Becoming a Digital Unicorn: 5 Steps to Set Yourself Apart in a Competitive Economy. The continuous wave of digital disruptions is demanding something new from each of us, whether you work for a large corporation or a small business, own a startup, or are a recent graduate looking to break into the industry. Your ability to think beyond what's possible and solve problems with a different lens is the secret sauce that will set you apart-and increase your uniqueness in the market. Becoming a Digital Unicorn is your personal pocketbook masterclass, providing you with a practical, step-by-step approach to reinvent yourself and secure your future by cultivating your unique mindset, purpose, gifts, and the digital skills needed to thrive in this rapidly changing economy. Today's needs are great with no shortage of problems to solve-and the digital universe is wide open. Where you go, and how far, can largely-if not completely-be driven by you.
The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes the Wall Street Journal Bestselling Wall Street Journal bestselling The Unicorn Project! “The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project…”—FERNANDO CORNAGO, Senior Director Platform Engineering, Adidas “Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how … the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all.”—DR. STEVEN SPEAR, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC. “The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!”––CORNELIA DAVIS, Vice President Of Technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., Author of Cloud Native Patterns This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms—this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity. “The Unicorn Project provides insanely useful insights on how to improve your technology business.”—DOMINICA DEGRANDIS, author of Making Work Visible and Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop ——— “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together.”—Gene Kim, November 2019
Imagine if the multinational hotel groups had founded Airbnb, or the big auto companies had launched Uber and Tesla, or Blockbuster had created Netflix. Large companies can start new ventures. You have ideas, talent, brand, capital—you have customers—you can strike back. In The Unicorn Within, Mach49 founder and CEO Linda Yates empowers large companies to beat startups at their own game—to build a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures to drive meaningful growth. How? With a teachable, repeatable, scalable method focused 100 percent on execution across the spectrum of venture creation from Ideate to Incubate, Accelerate, and Scale. She also offers keys to managing the Mothership and seizing the Mothership advantage to ensure your ventures reach escape velocity and thrive. And don't stop at just one venture. Yates also lays out her blueprint for building a Venture Factory capable of becoming your company's growth engine for years to come. The next Unicorns don't have to come from Silicon Valley. Regardless of your company's industry, geography, or history, they can come from you. Whether you're the CEO, a member of the C-suite, or an internal entrepreneur, you can help your company grow. With this book's proven method, you can unleash the Unicorn within.
All over the world, corporate executives are under increasing pressure to resist a new breed of competitors: the digital innovators disrupting long-established business models and capturing markets as a result. The old world is made up of enormous and incumbent market-leading companies known as "rhinos" while the new world is ruled by digitally native, innovative and disruptive companies known as "unicorns." And the success of the unicorns doesn't always make sense if you're going by the old rules.In the face of widespread "digital transformation" in virtually every industry, the question becomes: how can incumbent companies and executives keep their edge against their new competitors? In From Rhino to Unicorn, Victor Orlovski and Vladimir Korovkin combine their personal experience with analyses of more than 40 case studies to answer that question.Drawing on their combined decades of experience in both business and academia, Orlovski and Korovkin break down:-The eight key areas where unicorns have an advantage over rhino companies-Why most rhinos' attempts at digital transformation fail-The strategies successful companies use to navigate digital transformation-The seven most common mental "traps" companies fall into when trying to transform-The proven roadmap for rhino-to-unicorn transitions (used by major corporations like Sberbank)And much more.While many business books discuss innovation and disruption, few can match the depth of academic and economic analysis offered by From Rhino to Unicorn-and even fewer can offer actual strategies for established companies to thrive in the brave new world of digital transformation.
The #1 New York Times bestseller! Try to catch one of the world's most elusive mythical creatures—the unicorn—in this enchanting picture book for kids, the perfect Easter basket stuffer! From the New York Times and USA Today bestselling How to Catch series comes a dazzling new adventure! Filled with zany traps, STEAM concepts, silly rhymes, and lots of rainbow unicorn fun, parents, educators, and young readers alike will delight in this colorful story as the How to Catch Kids are off in the zoo to catch this fantastical beast. Perfect for children ages 4-10, this is the ultimate unicorn gift of the year, great for birthdays, bedtime, or any occasion! Can you catch the unicorn? You'll have to use your brain, So set your traps and prep your team to pet that rainbow mane! Also in the How to Catch Series: How to Catch a Mermaid How to Catch a Dinosaur How to Catch the Tooth Fairy How to Catch a Monster and more!
