Search results for ""Harvard Business Review Press""

Find your purpose at work.In an ideal world, our work lives would be completely fulfilling and intrinsically motivating.But what if you're stuck in a job and your heart isn't in it anymore? Or what if your company's mission seems unrelated to the work you do day in and day out? This book showcases the power of passion--and how you and your team can find it at work.This volume includes the work of: Morten T. Hansen Teresa M. Amabile Scott A. Snook Nick Craig This collection of articles includes "Finding Meaning at Work, Even When Your Job Is Dull," by Morten Hansen and Dacher Keltner; "What to Do When Your Heart Isn't in Your Work Anymore," by Andy Molinsky; "You Don’t Find Your Purpose--You Build It," by John Coleman; "How to Find Meaning in a Job That Isn't Your True Calling," by Emily Esfahani Smith; "You're Never Done Finding Purpose at Work," by Dan Pontefract; "From Purpose to Impact," by Nick Craig and Scott A. Snook; "Five Questions to Help Your Employees Find Their Inner Purpose," by Kristi Hedges; "How to Make Work More Meaningful for Your Team," by Lewis Garrad and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic; "The Power of Small Wins," by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer; and "The Founder of TOMS on Reimagining the Company's Mission," by Blake Mycoskie.HOW TO BE HUMAN AT WORK.The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.

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Learn how to deal with difficult colleagues and clients.At the heart of dealing with difficult people is handling their--and your own--emotions. How do you stay calm in a tough conversation? How do you stay unruffled in the face of passive-aggressive comments? And how do you know if you're difficult to work with?This book explains the research behind our emotional response to awful colleagues and shows how to build the empathy and resilience to make those relationships more productive.Books in this series are based on the work of experts including: Daniel Goleman Tony Schwartz Nick Morgan Daniel Gilbert This collection of articles includes "To Resolve a Conflict, First Decide: Is It Hot or Cold?" by Mark Gerzon; "Taking the Stress Out of Stressful Conversations," by Holly Weeks; "The Secret to Dealing with Difficult People: It's About You," by Tony Schwartz; "How to Deal with a Mean Colleague," by Amy Gallo; "How To Deal with a Passive-Aggressive Colleague," by Amy Gallo; "How to Work with Someone Who's Always Stressed Out," by Rebecca Knight; "How to Manage Someone Who Thinks Everything Is Urgent," by Liz Kislik; and "Do You Hate Your Boss?" by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries.HOW TO BE HUMAN AT WORK.The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.

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Most company's change initiatives fail. Yours don't have to. If you read nothing else on change management, read these 10 articles (featuring “Leading Change,” by John P. Kotter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you spearhead change in your organization. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management will inspire you to: Lead change through eight critical stagesEstablish a sense of urgencyOvercome addiction to the status quoMobilize commitmentSilence naysayersMinimize the pain of changeConcentrate resourcesMotivate change when business is good This collection of best-selling articles includes: featured article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" by John P. Kotter, "Change Through Persuasion," "Leading Change When Business Is Good: An Interview with Samuel J. Palmisano," "Radical Change, the Quiet Way," "Tipping Point Leadership," "A Survival Guide for Leaders," "The Real Reason People Won't Change," "Cracking the Code of Change," "The Hard Side of Change Management," and "Why Change Programs Don't Produce Change."

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Changing hearts is an important part of changing minds.Research shows that appealing to human emotion can help you make your case and build your authority as a leader.This book highlights that research and shows you how to act on it, presenting both comprehensive frameworks for developing influence and small, simple tactics you can use to convince others every day.This volume includes the work of: Nick Morgan Robert Cialdini Linda A. Hill Nancy Duarte This collection of articles includes "Understand the Four Components of Influence," by Nick Morgan; "Harnessing the Science of Persuasion," by Robert Cialdini; "Three Things Managers Should Be Doing Every Day," by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback; "Learning Charisma," by John Antonakis, Marika Fenley, and Sue Liechti; "To Win People Over, Speak to Their Wants and Needs," by Nancy Duarte; "Storytelling That Moves People," an interview with Robert McKee by Bronwyn Fryer; "The Surprising Persuasiveness of a Sticky Note," by Kevin Hogan; and "When to Sell with Facts and Figures, and When to Appeal to Emotions," by Michael D. Harris.How to be human at work. The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.

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Seven bestselling Harvard Business Review collections—in one convenient set.You want the most important ideas on management all in one place. Now you can have them—in a set of HBR’s 10 Must Reads, available as a 7-volume paperback boxed set or as an ebook set. We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on change, leadership, strategy, managing people, and managing yourself and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization''s performance. The HBR’s 10 Must Reads Boxed Set includes seven bestselling collections: HBR''s 10 Must Reads on Leadership (ways you can transform yourself from a good manager into an extraordinary leader); HBR''s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself (the path to your own professional success starts with a critical look in the mirror and what you see there—your greatest strengths and deepest values—are the founda

