How to Make the Most of Your Workday

In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans” – untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes: a new preface by the authors: “Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red”; updates on all cases and examples in the book; and two new chapters and an expanded third one – “Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps” – that address some of the most pressing questions listeners and readers have asked over the years.

Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands–they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America’s most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create “identity myths” that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can’t be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty–and outlines a distinctive set of “cultural branding” principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

You lost your job six months ago. You’ve emailed 90 resumes. You’ve scoured the job boards and the help wanted ads. You’ve called recruiters, old bosses, former coworkers…but nothing. You’re scared. You’re beginning to think there are no jobs out there. But there ARE jobs. And you can get one of them–if you’re willing to try the job search technique that most people are too timid to try.

If you’re one of 9 million Americans looking for a job, you don’t want to go 12 to 24 months without a job offer (as many do). The trick is to tap into the hidden job market–where 90 percent of the jobs really are!

Get Hired FAST! shows you how to use a direct-calling strategy that will generate at least three interviews in three weeks. It gives you a 15-day Action Plan, complete with charts, scripts, and other tools that will enable you to use the direct-calling technique like a professional.

This no-holds-barred book also includes insider advice on how to ace the interview once your calling strategy pays off, negotiate the best offer, and keep the job once you get it.

Get Hired FAST! shows you where and how to identify key contacts in target companies, how to uncover crucial data about target companies, how to script calls to hiring managers in advance–and handle any scenario, from voicemail to conversations with contacts’ staffers.