Strategic Planning

Stone Barrington is enjoying his usual dinner at Elaine's when his boss at Woodman & Weld, the law firm where Stone is "of counsel," walks in, sits down, and hands Stone a check for one million dollars. It seems Stone's undercover dealings with MI6 have brought in a big new client for the firm, and they're willing to pay Stone a huge bonus and make him a partner. But almost as soon as he's taken the deal, Stone gets wind of an impending scandal that might torpedo his big promotion.

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.

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.

Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.

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.

Financial Times, Best Business Books Forbes, Best Business Books The Next Big Idea Club, Best Leadership Books The Globe & Mail, Best Management Books “A bracingly direct guide about the pitfalls of strategy, based around a climbing metaphor" (Financial Times) What passes for strategy...

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they don't have it. Start-ups shut down if they can't develop it. "It" is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mindset so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage—they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional, an aspiring entrepreneur, or simply someone seeking to amplify your impact in the world, Do More, More Naturally offers you practical strategies and immediately actionable advice to propel you toward your goals.

Knowing the concepts of management accounting can have a very positive impact on your business. Through management accounting, you can create forecasts for the future, make smart buying decisions, analyze the rate of return on an investment and much more. Management accountants do a lot when it comes to the management aspect of running a business. Perhaps you are a management accountant, thinking of becoming one, or will be hiring someone who is proficient in the field. If so, this book is for you.

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.

The Art of Strategic Decision-Making will teach you to seize control of your life and make sure your decisions aren’t making you. This book cites years of research and scientific studies about what constitutes a great decision and the factors that will inevitably lead you there. It is an in-depth look at human nature and psychology and why we make decisions in the way we do - for better or for worse. This book is packed with theory, but it is all practical and actionable. Use these mental models and pieces of analysis on your decisions today.

There is no CEO task more significant than leading change in an organization whose old business model needs updating. Large-scale change involves rethinking how to engage customers, partners, and suppliers with new technology and hard decisions about how to reorganize internal operations—plus the challenges of executing the transformation. Too many things can go wrong, from natural organizational resistance and inertia, to lack of strategic focus, to execution problems. And yet, organizations today must be more dynamic than ever before.

This book explains why meaningful innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency and how large corporations can harness the power of small teams—startups—to drive radical change through systematic experimentation.

The world changes continuously and rapidly. It's foolhardy to believe that strategies should not do so as well. Nonprofit leaders already know this, but traditional strategic planning has locked them into a process that's divorced from today's reality. That's why plans sit on the shelf and why smart executives are always seeking workarounds in between planning periods. The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution offers a nimble and powerful alternative. In this groundbreaking book, strategy expert David La Piana introduces "Real-Time Strategic Planning."

The circularity principle is present in all aspects of life, from physics to food chains. With the pressing issue of climate change and environmental degradation, a circular economy presents a solution that can balance economic growth and sustainability by minimizing waste production and conserving finite resources.

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.

Companies market to a younger audience because they believe that’s where the money and the excitement are. But are they wrong? Perhaps very wrong? This is only one of the counterintuitive arguments that Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, a world leader in opinion polling, tackles in his groundbreaking new book, Next. Not since Boom, Bust & Echo has a Canadian expert in what Canadians will want and need distilled the growing trends based on real and extensive demographic data and dared to forecast what will come next.

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.

Having a plan is an essential part of life, no matter what you want - whether you are simply going to the shops and need to plan a route and things you want to buy or looking at a long-term future goals for finances or your career. In Strategic Planning: The Ultimate Guide to Be Unstoppable, Achieve Your Goals and Get Everything You Want, you will find all the information you will need to become an expert planner.

For thousands of years, we've created things called games that tap the tremendous psychic power of fun. In a revised and updated edition of For the Win, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue that applying the lessons of gamification could change your business, the way you learn or teach, and even your life. Werbach and Hunter explain how games can be used as a valuable tool to address serious pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, education, innovation, customer engagement, human resources, and sustainability.