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Join the global movement that's making corporations more people-centric to achieve great results.The world is facing a global leadership crisis. Seventy-seven percent of leaders think they do a good job of engaging their people, yet 88 percent of employees say their leaders don't engage enough. There is also a high level of suffering in the workplace: 35 percent of employees would forgo a pay raise to see their leaders fired.This is an enormous waste of human talent--despite the fact that $46 billion is spent each year on leadership development.Based on extensive research, including assessments of more than 35,000 leaders and interviews with 250 C-level executives, The Mind of the Leader concludes that organizations and leaders aren't meeting employees' basic human needs of finding meaning, purpose, connection, and genuine happiness in their work.But more than a description of the problem, The Mind of the Leader offers a radical, yet practical, solution. To solve the leadership crisis, organizations need to put people at the center of their strategy. They need to develop managers and executives who lead with three core mental qualities: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion.Using real-world inspirational examples from Marriott, Accenture, McKinsey & Company, LinkedIn, and many more, The Mind of the Leader shows how this new kind of leadership turns conventional leadership thinking upside down. It represents a radical redefinition of what it takes to be an effective leader--and a practical, hard-nosed solution to every organization's engagement and execution problems.

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The dangerous work of leading change--somebody has to do it. Will you put yourself on the line?To lead is to live dangerously. It's romantic and exciting to think of leadership as all inspiration, decisive action, and rich rewards, but leading requires taking risks that can jeopardize your career and your personal life. It requires putting yourself on the line, disrupting the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. And when people resist and push back, there's a strong temptation to play it safe. Those who choose to lead plunge in, take the risks, and sometimes get burned. But it doesn't have to be that way say renowned leadership experts Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky. In Leadership on the Line, they show how it's possible to make a difference without getting "taken out" or pushed aside. They present everyday tools that give equal weight to the dangerous work of leading change and the critical importance of personal survival. Through vivid stories from all walks of life, the authors present straightforward strategies for navigating the perilous straits of leadership. Whether you're a parent or a politician, a CEO or a community activist, this practical book shows how you can exercise leadership and survive and thrive to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

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Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization--resources that are too often squandered. There's plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What's really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company's full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article, "Your Scarcest Resource," Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag--the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy--and then offer a simple framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples showing how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.

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A curated collection of the business basics to fuel your success.You’ll get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with this set of concise, practical primers. Finance Basics explains the fundamentals of corporate finance—and its jargon; Running Meetings gives you the tools and checklists you need to keep your meetings effective and efficient; Presentations helps you create and deliver a persuasive performance, fast; Managing Projects shows you how to set up and execute on a project plan; Managing Time helps you to figure out where all the minutes of your day are going—and how to get them under control; Getting Work Done helps you to use each of those minutes more productively; Creating Business Plans shows you how to present the risks and rewards of your idea; Managing Up helps you to build your relationship with your boss

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How to Innovate and Execute Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business--one that is still thriving--while dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it? Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader's innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization's energy, time, and resources--in balanced measure--across what he calls "the three boxes": * Box 1: The present--Manage the core business at peak profitability * Box 2: The past--Abandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation * Box 3: The future--Convert breakthrough ideas into new products and businesses The three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples--GE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Services--and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.

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Your job as a manager is getting harder all the time. But your most critical responsibility--especially in today's world of intensifying competition--is how to help your people shine their brightest. How do you inspire solid contributors to strive for more? What should you do if a star player falls off their game? In Shine, bestselling author, psychiatrist, and ADD expert Edward Hallowell draws on brain science, performance research, and his own experience helping people maximize their potential to present a proven process for getting the best from your people: -Select--put the right people in the right job, and give them responsibilities that "light up" their brain. -Connect--strengthen interpersonal bonds among team members. -Play--help people unleash their imaginations at work. -Grapple and Grow--when the pressure's on, enable employees to achieve mastery of their work. -Shine--use the right rewards to promote loyalty and stoke your people's desire to excel. Brimming with Hallowell's trademark candor and warmth, Shine is a vital new resource for all managers seeking to inspire excellence in their teams.

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The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing premiums--not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets. In Redefining Health Care, internationally renowned strategy expert Michael Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Teisberg reveal the underlying--and largely overlooked--causes of the problem, and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that competition currently takes place at the wrong level--among health plans, networks, and hospitals--rather than where it matters most, in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions. Participants in the system accumulate bargaining power and shift costs in a zero-sum competition, rather than creating value for patients. Based on an exhaustive study of the U.S. health care system, Redefining Health Care lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining the way competition in health care delivery takes place--and unleashing stunning improvements in quality and efficiency. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move health care toward positive-sum competition that delivers lasting benefits for all.

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Even world-class companies, with powerful and proven business models, eventually discover limits to growth. That's what makes emerging high-growth industries so attractive. With no proven formula for making a profit, these industries represent huge opportunities for the companies that are fast enough and smart enough to capture them first. But building tomorrow's businesses while simultaneously sustaining excellence in today's demands a delicate balance. It is a mandatory quest, but one that is fraught with contradiction and paradox. Until now, there has been little practical guidance. Based on an in-depth, multiyear research study of innovative initiatives at ten large corporations, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble identify three central challenges: forgetting yesterday's successful processes and practices; borrowing selected resources from the core business; and learning how the new business can succeed.The authors make recommendations regarding staffing, leadership roles, reporting relationships, process design, planning, performance assessment, incentives, cultural norms, and much more. Breakthrough growth opportunities can make or break companies and careers. "Forget, Borrow, Learn" is every leader's guide to execution in unexplored territory.

