The 30 Day MBA in Marketing: Your Fast Track Guide to Business Success

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.

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.

The sales culture of the twenty-first century is one where decisions are often made on the fly, calls are not thought out, and communication is based on onscreen ramblings, hitting Òsend,Ó and seeing what happens next. While e-mail has made it easier for salespeople to communicate than ever before, itÕs crucial to your success that your message is clear, concise, and to the point.

Renowned sales guru Stephan Schiffman understands the unique benefits and challenges of using e-mail as a sales tool. E-mail Selling Techniques delivers dependable strategies to help you understand when and how to use e-mail to communicate with a client or prospect.

E-mail Selling Techniques offers essential guidelines for:

• The proper length and format of sales e-mails
• Advice on tone and content
• Tips for writing attention-grabbing subject lines
• Identifying when a phone call might be more appropriate If you rely on computers and portable e-mail devices to do business, Stephan Schiffman will show you how to use technology to your advantage and get the deal done.