Bringing hard data to the way we think about entrepreneurial success, this bold call to action draws on the latest scientific evidence to dispel the most pervasive startup myths and light a path to entrepreneurship for those eclipsed by the hype. When you think of a successful entrepreneur, who comes to mind? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe even Jesse Eisenberg, the man who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network? It may surprise you that most successful founders look very different from Zuckerberg or Gates. In fact, most startup origin stories are very different from the famous "unicorns" that have achieved valuations of over $1 billion, from Facebook to Google to Uber. In The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors, Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick takes us to the forefront of an empirical revolution in entrepreneurship. New data and better research methods have overturned the conventional wisdom behind what a successful founder looks like, how they succeed, and how the startup ecosystem works. Among the issues he examines: Which founders are most likely to succeed?Where do the best startup ideas come from?What's the most foolproof way of securing the funding needed to take a company to the next level?Should your sales pitch really be something out of Hollywood?What's the best way to grow and scale your company and create a thriving culture that won't hinder expansion? Mollick argues that entrepreneurship is too important, both for society and for the individuals who start companies, to be eclipsed by the shadows of unicorns. He shows we can democratize entrepreneurship—but only by following an evidence-based approach that puts to rest the false narratives that surround it.
***Over a half-million sold! And available now, the Wall Street Journal Bestselling sequel The Unicorn Project*** “Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.”—TIM O'REILLY, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives who are struggling with the growing complexity of IT.”—JIM WHITEHURST, President and CEO, Red Hat, Inc. Five years after this sleeper hit took on the world of IT and flipped it on it's head, the 5th Anniversary Edition of The Phoenix Project continues to guide IT in the DevOps revolution. In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook. Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again. “This book is a gripping read that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT, and offers real-world solutions.”—JEZ HUMBLE, Co-author of Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook
Today the fastest growing companies have no physical assets. Instead, they create innovative digital products and new data-driven business models. They capture huge market share fast and their capitalizations skyrocket. The success of these digital giants is pushing all companies to rethink their business models and to start digitizing their products and services. Whether you are a new start-up building a digital product or service, or an employee of an established company that is transitioning to digital, you need to consider how digitization has transformed every aspect of management. Data-driven business models scale not through asset accumulation and product standardization, but through disaggregation of supply and demand. The winners in the new economy master the demand for one and the supply to millions. Throughout the book the author illustrates with examples and use cases how the market competition has changed and how companies adept to the new rules of the game. The economic levers of scale and scope are also different in the digital economy and companies have to learn new tactics how to achieve and sustain their competitive advantage. While data is at the core of all digital business models, the monetization strategies vary across products, services and business models. Our Monetization Matrix is a model that helps managers, marketers, sales professionals, and technical product designers to align the digital product design with the data-driven business model.
Which description fits your organisation? DREAMERS: Most Dreamers or early-stage startups, know how to build products, not organisations. Most Dreamers stay local and never become a Unicorn with a national footprint. UNICORNS: Three curses the Unicorns have to watch for-a narcissistic leader, a leadership team of old cronies and a toxic culture. These prevent them from going global and becoming Market Shapers. MARKET SHAPERS: A Market Shaper changes how we live and work-across countries and cultures. Their challenge is to continuously earn the trust of governments and communities. INCUMBENTS: Many Incumbents were once Market Shapers and Unicorns. The leaders don't know that the firm and its offerings are irrelevant. Not being able to attract and retain talent is a warning bell the leaders often ignore. Packed with ideas and innovations, this powerhouse of a book by best-selling author and talent management specialist Abhijit Bhaduri explains why leadership, talent and culture are the new drivers of growth whether you are a Dreamer, a Unicorn, a Market Shaper or an Incumbent.
Beyond the mist lies a magical secret waiting to be discovered . . . From Epic! Originals, Unicorn Island is a middle-grade illustrated novel series about a young girl who discovers a mysterious island full of mythical beasts and darker dangers! When Sam arrives in Foggy Harbor, population 3,230, all she can see is a small, boring town that's way too far from home. And knowing that she's stuck there all summer with her grumpy Uncle Mitch only makes things worse. But when Sam discovers a hidden trapdoor leading to a room full of strange artifacts, she realizes Foggy Harbor isn't as sleepy as it seems. With the help of a new friend, Sam discovers an extraordinary secret beyond the fog: an island of unicorns whose fates are intertwined with hers.