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Firms with superior IT governance have more than 25% higher profits than firms with poor governance given the same strategic objectives. These top performers have custom designed IT governance for their strategies. Just as corporate governance aims to ensure quality decisions about all corporate assets, IT governance links IT decisions with company objectives and monitors performance and accountability. Based on a study of 250 enterprises worldwide, IT Governance shows how to design and implement a system of decision rights that will transform IT from an expense to a profitable investment.

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Today's economy is fueled by knowledge. Every leader knows this to be true, yet few have systematic methods for converting organizational knowledge into economic value. This book argues that communities of practice--groups of individuals formed around common interests and expertise--provide the ideal vehicle for driving knowledge-management strategies and building lasting competitive advantage. Written by leading experts in the field, Cultivating Communities of Practice is the first book to outline models and methods for systematically developing these essential groups. Through compelling research and company examples, including DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey & Company, Shell, and the World Bank, authors Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder show how world-class organizations have leveraged communities of practice to drive strategy, generate new business opportunities, solve problems, transfer best practices, develop employees' professional skills, and recruit and retain top talent. Underscoring the new central role communities of practice are playing in today's knowledge economy, Cultivating Communities of Practice is the definitive guide to fostering, designing, and developing these powerful groups within and across organizations.

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NEW from the bestselling HBR's 10 Must Reads series. The best leaders know how to communicate clearly and persuasively. How do you stack up? If you read nothing else on communicating effectively, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you express your ideas with clarity and impact--no matter what the situation. Leading experts such as Deborah Tannen, Jay Conger, and Nick Morgan provide the insights and advice you need to: * Pitch your brilliant idea--successfully * Connect with your audience * Establish credibility * Inspire others to carry out your vision * Adapt to stakeholders' decision-making styles * Frame goals around common interests * Build consensus and win support Looking for more Must Read articles from Harvard Business Review? Check out these titles in the popular series: HBR's 10 Must Reads: The Essentials HBR's 10 Must Reads on Collaboration HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership HBR's 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams

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Are you just playing--or playing to win? Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It's hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future--something that doesn't happen in most companies. Now two of today's best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy--explaining what it's for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point. A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G's sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success--where to play and how to win. The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are: * What is our winning aspiration? * Where will we play? * How will we win? * What capabilities must we have in place to win? * What management systems are required to support our choices? The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach--and then making the right choices to support it--makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.

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ARE YOUR WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WORKING AGAINST YOU? To achieve your goals and get ahead, you need to rally people behind you and your ideas. But how do you do that when you lack formal authority? Or when you have a boss who gets in your way? Or when you're juggling others' needs at the expense of your own? By managing up, down, and across the organization. Your success depends on it, whether you're a young professional or an experienced leader. The HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you: * Advance your agenda--and your career--with smarter networking * Build relationships that bring targets and deadlines within reach * Persuade decision makers to champion your initiatives * Collaborate more effectively with colleagues * Deal with new, challenging, or incompetent bosses * Navigate office politics

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"An outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation." -- Warren Buffett #1 on Warren Buffett's Recommended Reading List, Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Letter, 2012 Named one of "19 Books Billionaire Charlie Munger Thinks You Should Read" in Business Insider. "A book that details the extraordinary success of CEOs who took a radically different approach to corporate management." -- Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation "Thorndike explores the importance of thoughtful capital allocation through the stories of eight successful CEOs. A good read for any business leader but especially those willing to chart their own course." -- Michael Dell, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Dell What makes a successful CEO? Most people call to mind a familiar definition: "a seasoned manager with deep industry expertise." Others might point to the qualities of today's so-called celebrity CEOs--charisma, virtuoso communication skills, and a confident management style. But what really matters when you run an organization? What is the hallmark of exceptional CEO performance? Quite simply, it is the returns for the shareholders of that company over the long term. In this refreshing, counterintuitive book, author Will Thorndike brings to bear the analytical wisdom of a successful career in investing, closely evaluating the performance of companies and their leaders. You will meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms' average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty--in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. You may not know all their names, but you will recognize their companies: General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne. In The Outsiders, you'll learn the traits and methods--striking for their consistency and relentless rationality--that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance. Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value. Drawing on years of research and experience, Thorndike tells eye-opening stories, extracting lessons and revealing a compelling alternative model for anyone interested in leading a company or investing in one--and reaping extraordinary returns.

