Strategic Planning

Freedom By Design is the guide every service-based business owner needs but rarely finds, especially once growth starts feeling more like a grind than a reward. If your company has surpassed the $1M mark but left you with more stress, shrinking margins, and a team that leans too heavily on your shoulders, this book reveals why—and what to do about it.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you learn the most important ideas in leadership and management, feel confident in your business classes, and be ready to thrive in any role you take on. This book will inspire you to: succeed by playing to your strengths; learn to be more persuasive; give killer presentations; perfect your business-writing skills; find your authentic voice and leadership style; and build a purposeful career.

A year's worth of management wisdom, all in one place. We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up to date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Ginni Rometty to Robert I. Sutton and company examples from Maersk to Nvidia, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

Part of a series to cover the range of business functions in a typical MBA course, Total Quality Management: Strategic Planning teaches how to integrate strategic quality and business planning to create one tactical process for your entire business. Developed by two leading quality control experts, this well-researched, step-by-step guide helps your company successfully transition from traditional management to total quality management.

A comprehensive guide to successful event management, this audiobook serves as a valuable resource for both beginners and seasoned professionals, equipping them with the tools needed to plan, execute, and evaluate memorable events. The guide takes listeners through a deep exploration of understanding their audience, conceptualizing resonant events, managing budgets, procuring vendors, effectively marketing, and embracing technology. It also emphasizes the power of networking and the importance of post-event evaluation for continuous improvement.

The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the "new normal," where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it's going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job—and business—destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the "Roaring 2020s."

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.

Today's consumers demand more than products—they crave immersive, personalized experiences. As a result, traditional marketing and engagement strategies have lost their edge. The new frontier? Gaming, where over three billion people worldwide spend their time, attention, and money. In Press Play, Bastian Bergmann shows how visionary companies are capitalizing on gaming's unstoppable rise.

Rapidly grow your business while staying sane, focused, and fulfilled.

An introduction for everyone. Rather than a "how to" for hands-on techies, this book - now in its revised and updated edition - serves lay listeners and experts alike by covering new case studies and the latest state-of-the-art techniques. In this rich, fascinating, and surprisingly accessible introduction, leading expert Eric Siegel reveals how predictive analytics works and how it affects everyone every day.

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.

In 1991, the United States was the only global superpower. It seemed that the 21st century, like the 20th, would belong to America. Then came the stock market bubble, the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, and the financial catastrophe of 2008. Meanwhile, China was rising and the Middle East was awakening politically. Today it is clear that America is vulnerable - to domestic and international decline and unregulated greed.

More than 20 years ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the balanced scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the balanced scorecard into action.

In today's environment of partial attention and isolating remote work, few things are more satisfying than group experiences that produce powerful, meaningful connections and output. But this kind of enlivening, collective work doesn't happen by chance. It must be consciously designed and purposefully activated—in a team, an organization, and a culture. The good news is that making space for this kind of work doesn't have to be hard. There's a technique available to everyone, with no special certification required: gamestorming.

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. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. Strategy is simple, but simple is complex.

A breakthrough solution is exposed when some unexpected events force Caroline and Paul, a married couple working for their family's retail business, to make a few small changes in the way things are done. A solution that propels the family's regional chain of stores into a very profitable, rapidly growing, international enterprise. If there is a hint of Jonah, from The Goal, reappearing in this novel, it is Henry, the soon-to-retire president and majority owner of the company who logically states that, "if you do not deal directly with the core problem, don't expect significant improvement."

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

Retire-Me-Not-Planning might sound more like you...And you just realized that retirement planning isn’t something you can wait until retirement to do? You’re not alone… Almost half of the American workforce lacks an available retirement plan. When we’re young, it’s impossible to fathom a future in which we’ll be old enough to retire, and as our careers blossom and our lives fill up, it’s easy to let retirement planning slip by the wayside.

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 right pricing strategy can change the entire trajectory of a business, a market, and even society at large. To help you create your best pricing strategy efficiently and confidently, two leaders from BCG are introducing fresh perspectives on pricing that take you far beyond the realm of mind-numbing numbers.