Organizational Strategy

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 dominant idea - that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

As Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli implied, you're either predator or prey, and the animal you most resemble determines your position on the food chain. In The Wolf in CIO's Clothing Gartner analyst and author Tina Nunno expands on Machiavelli's metaphor, examining seven animal types and the leadership attributes of each. Nunno posits the wolf - a social animal with strong predatory instincts - as the ideal example of how a leader can adapt and thrive.

Setting business strategy enables you to develop absolute clarity on priorities, organize resources, and get better results than ever before. It may sound complicated, but Brian Tracy knows how to make it simple. In this practical audiobook, he shares the most important lessons for strategic planning.

Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post best seller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization how to guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business successwhere to play and how to win.

Almost one in four American working adults has a job that pays less than a living wage. Conventional wisdom says that’s how the world has to work. Bad jobs with low wages, minimal benefits, little training, and chaotic schedules are the only way companies can keep costs down and prices low. If companies were to offer better jobs, customers would have to pay more or companies would have to make less. But in The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, makes the compelling case that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind - with bad jobs - is a choice, not a necessity.

It's no secret that culture is the key to attracting and engaging top talent and seizing the competitive edge. But the vast majority of culture efforts fail as quickly as they started. Why? Because leaders are missing the big picture. They're creating and communicating values but failing to ensure the values are tied to the purpose and the strategy of the company while also being integrated into processes, operations, and behaviors.

Know What You're For details an effective growth strategy for businesses and nonprofits by closing the gap between two simple questions: What do you want to be known for? What are you known for? When the two answers match, organizations gain incredible momentum by unleashing the most powerful marketing force there is: lasting word-of-mouth support.

People Strategy: How to Invest in People and Make Culture Your Competitive Advantage provides listeners with a powerful framework in which to develop high-performing teams, increase employee motivation, and use data to build an inviting and effective company culture. Author Jack Altman, cofounder and CEO of Lattice, an award-winning HR and performance management platform, shows you how to: establish the values that will form the bedrock of your organization; develop feedback processes that help employees feel heard, supported, and equipped to succeed; and more.

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.

Whether it shows up as stress, top-down leadership styles, drama, or uncertainty, fear kills good decision-making, dampens morale, lowers employee engagement, and hurts bottom-line growth. The good news is that there's an antidote: Freedom at Work. In this groundbreaking book, Traci Fenton brings together decades of original research, based on her team's work with hundreds of top companies around the world, such as The WD-40 Company, Mindvalley, DaVita, Menlo Innovations, Zappos, HCL Technologies, and more, revealing the proven pathway to leadership success.

Traditionally, human resources has focused on recruiting good people, preparing them for assignments, motivating them to perform, and retaining them. These functions remain essential. But to be successful in turbulent times like ours, human capital strategy needs to be broader and much more far reaching.

The original edition of Discipline Without Punishment introduced a positive approach for getting problem employees to meet - and often even exceed - job requirements. The book still delivers on that promise, and in this revised edition, Dick Grote provides new insights, along with sample dialogues, memos, and worksheets.

In Ruthless Consistency, Michael Canic identifies the three surprising reasons most strategic change initiatives fail: Leaders unwittingly send mixed messages that demotivate their people and undermine those initiatives; leaders focus on what they do instead of what their people experience; and leaders are not as committed as they think they are or need to be. The book then introduces an intuitive yet comprehensive model for success.

A Stage 1 business is in a unique phase. With only 1-10 employees, each person is critical to the success of the enterprise. Profit is the first priority, and the organization must be confident overall, with a leader who casts and executes on a strong vision, coaches employees to develop their potential, and pushes through chaos with decisive decision making. This book concisely presents the research-based rules for growth that will guide a business owner through the challenges of running a Stage 1 business. The chapters are based on the unique dimensions of the Stages of Growth methodology...

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.

Inside Leadership in Diversity and Inclusion, you’ll discover how a team brimming with different cultural backgrounds can create better innovation and ingenuity; the largest hurdles and how to overcome them; the true meaning behind the terms “microaggressions", “unconscious bias", “privilege", and “antiracism” and how these terms apply to your business, proven techniques that you can implement to bring about major change and inclusive leadership, and much more!

A Stage 2 business has between 11-19 employees. As the Ramp-Up Stage, a Stage 2 company is at a place where it has gained enough employees that more organizational structure needs to be put into place. The owner or CEO needs to focus on developing up to three supervisors/managers who can begin to help oversee some of the team. Growth must continue to come through the increase of profitable revenue, which typically requires increasing the structure and consistency of business development initiatives. Failure to create stable revenue streams will lead to the company stalling, or potentially ...

A Stage 5 business has between 58-95 employees. It marks a time of integration for a company as the different departments are brought together by an integrated management team. Profit is a top priority to ensure that enough capital is generated to sustain a larger organization. The organization should exhibit twice as much confidence as caution in support of the focused change needed to install a Leadership Team and continue to pursue new opportunities. The leader needs to primarily guide through collaboration, inspire the team with a grand vision, and build loyalty through comradery. This ...

A Stage 3 business has between 20-34 Employees. As the Delegation Stage, A Stage 3 company is in the process of shifting from being owner-centric to enterprise-centric. As such, this Stage is often one of the most difficult for the CEO. People are a top priority, with an early form of a management team being developed to prepare for further growth. The organization must be equal parts cautious and confident, with a leader who coaches the employees and promotes staff buy-in while still exemplifying a standard of excellence. This book concisely presents the research-based rules for growth ...

Imagine if you could see the playbook that returned a struggling tech empire to the top of the tech leaderboard. The Microsoft Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled the tech company to once again become a leading tech innovator.