The authors of "The Balanced Scorecard" and "The Strategy-Focused Organization" present a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.
Digital transformation is no longer news--it's a necessity. Despite the widespread threat of disruption, many large companies in traditional industries have succeeded at digitizing their businesses in truly transformative ways. The New York Times, formerly a bastion of traditional media, has created a thriving digital product behind a carefully designed paywall. Best Buy has transformed its business in the face of Amazon's threat. John Deere has formed a data-analysis arm to complement its farm-equipment business. And Goldman Sachs and many others are using digital technologies to reimagine their businesses. In Driving Digital Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta provides an actionable framework for following their lead. For over 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. Gupta covers each aspect in vivid detail while providing navigation tips and best practices along the way. Filled with rich and illuminating case studies of companies at the forefront of digital transformation, Driving Digital Strategy is the comprehensive guide you need to take full advantage of the limitless opportunities the digital age provides.
What Globalization Now Means for Your Business Executives can no longer base their strategies on the assumption that globalization will continue to advance steadily. But how should they respond to the growing pressures against globalization? And what can businesses do to control their destinies in these times of uncertainty? In The New Global Road Map, Pankaj Ghemawat separates fact from fiction by giving readers a better understanding of the key trends affecting global business. He also explains how globalization levels around the world are changing, and where they are likely to go in the future. Using the most up-to-date data and analysis, Ghemawat dispels today's most dangerous myths and provides a clear view of the most critical issues facing policy makers in the years ahead. Building on this analysis, with examples from a diverse set of companies across industries and geographies, Ghemawat provides actionable frameworks and tools to help executives revise their strategies, restructure their global footprints, realign their organizations, and rethink how they work with local governments and institutions. In our era of rising nationalism and increased skepticism about globalization's benefits, The New Global Road Map delivers the definitive guide on how to compete profitably across borders.
You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. 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. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.
A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies. Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds—the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies. The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses. Their goal is to help managers and entrepreneurs build platform businesses that can stand the test of time and win their share of battles with both digital and conventional competitors. As experts who have studied and worked with these firms for some thirty years, this book is the most authoritative and timely investigation yet of the powerful economic and technological forces that make platform businesses, from Amazon and Apple to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google—all dominant players in shaping the global economy, the future of work, and the political world we now face.
This book offers a nuanced and detailed examination of two of the most important current debates about contemporary Russia's international activity: is Moscow acting strategically or opportunistically, and should this be understood in regional or global terms? The book addresses core themes of Russian activity – military, energy and economic - but it offers an unusual multi-disciplinary analysis to these themes. Monaghan incorporates both regional and thematic specialist expertise to give a fresh perspective to each of these core themes. Underpinned by detailed analyses of the revolution in Russian geospatial capabilities and the establishment of a strategic planning foundation, the book includes chapters on military and maritime strategies, energy security and economic diversification and influence. This serves to highlight the connections between military and economic interests that shape and drive Russian strategy.
A straightforward guide to leveraging your company's intellectual capital by creating a knowledge management culture The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management offers managers the tools they need to create an organizational culture that improves knowledge sharing, reuse, learning, collaboration, and innovation to ensure mesurable growth. Written by internationally recognized knowledge management pioneers, it addresses all those topics in knowledge management that a manager needs to ensure organizational success. Provides plenty of real-life examples and case studies Includes interviews with prominent managers who have successfully implemented knowledge management structures within their organizations Offers chapters composed of short theoretical explanations and practical methods that you can utilize, based primarily on hands-on author experience Taking an intellectual journey into knowledge management, beginning with an understanding of the concept of intellectual capital and how to establish an appropriate culture, this book looks at the human aspects of managing knowledge workers, promoting interactions for knowledge creation and sharing.
Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.
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 readers get lost before they begin. Now, there’s Mapping Innovation, a refreshing alternative in the crowded business innovation space. Engaging and informative without sacrificing substance and expertise, this groundbreaking guide provides thorough background on some of the greatest innovations of the past century as well as . It details the processes that advanced them from inception to world-changing products—and shows you how to replicate their success. Business innovation expert Greg Satell helps you find your way by revealing the four models of innovation: Basic Research, Breakthrough Innovation, Sustaining Innovation, and Disruptive Innovation. One size does not fit all, so he provides a framework—the Innovation Matrix—for discovering which “type” of innovation process best suits the problem you need to solve. It’s about asking the right questions, so that you can apply the right strategies to the problems you need to solve. In the end, you’ll have a crystal clear model for disrupting the marketplace, scaling your efforts to propel your enterprise forqward, and leverage digital platforms to your advantage. Mapping Innovation offers a simple and accessible but powerful approach to developing a strategy that will put you light years ahead of the competition!.
User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. Get a high-level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quickly Understand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projects Dive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discovery Prepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software