Career Strategy

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is the master key to power and victory and is the most important book ever written on overcoming obstacles and defeating your foes. All of the book’s millennia-old wisdom can be yours in a single sitting. Discover today why The Art of War has guided soldiers, generals, martial artists, and seekers throughout the ages.

Drawing from Machiavelli’s The Prince and applying it to modern leadership, this bold, unflinching guide shows how power actually works inside companies—from the boardroom to the backchannel. Whether you're managing up, fighting for visibility, or plotting your next move, this book gives you the raw, strategic playbook that most leadership books politely ignore.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help your company persevere through economic challenges and continue to grow while your competitors stumble. This book will inspire you to: harness your resources to pull through a pandemic; learn the right lessons from previous recessions; minimize pain while cutting costs and managing risk; foster a healthy culture during anxious times; make smart moves to protect your own job; and seize the opportunity to innovate and reinvent your business.

Green to Gold is an essential guide for forward-thinking business leaders who see the Green Wave coming and want to profit from it. This audio explores what every executive must know to manage the environmental challenges facing society and business. Based on the authors' years of experience and hundreds of interviews with corporate leaders around the world, Green to Gold, shows how companies generate lasting value.

In general, companies decide to begin franchising for one of three reasons: lack of money, people, or time. Opening your own franchise business is a big step for those who choose the venture, and it can be somewhat intimidating. The franchise marketplace is filled with innumerable franchise systems over a vast range of industries.

This book will take you from knowing nothing about the vending machine business to learning more about it than most people running an already successful business of this kind!

Decisions shape organizations. Decisiveness defines leaders. In today’s volatile, fast-paced world, hesitation isn’t just costly—it’s fatal. Organizations are drowning in data but starving for insights, paralyzed by complexity, and slowed by misaligned strategies. The leaders who thrive aren’t just fast or bold—they’re decisively aligned. The Decisive Company by Steve Elliott redefines decision-making for the modern enterprise.

Execution Excellence is the practitioner's guide to real-world implementation. Designed by a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) thought leader with 30 years of experience, this guide gives you a hands-on framework for putting the BSC methodology into action. Clear, and concise, this audiobook skips the theoretical exposition to get right to the point - how can companies use BSC to effectively deploy strategy and drive individual and enterprise performance? You'll find the answers here.

Pattern Breakers had its roots in the time when Mike Maples, a seasoned venture capitalist, was stumped, unable to get a grip on why some businesses he funded—Twitter, Twitch, and Okta, for example—took off, while others, some deemed “most likely to succeed,” shut their doors despite doing everything right. Was it dumb luck that separated gold from dross?

This book is not about lean. This book is about how to become lean. Lean strategy brings to a company a purpose of existence, belonging, influence, trust, and conscious leadership among its managers. It strengthens the autonomy and responsibility of individual employees and ultimately provides an everyday feeling of collaborative winning. This is my strategic approach to lean. Lean strategy consists of two parts. The first is to help you understand the problem. The second part of the book is a kind of manual.

Welcome aboard the voyage to personal empowerment and mental well-being through the mastery of self-talk! This book isn't about fleeting motivation; it's about long-term change – providing you with actionable tools and strategies that will be your unwavering companions on this transformative journey. The science behind self-talk and its incredible influence on your life's narrative…including a helpful self-assessment so you can analyze your own current self-talk.

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.

In "The Consumer's Journey to Purchasing Funeral Services: A Marketing Roadmap for Growing Market Share and Revenue," Bill A Johnston, a leading expert on Facebook ads for the funeral home industry, reveals the strategic marketing insights you need to become the market leader in your area. This comprehensive guide takes you through the consumer's journey from initial awareness to becoming a loyal, retained customer.

For the first time in any modern language, a female scholar and translator reimagines The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s ancient book of strategy and psychology has as much to tell us today as when it was first written 2,500 years ago. In a world forever at odds, his rules for anticipating the motivations and strategies of our competitors never cease to inspire leaders of all kinds.

What is great culture made of? How do you get more of it or turn around a group that needs improving? In The Culture Playbook, Daniel Coyle delivers a simple, clear, field-tested guide for building a strong, cohesive, high-performing group. Coyle has spent the last six years studying and consulting with some of the most successful groups on the planet—including IDEO, Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, Navy SEALS Team six and others. Here, he distils his findings into 60 concise, actionable, scientifically proven tips for building safety, generating trust and establishing purpose.

From ancient battlefields to the modern business landscape, competitors have tried innumerable approaches to conquering adversaries. Success for the victors has taken many forms and traveled many paths, but at its heart, winning strategy can be boiled down to ten universal principles. When learned and implemented, these principals become powerful drivers of business excellence. Renowned strategy expert William A. Cohen, whose considerable experience in the military, corporate, and academic sectors forms the basis for The Art of the Strategist.

Influencer marketing can no longer be ignored. Whether it's broad scale celebrity endorsement, or micro-influencers with niche, highly targeted followings, influencer marketing has become a natural extension of content marketing. However, while the opportunities are vast, the very nature of influencer marketing means that a brand must relinquish control of their marketing message to allow the influencer to communicate in their natural style.

Unequaled is the client service professional's guide to getting ahead and achieving professional goals. You're smart and hardworking, but guess what - so is everyone else. So how do you stand out? You need to distinguish yourself in order to get ahead, but simply being good at your job is not enough. Moving up is about soft skills, networking, client connections, emotional intelligence, and your personal reputation. This audiobook is a frank and candid guide to what it really takes to succeed in the field.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this audiobook explains why year-long marketing should not be your dominant focus, and explains the exponential benefits of mattering to your most loyal customers just a few times per year.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Leaders by General Stanley McChrystal, Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone, read by Paul Michael. Retired four-star general Stan McChrystal has studied leadership his whole adult life, from his first day at West Point to his most recent work with the corporate clients of the McChrystal Group. In this follow-up to his best sellers My Share of the Task and Team of Teams, McChrystal explores what leadership really means, debunking the many myths that have surrounded the concept. He focuses on 13 great leaders, showing that the lessons we commonly draw from their lives are seldom the correct ones.