Showing results by publisher "Berrett-Koehler Publishers" in Business Development

If you have a great product, but don’t have the operations in place to efficiently and effectively support it—production, manufacturing, sales, finance, human resources—you won’t succeed. Product innovation is seen as flashier, getting far more attention, but you can create an enduring competitive advantage by revolutionizing business operations.

The free-market, limited-government development model has been an ecological and social disaster for the developing world. Sustainable and equitable development is only possible with the active involvement of a strong central state that can guide the economy, protect the environment, and prioritize meeting their people’s basic needs. In this sure-to-be-controversial audiobook, Chandran Nair shows that the market-dominated model followed by the industrialized West is simply not scalable.

Positive Leadership shows how to reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and what Kim Cameron calls “positively deviant performance” - performance far above the norm. Citing a wide range of research in organizational behavior, medical science, and psychology as well as real-world examples, Cameron shows that to achieve exceptional success, leaders must emphasize strengths rather than simply focus on weaknesses.

Too many of us feel trapped by work that doesn't allow us to live our purpose, feed our passions, or use our gifts. We fantasize about starting our own business, but we're told this will mean going deeply into debt, spending years working 80 hours a week, and coping with the relentless pressure to grow. Eco-Bags founder Sharon Rowe says there's another way: go tiny. She is here to show you how. Tiny isn't a size - it's a state of mind. Like a tiny house, a tiny business is built on maintaining a laser focus on what is absolutely essential to you.

In this 20th-anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a new economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.

Digital transformation is more important than ever now that we’re in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds are becoming ever more blurred. But fully 70 percent of digital transformations fail. In this book, Saldanha lays out a five-stage process for moving from digitally automating processes here and there to making digital technology the very backbone of your company. For each of these five stages, Saldanha describes two associated disciplines vital to the success of that stage.

In Radical Product Thinking (RPT), product development is led by the vision for the change it’s intended to create. This methodology helps leaders reimagine the problems they face and align their team to find creative solutions using five elements: Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Execution, and Culture. R. Dutt guides listeners through these elements so they develop a clear process for achieving their desired change, incorporate it into daily activities, and turn RPT skills into muscle memory.

Traditional workplace conversations - which are based on a parent-child model - stymie growth and erode commitment. The Showkeirs advocate instead authentic conversations that are based on an adult-adult model. These conversations tell the truth, let go of the illusion of control, and view people as in charge of their own motivation. The result is a conversation revolution that creates greater commitment, real accountability for results, and improved organizational performance.

Here is the truth that the powerful Dirty Energy public relations machine doesn't want you to know: the ascent of solar energy is upon us. The production of solar-generated electricity has risen exponentially in the last few years, and employment in the solar industry has doubled since 2009. Meanwhile, electricity from coal has declined to pre-World War II levels as the fossil fuel industry continues to shed jobs.

Avoid the speed trap! Discover how changemakers can find lasting solutions to urgent social problems through a proven five step process for listening thoughtfully, building broad support, and exploring unconventional options.

B Corps are part of a global movement of more than 2,700 companies in 60 countries that are using the power of business as a force for good. B Corps have been certified to have met rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. This audiobook is the authoritative guide to the what, why, and how of B Corp certification.  

Through the exploration of robust cases and stories packed with deep insight and vital science, this extraordinary collection explores how we can adapt our notions of value, markets, and models of cooperation and collective action to create a world where economies and businesses excel, all people thrive, and nature flourishes.

Plenty of research has been done on why companies go terribly wrong, but what makes companies go spectacularly right? That's the question Kim Cameron asked more than a decade ago. Since then,Cameron and his colleagues have uncovered the principles and practices that set extraordinarily effective organizations apart from the merely successful.

Steered by Tom Szaky, recycling pioneer, eco-capitalist, and founder and CEO of TerraCycle, this audiobook explores current issues of production and consumption, practical steps for improving packaging and reducing waste today, and big ideas and concepts that can be carried forward. Intended to help every business from a small start-up to a large established consumer product company, this audiobook serves as a source of knowledge and inspiration. The message from these pioneers is not to scale back, but to innovate upward.  

Traditionally, an entrepreneur develops a detailed plan, finds money to fund it, and then pursues it to its conclusion. But conditions can change drastically at any point - you can end up locked into a process based on now-obsolete assumptions. The lean startup is all about agility and flexibility. Its mantra is "build, measure, learn": create small, experimental initiatives, get real-world feedback on them quickly, and use that data to identify what works and discard what doesn't. And then test some more.

Based on over 10 years working with small businesses, Kassan says the landscape of investment capital is far larger and more diverse than many would have you believe. Venture capitalists looking for a tenfold return on their investment are a tiny minority, and many investors are just as mission-driven as entrepreneurs. Kassan takes listeners through a six-step process to create a customized capital-raising plan, one that inspires them, excites them, and is in complete agreement with their business, their values, and their lives.

Entrepreneurial ventures often fail in the developing world because of the lack of something taken for granted in the developed world: trust. Over centuries the developed world has built up customs and institutions like enforceable contracts. This is not the case in the developing world. Using vivid examples from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and elsewhere, scholar and entrepreneur Tarun Khanna shows how entrepreneurs can build on existing customs and practices instead of trying to push against them.

Join a Growing Movement: Learn how you can join a global movement to redefine success in business, led by well-known icons like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's, disruptive upstarts like Warby Parker and Etsy, and recently covered by The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., and Entrepreneur.

Building a Successful Social Venture integrates leaning from the experience of hundreds of social enterprises that have participated in GSBI accelerator programs to formalize knowledge about what works. It provides rich case studies from social ventures to illustrate practice-based theories that combine the acumen of Silicon Valley executives with the intimate on-the-ground insights of social entrepreneurs working globally to eradicate poverty. 

How can organizations integrate sustainable design into their overarching operations and align it with profitability and corporate strategy? The Sustainability Scorecard is the first scientifically rooted, data-driven methodology for creating inherently sustainable and profitable products and processes. By redesigning with sustainability as a key design element, firms open themselves to unexpected solutions, leapfrog innovations, and sources of value that simply don’t occur when sustainability is leveraged purely as a risk-avoidance and compliance measure.