Showing results by publisher "Ascent Audio" in Forecasting & Strategic Planning

When pioneering business journalist and Inc. magazine editor at large Bo Burlingham wrote Small Giants, it became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem - how to handle the pressure to grow. Now Burlingham is back to tackle an even more common problem - how to exit your company well. Sooner or later, all entrepreneurs leave their businesses and all businesses get sold, given away, or liquidated.

Digital transformation is no longer news - it's a necessity. For more than a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn't. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture.

Dave Whorton was John Doerr's associate partner at high-flying Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers during Silicon Valley's big shift. After Netscape's IPO, he witnessed the VC industry pivot from a proven forty-year playbook of managing risk to something much more aggressive: Get big fast. Don't worry about profitability. Cash out and find another venture.

In Fusion Strategy, world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkataraman offer a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best-create physical products-with what digitals do best-use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets-to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

In this paradigm-shifting book, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and sustainable business guru Andrew Winston provide a model to help leaders build companies that contribute more to the world than they use or take - that is, net positive companies. Net Positive outlines the principles and practices for surviving and thriving based on the experience of one world-leading company, Unilever, and other groundbreaking global organizations.

In this bestselling book, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on artificial intelligence and machine learning, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you understand the future direction of AI, bring your AI initiatives to scale, and use AI to transform your organization.

The Leadership Contract is the modern leader's handbook for organizational renewal. In today's business climate, leadership is both a trait and a specific set of skills. It's about trust, commitment, communication, and drive. This book shows you how to become the leader your organization needs. You'll go beyond adopting the habits and practices of an effective leader and actually put it in writing to establish a leadership contract that ensures the success of your company.

From technology, media, and retail to sport teams, government agencies, and financial institutions, learn the actual strategies and processes being used to learn about customers, improve manufacturing, spur innovation, improve safety, and so much more. Organized for easy dip-in navigation, each chapter follows the same structure to give you the information you need quickly. For each company profiled, learn what data was used, what problem it solved, and the processes put in place to make it practical, as well as the technical details, challenges, and lessons learned from each unique scenario.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you toggle between long- and short-term views, manage risk and innovation, and cultivate productive relationships with your staff and your board. This book will inspire you to: navigate the changing global business environment.

Your business might be humming along fine, or it might be struggling to stay afloat. Either way, you know that your company has a lot more potential than the results show. What if you had a quick, effective way to ramp up productivity, morale, and your bottom line - a process you could begin right now, a strategy that would immediately start to improve broken functions without disrupting the parts of your business that don't need fixing?

At the core of this classic treatise is the message that sledgehammer approaches can backfire, and size alone does not guarantee wins. Strategy, positioning, planning, leadership - all play equally significant roles, making Sun Tzu's teachings perfect for small business owners and entrepreneurs entrenched in fierce competition for customers, market share, talent - for their very survival.

In this book, The Boston Consulting Group's Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You'll learn how to: set clear goals for your name and brand before you start, craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission, build a brand unique to you by creating your own word, find the balance between "cool" and clear, and narrow down your list of names with five easy tests.

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality - called "innovation capital" - is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method).

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

You're facing a problem at work. There are many ways you can approach the situation, but each comes with its own pros and cons. How do you sort through all the information so that you know you're taking the right path? The answer is in how you think. The HBR Guide to Critical Thinking will help you navigate your most challenging issues, from difficult problems to tough decisions to complex scenarios.

Create the Future is an exciting guidebook for disruptive thinking, innovation, and change, paired with The Innovation Handbook, an updated version of the award-winning book, Exploiting Chaos. The bestseller is loaded with the same tactics, tools, and frameworks that Gutsche's team uses to accelerate 700 of the world's most powerful brands, billionaires, CEOs, and NASA.