Winning by Not Competing: A Fresh Approach to Strategy

Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for d...

Whether challenged with taking on a startup, turning a business around, or inheriting a high-performing unit, a new leader's success or failure is determined within the first 90 days on the job.

In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers...

"In their playing you hear not only precision, color and balance, but thunder, lightning and the language of the heart." This is what the Boston Globe said about a performance by conductor Benjamin Zande...

More than a decade 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 Organiz...

All companies must grow to survive-but only one in five growth strategies succeeds. In Profit from the Core, strategy expert Chris Zook revealed how to grow profitably by focusing on and achieving full potential in the core business. But what happens when your core business provides insuff...

Drawing from decades of research within world-class organizations, the authors show that great leaders-whether CEOs or managers, coaches or politicians-excel not just through skill and smarts, but by connecting with others using Emotional Intelligence...

Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and lead to costly errors in judgment.

Now, internationally renowne...

How do companies in mature markets—where savings from cost-cutting have been exhausted and breakthrough innovations are hard to come by—achieve sustainable increases in profits? For decades, managers have been told the answer lies ...

At best one company in ten is able to sustain profitable growth. Yet capital markets demand that all companies seek it relentlessly and mercilessly punish those who fail. Why is consistent, persistent growth so difficult to achieve? Surprisingly, it’s not for lack of great...

Economic and stock-market cycles affect companies in every industry. Unfortunately, a confusing array of anecdotal and conflicting indicators often renders it impossible for managers and investors to see ...

Firms with superior IT governance have more than 25% higher profits than firms with poor governance given the same strategic objectives. These top performers have custom-designed IT governance for their strategies. Just as corporate governance aims to ensure quality decisions about all corporate ...

This book challenges conventional wisdom about how to groom executives for the top positions in your firm. It presents a strategic framework for identifying and developing future executives that senior managers can use t...

Most organizations consist of multiple business and support units, each populated by highly trained, experienced executives. But often the efforts of individual units are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportun...

A No-Nonsense Approach to Customer-Focused Business

In their relentless quest for differentiation, many companies have neglected the very activities that matter most to customers.

This refreshingly straightforward book argues that it is not ...

Communities ...

Today's business environment demands significant changes in the way we do business. Simply formulating strategy is no longer sufficient; we must also design the processes ...

Leadership requires many attributes besides intelligence and business savvy-courage, character, compassion, and respect are just a few. New managers learn concrete skills in the classroom or on the job, but where do they...

Three experts in the field outline a powerful measurement system that highlights the...

Managers in every business are expected to use financial data to make decisions, allocate resources, and budget expenses. But the truth is, many are uncomfortable applying the most basic financial tools in their day-to-day work. Even man...

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing premiums-not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets.

In Redefining Healt...

Even world-class companies, with powerful and proven business models, eventually discover limits to growth. That's what makes emerging high-growth industries so attractive. Although they lack a proven formula for making a profit, these indust...

The candles that lit the nights of Union soldiers during the Civil War. The synthetic detergent that eradicated hours of toil for women in the 1940s. The disposable diapers that added convenience to the lives of busy parents.

All of these breakthrough ...

Pat Fallon and Fred Senn argue that leaders have more creativity within their organizations th...

CEOs regularly announce ambitious growth targets, then fail to achieve them. The reason? Their growing addiction to bad profits. These corporate steroids boost short-term earnings but alienate customers. They undermin...

Designing organizations to maximize performance

The design of an organization-the accountability system that defines roles, rights, and responsibilities throughout the firm-has a direct impact on the performance of every employee. Yet few leaders devote focused attention to how this d...

In today's volatile marketplace, it's rare for firms to last-much less consistently increase earnings-for more than four decades. That's what makes the story of 115-year-old global manufacturing and technology leader Emerson so remarka...

Driving strategy through workforce performance

In a marketplace fueled by intangible assets, anything less than optimal workforce success can threaten a firm's survival. Yet in most organizations, employee performance is both poorly managed and underutilized.

The Workf...