Management

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The Future of Management

“Like many great inventions, management practices have a shelf life….Gary Hamel explains how to jettison the weak ones and embrace the ones that work. (Fortune) “There’s much here that will resonate with forward-thinking managers.” (BusinessWeek) Publisher’s Summary: What really fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence or new business models, but management innovation: new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and building strategies. Over the past century, breakthroughs in the “technology of management” have enabled a few companies, including General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, and Visa, to cross new performance thresholds and build long-term advantages. Yet most companies lack a disciplined process for radical management innovation. World renowned business sage Gary Hamel argues that organizations need bold management innovation now more than ever. The current management model, centered on control and efficiency, no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. In his most provocative book to date, Hamel takes aim at the legacy beliefs preventing 21st-century companies from surmounting new challenges. With incisive analysis and vivid illustrations, he explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator, and reveals: The make-or-break challenges that will determine competitive success in an age of head-snapping change; The toxic effects of our legacy-management beliefs; The unconventional management practices generating breakthrough results in a handful of pioneering organizations; The new principles every company must weave into its management DNA; The Web’s potential to obliterate smokestack management practices; The actions your company can take now to build its own management advantage. Get ready to throw off the shackles of yesterday’s management dogma. Tomorrow’s winners will be those companies that start inventing the future of management today.

CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology

If you are a CIO, or intend to become a CIO, or simply want to understand the strategic importance of IT for your entire enterprise, CIO Best Practices provides you with the best practice guidance on the key responsibilities of the CIO and its important role in modern organizations. This is the most definitive and important work you will find on achieving and exercising strategic IT leadership.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.” Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.” In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits. Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

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.

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.

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.