FT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTH 'A comprehensive, concise, and practical guide that will enable anyone, in any situation, to develop their strategic thinking' Tiffani Bova, Chief Growth Evangelist, Salesforce, WSJ bestselling author, Growth IQ 'A must read for everyone who ever deals with complex important challenges. There are many take-away gems here that will help you push through the knotty centre of hard-to-resolve problems. Highly recommended!', Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy Being strategic is a critical skill. It enables you to solve problems on a day-to-day basis while also keeping an eye on the long term, anticipating opportunities and mitigating threats along the way. Fred Pelard has been teaching strategic thinking to executives at all levels at leading companies around the world for almost 20 years. How to Be Strategic is his accessible and thorough guide to strategic thinking in any situation. It contains 12 smartly illustrated, workable methodologies from leading experts like Eric Ries, Chan Kim, and Barbara Minto, and will help you find your own path to the right solution every time. 'A wonderful and inspirational look into wide-ranging frameworks and theories to spark new thinking and strategy' Tom Goodwin, author of Digital Darwinism and Head of Futures and Insight at Publicis Groupe 'Practical and comprehensive' Roeland Assenberg, Director, Strategy and Banking, Monitor Deloitte Netherlands

Industries that drive economic growth and support our comfortable modern lifestyles have exploited natural resources to do so. But now there’s growing understanding that business can benefit from a better relationship with the environment. Leading corporations have begun to leverage nature-based remediation, restoration, and enhanced lands management to meet a variety of business needs, such as increasing employee engagement and establishing key performance indicators for reporting and disclosures. Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning offers fresh insights for corporations and environmental groups looking to create mutually beneficial partnerships that use conservation action to address business challenges and realize meaningful environmental outcomes. Recognizing the long history of mistrust between corporate action and environmental effort, Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning begins by explaining how to identify priorities that will yield a beneficial relationship between a company and nonprofit. Next, O’Gorman offers steps for creating ecologically-focused projects that address key business needs. Chapters highlight existing projects with different scales of engagement, emphasizing that headline-generating, multimillion dollar commitments are not necessarily the most effective approach. Myriad case studies featuring programs from habitat restoration to environmental educational initiatives at companies like Bridgestone USA, General Motors, and CRH Americas are included to help spark new ideas. With limited government funding available for conservation and increasing competition for grant support, corporate efforts can fill a growing need for environmental stewardship while also providing business benefits. Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning presents a comprehensive approach for effective engagement between the public and private sector, encouraging pragmatic partnerships that benefit us all.

How "Aha!" really happens. When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer "At night," or "In the shower," or "Stuck in traffic." You get a flash of insight. Things come together in your mind. You connect the dots. You say to yourself, "Aha! I see what to do." Brain science now reveals how these flashes of insight happen. It's a special form of intuition. We call it strategic intuition, because it gives you an idea for action-a strategy. Brain science tells us there are three kinds of intuition: ordinary, expert, and strategic. Ordinary intuition is just a feeling, a gut instinct. Expert intuition is snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar, the way a tennis pro knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponent's racket. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this kind of intuition in Blink.) The third kind, strategic intuition, is not a vague feeling, like ordinary intuition. Strategic intuition is a clear thought. And it's not fast, like expert intuition. It's slow. That flash of insight you had last night might solve a problem that's been on your mind for a month. And it doesn't happen in familiar situations, like a tennis match. Strategic intuition works in new situations. That's when you need it most. Everyone knows you need creative thinking, or entrepreneurial thinking, or innovative thinking, or strategic thinking to succeed in the modern world. All these kinds of thinking happen through flashes of insight--strategic intuition. And now that we know how it works, you can learn to do it better. That's what this book is about. Over the past ten years, William Duggan has conducted pioneering research on strategic intuition and for the past three years has taught a popular course at Columbia Business School on the subject. He now gives us this eye-opening book that shows how strategic intuition lies at the heart of great achievements throughout human history: the scientific and computer revolutions, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, modern art, microfinance in poor countries, and more. Considering the achievements of people and organizations, from Bill Gates to Google, Copernicus to Martin Luther King, Picasso to Patton, you'll never think the same way about strategy again. Three kinds of strategic ideas apply to human achievement: * Strategic analysis, where you study the situation you face * Strategic intuition, where you get a creative idea for what to do * Strategic planning, where you work out the details of how to do it. There is no shortage of books about strategic analysis and strategic planning. This new book by William Duggan is the first full treatment of strategic intuition. It's the missing piece of the strategy puzzle that makes essential reading for anyone interested in achieving more in any field of human endeavor.

