Very few large companies manage to avoid stalls in revenue growth. These stalls are not attributable to the natural business cycle. Rather, careful analysis reveals that the vast majority of such stalls are the direct result of strategic choices made by corporate leaders. In short, stoppages in growth are almost always avoidable. This extensively researched book analyzes the growth experiences of more than six hundred Fortune 100 companies ...

An introduction to the most enduring ideas on management from Harvard Business ReviewChange is the one constant in business, and we must adapt or face obsolescence. Yet certain challenges never go away. That's what makes this book "must read." These are the 10 seminal articles by management's most influential experts, on topics of perennial concern to ambitious managers and leaders hungry for inspiration--and ready to run with big ideas to accelerate their...

Peter Cappelli confronts the myth of the skills gap and provides an actionable path forward to put people back to work.Even in a time of perilously high unemployment, companies contend that they cannot find the employees they need. Pointing to a skills gap, employers argue applicants are simply not qualified; schools aren't preparing students for jobs; the government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants; and even when the match is right, prospective employ...

The New Sustainability Advantage shows how the benefits of the "triple bottom line" can increase a typical company's profit by at least 51 to 81% within five years, depending on the company's size and industry sector, while avoiding risks that could jeopardize its financial wellbeing.Fully revised and updated, this 10th anniversary edition clearly demonstrates that, by focusing on seven powerful yet easy-to-grasp sustainability strategies, businesses can:In...

Dithering. Decisions that turn out wrong. Decisions that people sabotage or don't know how to implement. If your company's experiencing these problems, it's not alone. Most organizations don't know how to make and execute good decisions. And they're paying a high price-as profitability and competitiveness erode.It doesn't have to be this way. In Decide and Deliver, the authors draw on Bain & Company's extensive research to present a five-step process for improving your fir...

Find the right innovation modelInnovation is a much-used buzzword these days, but when it comes to creating and implementing a new idea, many companies miss the mark-plans backfire, consumer preferences shift, or tried-and-true practices fail to work in a new context. So is innovation just a low-odds crapshoot?In The Architecture of Innovation, Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner-one of the foremost experts on how innovation works-says in...

In Smart Pricing: How Google, Priceline and Leading Businesses Use Pricing Innovation for Profitability, Wharton professors and renowned pricing experts Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang draw on examples from high tech to low tech, from consumer markets to business markets, and from U.S. to abroad, to tell the stories of how innovative pricing strategies can help companies create and capture value as well as customers. They teach the pricing principles behind those innovative ideas ...

Robust methods to identify new growth opportunitiesYOUR SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND growth; your company needs growth; and your career can suffer or soar because of how you drive growth-or don’t. While executives often talk about their great growth plans, very few of these plans actually deliver real gains in growth and profitability. How do some companies manage to beat the odds and bust through the obstacles that make explosive growth so elusive?In this hands-on ...

Strategy is the most central issue in management. It has to do with defining the purpose of an organization, understanding the market in which it operates and the capabilities the firm possesses, and putting together a winning plan. There are many influential frameworks to help managers undertake a systematic reflection on this issue. The most dominant approaches are Michael Porter’s "Competitive Strategy" and the "Resource-Based View of the Firm," popularized by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahal...

As the fallout from the financial meltdown of 2008 grows progressively worse, companies, industries, and entire markets cling precariously to life or have ceased to exist altogether. And the turbulence may not be over any time soon.In Chaotics, noted business strategists Philip Kotler and John Caslione present the intriguing, if unsettling, argument that these troubled times are not an aberration, but the new face of normal. In fact, the e...

Two experts on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation.A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their techno...

You don't care who can access your data because you have nothing to hide. But what if corporations were using that data to control your decisions?As millions of consumers carry on unaware, powerful corporations race to collect more and more data about our behaviors, needs, and desires. This massive trove of data represents one of the most valuable assets on the planet.In All You Can Pay, Anna Bernasek and D. T. Mongan show how companies use what th...