A style expert reveals how clothes can make a difference in our business success—and open up a new world of opportunities. The way people present themselves is a secret sales weapon. It gives them an edge within their industry. And all they have to do to activate that edge is change their clothes. Strategically Suited helps you grow your business or advance your career by making a great first impression—and as a bonus, looking your best can give you a new and powerful confidence. With advice that can work for men or women, and an emphasis on staying true to your own style, longtime image and sales strategist Lee Heyward shows that when you up-level your look, you’ll feel great, have more fun—and close more business.

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.

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.

Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. It can be read as a whole or you can dip into the easy-to-read, bite-size sections as and when you need to deal with a particular issue. The structure has been specially designed to make sections quick and easy to use – you’ll find yourself referring back to them again and again.

Real executives talk about how Six Sigma changed their organizations for the better Backed by the real-world experience of executives who successfully implemented Six Sigma, this book shows how this powerful, data-driven quality improvement methodology can improve the learning cycle and financial and corporate reporting, as well as strategic planning, customer demand issues, and more. Case studies and interviews provide real-life best practices that make the implementation process that much easier for managers. The authors are Six Sigma experts affiliated with PricewaterhouseCoopers and here present an innovative examination of this powerful and popular methodology.

The global higher education sector has changed dramatically as universities continue to face unprecedented challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are struggling to navigate this crisis while maintaining high-quality course delivery, ensuring strong student recruitment numbers, and providing clear communication to staff and students. Issues have emerged at an exponential rate, and coping with the pandemic has been particularly difficult for universities as they serve several functions, such as being educational institutions as well as major employers. Leadership and Management Strategies for Creating Agile Universities reflects on the challenges that higher education institutions have faced during the pandemic and the associated projected socio-economic impact yet to be felt. It also considers how different universities have addressed the challenges so as to learn what has and has not worked and speculates what future implications exist for the vision of a new higher education sector in a changing world. Covering topics such as developmental leadership, IT governance, and lifelong learning, it is ideal for policymakers, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, governors, decision makers, teachers, and students.