How to succeed at work and life—in an increasingly unpredictable worldIn a world where you can no longer plan or predict your way to success, how can you achieve your most important goals? It’s a daunting question. But in today’s environment, where change is the only constant, it’s a question everyone must answer. This is true whether you are an innovator or an entrepreneur, a manager or a newly minted graduate.The first step, say the authors of this book, is this: “Just start.” In other words, take action now and learn as you go.Written by a trio of seasoned business leaders, Just Start combines fascinating research with proven practices to deliver a reliable method for helping you advance toward your goals—despite the uncertainty that is all too common today. Babson College President Leonard Schlesinger, organizational learning expert Charles Kiefer, and veteran journalist Paul B. Brown share their own deep and varied experiences and draw from a source where striving amid constant uncertainty actually works: the world of serial entrepreneurship. In this world, people don’t just think differently—they act differently, as well.Using this novel approach, Just Start will help you:• Determine the best strategy and tactics when the future is uncertain• Minimize financial risk in every decision you make• Attract like-minded people to what you want to do (and learn why this is important)• Understand why “Act. Learn. Build (so you can) Act again” is the best course of action when facing the unknownSo throw out your forecasting tools and shrug off that nagging frustration that comes with constant uncertainty. Just Start distills for you the very essence of what makes people successful in today’s volatile environment. This book is your guide to achieving your goals—whether your project is professional or personal, or somewhere in between.
How should you grow your organization?It’s one of the most challenging questions an executive team faces—and the wrong answer can break your firm.The problem is most firms’ growth strategies emphasize just one type of growth—some focus on organic growth, others on M&A. When these strategies falter, the common response is simply to try harder—but firms falling into this “implementation trap” usually end up losing out to a competitor whose approach is more inclusive.So where do you start? By asking the right questions, argue INSEAD’s Laurence Capron and coauthor Will Mitchell, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Drawing on decades of research and teaching, Capron and Mitchell find that a firm’s aptitude for determining the best resource pathways for growth has a defining impact on its success. They’ve come up with a helpful framework, reflecting practices of a variety of successful global organizations, to determine which path is best for yours.The resource pathways framework is built around three strategic questions:• BUILD: Are your existing internal resources relevant for developing the new resources that you have targeted for growth?• BORROW: Could you obtain the targeted resources via an effective relationship with a resource partner?• BUY: Do you need broad and deep relationships with your resource provider?Written for large multinationals and emerging firms alike, Build, Borrow, or Buy will help solve a perennial question and will guide you through change while priming your organization for optimal growth.
Conversation-powered leadershipHow can leaders make their big or growing companies feel small again? How can they recapture the “magic”—the tight strategic alignment, the high level of employee engagement—that drove and animated their organization when it was a start-up? As more and more executives have discovered in recent years, the answer to this conundrum lies in the power of conversation.In Talk, Inc., Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind show how trusted and effective leaders are adapting the principles of face-to-face conversation in order to pursue a new form of organizational conversation. They explore the promise of conversation-powered leadership—from the time-tested practice of talking straight (and listening well) to the thoughtful adoption of social media technology. And they offer guidance on how to balance the benefits of open-ended talk with the realities of strategic execution.Drawing on the experience of leaders at diverse companies from around the world, Talk, Inc., offers provocative insights and user-friendly tips on how to make organizational culture more intimate, more interactive, more inclusive, and more intentional—in short, more conversational.
Why Prediction Markets Are Good for BusinessFrom selecting the lead actress in a Broadway musical, to predicting a crucial delay in the delivery of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner months before the CEO knew about it, to accurately forecasting US presidential elections—prediction markets have realized some amazing successes by aggregating the wisdom of crowds.Until now, the potential for this unique approach has remained merely an interesting curiosity. But a handful of innovative organizations—GE, Google, Motorola, Microsoft, Eli Lily, even the CIA—has successfully tapped employee insights to change how business gets done.In Oracles, Don Thompson explains how these and other firms use prediction markets to make better decisions, describing what could be the origins of a social revolution. Thompson shows how prediction markets can:• draw on the hidden knowledge of every employee• tap the “intellectual bandwidth” of retired employees• replace surveys• substitute for endless meetingsBy showing successes and failures of real organizations, and identifying the common roadblocks they’ve overcome, Oracles offers a guide to begin testing expertise against the collective wisdom of employees and the market—all to the benefit of their bottom line.
Explains the essential concepts of finance—budgeting, forecasting, and planning—to managers who are not financial managers. Understanding Finance contains relevant information on how to: understand what the three basic financial statements and ratio analysis tell about a company's financial health; develop and track a budget; and assess an investment opportunity.
A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Amazon BestsellerReverse Innovation is the new business idea everyone is talking about. Why? Because it presents the blueprint for scaling growth in emerging markets, and importing low-cost and high impact innovations to mature ones.Innovation is no longer the exclusive domain of the Silicon Valley elite. Reverse Innovation will open your eyes to the fact that the dynamics of global innovation are changing—and if you want your firm to survive, you’d better pay attention. The gap between rich nations and emerging economies is closing. No longer will innovations travel the globe in only one direction, from developed to developing nations. They will also flow in reverse. CEOs of the world’s most influential companies agree and have cited Reverse Innovation as their playbook for the next generation of global growth. Authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth explain where, when, and why reverse innovation is on the rise and why the implications are so profound. Learn how to make innovation in emerging markets happen and how such innovations can unlock even greater opportunity throughout the world. You’ll follow some of the world’s leading companies (including GE, Deere & Company, P&G, and PepsiCo) through stories that illustrate exactly what works and what doesn’t.If you’re in a Western economy, you need to accept that the future lies far from home. But the idea is not just for Western audiences. If innovation is at the heart of your company or your career, no matter where you practice business, Reverse Innovation is a phenomenon you need to understand. This book will help you do that.