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Foreword by Richard Hytner, Deputy Chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide We've all worked with one--a smart and immensely talented individual who brings enormous value to the organization. The problem? He's an awful teammate. So as a leader, do you consider this key player toxic or irreplaceable? There Is an I in Team explores the relationship between individual and team--asking the question, How can we harness the talent of individual performers into a cohesive, productive team that creates overall value? And why are so many of our assumptions about teams wrong? Business challenges like this one mimic many of the issues facing sports teams, though admittedly the sports metaphors most commonly used in business are trite and superficial comparisons. What's needed are real and substantial lessons that managers actually can take from the world of high-performance sports and use in an everyday work environment. This book meets that need. University of Cambridge professor Mark de Rond has combined cutting-edge social and psychological research with rich stories from world-class sports teams, coaches, athletes, and even business executives. The result challenges our most popular notions about teams. Equally critical, it teaches an innovative way to transform team potential into measurable business advantage. You'll learn: * Why there is an I in team--and why that matters * Why an ideal team is rarely comprised of the best individual performers * Why conflict happens even when intentions are perfectly aligned * Why likability can trump competence even in technically sophisticated environments * Why a focus on interpersonal harmony can actually hurt team performance * Why data and sophisticated statistical tools are unlikely to eliminate the role of intuition At once readable and teachable, There Is an I in Team will strengthen your understanding of the issues that permeate teams of high-performers, and it will help you apply these new insights to your own work--giving you and your team an edge over the competition.

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Business model innovation is the key to unlocking transformational growth--but few executives know how to apply it to their businesses. In Seizing the White Space, Mark Johnson gives them the playbook. Leaving the rhetoric to others, Johnson lays out an eminently practical framework that identifies the four fundamental building blocks that make business models work. In a series of in-depth case studies, he goes on to vividly illustrate how companies are using innovative business models to seize their white space and achieve transformational growth by fulfilling unmet customer needs in their current markets; serving entirely new customers and creating new markets; and responding to tectonic shifts in market demand, government policy, and technologies that affect entire industries. He then lays out a structured process for designing a new model and developing it into a profitable and thriving enterprise, while investigating the vexing and sometimes paradoxical managerial challenges that have commonly thwarted so many companies in their unguided forays into the unknown. Business model innovators have reshaped entire sectors--including retail, aviation, and media--and redistributed billions of dollars of value. With road-tested frameworks, analytics, and diagnostics, this book gives executives everything they need to reshape their businesses and achieve transformative growth.

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We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: with ambition, drive, and talent, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their knowledge workers careers. Instead, you must be your own chief executive officer. That means it's up to you to carve out your place in the world and know when to change course. And it's up to you to keep yourself engaged and productive during a career that may span some 50 years. In Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker explains how to do it. The keys: Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself by identifying your most valuable strengths and most dangerous weaknesses; Articulate how you learn and work with others and what your most deeply held values are; and Describe the type of work environment where you can make the greatest contribution. Only when you operate with a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true and lasting excellence. Managing Oneself identifies the probing questions you need to ask to gain the insights essential for taking charge of your career. Peter Drucker was a writer, teacher, and consultant. His 34 books have been published in more than 70 languages. He founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and counseled 13 governments, public services institutions, and major corporations.

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A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive. Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations? In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us. This persuasive and practical book, filled with hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

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The information revolution has made for a radically more fluid knowledge environment, and the growth of venture capital has created inexorable pressure towards fast commercialisation of existing technologies Companies that don't use the technologies they develop are likely to lose them. Key features Over the past several years, Hank Chesbrough has done excellent research and writing on the commercialisation of technology and the changing role and context for R&D. This book represents a powerful synthesis of that work in the form of a new paradigm for managing corporate research and bringing new technologies to market Chesbrough impressively articulates his ideas and how they connect to each other, weaving several disparate areas of work R&D, corporate venturing, spinoffs, licensing and intellectual property into a single coherent framework.

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What fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models, but management innovation--new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies. Through history, management innovation has enabled companies to cross new performance thresholds and build enduring advantages. In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century--centered on control and efficiency--no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management. Hamel explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator, revealing: The make-or-break challenges that will determine competitive success in an age of relentless, head-snapping change. The toxic effects of traditional management beliefs. The unconventional management practices generating breakthrough results in "modern management pioneers." The radical principles that will need to become part of every company's "management DNA." The steps your company can take now to build your "management advantage." Practical and profound, The Future of Management features examples from Google, W.L. Gore, Whole Foods, IBM, Samsung, Best Buy, and other blue-ribbon management innovators.

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"Inc." magazine calls it one of "the best, clearest guides to the numbers" on the market. Readers agree, saying it's exactly "what i need to know" and calling it a "must-read" for decision makers without expertise in finance. Since its release in 2006, "Financial Intelligence" has become a favorite among managers who need a guided tour through the numbers - helping them to understand not only what the numbers really mean, but also why they matter. This new, completely updated edition brings the numbers up to date and continues to teach the basics of finance to managers who need to use financial data to drive their business. It also addresses issues that have become even more important in recent years - including questions around the financial crisis and those around broader financial and accounting literacy. Accessible, jargon-free, and filled with entertaining stories of real companies, "Financial Intelligence" gives non-financial managers the confidence to understand the nuance beyond the numbers - to help bring everyday work to a new level.

