In this essential new text, innovation expert and Dell insider Heather Simmons asks: How did Dell go from one of the most admired companies in the world to a firm whose stock flatlined for the better part of a decade? Reinventing Dell turns Dell's rise, fall, and emergent return into cogent lessons that business leaders can't do without.

Fearless, innovative, driven and daring. These are the qualities of a disruptor: a business that is willing to take risks to achieve incredible success. In The Disruptors, leading business journalist Sally Percy investigates the stories behind some of the world's most innovative businesses, who took unconventional and trailblazing approaches to overcome the competition and achieve success. Spotify, Nintendo, TikTok and A24. These are all businesses that have taken disruptive pathways to success and have redefined their industries. The Disruptors dives into the strategies behind these stories, offering valuable insights into innovative and daring entrepreneurship.

The step-by-step guide to defining your vision—and making it reality As a leader, it’s your job to look beyond the present and envision a brighter future for your school. Choosing the right path, however, can be a challenge. This inspirational resource is your guide. By following its one-of-a-kind iterative visioning process, you’ll sharpen your vision into a road map for transformative change—tailored to the needs of your learning community. Features include: Key strategies and tools for building a shared vision Practical implementation ideas Case studies from exemplary schools Common trends at the heart of impactful, positive change Thought-provoking vignettes Turn vision into reality, possibilities into plans, and create an environment that strengthens engagement, provides safe and nurturing learning opportunities, and produces students with the skills, knowledge, and disposition to be successful in life.

This book provides an insider's view of how today's blockbuster companies arrived at the top and explains how your business can do the same—in good economies or bad. How—and why—did revolutionary companies like Google, Apple, Cisco, and Southwest Airlines come about? The growth and success of such companies seems extraordinary, if not impossible, yet it has happened repeatedly despite the advance and proliferation of businesses to the point where it would seem that "everything's already been done." It's the specific business plans and mindsets of the people behind these rare "transformative" companies that enable these stunning achievements. In Built for Change: Essential Traits of Transformative Companies, the author reveals what distinguishes these unique enterprises from the multitudes striving for success in a fiercely competitive world. This book will fascinate and benefit small business owners, entrepreneurs, and CEOs of large corporations, as well as venture capitalists, institutional fund managers, angel investors, and university professors and business students. Readers will learn how to spot transformative companies as they develop and how they can apply the principles behind businesses such as Starbucks, Dell, and UPS to their own enterprises.

Self reinvention is easy! Everybody can reinvent themselves in a challenging economy by incorporating the simple indisputable truths in Reinvention Made Easy. But even the most creative leaders will find this a personally challenging and value changing read. "The economy doesn't go up or down; it becomes different!" The realities of your business have changed forever. Leaders manage the way they react to change. The next year is probably the end of the way we will do business. Your business purpose is not determined by you, but by the needs or wants that are satisfied when the customer buys a product or service. Effective market leaders see themselves from the customer's viewpoint. To reinvent yourself, you must answer these questions raised in Reinvention Made Easy: When will the recession end?, Why don't people buy what I sell?, Why does my team hate me?, Why doesn't my team work always work?, How am I punishing my customers?, What is costing me more money than making me? The answers are so un-comfortable, you will be forced to think your way to very last page.

Life histories are a class of oral data distinct from memoirs, autobiography, and conventional history in multiple ways. It is a way to lay out the felt experience of events in people’s everyday lives and not simply the statement of historical facts. As narrated pieces, life histories possess the unique voice of the individuals. Collecting data through life histories enables the interviewer-interviewee to develop a special bond that has the capacity to empower both in different ways. Subject Lessons examines the use of and value in using one’s life history as research within the social sciences.

More Than Class examines the changing texture of power relations in U.S. workplaces, focusing on sites ranging from security booths to bedrooms to mining shafts, rather than the traditional shop floor. The contributors see class analysis as a powerful tool for thinking about and addressing inequalities at the core of U.S. economic and social organization. They also take a look at ways to use new approaches—e.g. analysis of the intersections of identity and empowerment or disempowerment through constructions of race, ethnicity, and gender—to study subtle and not-so-subtle power relations in workplaces.

Create the personalized and compelling experiences that today's customers expect by harnessing AI and digital technologies to create smart connected products, with this cutting-edge guide from senior leaders at Accenture. Digital technology is both friend and foe: highly disruptive, yet it cannot be ignored. As traditional products transform into smart connected products faster than ever before, companies that fail to make use of it now put themselves in the firing line for disintermediation or even eradication. However, digital technology is also the biggest opportunity for product-making businesses to create the next generation of goods in the marketplace. In Reinventing the Product, Eric Schaeffer and David Sovie, both Senior Managing Directors at Accenture, show how this reinvention is made possible, to deliver truly intelligent, and often even autonomous, products. Reinventing the Product makes the case for companies to rethink their product strategy, innovation and engineering processes, including: - How to harness the opportunities of AI and digital technologies, such as IoT sensors, blockchain, advanced analytics, cloud and edge computing - Practical advice on transforming their entire culture to build the future of successful 'living products' - Features case studies from global organizations such as Faurecia, Signify, Symmons and Haier and interviews with thought leaders from top companies including Amazon, ABB, Tesla, Samsung and Google This book provides the only advice any product-making company needs as it embarks on, or accelerates, its digitization journey.

The proven, effective strategy for reinventing your business in the age of ever-present disruption Disruption by digital technologies? That's not a new story. But what is new is the "wise pivot," a replicable strategy for harnessing disruption to survive, grow, and be relevant to the future. It's a strategy for perpetual reinvention across the old, now, and new elements of any business. Rapid recent advances in technology are forcing leaders in every business to rethink long-held beliefs about how to adapt to emerging technologies and new markets. What has become abundantly clear: in the digital age, conventional wisdom about business transformation no longer works, if it ever did. Based on Accenture's own experience of reinventing itself in the face of disruption, the company's real world client work, and a rigorous two-year study of thousands of businesses across 30 industries, Pivot to the Future reveals methodical and bold moves for finding and releasing new sources of trapped value-unlocked by bridging the gap between what is technologically possible and how technologies are being used. The freed value enables companies to simultaneously reinvent their legacy, and current and new businesses. Pivot to the Future is for leaders who seek to turn the existential threats of today and tomorrow into sustainable growth, with the courage to understand that a wise pivot strategy is not a one-time event, but a commitment to a future of perpetual reinvention, where one pivot is followed by the next and the next.

How challenger parties, acting as political entrepreneurs, are changing European democracies Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. In this book, Catherine De Vries and Sara Hobolt explore why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs. Drawing analogies with how firms compete, De Vries and Hobolt demonstrate that political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Challenger parties employ two types of innovation to break established party dominance: they mobilize new issues, such as immigration, the environment, and Euroscepticism, and they employ antiestablishment rhetoric to undermine mainstream party appeal. Unencumbered by government experience, challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment. Delving into strategies of dominance versus innovation, the authors explain why European party systems have remained stable for decades, but also why they are now increasingly under strain. As challenger parties continue to seek to disrupt the existing order, Political Entrepreneurs shows that their ascendency fundamentally alters government stability and democratic politics.