FINALIST: Business Book Awards 2020 - HR & Management Category In order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, businesses need to unlock the skills, talent and capabilities of their people, both individually and collectively. While many business and leaders recognise this, they have until now lacked a strategic approach to achieving it. Competitive People Strategy is a comprehensive roadmap showing how businesses can connect their human potential to their bottom line, and provides step-by-step guidance on how to create, test and measure a differentiated people strategy. Featuring tips and checklists throughout, it explores the core building blocks of leadership and organizational culture, as well as employee experience and engagement. It also examines the roles of effective talent attraction and management, and how to lead change and transformation. Central to the book is the importance of moving HR from a support function to becoming a creator of value and driver of business success. Drawing upon insights from organizations including Royal Mail and Starbucks, as well as interviews with senior HR leaders, Competitive People Strategy is an essential guide to developing a people strategy which creates a purpose-driven culture, provides greater value to customers and achieves superior business results.

The Wall Street Journal bestseller! Learn to unlock the potential of your employees and colleagues with this definitive resource for people management People Strategy: How to Invest in People and Make Culture Your Competitive Advantage provides readers with a powerful framework in which to develop high-performing teams, increase employee motivation, and use data to build an inviting and effective company culture. Author Jack Altman, cofounder and CEO of Lattice, an award-winning HR and performance management platform, shows you how to: Establish the values that will form the bedrock of your organization Develop feedback processes that help employees feel heard, supported, and equipped to succeed Monitor the breadth and depth of employee engagement in your company Use the data and insights created by your People Strategy to drive business results Perfect for executives, managers, and human resource professionals, People Strategy also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone with even an interest in how to develop, nurture, and unlock the potential of their employees and colleagues.

In this pathbreaking book, Michael E. Porter unravels the rules that govern competition and turns them into powerful analytical tools to help management interpret market signals and forecast the direction of industry development.

Shows readers how to turn competitors’ strength to their advantage. Selling Points Yoffie-Kwak provide insightful analysis of leading companies’ judo strategies through in-depth case studies of Palm Computing, RealNetworks, and CNET Networks, among others The “Users’ Guide to Judo Strategy”—a section at the end of the book—offers a summary of the principles of judo strategy that readers can apply to their own business situations. Packed with the insights of world-class managers and strategists, Judo Strategy describes how companies can become giant-killers, while also teaching readers how to protect their hard-fought position from challengers in the wings.

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.

User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team craft innovative multi-device products that people want to use. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, UX/UI designer, product manager, or part of an intrapreneurial team, this book teaches simple-to-advanced strategies that you can use in your work right away. Along with business cases, historical context, and real-world examples throughout, you’ll also gain different perspectives on the subject through interviews with top strategists. Define and validate your target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques Conduct competitive research and analysis to explore a crowded marketplace or an opportunity to create unique value Focus your team on the primary utility and business model of your product by running structured experiments using prototypes Devise UX funnels that increase customer engagement by mapping desired user actions to meaningful metrics

The source of competitive advantage has shifted in many organizations from reliability to innovation and flexibility. But what does it take for an organization that innovates to then manage effectively? In this follow-up to Built to Change, Ed Lawler argues that it is a combination of the right structure and the right people. First, organizations must decide what structure they are: are you a high-involvement organization that has products and services that require a high level of coordination and cooperation among employees? Or do you have a more global competitor structure in which you are constantly bringing in new talent and technological expertise? Are you a mixture of both? Lawler outlines the unique human capital strategy for each approach, shows what it looks like in action, and provides the foundation and tools for creating competitive and innovative organizations.

A new paradigm for balancing flexibility and commitment in management strategy through the amalgamation of real options and game theory. Corporate managers who face both strategic uncertainty and market uncertainty confront a classic trade-off between commitment and flexibility. They can stake a claim by making a large capital investment today, influencing their rivals' behavior, or they can take a “wait and see” approach to avoid adverse market consequences tomorrow. In Competitive Strategy, Benoît Chevalier-Roignant and Lenos Trigeorgis describe an emerging paradigm that can quantify and balance commitment and flexibility, “option games,” by which the decision-making approaches of real options and game theory can be combined. The authors first discuss prerequisite concepts and tools from basic game theory, industrial organization, and real options analysis, and then present the new approach in discrete time and later in continuous time. Their presentation of continuous-time option games is the first systematic coverage of the topic and fills a significant gap in the existing literature. Competitive Strategy provides a rigorous yet pragmatic and intuitive approach to strategy formulation. It synthesizes research in the areas of strategy, economics, and finance in a way that is accessible to readers not necessarily expert in the various fields involved.

From the million-copy-bestselling author of Execution 'Ingenious . . . An insightful and practical guide for leaders and practitioners at every level.' Forbes Welcome to the age of big tech. The old rules no longer apply. How do companies build a competitive advantage in the digital age? In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan - million-copy-bestselling author and advisor to some of the world's top CEOs - reveals that the tech giants have radically rewritten the rules of business. If you want to win, you need to learn to play a new game. Delving into the inner workings of the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Alibaba, Charan uncovers the six rules that the digital giants use to stay ahead: from their emphasis on creating corporate 'ecosystems', to the way they approach team organisation and moneymaking. And he outlines how to use these rules to transform your business, starting today. 'One of the world's preeminent counselors to CEOs.' Harvard Business Review 'The most influential consultant alive.' Fortune

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.