Career Strategy

No one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life. Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict, and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure.

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.

Start making choices now that serve your desired future. Today’s fast-paced and radically shifting business world means that many leaders, even those considered successful, are simply navigating urgent tasks with little to no strategy. In Strategy to Action, award-winning educator and coach Keita Demming of The Covenant Group presents an innovative and deceptively simple tool to help business professionals unite their short-term tactics with their long-term goals.

The Failure of Risk Management provides effective solutions to significant faults in current risk analysis methods. Conventional approaches to managing risk lack accurate quantitative analysis methods, yielding strategies that can actually make things worse. Many widely used methods have no systems to measure performance, resulting in inaccurate selection and ineffective application of risk management strategies. These fundamental flaws propagate unrealistic perceptions of risk in business, government, and the general public.

Every company needs a 3HAG - a three-year highly achievable goal! The 3HAG way is a prescriptive framework that takes the guessing out of your strategy and ensures you and your whole team are confident in where you are going. You’ll find step-by-step instructions to gut out your first 3HAG while building the confidence required to execute with speed toward your goals.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

In Ruthless Consistency, Michael Canic identifies the three surprising reasons most strategic change initiatives fail: Leaders unwittingly send mixed messages that demotivate their people and undermine those initiatives; leaders focus on what they do instead of what their people experience; and leaders are not as committed as they think they are or need to be. The book then introduces an intuitive yet comprehensive model for success.

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.

A global security expert draws on psychological insights to help you master the art of social engineering—human hacking. Make friends, influence people, and leave them feeling better for having met you by being more empathetic, generous, and kind. Eroding social conventions, technology, and...

The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough—today companies need “radical differentiation” to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press—due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this book to show how the techniques and strategies of...

Pricing mastery made easy. A must-listen for entrepreneurs seeking to determine what their customers value and set prices they want by understanding the truth about pricing—it isn't about the price. Everything that happens before the price matters much more than the price itself. Have happier clients, boost your profits, and confidently master the pricing game with this comprehensive guide.

Africa's Business Revolution provides the inside story on business in Africa and its future growth prospects and helps executives understand and seize the opportunities for building profitable, sustainable enterprises.

Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap and other business best-sellers, has written an audiobook that leaps right into your pounding heart. One rainy night in December, young CEO David Stone is inexplicably called back to the office. The company’s chairman tells him that the board members have reached the end of their patience. If David can’t produce a viable turnaround plan in five weeks, he’s out of a job. The problem is, he’s already used every trick in the book and nothing has worked. His only hope is to try something new. But what?

Chock-full of real-world examples of mistakes, heartbreak, and redemption that makes it sound more like a juicy exposé than a business book, Love as a Business Strategy offers a new, people-first framework for achieving any business outcome. Written by authors who aren't fans of run-of-the-mill, nap-inducing business or leadership books, this book clearly shows that a better way of doing business is possible, helping listeners ditch the status quo, embrace humanity, and achieve lasting success.

In Redefining Retail: 10 Guiding Principles for a Post-Digital World, Prof. Philip Kotler and Dr. Giuseppe Stigliano deliver a timely and insightful examination of retail and consumer brand marketing. In the book, you'll find practical and concrete techniques for redefining your organization's internal operations and processes, as well as its business strategy. You'll rethink the entire value chain as you consider the growing importance of sustainability, diversity and inclusion, working policies, and more.

Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar: Each was a master of war. Each had to look beyond the battlefield to decide whom to fight and why; to know what victory was and when to end the war; to determine how to bring stability to the lands he conquered. Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had to be not only generals but statesmen. And yet each was a battlefield commander, a strategist, a leader of men - in short, a warrior.

Few management ideas have spread so far and so wide as the Net Promoter System (NPS). Created by author and loyalty guru Fred Reichheld, companies across the spectrum have adopted it - from industrial giants such as Mercedes-Benz and Cummins Engine to Silicon Valley sweethearts such as Apple and Google to digital innovators like Warby Parker and Peloton.

Bestselling author and futurist Mark Schaefer explains why community is a vastly overlooked marketing opportunity for most organizations. He explains how three major trends are colliding in a way that makes brand communities the future of marketing strategy.

Business relationships are still dominated by a narrow perspective—trying to match products to customer needs and making deals. It's a buyer-seller relationship built on a transactional mindset, and it's not how you should be doing business. There's a better way—orchestrating growth—in which suppliers and customers collaborate to build strategies and grow together. Christoph Senn and Mehak Gandhi lay out the Triple Fit Strategy framework, which will help you escape the product-centric mindset and put customers at the heart of your business strategy.