This indispensable guide for the creative manager takes readers on a powerful, comprehensive, and illuminating tour through the fields of strategic management. The result is a brilliant, penetrating primer on business strategy that is, at the same time, immensely readable and fun.

If you're like most managers and things keep you up at night, now you can turn to a book that's designed especially for you! But you won't find talking rabbits or princesses here. (There is a cow, but it doesn't jump.) Henry Mintzberg has culled forty-two of the best posts from his widely read blog and turned them into a deceptively light, sneakily serious compendium of sometimes heretical reflections on management. The moral here is this: managers need to leave their castles and find out what's actually going on in their kingdoms. And like real bedtime stories, these essays have metaphors galore. So prepare to grow strategies like weeds and organize like a cow. Discover the maestro myth of managing, find the soft underbelly of hard data, and learn why downsizing is bloodletting and your board should be a bee. Mintzberg writes, “Just try not to be outraged by anything you read, because some of my most outrageous ideas turn out to be my best. They just take a while to become obvious.”

"Strategy Bites Back invites you to encounter an unlikely set of voices and something sharp to say about strategy - from Mozart to Coco Chanel's "little black dress". These perspectives will provide you with new and dramatically different angles from which to attack the world of strategy." "This book is for everyone involved with strategy - manager, CEO, consultant, professor, student - who wants to see strategy more broadly, more deeply and more playfully."--BOOK JACKET.

Emphasising that firms face uncertainties and unknowns, this book argues that the core of strategic thinking and processes rests on the organization and its leaders developing newly imagined solutions to the opportunities that these uncertainties open up. It presents new approaches for managers, consultants, strategy teachers and students.

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.

“Henry Mintzberg’s views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys.” The Observer “My favourite management book of the last 25 years? No contest. The Rise & Fall of Strategic Planning.” Tom Peters, managment guru Strategy is the most prestigious but also the most confusing part of business. Managers are constantly bombarded with new jargon and the latest fads promising the magic bullet for every strategic problem. The world of strategy can seem to be an impenetrable jungle. Strategy Safari presents a powerful antidote to the dilemma of needing to know about strategy and yet not being able to find any comprehensible guidelines. This revised edition is a comprehensive, colourful and illuminating tour through the wilds of strategic management. In this provocative, jargon-free and extremely readable guide, top strategy authors Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel clearly set out and critique each of the ten major schools of strategic management thinking to help you grasp what you really need to know. Take the strategy safari – your business will thank you for it.

Verbeke provides a new perspective on international business strategy by combining analytical rigour and true managerial insight on the functioning of large multinational enterprises (MNEs). With unique commentary on 48 seminal articles published in the Harvard Business Review, the Sloan Management Review and the California Management Review over the past three decades, Verbeke shows how these can be applied to real businesses engaged in international expansion programmes, especially as they venture into high-distance markets. The second edition has been thoroughly updated and features greater coverage of emerging markets with a new chapter and seven new cases. Suited for advanced undergraduates and graduate courses, students will benefit from updated case studies and improved learning features, including 'management takeaways', key lessons that can be applied to MNEs and a wide range of online resources.

William DugganÕs 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, showed how innovation really happens in business and other fields and how that matches what modern neuroscience tells us about how creative ideas form in the human mind. In his new book, Creative Strategy, Duggan offers a step-by-step guide to help individuals and organizations put that same method to work for their own innovations. DugganÕs book solves the most important problem of how innovation actually happens. Other methods of creativity, strategy, and innovation explain how to research and analyze a situation, but they donÕt guide toward the next step: developing a creative idea for what to do. Or they rely on the magic of ÒbrainstormingÓÑjust tossing out ideas. Instead, Duggan shows how creative strategy follows the natural three-step method of the human brain: breaking down a problem into parts and then searching for past examples to create a new combination to solve the problem. ThatÕs how innovation really happens. Duggan explains how to follow these three steps to innovate in business and any other field as an individual, a team, or a whole company. The crucial middle stepÑthe search for past examplesÑtakes readers beyond their own brain to a Òwhat-works scanÓ of what others have done within and outside of the company, industry, and country. It is a global search for good ideas to combine as a new innovation. Duggan illustrates creative strategy through real-world cases of innovation that use the same method: from Netflix to Edison, from Google to Henry Ford. He also shows how to integrate creative strategy into other methods you might currently use, such as PorterÕs Five Forces or Design Thinking. Creative Strategy takes the mystery out of innovation and puts it within your grasp.

Companies know that globalizing their web sites should produce revenue growth. This book aims to show web developers how to do it, presenting spotlights on real companies who have globalized their sites and the benefits they've received.

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