Go from ordinary to extraordinary with 7 essential soft skills. You need Adaptability, Resilience, Optimism, Integrity, Critical thinking, Pro-activity and Empathy to stay one step ahead. Our world is changing - so fast, so furiously, so ferociously - that to stand out at work you need to change what you're doing. And quickly. To get ahead, you need soft skills. To stay ahead you need The Advantage. Just doing your job won’t get you to the top, but what does it take? Soft skills are your secret weapon. These days we’re all working harder and longer, but finding it harder than ever to make an impact and get the results we want. Traditional skills like being a good team player, a solid leader or a brilliant negotiator don’t seem to be as effective anymore. To really stand out, you need to be doing something different, something better. You need The Advantage. In this groundbreaking book, we set the scene for seven new skills that will propel you and your career forward. Through a combination of scientific research, no-nonsense advice, practical exercises and case studies, this book shows you how to understand, develop and use: Adaptability - respond effectively to challenges and grab new opportunities Resilience - learn from experience and attack the next challenge with equal boldness Optimism - be the most positive person you know Integrity - trust, values and honesty are the name of the game now as is authenticity Critical thinking - challenge assumptions and find solutions Pro-activity - thinking and acting ahead Empathy - respect and nurture your relationships STAY AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

The enhanced edition includes over 30 minutes of video featuring author Patrick Lencioni exploring the book's concepts more in-depth and providing new illustrative stories. It also includes color PDFs of many of the book's models, tools, and assessments.

Executives are beginning to realize that the most effective way to fight the recession or to conquer competitive challenges is not to retreat, but to optimize every asset under management--especially an organization's human resources. This groundbreaking book argues against historical assumptions regarding managing talent and how human capital should be perceived. Introducing three factors--Alignment, Capabilities, and Engagement (ACE)--this guide demonstrates how ACE forms the framework for optimizing, managing, and measuring the value contribution of human resources to the strategic and operational success of an organization. Answering questions such as Are we optimally using the talent we have acquired? Are we bringing in, developing, and retaining the right talent? and Are we developing leaders effectively? this is the perfect resource for business leaders in companies of all sizes.

This book presents strategies that put the customer at the center of an enterprise. It elaborates on the reasons for viewing customers as assets that a firm needs to acquire, develop and cultivate in order to generate profitable relationships, and champions customer profitability as the metric for measuring business performance. Further, it advocates the need to provide solutions to customers’ requirements with bundles of products and services. It broadens the definition of customer value beyond tangible benefits and price to include both tangible and intangible benefits and total ownership costs, while embracing a variety of unique customer needs. The book highlights the value of business planning, marketing and sales mechanisms and changing employee behavior to create lifelong, high-value profitable customer relationships that satisfy the customer’s needs. Competitive Advantage of Customer Centricity maps a new journey that entire organizations must undertake in order to achieve these lucrative goals.

This book takes a multi-disciplinary approach to analyzing the nature of ‘competition’ and ‘competitive advantage’ within the U.S. pro sport industry. By many measures, the four major pro sports leagues in the U.S. – the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), National Hockey League (NHL), and Major League Baseball (MLB) – are now some of the most successful business entities in the country. While these established leagues have generally been highly profitable throughout their respective existences, the past two decades have been particularly lucrative, with franchise values in all four leagues growing rapidly, and at levels well beyond market rates of return. Within this context, the book seeks to explore the nature of the competitive advantage that these leagues apparently possess. The purpose is to identify not only how these leagues have been able to get to where they are today, but also to examine the competitive threats and opportunities that these leagues face as they move forward. A key contribution of the book is that it analyzes these issues from a multi-disciplinary approach including a traditional economics perspective, public policy and public choice theory and strategic management, to provide a parallel explanation for the success of each of the four major leagues. It argues that no single conceptual approach can, in itself, adequately explain the full richness of the issue. Its stresses that these various approaches should generally be viewed as complements, rather than as being mutually exclusive, and that a full understanding of the issue requires one to adopt a multi-disciplinary perspective, making it of interest to scholars in strategic management, sport management, and economics. It can serve as an effective teaching tool in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses for students in these fields, and is particularly useful for faculties seeking to emphasize to their students the importance of a multi-disciplinary, integrative, approach when analyzing business and management issues. The book may also be of interest to leaders within the sport industry itself, and will help to provide insight and perspective as leagues seek to enhance their competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The winner of the UK's Business Book of the Year Award for 2021, this is a groundbreaking exposé of the myths behind startup success and a blueprint for harnessing the things that really matter. What is the difference between a startup that makes it, and one that crashes and burns? Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. But an Unfair Advantage is not just about your parents' wealth or who you know: anyone can have one. An Unfair Advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition. This groundbreaking book shows how to identify your own Unfair Advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba offer a unique framework for assessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths. Hard work and grit aren't enough, so they explore the importance of money, intelligence, location, education, expertise, status, and luck in the journey to success. From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds, and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn't realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.

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.

Presenting the most recent developments in research and strategy, this text applies these theories and illustrates their implementation in business cases.

The Price Advantage by three preeminent experts at McKinsey & Company is the most pragmatic and insightful book on pricing available. Based on in-depth, first-hand experience with hundreds of companies, this book is designed to provide managers with comprehensive guidance through the maze of pricing issues. The authors demonstrate why pricing excellence is critical to corporate success and profitability, then explain state-of-the-art approaches to analyzing and improving your own pricing strategy for any product or service. Their advice is critical for readers who need to develop pricing strategies that work in both good economic times and bad.