensuring that your attendees are pleased following the event.

Turn losing your job into an epic comeback with this unfiltered, comprehensive GPS guide to rebuilding your career on your terms. So, you got fired, laid off, restructured, canned. Welcome to the club, baby! In today’s seismically changing job market, getting fired doesn’t automatically mean...