Career Strategy

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity—you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn't teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers.

Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were the weapons of choice at Wall Street investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.

We all use strategy in our everyday lives—whether in business, sports, games, pursuing a potential partner, politics, arms races, peace negotiations, or even personal disagreements. This book distills twelve years of research, interviews, and analysis into a comprehensive guide on the essence of strategy. It concisely outlines the most critical elements of strategy and presents over 300 real-world examples of strategic and tactical applications.

Meant for This is for anyone with a dream inside their heart they can’t ignore. The kind of dream that feels too big or too impossible to ever become a reality. Whether you’ve put it on the back burner for years or you’ve been working toward it your whole life, this book will breathe new life into it and create a whole new world of possibility.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil's Advocate, the 11th-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams - comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors - are used widely in both the public and private sector.

Two-time New York Times best-selling authors Roger Connors and Tom Smith show how leaders can achieve record-breaking results by quickly and effectively shaping their organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset - their people. Change the Culture, Change the Game joins their classic book The Oz Principle and their recent best seller How Did That Happen? to complete the most comprehensive series ever written on workplace accountability.

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business-one that is still thriving-while dramatically reinventing it?

Michael Porter’s succinct summary of his landmark book Strategy, considered the best book on strategy of all time.

The world changes continuously and rapidly. It's foolhardy to believe that strategies should not do so as well. Nonprofit leaders already know this, but traditional strategic planning has locked them into a process that's divorced from today's reality. That's why plans sit on the shelf and why smart executives are always seeking workarounds in between planning periods. The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution offers a nimble and powerful alternative. In this groundbreaking book, strategy expert David La Piana introduces "Real-Time Strategic Planning."

This comprehensive guide empowers aspiring leaders and professionals to build and leverage a personal board of advisors, offering actionable strategies for mapping out professional growth, applicable insights to career mapping, and real-life examples for accelerated personal and professional growth—who to connect with, what to discuss, and how to map out your career together!

A new model is being pioneered by geeks; a radical new mindset that has shifted the paradigm entirely on what a business can – and should – be. They do not follow the rules of the Industrial era, with their hierarchies and bureaucratic ways of thinking. They do not follow the principles preached in business schools since the dawn of time. They have all dedicated themselves to approaching business as a geek would: through trial and error, egalitarianism, evidence and stress-testing ideas in a group setting – rather than relying on the boss’s instincts.

The future is an uncertain, uncomfortable prospect for employees, employers, and society at large. A flurry of unprecedented events have proven that, despite what some politicians and economists may tell us, the future is not set in stone. In light of this uncertainty, The Future Starts Now looks toward the various innovations and technologies that may shape our future. Authors Theo Priestley and Bronwyn Williams have brought together the world's leading futurists to articulate and clarify the current trajectories in technology, economics, politics, and business.

Do you know the best way to drive your company's growth? If not, it's time to boost your growth IQ. Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business's performance can feel overwhelming. But, as you'll discover in Growth IQ, there are just 10 simple - but easily misunderstood - paths to growth, and every successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context.

Data analytics offer an incredible opportunity to predict the future, engage with new technological advancements, and gain valuable insights about your business. But unless you're staying on top of the cutting edge of analytics, your company is wasting that potential-and your competitors will be gaining speed while you fall behind. These articles by experts and consultants will help you understand today's essential thinking about what data analytics are capable of and how to adopt their use in your organization.

In the military, a field manual provides instructions in simple, clear, step-by-step language to help soldiers complete their mission. In the civilian sector, books offer information on everything from fixing a leaky tap to developing an effective workout programme to cooking a good steak. Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual is here to help you navigate your way through the difficulties of leadership by providing a direct, situational, pragmatic how-to guide that anyone can instantly put to use.

Phil Town is now a very wealthy man, but he wasn't always. In fact, he was living on a salary of $4000 a year when some well-timed advice launched him down a highway of investing self-education that revealed what the true "rules" are and how to make them work in one's favor.

When you think of success, what comes to mind? Career, public achievements, diplomas, degrees? We work hard to find a job, gain promotions, and develop skills to become a peak performer. We’re continually striving to win at work. But does winning at work mean we have to lose at home? In all our “winning,” are we neglecting what matters most? Unfortunately, too many leaders achieve career success, only to find they have critically damaged their relationships with the people closest to them. Winning Begins at Home will help you change all that.

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

No pre-pandemic strategy is effective anymore. Alan Weiss has developed an original, new approach to strategy which thus far has certified over 100 people globally, delivering this approach to scores of firms of all types in four countries.