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A year's worth of management wisdom, all in one place. We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Clayton M. Christensen to Adam Grant and company examples from Intel to Uber, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations to your fingertips. This book will inspire you to: * Rethink the way you work in the face of advancing automation * Transform your business using a platform strategy * Apply design thinking to create innovative products * Identify where too much collaboration may be holding your people back * See the theory of disruptive innovation in a brand new light * Recognize the signs that your cross-cultural negotiation may be falling apart This collection of articles includes "Collaborative Overload," by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant; "Algorithms Need Managers, Too," by Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg, and Sendhil Mullainathan; "Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy," by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary; "What Is Disruptive Innovation?," by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Rory McDonald; "How Indra Nooyi Turned Design Thinking into Strategy," an interview with Indra Nooyi by Adi Ignatius; "Engineering Reverse Innovations," by Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan; "The Employer-Led Health Care Revolution," by Patricia A. McDonald, Robert S. Mecklenburg, and Lindsay A. Martin; "Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da," by Erin Meyer; "The Limits of Empathy," by Adam Waytz; "People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO," by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey; and "Beyond Automation," by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby.

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The best of Clayton Christensen's seminal work on disruptive innovation, all in one place. No business can afford to ignore the theory of disruptive innovation. But the nuances of Clayton Christensen's foundational thinking on the subject are often forgotten or misinterpreted. To achieve continuing growth in your business while defending against upstarts, you need to understand clearly what disruption is and how it works, and know how it applies to your industry and your company. In this collection of Christensen's most influential articles--carefully selected by Harvard Business Review's editors--his incisive arguments, clear theories, and readable stories give you the tools you need to understand disruption and what to do about it. The collection features Christensen's newest article looking back on 20 years of disruptive innovation: what it is, and what it isn't. Covering a broad spectrum of topics--business model innovation, mergers and acquisitions, value-chain shifts, financial incentives, product development--these articles illuminate the impact and implications of disruptive innovation as well as Christensen's broader thinking on management theory and its application in business and in life. This collection of best-selling articles includes: "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave," by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen, "Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change," by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf, "Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure," by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, "Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things," by Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman, and Willy C. Shih, "Reinventing Your Business Model," by Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann, "The New M&A Playbook," by Clayton M. Christensen, Richard Alton, Curtis Rising, and Andrew Waldeck, "Skate to Where the Money Will Be," by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Matthew Verlinden, "Surviving Disruption," by Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen, "What Is Disruptive Innovation?" by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, "Why Hard-Nosed Executives Should Care About Management Theory," by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, and "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen.

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In 1996, John P. Kotter's Leading Change became a runaway best seller, outlining an eight-step program for organizational change that was embraced by executives around the world. Then, Kotter and co-author Dan Cohen's The Heart of Change introduced the revolutionary "see-feel-change" approach, which helped executives understand the crucial role of emotion in successful change efforts. Now, The Heart of Change Field Guide provides leaders and managers tools, frameworks, and advice for bringing these breakthrough change methods to life within their own organizations. Written by Dan Cohen and with a foreword by John P. Kotter, the guide provides a practical framework for implementing each step in the change process, as well as a new three-phase approach to execution: creating a climate for change, engaging and enabling the whole organization, and implementing and sustaining change. Hands-on diagnostics--including a crucial "change readiness module"--reveal the dynamics that will help or hinder success at each phase of the change process. Both flexible and scaleable, the frameworks presented in this guide can be tailored for any size or type of change initiative. Filled with practical tools, checklists, and expert commentary, this must-have guide translates the most powerful approaches available for creating successful change into concrete, actionable steps for you and your organization. Dan Cohen is the co-author, with John P. Kotter, of The Heart of Change, and a principal with Deloitte Consulting, LLC.

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Effective managers know that timely coaching can dramatically enhance their teams' performance. Coaching and Mentoring offers managers comprehensive advice on how to help employees grow professionally and achieve their goals. This volume covers the full spectrum of effective mentoring and the nuts and bolts of coaching. Managers learn how to master special mentoring challenges, improve listening skills, and provide ongoing support to their employees. The Harvard Business Essentials series is designed to provide comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Drawing on rich content from Harvard Business School Publishing and other sources, these concise guides are carefully crafted to provide a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience and are especially valuable for the new manager. To assure quality and accuracy, a specialized content adviser from a world-class business school closely reviews each volume. Whether you are a new manager seeking to expand your skills or a seasoned professional looking to broaden your knowledge base, these solution-oriented books put reliable answers at your fingertips.

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We're living in the Age of Persuasion. Leaders and organizations of all kinds--public and private, large and small--fulfill their missions only by competing in the marketplace of images and messages. To win in that marketplace, they need advertising. This has been true since the advent of mass media, from mass-circulation magazines and radio through the age of television and the Internet. Yet even as they use advertising to capture consumers' imaginations and build their brands, few people know of the ingenious and tormented man who built the modern advertising industry and shaped a new consumer sensibility as the twentieth century unfolded: Albert D. Lasker. Drawing on a recently uncovered trove of Lasker's papers, Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz have written a fascinating biography of one of the past century's most influential, intriguing, troubled, and instructive figures. Lasker's creative and powerful use of "reason-why" advertising to inject ideas and arguments into ad campaigns had a profound impact on modern advertising, foreshadowing the consumer-centered "unique selling proposition" approach that dominates the industry today. His tactics helped launch or revitalize companies and brands that remain household names--including Palmolive, Goodyear, and Quaker Oats. As Lasker rose in prominence, he went beyond consumer products to apply his brilliance to presidential politics, government service, and professional sports, changing the game wherever he went, and building a vast fortune along the way. But his intensity had a price--he was felled by mental breakdowns throughout his life. This book also tells the story of how he fought back with determination and with support from family and friends in an age when lack of effective treatment doomed most mentally ill people. The Man Who Sold America is a riveting account of a man larger than life, who shaped not only an industry but also a century.

