Career Strategy

From Seth Godin, one of the world's most influential business thinkers and bestselling author of This is Marketing, comes an essential guide to thinking strategically in a complex, ever-changing world. This is Strategy is a modern classic that offers perspectives you'll find yourself returning to again and again. Rather than providing step-by-step formulas, Godin offers something more valuable: a new way of seeing and thinking about the challenges you face.

From the creator of Valuetainment, the number-one YouTube channel for entrepreneurs, and “one of the most exciting thinkers” (Ray Dalio, author of Principles) in business today, comes a practical and effective guide for thinking more clearly and achieving your most audacious professional goals.

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies - from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history - the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it.

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to - and approach for - overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy”.

Setting business strategy enables you to develop absolute clarity on priorities, organize resources, and get better results than ever before. It may sound complicated, but Brian Tracy knows how to make it simple. In this practical audiobook, he shares the most important lessons for strategic planning.

Michael Porter’s groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work - competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces - but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that. This book provides an engaging summary of Porter’s ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work....

Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"—a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the typical response was just to apply it again—with greater enthusiasm.

A business's overall strategy may be set at board level, but many people throughout the organisation will be involved in deciding that strategy and implementing it - making decisions that are strategic in nature. On these decisions hangs the future of the business: how successful it is, even whether it is successful. Yet business history is full of strategic decisions, both big and small, that were weak, poorly conceived and consequently disastrous.

In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.

As Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli implied, you're either predator or prey, and the animal you most resemble determines your position on the food chain. In The Wolf in CIO's Clothing Gartner analyst and author Tina Nunno expands on Machiavelli's metaphor, examining seven animal types and the leadership attributes of each. Nunno posits the wolf - a social animal with strong predatory instincts - as the ideal example of how a leader can adapt and thrive.

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.

In the military, a field manual provides instructions in simple, clear, step-by-step language to help soldiers complete their mission. In the civilian sector, books offer information on everything from fixing a leaky tap to developing an effective workout programme to cooking a good steak. Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual is here to help you navigate your way through the difficulties of leadership by providing a direct, situational, pragmatic how-to guide that anyone can instantly put to use.

Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into 19 languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.

In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage.

In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.

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.

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale - and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization. Through case studies, you'll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance.

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.

In Cracked It!, seasoned strategy professors and consultants Bernard Garrette, Corey Phelps and Olivier Sibony present a rigorous and practical four-step approach to overcome these pitfalls. Building on tried-and-tested (but rarely revealed) methods of top strategy consultants, research in cognitive psychology, and the latest advances in design thinking, they provide a step-by-step process and toolkit that will help listeners tackle any challenging business problem. Using compelling stories and detailed case examples, the authors guide listeners through each step in the process.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles (featuring "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.