73 management books
Sort by Date, Author or Rating
Books
Patrick Hoverstadt (2008)
The world of management is in crisis – the old remedies no longer work and organizations are failing at an increasing rate. Although many talk of ‘joined up thinking’, few offer practical guidance on how to achieve this in organizations. The Fractal Organization sets down the practical implications of a well tested systemic approach to building organizations that are capable of surviving and flourishing in these turbulent times.
|
11 votes
|
Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (2007)
Since the first edition of Managing the Unexpected was published in 2001, the unexpected has become a growing part of our everyday lives. The unexpected is often dramatic, as with hurricanes or terrorist attacks. But the unexpected can also come in more subtle forms, such as a small organizational lapse that leads to a major blunder, or an unexamined assumption that costs lives in a crisis. Why are some organizations better able than others to maintain function and structure in the face of unanticipated change? Authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe answer this question by pointing to high reliability organizations (HROs), such as emergency rooms in hospitals, flight operations of aircraft carriers, and firefighting units, as models to follow. These organizations have developed ways of acting and styles of learning that enable them to manage the unexpected better than other organizations. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the groundbreaking book Managing the Unexpected uses HROs as a template for any institution that wants to better organize for high reliability.
|
4 votes
|
Gary Hamel (2007)
"Like many great inventions, management practices have a shelf life....Gary Hamel explains how to jettison the weak ones and embrace the ones that work. (Fortune) "There's much here that will resonate with forward-thinking managers." (BusinessWeek) Publisher's Summary: What really fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence or new business models, but management innovation: new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and building strategies. Over the past century, breakthroughs in the "technology of management" have enabled a few companies, including General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, and Visa, to cross new performance thresholds and build long-term advantages. Yet most companies lack a disciplined process for radical management innovation. World renowned business sage Gary Hamel argues that organizations need bold management innovation now more than ever. The current management model, centered on control and efficiency, no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. In his most provocative book to date, Hamel takes aim at the legacy beliefs preventing 21st-century companies from surmounting new challenges. With incisive analysis and vivid illustrations, he explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator, and reveals: The make-or-break challenges that will determine competitive success in an age of head-snapping change; The toxic effects of our legacy-management beliefs; The unconventional management practices generating breakthrough results in a handful of pioneering organizations; The new principles every company must weave into its management DNA; The Web's potential to obliterate smokestack management practices; The actions your company can take now to build its own management advantage. Get ready to throw off the shackles of yesterday's management dogma. Tomorrow's winners will be those companies that start inventing the future of management today.
|
5 votes
|
Karl E. Weick (1995)
The teaching of organization theory and the conduct of organizational research have been dominated by a focus on decision-making and the concept of strategic rationality. However, the rational model ignores the inherent complexity and ambiguity of real-world organizations and their environments. In this landmark volume, Karl E Weick highlights how the 'sensemaking' process shapes organizational structure and behaviour. The process is seen as the creation of reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves.
|
3 votes
|
Karl E. Weick (2000)
This volume brings together the best–known and most influential articles on sensemaking by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick. Weick explores the process of how organizations discover that they face important decisions. Often organizations have discussions in order to see what they think, or act in order to see what they want – before they are even aware that a decision has to be made. The effective organization is one that understands this process of sensemaking and learns to manage it with wisdom. The ways in which people do that are demonstrated in chapters of this book. This important collection provides a valuable addition to the international literature on organization theory and will be welcomed by students and researchers alike.
|
3 votes
|
Elspeth J. Murray and Peter R. Richardson (2002)
In the age of rapidly changing technology, increased global opportunities and globalisation, and shareholder activity, executives all over the world are expected to use the right techniques in order to gain the highest level of success for their organization. These executives need the knowledge and tools that will allow them to continue to thrive and remain ahead of the competition in the business environment. This volume and its accompanying guide puts them on the right track. It offers a practical and proven framework for rapid implementation of strategic change that can be used by executives and their organisations. Complete with an collection of examples and checklists, the accompanying guides provide guidance on specific types of change initiatives such as the launch of a new strategic plan, deep cultural change, acquisitions, and new products.
|
1 vote
|
Chris Potts (2008)
Called 'part entertaining novel and part enlightening textbook' by reviewers, FruITion is about Ian the CIO. How will Ian as the CIO react when the management team explores a very different relationship with IT? The strategy that emerges has major implications for the CIO and everyone in the IT department.