Strategic Planning for Public Libraries is a complete planning toolkit. Each purchase comes with a downloadable supplemental folder full of reusable templates, worksheets, as well as real-life examples from other libraries to help guide the reader through the planning process. This book provides a framework that any library, whether it serves urban, suburban, or rural communities, can use as a basis for its strategic planning.

Today’s organizations face difficult challenges in order to remain competitive—the quickening pace of change, increasing uncertainty, growing ambiguity, and complexity. To meet these challenges, organizations must broaden the scope of leadership responsibility for strategic leadership and engage more people in the process of leadership. In Becoming a Strategic Leader Rich Hughes and Kate Beatty from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) offer executives and managers a handbook for implementing a strategic leadership process that reaches leaders at all levels of organizations. Based on CCL’s successful Developing the Strategic Leader Program, this book outlines the framework of strategic leadership and contains practical suggestions on how to develop the individual, team, and organizational skills needed for institutions to become more adaptable, flexible, and resilient. The authors also show how individual managers can exercise effective strategic leadership through their distinctive and systemic approach—thinking, acting, and influencing.

Strategic Management (2020) is a 325-page open educational resource designed as an introduction to the key topics and themes of strategic management. The open textbook is intended for a senior capstone course in an undergraduate business program and suitable for a wide range of undergraduate business students including those majoring in marketing, management, business administration, accounting, finance, real estate, business information technology, and hospitality and tourism. The text presents examples of familiar companies and personalities to illustrate the different strategies used by today's firms and how they go about implementing those strategies. It includes case studies, end of section key takeaways, exercises, and links to external videos, and an end-of-book glossary. The text is ideal for courses which focus on how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful. Students will learn how to conduct case analyses, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses.

Public relations professionals are operating in an increasingly challenging and complex environment. Pressures from outside the organisation include new accountabilities, empowered stakeholders, increased public cynicism and a new communication landscape. Internally, there are increasing demands to demonstrate a strategic contribution, alongside a requirement to coach and counsel senior managers exposed to these environmental pressures. This revised and updated edition provides a framework to enable public relations professionals to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness, while also setting out the specific capabilities public relations leaders must exhibit to operate at the highest levels of the organisation. This edition further develops the pioneering approach to integrating thinking around public relations, leadership, and strategy. It has been updated comprehensively to address contemporary developments and introduce new research and fresh perspectives from the authors. New to this edition are insights from Chief Executives on what they expect from public relations leaders and a comprehensive set of capabilities which scope the demanding role of professionals at the top of their game. Concise and practical, this textbook is suitable for MBA and other postgraduate and executive education qualifications in Public Relations and Corporate Communications – especially for those students who wish to pursue a successful career as a professional public relations specialist, able to operate strategically at the top of successful organisations.

This guidebook is essential reading for all professionals in the field.

The success of any organization depends on high-quality customer service. But for companies that strategically align customer service with their overall corporate strategy, it can transcend typical good business to become a profitable word-of-mouth machine that will transform the bottom line. Drawing on over thirty years of research for companies such as 3M, American Express, Chik-Fil-A, USAA, Coca-Cola, FedEx, GE, Cisco Systems, Neiman Marcus, and Toyota, author Goodman uses formal research, case studies, and patented practices to show readers how they can: • calculate the financial impact of good and bad customer service • make the financial case for customer service improvements • systematically identify the causes of problems • align customer service with their brand • harness customer service strategy into their organization's culture and behavior Filled with proven strategies and eye-opening case studies, this book challenges many aspects of conventional wisdom—using hard data—and reveals how any organization can earn more loyalty, win more customers...and improve their financial bottom line.