Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control In The Age Of Temporary Advantage


Charles H. Fine - 1998
    In order to survive-let alone thrive-companies must be able to anticipate and adapt to change, or face rapid, brutal extinction. In Clockspeed, Charles Fine draws on a decade’s worth of research at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management to introduce a new vocabulary for understanding the forces of competition and making strategic decisions that will determine the destiny of your company, as well as your industry.Taking inspiration from the world of biology, Fine argues that each industry has its own evolutionary life cycle (or “clockspeed”), measured by the rate at which it introduces new products, processes, and organizational structures. Just as geneticists study the fruit fly to gain insight into the evolutionary paths of all animals, managers in any industry can learn from the industrial fruit flies-such as Internet services, personal computers, and multimedia entertainment-which evolve through new generations at breakneck speed. Applying the lessons of the fruit flies to industries as diverse as bicycles, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, Fine illustrates how competitive advantage is lost or gained by how well a company manages dynamic web of relationships that run throughout its chain of suppliers, distributors, and alliance partners.Packed with revolutionary concepts and tools to help managers make key strategic decisions that affect current and future performance, Clockspeed shows, as no other book before it, how the ultimate core competency is mastering the art of supply chain design, carefully choosing which components and capabilities to keep in-house and which to purchase from outside.The consequences of faulty of visionary decisions can be enormous and dramatic. Witness the case of IBM in the early 1980s, when it outsourced key PC components to Microsoft and Intel, unleashing the “Intel Inside” phenomenon and a complete restructuring of the computer industry. Going further, Fine sees the personal computer as merely a component in the vast information-entertainment industry, which evolves at speeds unimagined a few years ago. He uses this “fruit fly” as well to peer into the future of industrial evolution and find practical advice for players in all industries, from automobiles to health care information systems.Clockspeed not only serves up some new “laws” of value chain dynamics, but it also offers recommendations for achieving industry leadership through simultaneous product, process, and supply chain design. In challenging managers to think like corporate geneticists Clockspeed contributes the next creative leap in business strategy.

The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization


Nathan Furr - 2014
    But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice.Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success.Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use.Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

From Jobless to Amazon Bestseller: The Step-by-Step System I Followed to Write, Self-publish, Market and Promote my Book to Become a #1 Bestseller on Amazon


Marc Reklau - 2015
     Why you should choose Self-publishing. Why you should choose Amazon. How to write you book fast without ever suffering from “writer’s block”. How to find a title that sells for your book. How to get a cover that sells made. How to price your book right. Why it’s easier than you thought to get an Amazon bestseller. How to market and promote your book and get it in the top of the charts on Amazon. What your book can do for you in the long term (passive income, traditional publishing contracts, radio & TV appearances etc.). And so much more! Think of it! If you publish on Amazon, millions of people are only a click away from downloading your book on their Kindle, PC, Mac, tablets or smartphones. That’s an enormous amount of potential customers! Why not use Amazon’s “look inside” feature and check out the first chapters of “From Jobless to Amazon Bestseller” before you buy?  Just click on the book image above and start reading.

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company


Steve Blank - 2012
    It:Incorporates the "Business Model Canvas" as the organizing principle for startup hypothesesProvides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus physical productsOffers a wealth of detailed instruction on how to get, keep, and grow customers recognizing the different techniques for web and physical channelsAnd teaches a "new math" for startups: "metrics that matter for fueling growth"The Startup Owner's Manual is a step-by-step, near-encyclopedic reference manual or "how to" for building a successful, scalable startup. Want to know what to do the first, week, month or year?What's the right distribution channel for your product?How to get traffic to your web site? …and how to activate customers or users on arrival?Who are the right "first customers," and why? …plus many more great tips in nearly 500 pages, complete with index, glossary, and Customer Development ChecklistsIt's the indispensible reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.

Truth, Lies, and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning


Jon Steel - 1998
    While many in the industry are still dissecting consumer behavior, extrapolating demographic trends, developing complex behavioral models, and measuring Pavlovian salivary responses, Steel advocates an approach to consumer research that is based on simplicity, common sense, and creativity--an approach that gains access to consumers' hearts and minds, develops ongoing relationships with them, and, most important, embraces them as partners in the process of developing and advertising.A witty, erudite raconteur and teacher, Steel describes how successful account planners work in partnership with clients, consumer, and agency creatives. He criticizes research practices that, far from creating relationships, drive a wedge between agencies and the people they aim to persuade; he suggests new ways of approaching research to cut through the BS and get people to show their true selves; and he shows how the right research, when translated into a motivating and inspiring brief, can be the catalyst for great creative ideas. He draws upon his own experiences and those of colleagues in the United States and abroad to illustrate those points, and includes examples of some of the most successful campaigns in recent years, including Polaroid, Norwegian Cruise Line, Porsche, Isuzu, got milk? and others.The message of this book is that well-thought-out account planning results in better, more effective marketing and advertising for both agencies and clients. And also makes an evening in front of the television easier to bear for the population at large.

Seeing What's Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change


Clayton M. Christensen - 2004
    Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data and lead to costly errors in judgment. Now, internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth present a groundbreaking framework for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry. Based on proven theories outlined in Christensen's landmark books The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution, Seeing What's Next offers a practical, three-part model that helps decision-makers spot the signals of industry change, determine the outcome of competitive battles, and assess whether a firm's actions will ensure or threaten future success. Through in-depth case studies of industries from aviation to health care, the authors illustrate the predictive power of innovation theory in action.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations


Clay Shirky - 2008
    'Here Comes Everybody' is an examination of how the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form and exist within groups, with profound long-term economic and social effects, for good and for ill.

Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master


Paul W. Farris - 2006
    In Marketing Metrics, four leading researchers and consultants systematically introduce today's most powerful marketing metrics. The authors show how to use a "dashboard" of metrics to view market dynamics from various perspectives, maximize accuracy, and "triangulate" to optimal solutions. Their comprehensive coverage includes measurements of promotional strategy, advertising, and distribution; customer perceptions; market share; competitors' power; margins and profits; products and portfolios; customer profitability; sales forces and channels; pricing strategies; and more. You'll learn how and when to apply each metric, and understand tradeoffs and nuances that are critical to using them successfully. The authors also demonstrate how to use marketing metrics as leading indicators, identifying crucial new opportunities and challenges. For clarity and simplicity all calculations can be performed by hand, or with basic spreadsheet techniques. In coming years, few marketers will rise to senior executive levels without deep fluency in marketing metrics. This book is the fastest, easiest way to gain that fluency.

Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots


Chris Zook - 2003
    In Profit from the Core, strategy expert Chris Zook revealed how to grow profitably by focusing on and achieving full potential in the core business. But what happens when your core business provides insufficient new growth or even hits the wall? In Beyond the Core, Zook outlines an expansion strategy based on putting together combinations of adjacency moves into areas away from, but related to, the core business, such as new product lines or new channels of distribution. These sequences of moves carry less risk than diversification, yet they can create enormous competitive advantage, because they stem directly from what the company already knows and does best. Based on extensive research on the growth patterns of thousands of companies worldwide, including CEO interviews with 25 top performers in adjacency growth, Beyond the Core 1) identifies the adjacency pattern that most dramatically increases the odds of success: "relentless repeatability;" 2) offers a systematic approach for choosing among a range of possible adjacency moves; and 3) shows how to time adjacency moves during a variety of typical business situations. Beyond the Core shows how to find and leverage the best avenues for growth--without damaging the heart of the firm.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think


Viktor Mayer-Schönberger - 2013
    “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com

Talking to Humans


Giff Constable - 2014
    This book will teach you how to structure and run effective customer interviews, find candidates, and turn learnings into action.

Technology-as-a-Service Playbook: How to Grow a Profitable Subscription Business


Thomas Lah - 2016
    Whether you are a pureplay cloud company or a traditional technology provider making the pivot to the cloud, this book will help guide your decision-making and execution around the “as-a-service” model to put your company on a path to profitable growth

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation


Tim Brown - 2009
    The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.This book introduces the idea of design thinking‚ the collaborative process by which the designer′s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people′s needs not only with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short‚ design thinking converts need into demand. It′s a human−centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative.Design thinking is not just applicable to so−called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It′s a methodology that has been used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente to icnrease the quality of patient care by re−examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change‚ or Kraft to rethink supply chain management. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization‚ product‚ or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Marketing Genius


Peter Fisk - 2006
    Marketing guru Peter Fisk's inspirational manual of marketing shows you how to inject marketing genius into your business to stand out from the crowd and deliver exceptional results. Marketing Genius is about achieving genius in your business and its markets, through your everyday decisions and actions. It combines the deep intelligence and radical creativity required to make sense of, and stand out in today's markets. It applies the genius of Einstein and Picasso to the challenges of marketing, brands and innovation, to deliver exceptional impact in the market and on the bottom line. Marketers need new ways of thinking and more radical creativity. Here you will learn from some of the world's most innovative brands and marketers - from Alessi to Zara, Jones Soda to Jet Blue, Google to Innocent. Peter Fisk is a highly experienced marketer. He spent many years working for the likes of British Airways and American Express, Coca Cola and Microsoft. He was the CEO of the world's largest professional marketing organisation, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and lead the global marketing practice of PA Consulting Group. He writes and speaks regularly on all aspects of marketing. He has authored over 50 papers, published around the world, and is co-author of the FT Handbook of Management. -Marketers who want to recharge their left and right brains can do no better than read Marketing Genius. It's all there: concepts, tools, companies and stories of inspired marketers.- --Professor Philip Kotler, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and author of Marketing Management-A fantastic book, full of relevant learning. The mass market is dead. The consumer is boss. Imagination, intuition and inspiration reign. Geniuses wanted.- --Kevin Roberts, Worldwide CEO Saatchi & Saatchi, and author of Lovemarks-This is a clever book: it tells you all the things you need to think, know and do to make money from customers and then calls you a genius for reading it.- --Hamish Pringle, Director General of Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and author of Celebrity Sells-This is a truly prodigious book. Peter Fisk is experienced, urbane and creative, all the attributes one would expect from a top marketer. The case histories in this book are inspirational and Peter's writing style is engaging and very much to the point. This book deserves a special place in the substantial library of books on marketing.- --Professor Malcolm McDonald, Cranfield School of Management, and author of Marketing Plans-Customers, brands and marketing should sit at the heart of every business's strategy and performance today. Marketing Genius explains why this matters more than ever, and how to achieve it for business and personal success- --Professor John Quelch, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of New Global Brands-Marketing Genius offers marketers 99% inspiration for only 1% perspiration.- --Hugh Burkitt, CEO, The Marketing Society

Business the Bill Gates Way: 10 Secrets of the World's Richest Business Leader


Des Dearlove - 1998
    The book reveals the secrets, deals, schemes and dreams of these, the world's fiercest business competitors.