|
17 votes
|
Geoffrey Moore (2006)
Geoffrey Moore is one of the most respected and bestselling names in business books. In his widely quoted Crossing the Chasm, he identified and addressed the greatest challenge facing new ventures. Now he's back with a book for established businesses that need to learn how to adapt - or suffer the slow declines into marginalized performance that have characterized so many Fortune 500 icons in recent years. Deregulation, globalization, and e-commerce are exerting unprecedented pressures on company profits. In this new economic ecosystem, companies must dramatically differentiate from their direct competitors - or risk declining performance and eventual extinction. But how do companies choose the right innovation strategy? Or overcome internal inertia that resists the kind of radical commitments needed to truly set the company's offers apart? Illustrating his arguments with more than one hundred examples and a full-length case study based on his unprecedented access to Cisco Systems, Moore shows businesses how to meet today's Darwinian challenges, whether they're producing commodity products or customized services. For companies whose competitive differentiation to the marketplace is still effective, he demonstrates how innovations in execution can help boost productivity, whether a company is competing in a growth market, a mature market, or even a declining market. For companies in danger of succumbing to competitive pressures, he shows how to overcome inertia by engaging the entire corporate community in an unceasing commitment to innovate and evolve. For any business competing in today's eat-or-be-eaten economic jungle, this groundbreaking guide shows not only how to survive, but also thrive.
|
2 votes
|
Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, Joseph B. Lampel (2004)
SWOTed by strategy models? Crunched by analysis? Strategy doesn’t have to be this way. Strategy is really all about being different. Thinking about it shouldn't make you reach for the snooze button, but in the world of strategy everybody has become so serious. If that gets us better strategies, fine. But it doesn’t; we get worse ones—predictable, generic, uninspiring, dull. Strategy doesn’t only have to position; it also has to inspire. So an uninspiring strategy is really no strategy at all. The most interesting and most successful companies are not boring. They have novel, creative, inspiring, sometimes even playful strategies. By taking the whole strategy business less seriously, they end up with more serious results—and have some fun in the bargain. Strategy Bites Back invites you to encounter a diverse and unlikely set of voices with something sharp to say about strategy --- from Michael Porter and Peter Drucker to Coco Channel’s "little black dress". Taken together these perspectives will provide you with new and dramatically different angles from which to attack the world of strategy.
|
4 votes
|
Gary Doucet, John Gøtze, Pallab Saha, Scott Bernard (2009)
The book introduces the idea of Coherency Management, and asserts that this is the primary outcome goal of an enterprise's architecture. With submissions from over 30 authors and co-authors, the book reinforces the idea that EA is being practiced in an ever-increasing variety of circumstances - from the tactical to the strategic, from the technical to the political, and with governance that ranges from sell to tell. The characteristics, usages, value statements, frameworks, rules, tools and countless other attributes of EA seem to be anything but orderly, definable, classifiable, and understandable as might be hoped given heritage of EA and the famous framework and seminal article on the subject by John Zachman over two decades ago. Notably, EA is viewed as an Enterprise Design and Management approach, adopted to build better enterprises, rather than a IT Design and Management approach limited to build better systems.
|
14 votes
|
W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne (2005)
Winning by not competing: a fresh approach to strategy Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue 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 a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating “blue oceans”: untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—which the authors call “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.
|
3 votes
|
Alexander Osterwalder (2010)
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don′t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co–created by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4–color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game–changing business model––or analyze and renovate an old one.
|
3 votes
|
Elspeth J. Murray and Peter R. Richardson (2003)
In an age of rapidly changing technology, shifting global opportunities, and activist shareholders, executives are expected to respond quickly. These executives are seeking tools that will allow them to keep a step ahead of changes in the business environment, because they are critically aware of the fact that slow change equals slow death.Organizational Change in 100 Days: A Fast Forward Guide is one such tool. Developed to be used as a companion to Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days, this book provides exercises and worksheets that will allow the reader to develop and implement a plan for organizational change. This guide's flexible format can be used either in groups or by individuals, and will be especially useful to facilitators, trainers, and consultants who work with companies on change strategies.
