Books

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What Were They Thinking?

Every day companies and their leaders fail to capitalize on opportunities because they misunderstand the real sources of business success. Based on his popular column in Business 2.0, Jeffrey Pfeffer delivers wise and timely business commentary that challenges conventional wisdom while providing data and insights to help companies make smarter decisions. The book contains a series of short chapters filled with examples, data, and insights that challenge questionable assumptions and much conventional management wisdom. Each chapter also provides guidelines about how to think more deeply and intelligently about critical management issues. Covering topics ranging from managing people to leadership to measurement and strategy, it’s good organizational advice, delivered by Dr. Pfeffer himself.

Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds

Think about the last time you tried to change someone’s mind about something important: a voter’s political beliefs; a customer’s favorite brand; a spouse’s decorating taste. Chances are you weren’t successful in shifting that person’s beliefs in any way. In his book, Changing Minds, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner explains what happens during the course of changing a mind – and offers ways to influence that process. Remember that we don’t change our minds overnight, it happens in gradual stages that can be powerfully influenced along the way.This book provides insights that can broaden our horizons and shape our lives.

Big Think Strategy: How to Leverage Bold Ideas and Leave Small Thinking Behind

Business leaders need bold strategies to stay relevant and win. In Big Think Strategy, Schmitt shows how to bring bold thinking into your business by sourcing big ideas and executing them creatively. With the tools in this book, any leader can overcome institutionalized small think the inertia, the narrow-mindedness, and the aversion to risk that block true innovation. Your reward? Big, bold, and decidedly doable strategies that excite your employees and leave your rivals scrambling. Drawing on years of advising corporate leaders on creativity and strategy development, Schmitt explains how to infuse fresh thinking into the planning process. Through his commentary on the Trojan War, the film Fitzcarraldo, and the composer Gustav Mahler, Schmitt uncovers the essence of bold leadership and the levers of revolutionary change. Abundant examples from Apple, Whole Foods, MySpace, IBM, General Electric, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to name a few, show big think strategy in action. Tested by daring executives in a diverse range of industries, the practical ideas and tools in this book will help you leverage bold ideas in your strategic planning and position your firm uniquely for lasting market relevance and success.

Execution Premium. Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage

In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area–not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans. It doesn’t have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations, the authors describe a multistage system that enables you to gain measurable benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy. This book shows you how to: Develop an effective strategy–with tools such as SWOT analysis, vision formulation, and strategic change agendas; Plan execution of the strategy–through portfolios of strategic initiatives linked to strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards; Put your strategy into action–by integrating operational tools such as process dashboards, rolling forecasts, and activity-based costing; Test and update your strategy–using carefully designed management meetings to review operational and strategic data. Drawing on extensive research and detailed case studies from a broad array of industries, The Execution Premium presents a systematic and proven framework for achieving the financial results promised by your strategy.

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following “best practice” can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you’ll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions—including “What are the causal relationships at work here?” and “What are the implied trade-offs?” Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.

Five Minds for the Future

We live in a time of vast changes. And those changes call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In Five Minds for the Future: Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead: the disciplinary mind—mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft; the synthesizing mind—ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others; the creating mind—capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena; the respectful mind—awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups; the ethical mind—fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and citizen. World-renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner takes that thinking to the next level in this book, drawing from a wealth of diverse examples to illuminate his ideas. Concise and engaging, Five Minds for the Future will inspire lifelong learning in any reader as well as provide valuable insights for those charged with training and developing organizational leaders—both today and tomorrow.