Strategic Management

A rigorous two-year study of the top 800 value-creating public companies found that growth generated internally through a commitment to customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and profitability resulted in consistent employee retention, stock value improvements, and better returns on investment.

In The Road to Organic Growth, Edward Hess shares the full results of his breakthrough study, providing fresh, and often-surprising perspectives on what it really takes to foster organic growth. Using instructive examples from leading companies such as SYSCO, Best Buy,Tiffany & Company, Outback Steakhouse, and Stryker Corporation, Hess reveals the strategies these trailblazers used to achieve long-term growth from within.

Drawing upon original research, interviews, and in-depth corporate studies, Hess identifies the six keys to achieving organic growth and-most important-explains how to seamlessly and consistently incorporate them into a formula for sustainability and competitive advantage to

• Develop a simple, easy-to-understand business model and growth strategy
• Be entrepreneurial at the point of customer contact
• Measure everything-from finances to operations to behaviors
• Build an engaged, loyal, and multi-talented people pipeline
• Find humble, internally-focused operators to lead your company
• Be an execution and technology champion

  The Road to Organic Growth proves that you can build a sustainable, successful business without the expense of acquisitions, financial manipulations, or devaluing your employees. By exceeding customer expectations, building an employee-centric organization, and focusing intensely on measurement and performance, your company will achieve consistent, solid growth from within.

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.

Most organizations consist of multiple business and support units, each populated by highly trained, experienced executives. But often the efforts of individual units are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportunities, and diminished performance.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue that the responsibility for this critical alignment lies with corporate headquarters. In this book, the authors apply their revolutionary Balanced Scorecard management system to corporate-level strategy, revealing how highly successful enterprises achieve powerful synergies by explicitly defining corporate headquarters’ role in setting, coordinating, and overseeing organizational strategy.

Based on extensive field research in organizations worldwide, Alignment shows how companies can build an enterprise-level Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard that clearly articulate the “enterprise value proposition”: how the enterprise creates value above that achieved by individual business units operating alone. The book provides case studies, actionable frameworks, and sample scorecards that show how to align business and support units, boards of directors, and external partners with the corporate strategy and create a governance process that will ensure that alignment is sustained.

The next breakthrough in strategy execution from the field’s premier thinkers, Alignment shows how today’s companies can unlock unrealized value from enterprise synergies.

Unlock your unique strengths with How the World Sees You. Learn the science of fascination to maximize your personal brand and highest value.

Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself.

Hogshead rose to the top of the advertising profession in her early 20s, writing ads that fascinated millions of consumers. Over the course of her ad career, Sally won hundreds of awards for creativity, copywriting, and branding, and was one of the most awarded advertising copywriters right from start of career, including almost every major international advertising award.

She frequently appears in national media including NBC’s Today Show and the New York Times. Hogshead was recently inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, the industry’s highest award for professional excellence. Her advertising work hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The science of fascination is based on Hogshead’s decade of research with 250,000 participants, including dozens of Fortune 500 teams, hundreds of small businesses, and over a thousand C-level executives.

At a time when it’s harder than ever to get and keep people’s attention, we could all use some help. Enter Sonya Hamlin, author of the now classic How to Talk So People Listen (1988), and one of the country’s leading communication experts. In this revised and updated edition, Sonya Hamlin, arguably America’s leading communication expert, shows us how to successfully capture people’s attention so that they listen, understand,…