|
3 votes
|
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison (2010)
Exploring the paradigm shift in business brought about by innovations in communication technology, this collaboration from three consultant-authors provides a succinct metaphor for the shift in the information economy-from "push" to "pull"-but little else. Though they provide an effective survey of the effect of more interactive, ubiquitous and on-demand communication, it already feels dated; the essential messages that Hagel, Brown, and Davison derive-networking is key, you should pursue your passions, many traditional ways of doing business are over-are old news in the business self-help section. The examples they provide focus primarily on individually-driven collaborative efforts (wikis, online gaming) and make poor analogies for someone looking to revitalize a corporation or present a compelling case for change to colleagues or an intransigent CEO. Professionals who already know that the Internet isn't just a phase will need more information than this book provides.
|
3 votes
|
Tony Davila, Marc J. Epstein, Robert Shelton (2005)
Making Innovation Work presents a formal innovation process proven to work at HP, Microsoft and Toyota, to help ordinary managers drive top and bottom line growth from innovation. The authors have drawn on their unsurpassed innovation consulting experience -- as well as the most thorough review of innovation research ever performed. They'll show what works, what doesn't, and how to use management tools to dramatically increase the payoff from innovation investments. Learn how to define the right strategy effective innovation; how to structure an organization to innovate best; how to implement management systems to assess ongoing innovation; how to incentivize teams to deliver, and much more. This book offers the first authoritative guide to using metrics at every step of the innovation process -- from idea creation and selection through prototyping and commercialization.
|
2 votes
|
John Kotter (2006)
Most of the denizens of the Antarctic penguin colony sneer at Fred, the quiet but observant scout who detects worrying signs that their home, an iceberg, is melting. Fred must cleverly convince and enlist key players, such as Louis, the head penguin; Alice, the number two bird; the intractable NoNo the weather expert; and a passle of school-age penguins if he is to save the colony. Their delightfully told journey illuminates in an unforgettable way how to manage the necessary change that surrounds us all. Simple explanatory material following the fable enhances the lasting value of these lessons.
|
1 vote
|
David Apgar (2006)
Risk Intelligence gives executives and business managers a simple mental model and simple tools to manage these risks. According to the author's model, risks fall into two categories: knowable and therefore learnable, and unknowable and therefore difficult to prepare for. The book not only shows readers how to analyse their knowable risks but helps them to appreciate the quality and utility of their own analysis. As it turns out, some people have a higher risk IQ than others and therefore analyse and manage risks more effectively. This book helps people of all risk aptitudes to assess and improve their risk IQs.
|
1 vote
|
A Mulholland, C, S Thomas, P Kurchina (2007)
Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual tells the tale of Vorpal Inc., a company that pioneers the implementation of service-oriented architecture to transform its business model. CEO Jane Moneymaker believes in marketing manager Hugo Wunderkind's idea of creating a new market using non-traditional methods based on mashups, but struggles to achieve this vision. The story illustrates what it takes to achieve cultural change, overturning established business and IT structures. By embracing a service-oriented approach Moneymaker makes Vorpal faster, flexible and more responsive, bringing an end to business as usual. Mashup Corporations takes a unique approach to communicating its message. From the first page, readers will find themselves in a story populated with people who interact in ways that will ring true to others who have struggled to make technology work in an organization, large or small. The conflicts that naturally arise between CEOs, CIOs, and line of business managers illustrate the important issues at stake within Vorpal and most other companies. As the leaders of Vorpal find their way out of their predicament, rules about how mashups and service orientation can be properly applied emerge. These rules, which may be the most enduring contribution of the book, are illustrated and analyzed using real-life examples.
|
3 votes
|
Everett M. Rogers (1962)
Now in its fifth edition, Diffusion of Innovations is a classic work on the spread of new ideas. It has sold 30,000 copies in each edition and will continue to reach a huge academic audience. In this renowned book, Everett M. Rogers, professor and chair of the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, explains how new ideas spread via communication channels over time. Such innovations are initially perceived as uncertain and even risky. To overcome this uncertainty, most people seek out others like themselves who have already adopted the new idea. Thus the diffusion process consists of a few individuals who first adopt an innovation, then spread the word among their circle of acquaintances--a process which typically takes months or years. But there are exceptions: use of the Internet in the 1990s, for example, may have spread more rapidly than any other innovation in the history of humankind. Furthermore, the Internet is changing the very nature of diffusion by decreasing the importance of physical distance between people. The fifth edition addresses the spread of the Internet, and how it has transformed the way human beings communicate and adopt new ideas.
|
1 vote
|
Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D Anthony, Erik A Roth (2004)
When a disruptive innovation is launched, it changes the entire industry and every firm operating within in
This book argues that it is possible to predict which companies will win and which will lose in a specific situation—and provides a practical framework for doing so.