American capitalism is in dire straits, caught in a perilous pattern of increasing volatility, decreasing investor returns, and ongoing bad behavior by executives. And it’s getting worse. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we’ve seen two massive value-destroying market meltdowns and a string of ethics breaches, including accounting scandals, options-backdating schemes, and the subprime mortgage debacle.Just what is going on here? Is it the inevitable decline of the American economy? Is it the new normal in a technology-enabled global marketplace? Or is it possible that the very theories we’ve embraced to underpin our capital markets are actually producing these crises?In Fixing the Game, Roger Martin reveals the culprit behind the sorry state of American capitalism: our deep and abiding commitment to the idea that the purpose of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. This theory has led to a massive growth in stock-based compensation for executives and, through this, to a naive and wrongheaded linking of the real market—the business of designing, making, and selling products and services—with the expectations market—the business of trading stocks, options, and complex derivatives. Martin shows how this tight coupling has been engineered and lays out its results: a single-minded focus on the expectations market that will continue driving us from crisis to crisis—unless we act now.Using the National Football League as his primary example, Martin illustrates that it is possible to take a much more thoughtful and effective approach than we now do to the intersection of the real and the expectations markets and to governance in general in the capital markets. Martin shows how we can act to end the destructive cycle, including:• Restructuring executive compensation to focus entirely on the real market, not the expectations market• Rethinking the meaning of board governance and role of board members• Reining in the power of hedge funds and monopoly pension fundsConcise, hard-hitting, and entertaining, Fixing the Game advocates seizing American capitalism from the jaws of the expectations market and planting it firmly in the real market—and it presents the steps we must take now to do so.
Foreword by Richard Hytner, Deputy Chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi WorldwideWe’ve all worked with one—a smart and immensely talented individual who brings enormous value to the organization. The problem? He’s an awful teammate.So as a leader, do you consider this key player toxic or irreplaceable?There Is an I in Team explores the relationship between individual and team—asking the question, How can we harness the talent of individual performers into a cohesive, productive team that creates overall value? And why are so many of our assumptions about teams wrong?Business challenges like this one mimic many of the issues facing sports teams, though admittedly the sports metaphors most commonly used in business are trite and superficial comparisons. What’s needed are real and substantial lessons that managers actually can take from the world of high-performance sports and use in an everyday work environment. This book meets that need. University of Cambridge professor Mark de Rond has combined cutting-edge social and psychological research with rich stories from world-class sports teams, coaches, athletes, and even business executives. The result challenges our most popular notions about teams. Equally critical, it teaches an innovative way to transform team potential into measurable business advantage.You’ll learn:• Why there is an I in team—and why that matters• Why an ideal team is rarely comprised of the best individual performers• Why conflict happens even when intentions are perfectly aligned• Why likability can trump competence even in technically sophisticated environments• Why a focus on interpersonal harmony can actually hurt team performance• Why data and sophisticated statistical tools are unlikely to eliminate the role of intuitionAt once readable and teachable, There Is an I in Team will strengthen your understanding of the issues that permeate teams of high-performers, and it will help you apply these new insights to your own work—giving you and your team an edge over the competition.
Edited by Harvard Business School professor Jay W. Lorsch, the preeminent authority on corporate boards, this book gathers the leading voices from business and academia to address the challenges of governance in the 21st century.We are at a crucial juncture in the evolution of business and the economy. We must now reshape the structures and practices of business leadership to avoid going down the same path again. To a large extent this is a question of governance and the role of corporate boards, to help us wrestle with critical issues like CEO performance and succession, compensation, and forward-looking strategy.In The Future of Boards, governance sage Jay Lorsch has gathered thought leaders and some of the most experienced voices at Harvard Business School to describe the moment we are in, identify and analyze the salient issues, and chart a course for the future. Articles include Bill George on how boardroom conflicts can be understood and managed; Krishna Palepu on how directors can gain the knowledge necessary to effectively oversee strategy; Lorsch himself and colleague Rakesh Khurana on how boards can set reasonable compensation while still motivating top talent; and Ken Merchant and Kat Pick on group pathologies in the boardroom and how to overcome them.The Future of Boards will be must reading for CEOs, business and industry leaders, policymakers, and anyone involved in influencing and reshaping business in the 21st century.
An argument for simplicity from the bestselling authors of Profit from the CoreIs radical reinvention the key to winning in today’s fast-paced world? Not judging by the results of some of the world’s best-performing companies.In Repeatability, Chris Zook and James Allen—leaders of Bain & Company’s influential Strategy practice—warn that complexity is a silent killer of profitable growth. Successful companies endure by maintaining simplicity at their core. They don’t stray from, or regularly discard, their business model in pursuit of radical renovation. Instead, they build a “repeatable business model” that produces continuous improvement and allows them to rapidly adapt to change without succumbing to complexity.Based on a multiyear study of more than two hundred companies, the book stresses the value of repeatability in business, showing how the “big idea” today is really made up of a series of successful smaller ideas driven by a simple and repeatable business model. Zook and Allen show how some of the world’s best-known firms combine a core differentiation model with speed, adaptability, and simplicity to land them at the top for long periods of time. These firms include: Apple, Danaher, DaVita, IKEA, Nike, Olam, Tetra Pak, Vanguard, and others.CEOs, senior executives, managers, and investors all need to read this book. It’s the new blueprint for reaching the top—and staying there.