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CEOs are more than frustrated by marketing's inability to deliver results. Has the profession lost its relevance? Nirmalya Kumar argues that, although the function of marketing has lost ground, the importance of marketing as a mind-set--geared toward customer focus and market orientation--has gained momentum across the entire organization. This book challenges marketers to change their role from implementers of traditional marketing functions to strategic coordinators of organization-wide initiatives aimed at profitably delivering value to customers. Kumar outlines seven cross-functional and bottom-line-oriented initiatives that can put marketing back on the CEO's agenda--and elevate its role in shaping the destiny of the firm.

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Most managers today understand the value of building a learning organization. Their goal is to leverage knowledge and make it a key corporate asset, yet they remain uncertain about how best to get started. What they lack are guidelines and tools that transform abstract theory--the learning organization as an ideal--into hands-on implementation. For the first time in Learning in Action, David Garvin helps managers make the leap from theory to proven practice. Garvin argues that at the heart of organizational learning lies a set of processes that can be designed, deployed, and led. He starts by describing the basic steps in every learning process--acquiring, interpreting, and applying knowledge--then examines the critical challenges facing managers at each of these stages and the various ways the challenges can be met. Drawing on decades of scholarship and a wealth of examples from a wide range of fields, Garvin next introduces three modes of learning--intelligence gathering, experience, and experimentation--and shows how each mode is most effectively deployed. These approaches are brought to life in complete, richly detailed case studies of learning in action at organizations such as Xerox, L. L. Bean, the U. S. Army, and GE. The book concludes with a discussion of the leadership role that senior executives must play to make learning a day-to-day reality in their organizations.

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A Wall Street Journal Bestseller "For nearly thirty years, my life's work has been to help people like you find ways to bring the often warring aspects of life into greater harmony." -- Stew Friedman, from Leading the Life You Want You're busy trying to lead a "full" life. But does it really feel full--or are you stretched too thin? Enter Stew Friedman, Wharton professor, adviser to leaders across the globe, and passionate advocate of replacing the misguided metaphor of "work/life balance" with something more realistic and sustainable. If you're seeking "balance" you'll never achieve it, argues Friedman. The idea that "work" competes with "life" ignores the more nuanced reality of our humanity--the interaction of four domains: work, home, community, and the private self. The goal is to create harmony among them instead of thinking only in terms of trade-offs. It can be done. Building on his national bestseller, Total Leadership, and on decades of research, teaching, and practice as both consultant and senior executive, Friedman identifies the critical skills for integrating work and the rest of life. He illustrates them through compelling original stories of these remarkable people: * former Bain & Company CEO and Bridgespan co-founder Tom Tierney * Facebook COO and bestselling author Sheryl Sandberg * nonprofit leader and US Navy SEAL Eric Greitens * US First Lady Michelle Obama * soccer champion-turned-broadcaster Julie Foudy * renowned artist Bruce Springsteen Each of these admirable (though surely imperfect) people exemplifies a set of skills--for being real, being whole, and being innovative--that produce a sense of purpose, coherence, and optimism. Based on interviews and research, their stories paint a vivid picture of how six very different leaders use these skills to act with authenticity, integrity, and creativity--and they prove that significant public success is accomplished not at the expense of the rest of life, but as the result of meaningful engagement in all its parts. With dozens of practical exercises for strengthening these skills, curated from the latest research in organizational psychology and related fields, this book will inspire you, inform you, and instruct you on how to take realistic steps now toward leading the life you truly want.

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Shift your strategy downstream. Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors? If you think the answer is your superior products, think again. Products are important, of course. For decades, businesses sought competitive advantage almost exclusively in activities related to new product creation. They won by building bigger factories, by finding cheaper raw materials or labor, or by coming up with more efficient ways to move and store inventory--and by inventing exciting new products that competitors could not replicate. But these sources of competitive advantage are being irreversibly leveled by globalization and technology. Today, competitors can rapidly decipher and deploy the recipe for your product's secret sauce and use it against you. "Upstream," product-related advantages are rapidly eroding. This does not mean that competitive advantage is a thing of the past. Rather, its center has shifted. As marketing professor Niraj Dawar compellingly argues, advantage is now found "downstream," where companies interact with customers in the marketplace. Tilt will help you grasp the global nature of this downstream shift and its profound implications for your strategy and your organization. With vivid examples from around the world, ranging across industries and sectors, Dawar shows how companies are reorienting their strategies around customer interactions to create and capture unique value. And he demonstrates how, unlike product-related advantage, this value is cumulative, continuously building over time. In an increasingly customer-centered world marketplace, let Tilt serve as your guide to shifting your strategy downstream--and achieving enduring competitive advantage.