Most books on innovation—including Christensen’s previous two books—approached innovation from the inside-out, showing firms how they can create innovations inside their own companies. This book is written from an “outside-in” perspective, showing how executives, investors, and analysts can assess the impact of a new innovation on the firms they have a vested interest in.
|
3 votes
|
Peter Skarzynski, Rowan Gibson (2008)
If you're like most business leaders, innovation now tops your corporate agenda. But despite all the talk and excitement about the importance of innovation, managers have so far found scant help for innovating in a systematic way that fuels consistent growth and sustained success. In Innovation to the Core, Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski and business strategist Rowan Gibson change all that. They share the accumulated wisdom from Strategos--the consulting firm Skarzynski co-founded with Gary Hamel that helps clients instill innovation into their very core. Drawing on a wealth of stories and examples, the book shows how companies of every stripe have overcome the barriers to successful, profitable innovation. You'll find parts devoted to crucial topics--such as how to organize the discovery process, generate strategic insights, enlarge your innovation pipeline, and maximize your return on innovation. Frequent hands-on tools--frameworks, checklists, probing questions--help you put the book's ideas into action. Crafted in close coordination with Gary Hamel--the man who Fortune magazine has called "the world's leading expert on business strategy"--Innovation to the Core is the definitive fieldbook for making innovation a core competence in your organization.
|
1 vote
|
Roger L. Martin (2007)
If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following “best practice” can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you’ll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions—including “What are the causal relationships at work here?” and “What are the implied trade-offs?” Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.
|
1 vote
|
Mark Morgan, William Malek, Raymond E Levitt (2008)
Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive strategies? Because leaders don't identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy. Moreover, even when strategy makers do break their plans down into doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic investments and assure that needed resources are applied in priority order. And they often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations. In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek present six imperatives that enable you to do the right strategic projects--and do those projects right. And it is no accident that the six imperatives combine to create the acronym INVEST: Ideation: Clarify and communicate Purpose, Identity and Long Range Intention; Nature: Develop alignment between Strategy, Structure and Culture based on Ideation; Vision: Create clear Goals and Metrics aligned to Strategy and guided by Ideation; Engagement: Do the right projects based on the Strategy through Portfolio management; Synthesis: Do Projects and Programs right, in alignment with Portfolio; Transition: Move the Project and Program outputs into Operations where benefit is realized. Full of intriguing company examples and practical advice, this crucial new resource shows you how to make strategy happen in your organization
|
2 votes
|
John P Kotter (2008)
In his international bestseller "Leading Change," Kotter provided an action plan for implementing successful transformations. Now, he shines the spotlight on the crucial first step in his framework: creating a sense of urgency by getting people to actually see and feel the need for change.
|
1 vote
|
Henry Mintzberg (2000)
In this definitive and revealing history, Henry Mintzberg unmasks the process that has mesmerized so many organisations since 1965: strategic planning. One of the original management thinkers, Mintzberg concludes that strategy cannot be planned because planning is about analysis and strategy is about synthesis. That is why, he asserts, the process has failed so often and dramatically. Mintzberg traces the origin and history of strategic planning through its prominence and subsequent fall. He argues that we must reconcieve the process by which strategies are created by emphasizing informal learning and personal vision. Mintzberg proposes new definitions of planning and strategy, and examines in unusual ways the various models of strategic planning and the evidence of why they failed. Reviewing the so-called 'pitfalls' of planning, he shows how the process itself can destroy commitment, narrow a company's vision, discourage change and breed an atmosphere of politics. In a harsh critique of many sacred cows, he describes three basic fallacies of the process - in that discontinuities can be predicted, that strategists can be detached from the operations of the organisation, and that the process of strategy-making itself can be formalized. Mintzberg devotes a substantial section to the new role of planning, plans and planners, not inside the strategy-making process, but around it, in support of it, providing some of its inputs and sometimes programming its outputs, as well as encouraging strategic thinking in general. This book is essential reading for anyone in an organization who is influenced by the planning or strategy-making process. It is also suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking corporate strategy, strategic management and business policy courses.
|
3 votes
|
