Imagine, if you can, the world of business - without corporate strategy.
Remarkably, fifty years ago that's the way it was. Businesses made plans, certainly, but without understanding the underlying dynamics of competition, costs, and customers. It was like trying to design a large-scale engineering project without knowing the laws of physics.
But in the 1960s, four mavericks and their posses instigated a profound shift in thinking that

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To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate your organization's competitive strategy into the day-to-day actions carried out in your company. That means channeling resources into the right efforts, achieving the right balance between innovation and control, and getting everyone pulling in the same direction. How to keep all this on track? Identify critical gaps in your strategy execution processes, focus on the most important choices you must make,...

"The secret to planning a deeply personal and meaningful wedding has nothing to do with budget. It's about creating a celebration that reflects a couple's core values. Translating those values is the work of Modern Wedding, an information-filled guide with hundreds of creative ideas and beautiful, inspiring photographs for readers to look at and say, "This feels like us." The book unpacks every element of a wedding-stationery, attire, seating plans,...

"Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches--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 current business--one that is still thriving--while...

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single...

In Fire Your Financial Advisor: 40 Years of Greed and Exploitation of the American Retiree, and How You Can Fight Back, Greg Aler tells the story of how the financial industry created a trillion-dollar empire by withholding information while over-charging and under-servicing retirees regarding the real risks of retirement. Greg then introduces the Retirement Planner. This is a new guide who was built to replace the financial advisor and address the...

Taking control of your company's destiny starts with planning strategically from the beginning.

How will you determine if your company has succeeded if you can't base its performance on a well-defined business strategy? A strategic plan, established at your venture's birth, helps crystalize the future of the organization—mapping a clear path from where the company stands today to where you wish it to be.

Setting

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New competitive realities have ruptured industry boundaries, overthrown much of standard management practice, and rendered conventional models of strategy and growth obsolete. In their stead have come the powerful ideas and methodologies of Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, whose much-revered thinking has already engendered a new language of strategy. In this book, they develop a coherent model for how today's executives can identify and accomplish no...

Here's a startling concept for anyone who knows anything about business:
"For successful companies, competition is irrelevant." Flying in the face of the conventional wisdom of most senior management today, the internationally noted business consultant Michel Robert explains why gigantically successful businesses ignore their competitors...and reap huge profits! How does it work?A number of CEOs who have used Robert's unique strategic thinking...

Business model innovation is the key to unlocking transformational growth--but few executives know how to apply it to their businesses. In Reinvent Your Business Model, Mark Johnson reveals the playbook. Johnson lays out an eminently practical framework that identifies the four fundamental building blocks that make business models work. In a series of in-depth case studies, he goes on to vividly illustrate how companies are using innovative business...