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In The Discipline of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explore the often counter-intuitive features that make up high-performing teams--such as selecting team members for skill, not compatibility--and explain how managers can set specific goals to foster team development. The result is improved productivity and teams that can be counted on to deliver more than just the sum of their parts. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

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Moving beyond mere tolerance Us-versus-them is the costly mind-set in which organizations, communities, and whole nations too often find themselves trapped. In fact, recognizing difference as a positive force can bring astonishing value to even the most diverse organizations. In Us Plus Them, leadership scholar Todd Pittinsky introduces a groundbreaking new science of diversity that: * Debunks the assumption that wherever there is difference there will be inherent tension and animosity * Challenges the effectiveness of our standard attempts to fight prejudice and combat hate in our schools and workplaces, our civic and religious lives * Reveals how we benefit from the mixing of different ethnic, racial, national, social, and religious groups in a globalized world Through a wide range of examples--from Maine and Michigan to Rwanda and Bhutan, and from small-town classrooms to corporate boardrooms--Pittinsky opens our eyes to misunderstood yet useful aspects of us-and-them relations, including many of the neglected positive dimensions of difference. He provides a bold new assessment of the popular and scientific approaches to the issue, proving that it's time to move beyond mere tolerance to build communities in which the two sides of the us-and-them equation engage each other because they both want to. Much as Martin Seligman and positive psychology have shifted the focus from mental illness to mental healthiness, this book shifts our mind-set to diversity as a positive force. Understanding the science and practical use of that energy will help us build the schools, neighborhoods, companies, and nations we want, and not simply avoid the ugliest problems of the past. Pittinsky shows us that our great diversity experiment hasn't failed--it hasn't even begun.

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In this age of hypercompetition, the Internet constitutes a powerful tool for inventing radical new business models that will leave your rivals scrambling. But as brain scientist and entrepreneur Jeffrey Stibel explains in Wired for Thought, you have to understand its true nature. The Internet is more than just a series of interconnected computer networks: it's the first real replication of the human brain outside the human body. To leverage its power, you first need to understand how the Internet has evolved to take on similarities to the brain. This engaging and provocative book provides the answer. Stibel lays out: - How networks have changed and what that implies for how people connect and form communities - What the Internet-and online business opportunities-will look like in the future - What the next stage of artificial intelligence will be and what opportunities it will present for businesses Stibel shows how exceptional companies are using their understanding of the Internet's brainlike powers to create competitive advantage-such as building more effective Web sites, predicting consumer behavior, leveraging social media, and creating a collective consciousness.

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Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

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Find the right innovation modelInnovation is a much-used buzzword these days, but when it comes to creating and implementing a new idea, many companies miss the mark—plans backfire, consumer preferences shift, or tried-and-true practices fail to work in a new context. So is innovation just a low-odds crapshoot?In The Architecture of Innovation, Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner—one of the foremost experts on how innovation works—says innovation can be understood and managed. The key to success? Incentives.Fortunately, new research has shed light on the role incentives can play in promoting new ideas, but these findings have been absent from innovation literature—until now. By using the principles of organizational economics, Lerner explains how companies can set the right incentives and time horizons for investments and create a robust innovation infrastructure in the process.Drawing from years of experience studying and advising companies, venture capital firms, and an assortment of governments around the globe, Lerner looks to corporate labs and start-ups, and argues that the best elements of both can be found in hybrid models for innovation. While doing so, he uses a wide range of industry-rich examples to show how these models work and how you can put them into practice in your own organization.Practical and thought-provoking, The Architecture of Innovation is the missing blueprint for any company looking to strengthen its innovation competence.

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In this McKinsey Award-winning article, first published in May 1989, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad explain that Western companies have wasted too much time and energy replicating the cost and quality advantages their global competitors already experience. Canon and other world-class competitors have taken a different approach to strategy: one of strategic intent. They begin with a goal that exceeds the company's present grasp and existing resources: "Beat Xerox"; "encircle Caterpillar." Then they rally the organization to close the gap by setting challenges that focus employees' efforts in the near to medium term: "Build a personal copier to sell for $1,000"; "cut product development time by 75%." Year after year, they emphasize competitive innovation--building a portfolio of competitive advantages; searching markets for "loose bricks" that rivals have left underdefended; changing the terms of competitive engagement to avoid playing by the leader's rules. The result is a global leadership position and an approach to competition that has reduced larger, stronger Western rivals to playing an endless game of catch-up.

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Most business leaders can take only so much pressure before their performance slides. Yet some CEOs deliver their greatest successes when times get toughest--when customers' preferences are shifting away from a company's products, when new regulations are shrinking profit margins, when political unrest is destroying supply lines. In Better Under Pressure, Justin Menkes reveals the common traits that make these leaders successful. Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixty CEOs from an array of industries and performance data from two hundred other leaders, Menkes shows that great executives strive relentlessly to maximize their own potential--as well as stoke their people's innate thirst for their own triumphs. To do so, they draw on a set of three essential and rare attributes: * Realistic optimism: They recognize the risks threatening their organization's survival--and their own failings--while remaining confident in their ability to have an impact. * Subservience to purpose: They dedicate themselves to pursuing a noble cause and win their team's commitment to that cause. * Finding order in chaos: They find clarity amid the many variables affecting their business by culling data and forming the conclusions that matter most to the company. The good news: these three capabilities can be learned. Drawing on a broad range of examples from real companies--including Avon, Yum Brands, Southwest, Procter & Gamble, and Ryerson Steel, to name just a few--Menkes demonstrates how each psychological attribute manifests itself in real life and enables top performance under extreme duress. He also shows you how to develop and deploy those attributes--so you can transform yourself into a leader who only shines brighter as the pressure intensifies. Deeply personal, brimming with compelling stories from real-life CEOs, and packed with powerful insights, tools, and practices, this book is a potent resource for aspiring, emerging, and seasoned business leaders alike.

