Design a Better Business

In The Startup Way, Eric Ries shares his insights, stories and best practices, delivering a critical toolkit to solve all business challenges. Today every company needs to get faster and smarter. Listen to The Startup Way and discover how to embrace change, survive and thrive.

Often the decision between a customer choosing you over someone like you is your ability to know exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to make it count. Phil M. Jones has trained more than two million people across five continents and over 50 countries in the lost art of spoken communication. In Exactly What to Say, he delivers the tactics you need to get more of what you want.

Would you like to have better solutions to your problems? Struggling to understand why things went wrong when you did everything right? The Art of Thinking in Systems can help you with these problems. You think systems thinking is for politicians, and powerful CEO's? Let me tell you this: a small business is a system, your class at school is a system, your family is a system. You are the element of larger systems - your town, your country, the world. These systems have a different dynamic. The more you know about their nature, the more optimal solutions you'll find to problems.

Blockchains are new technology layers that rewire the Internet and threaten to side-step older legacy constructs and centrally served businesses. At its core, a blockchain injects trust into the network, cutting off some intermediaries from serving that function and creatively disrupting how they operate. Metaphorically, blockchains are the ultimate non-stop computers. Once launched, they never go down, and offer an incredible amount of resiliency, making them dependable and attractive for running a new generation of decentralized services and software.

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer.

As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams - product management, design, and software engineering - learn a different model.

To make these big moves happen for your company, you’re going to have to break through inertia, gamesmanship, and risk aversion. You’re going to have to mitigate human biases and manage group dynamics. Eight practical shifts can help you do this, and unlock bigger, bolder, better strategies.  This is not another by-the-book approach to strategy. It’s not another trudge through frameworks or small-scale case studies promising a secret formula for success. It’s an irreverent, fact-driven, and humorous take on the real world of strategic decision making.

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader, whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church pastor, the head of a school, or a government official. Richard Rumelt argues that the heart of a good strategy is insight - into the true nature of the situation, into the hidden power in a situation, and into an appropriate response. He shows you how insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools for guiding your own thinking.

A practical four-step methodology for any leader or manager facing a tough choice, and for creating integrative solutions to big, complex, and pressing problems. Stimulating and practical, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of causation, spiralling back seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, even centuries, right back to the dawn of time and the origins of our species. In the epic sweep of history, how does our biology affect the arc of war and peace, justice and persecution? How have our brains evolved alongside our cultures?

Map the innovation space - and blaze a path to profits and growth. Countless books, articles, and other advice promise leaders solutions to the complex challenges they face. Some offer quick, silver-bullet remedies - a straight line to success! - and some are so technical that audiences get lost before they begin. Now, there's Mapping Innovation, a refreshing alternative in the crowded business innovation space.

This is A.G. Lafley’s guidebook. Shouldn’t it be yours as well?Winning CEO A.G. Lafley is now back at the helm of consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. If you want to know the strategy he’ll use to restore P&G to its former dominance, read this book.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

You might've talked about innovation with your IT department or software development agency lately and the words "design thinking" were surely mentioned. So what is it? Just another piece of business jargon to add to your arsenal or a useful tool? Or maybe even an overestimated hype? Nowadays every organization or business runs into a myriad of problems as business models become increasingly more complex. Globalization and advances in communication and technology, all add up to creating unique opportunities but also new challenges that are not easy to solve applying the old tested methods.