Advance praise for Corporate-Level Strategy. "At last a book that cuts through all the corporate jargon and academic generalizations to answer the question 'Does the corporate parent create or destroy value for the organization?' The authors suggest a simple yet compelling framework for making this determination. Must reading for students and practitioners alike." -Robert Cizik Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Cooper Industries "In an era when the role of corporate-level management is quite justifiably being questioned and challenged, it is refreshing to find a book that clearly shows how parent companies can add rather than destroy value in their businesses. As we would expect of these world class authorities, Goold, Campbell, and Alexander have leveraged their fascinating research findings into an eminently readable and highly practical book." -Chris Bartlett Professor Harvard Business School "A vital and deeply researched contribution to thinking about corporate strategy." -Gary Hamel London Business School "I am very impressed by the extensive work on which this book is based, and by the concept of parenting advantage that it puts forward." -Yasutaka Obayashi Senior General Manager, Corporate Strategy Canon "Great companies grow, they don't just cut. With breakups and restructuring done, corporate parenting is coming back. Goold, Campbell, and Alexander have produced a comprehensive and intelligent book which should become a standard guide on the subject." -Tom Hout Vice President The Boston Consulting Group "A perceptive and valuable insight into an often underestimated area of strategy. This book clearly demonstrates the importance of parenting to the longer term development and prosperity of multibusiness companies." -Alan R. Jackson Chief Executive, BTR "I am glad someone has so well and so fully shed light on this important body of thinking." -Sigurd Reinton Director, McKinsey & Company, 1981-1988

A modern theory of executive strategy for the information age The information revolution has radically transformed virtually every aspect of business today. Yet, no book has fully addressed its impact on strategic management-until now. In Executive Strategy: Strategic Management and Information Technology, Frederick Betz builds on his pioneering work concerning the management of technical innovation to explore the powerful relationship between traditional strategic management and today's computer and communications technologies. By adapting established strategy-related concepts and processes to the strategic management challenges faced by companies in the information age, this book offers readers the background they need to guide processes ranging from the creation of strategic business models and the development of comprehensive planning scenarios to the strategic management of business diversification and the formulation of information strategy. Concepts are developed with a survey of the older business literature on strategy and the newer information strategy literature, and illustrated by a wealth of new technology and e-commerce-related case studies. The case studies, presented in the book and on its accompanying Web site (www.execstrat.com), are drawn from leading companies such as Apple Computer, Pixar, AOL Time Warner, and Amazon.com. From the Internet and e-commerce to the role of computer-aided tools such as inventory control and project management software, the world of information technology is filled with innovations that have crucial ramifications for the strategic management of every business. This book equips present and future engineering and business professionals with the road map they need to help steer the modern organization skillfully through the twists and turns of this new and exciting business landscape.

"The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy" provides executives, leaders, and facilitators with a step-by-step resource for guiding their team through all phases of the strategic planning process from gaining the team's buy-in to do planning and identify strategic issues, all the way through organization alignment, implementation, monitoring, and making adjustments.

From executives complaining that their teams don’t contribute ideas to employees giving up because their input isn’t valued--company culture is the culprit. Courageous Cultures provides a road map to build a high-performance, high-engagement culture around sharing ideas, solving problems, and rewarding contributions from all levels. Many leaders are convinced they have an open environment that encourages employees to speak up and are shocked when they learn that employees are holding back. Employees have ideas and want to be heard. Leadership wants to hear them. Too often, however, employees and leaders both feel that no one cares about making things better. The disconnect typically only widens over time, with both sides becoming more firmly entrenched in their viewpoints. Becoming a courageous culture means building teams of microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates working together. In our world of rapid change, a courageous culture is your competitive advantage. It ensures that your company is “sticky” for both customers and employees. In Courageous Cultures, you’ll learn practical tools that help you: Learn the difference between microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates and how they work together. See how the latest research conducted by the authors confirms why organizations struggle when it comes to creating strong cultures where employees are encouraged to contribute their best thinking. Learn proven models and tools that leaders can apply throughout all levels of the organization, to reengage and motivate employees. Understand best practices from companies around the world and learn how to apply these strategies and techniques in your own organization. This book provides you with the practical tools to uncover, leverage, and scale the best ideas from every level of your organization.

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.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

How to close the gap between strategy and execution Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don’t have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors. Based on new research, the authors reveal five practices for connecting strategy and execution used by highly successful enterprises such as IKEA, Natura, Danaher, Haier, and Lego. These companies: • Commit to what they do best instead of chasing multiple opportunities • Build their own unique winning capabilities instead of copying others • Put their culture to work instead of struggling to change it • Invest where it matters instead of going lean across the board • Shape the future instead of reacting to it Packed with tools you can use for building these five practices into your organization and supported by in-depth profiles of companies that are known for making their strategy work, this is your guide for reconnecting strategy to execution.

Making strategy requires undertaking major—often irreversible—decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts. Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist. This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.

Many strategies are explained as actions that will achieve the desired goals or visions of the company, but in order to predict the success of your strategy it is vital to gain an understanding of how it will impact on the financial statement. Executive Finance and Strategy works on the premise that financial models can clearly demonstrate where a particular strategy might lead, enabling you to evaluate past accounts and statements in order to respond to recent company history. It also explains how company law and ethics underpin financial statements and clarifies your responsibilities as a senior manager or director. By using finance as a record keeper and predictor of success, it helps you quantify your strategy to gain support from colleagues and take the right actions to ensure sustainable growth. Online supporting resources for this book include tables and formulas to support financial models within the book.

Are you missing opportunities for growth that are right in front of you? In today’s volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing you to stay focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Profiting from the core is crucial, but the danger is that overfocus on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but risky. Fixating too much on either strategy can cause you to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business. In this insightful yet practical book, strategy experts Alan Lewis and Dan McKone articulate a mindset that helps leaders recognize and capitalize on these opportunities. The Edge Strategy framework challenges how the boundaries of your existing products and services map to your customers’ views of the world and then provides three different lenses through which you can see and leverage value: • Product edge. How to capture incremental profits and other benefits by slightly altering the elements and composition of a core offering • Journey edge. How to create and capture extra value by adjusting your role in supporting the customer’s journey to and through your offering • Enterprise edge. How to unlock additional value from resources and capabilities that support your core offering by applying them in a different context, for a different offering or different set of customers With engaging examples across many industries, Lewis and McKone coach you on how to identify and assess each of the different “edges” and then provide concrete insights and advice on applying edge strategy and tactics to use in specific business contexts. The book concludes with a ten-step process to help executives and managers find and leverage the edges in their own companies. Edge Strategy is the concise, hands-on guide for growing your business by getting more yield from assets already in place, relationships already established, and investments already made.