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It used to be only dotcom start-ups lacked workable business models. But now the ubiquity of cheap communications and computing is deeply wounding business models across the board. Combined with rapidly changing customer expectations, the rules for how value is delivered, and what, when, and how much customers will pay are in flux. What can you do to ensure that you have a business model that will work today and in the future? Create new revenue models, advises Saul J. Berman in Not for Free. The most important strategy now is wringing new income streams from existing assets, physical and digital, by exploiting new segments, new uses and new value additions. Using the media industry, the canary in the coalmine for business model disruption, as a starting point, Berman explores the revenue strategies that are working, and the ones that are failing, in this new world. Drawing on examples from a variety of industries like Progressive Insurance, Rent the Runway, Castrol, Redbox, Mint and many others, Berman guides you through the opportunities and pitfalls of new revenue strategies. Timely and practical, Not for Free tackles a problem plaguing all companies: growing revenue organically in the near term.

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Only 30 percent of strategic initiatives are successfully executed. Of those that are, most CEOs view the process as too slow. What's going on? And how can you accelerate execution in your company? In Strategic Speed, the authors provide the answers. Start by understanding the barriers to execution: Employees don't grasp where an initiative is going. They don't adopt new behaviors. They're not committed to working together to achieve results. Most leaders try to speed things up by changing processes or installing new technologies. But better processes and systems won't remove the barriers. Instead, you need to unleash three people factors--clarity (understanding the goal), unity (collaborating across work groups), and agility (adapting quickly). The authors explain how to unleash these factors by exercising four leadership abilities: * Affirming strategies: Ensuring everyone knows the destination and wants to go there * Driving initiatives: Accelerating projects called for by your strategy * Managing climate: Controlling what it feels like to work in your team * Cultivating experience: Harnessing employees' knowledge and expertise Strategic Speed provides real-world examples--from companies as diverse as Tata Sky, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Ameriprise, and Fender Guitars--showing these practices in action. And it's packed with tools and assessments for diagnosing where your execution efforts are in trouble and choosing specific actions for accelerating results in your firm.

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The Lessons Learned Series Wondering how the most accomplished leaders from around the globe have tackled their toughest challenges? Now you can find out--with Lessons Learned. Concise and engaging, each volume in this new series offers twelve to fourteen insightful essays by top leaders in business, the public sector, and academia on the most pressing issues they've faced. A crucial resource for today's busy executive, Lessons Learned gives you instant access to the wisdom and expertise of the world's most talented leaders. Featuring interviews with: Doug Elix, IBM Dave Balter, BzzAgent Richard Santulli, NetJets David Bell, Interpublic Group

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Bringing groups together is a central and unrelenting task of leadership. CEOs must nudge their executives to rise above divisional turf battles, mayors try to cope with gangs in conflict, and leaders of many countries face the realities of sectarian violence. Crossing the Divide introduces cutting-edge research and insight into these age-old problems. Edited by Todd Pittinsky of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, this collection of essays brings together two powerful scholarly disciplines: intergroup relations and leadership. What emerges is a new mandate for leaders to reassess what have been regarded as some very successful tactics for building group cohesion. Leaders can no longer just "rally the troops." Instead they must employ more positive means to span boundaries, affirm identity, cultivate trust, and collaborate productively. In this multidisciplinary volume, highly regarded business scholars, social psychologists, policy experts, and interfaith activists provide not only theoretical frameworks around these ideas, but practical tools and specific case studies as well. Examples from around the world and from every sector - corporate, political, and social - bring to life the art and practice of intergroup leadership in the twenty-first century.

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Venture capitalists are the handmaidens of innovation. Operating in the background, they provide the fuel needed to get fledgling companies off the ground--and the advice and guidance that helps growing companies survive their adolescence. In Creative Capital, Spencer Ante tells the compelling story of the enigmatic and quirky man--Georges Doriot--who created the venture capital industry. The author traces the pivotal events in Doriot's life, including his experience as a decorated brigadier general during World War II; as a maverick professor at Harvard Business School; and as the architect and founder of the first venture capital firm, American Research and Development. It artfully chronicles Doriot's business philosophy and his stewardship in startups, such as the important role he played in the formation of Digital Equipment Corporation and many other new companies that later grew to be influential and successful. An award-winning Business Week journalist, Ante gives us a rare look at a man who overturned conventional wisdom by proving that there is big money to be made by investing in small and risky businesses. This vivid portrait of Georges Doriot reveals the rewards that come from relentlessly pursuing what-if possibilities--and offers valuable lessons for business managers and investors alike.

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