This book provides a blueprint for sustained and profitable business growth to help companies build the ultimate competitive edge. By combining proven planning and execution strategies with daily hard work and routines, The Growth Advantage cracks open business secrets that teach companies how to achieve that dream of steady, predictable growth.
Provides a blueprint for your company’s sustained and profitable growth. Let’s face it: sustained business growth doesn’t just happen. Growth must be planned for and executed, cultivated from a strategic standpoint and applied tactically at the frontline, led by the right people, and focused on the right objectives. The Growth Advantage provides a blueprint for sustained and profitable growth for any business. It is designed to help companies build the ultimate competitive edge. The book is broken into three parts that outline the Planning Advantage, the Execution Advantage, and the Company Advantage, which will help you align your company with its goals. The Growth Advantage cracks open the business secrets that teach companies how to achieve that dream of steady, predictable growth through effective planning and solid execution. Readers learn how their company can develop and sustain a blueprint for growth that guides company actions on a daily and weekly basis. Combining elements of culture, strategy, planning, execution, talent acquisition, training, motivation, accountability, and brand differentiation into one book with clear, actionable steps, Bob Lisser brings readers along a journey that starts with a plan and ends with success.
Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit … Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term. Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G. After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor. This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others. Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos, Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.
A powerful new kind of competitive advantage is now possible thanks to technological and social disruptions that are already occurring. These disruptions revolutionize how companies can partner to create new growth. The Reciprocity Advantage shares a model for creating that growth: define your right-of-way (the underutilized resources you already own that you can share with others), partner to do what you can’t do alone, experiment to learn, and scale the new business at low risk. Reciprocity and advantage are words that are not normally seen together, but reciprocity—giving now to get later—will become a normal part of winning in the future. The Reciprocity Advantage shows you how to leverage new forces like digital natives and cloud-served supercomputing now into massively scalable, profitable, incremental growth for your business. Provocative and pragmatic, leading ten-year forecaster Bob Johansen and experienced business developer Karl Ronn describe how to lean in to disruptions to create new growth for your business. They include actual cases showing early successes for a range of companies and nonprofits like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and TED. They then provide key exercises to define your promising new ideas and nurture them into healthy new businesses. Their recommendations are based on practical experience in managing the problems of new business creation and many years of helping others see the future more clearly. Distilled from hands-on work, this book gets you started today on creating your own reciprocity advantage.
A competitive advantage just isn't enough. Your company is turning in regular profits every year, and its market share is only getting bigger. Competitors can’t touch you. So why is your stock price so sluggish? The answer is as simple as it is cruel: investors aren’t interested in history, and they already know you’re profitable and competitive—that knowledge is baked into your stock price. The hard reality is that a competitive advantage just isn’t enough. Investors want companies to surprise them with unexpected value, which means that you can outperform market expectations only if you as a leader know how to find, create, and deliver a series of multiple competitive advantages. This is why a corporate theory is so important. A good corporate theory provides a compass for those at the strategic helm, guiding their decisions about what assets and activities to pursue, what investments to make, and what strategies to adopt. Behind every long-term corporate success story lies a basic theory about how that company creates value. In Beyond Competitive Advantage, strategy professor Todd Zenger describes what makes a great corporate theory and helps readers understand the many tensions and trade-offs they’ll face as they apply the theory to meet the challenge of market expectations. Based on years of research and analysis, Beyond Competitive Advantage provides managers and executives with a framework for both sustaining value and creating growth.
Kaye and Giulioni identify three broad types of conversations that have the power to motivate employees more deeply than any well-intentioned development event or process to help with career development.
Defining an organization by its growth strategy enables business leaders to make better decisions about the ways their companies compete. Anjan Thakor's four categories of growth, which he arranges into the Competing Values Framework, delivers methods for developing strategies grounded in internal cultures and industry goals. Written for professionals, this book provides easy access to concepts in fields as diverse as corporate strategy, finance, organizational behavior, change management, and leadership. - Teaches ways to formulate a growth strategy and implement it through simple organizational interventions - Provides an intuitive framework and common language about growth strategies - Teaches readers how an effective growth strategy can boost stock price - Readers learn what kind of growth strategy will maximize the value of an organization - Readers with varied functional backgrounds can understand these concepts
Conventional wisdom on strategy is no longer a reliable guide. In Essential Advantage, Booz & Company's Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with coherence: a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique. Achieving this clarity takes a sharpness of focus that only exceptional companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's blend of strategic direction and distinctive capabilities that give it the "right to win" in its chosen markets. Based on extensive research and filled with company examples--including Amazon.com, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Sons, and Procter & Gamble--Essential Advantage helps you construct a coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes. The authors reveal: · Why you should focus on a system of a few aligned capabilities · How to identify the "way to play" in your market · How to design a strategy for well-modulated growth · How to align a portfolio of businesses behind your capability system · How your strategy clarifies growth, costs, and people decisions Few companies achieve a capability-driven "right to win" in their market. This book helps you position your firm to be among them.
The winner of the UK's Business Book of the Year Award for 2021, this is a groundbreaking exposé of the myths behind startup success and a blueprint for harnessing the things that really matter. What is the difference between a startup that makes it, and one that crashes and burns? Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. But an Unfair Advantage is not just about your parents' wealth or who you know: anyone can have one. An Unfair Advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition. This groundbreaking book shows how to identify your own Unfair Advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba offer a unique framework for assessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths. Hard work and grit aren't enough, so they explore the importance of money, intelligence, location, education, expertise, status, and luck in the journey to success. From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds, and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn't realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.
Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.
