Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 By the late 1990s, it was clear that PG needed to win in skin care. Skin care constitutes about a quarter of the total beauty industry and has the potential to be highly profitable. Oil of Olay was struggling. It wasn’t PG’s only skin-care brand, but it was by far the largest and best known. #2 PG invested in the SK-II brand, Cover Girl, Pantene, Head Shoulders, and Herbal Essences. The company bought Wella and Clairol to create a position in hair styling and color. #3 The company was able to redefine what anti-aging products could do. It began selling higher-end, more prestigious products in a traditionally high-volume environment. It attracted consumers from both the mass and prestige channels. #4 Olay needed to look and feel the part. The packaging had to represent an aspiration, but also effectively deliver the product. Pricing had to be just right – not too high for mass consumers, but not too low for prestige consumers.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 By the late 1990s, it was clear that PG needed to win in skin care. Skin care constitutes about a quarter of the total beauty industry and has the potential to be highly profitable. Oil of Olay was struggling. It wasn’t PG’s only skincare brand, but it was by far the largest and best known. #2 PG invested in the SKII brand, Cover Girl, Pantene, Head Shoulders, and Herbal Essences. The company bought Wella and Clairol to create a position in hair styling and color. #3 The company was able to redefine what antiaging products could do. It began selling higherend, more prestigious products in a traditionally highvolume environment. It attracted consumers from both the mass and prestige channels. #4 Olay needed to look and feel the part. The packaging had to represent an aspiration, but also effectively deliver the product. Pricing had to be just right – not too high for mass consumers, but not too low for prestige consumers.

Pricing holds the key to business success. The greatest challenge in pricing is the human factor. To price effectively, customer psychology usually trumps rational microeconomic thinking. * How did Subway turn one accidentally discovered price promotion into a multi-billion dollar success story? * How much knowledge of prices do customers really have? * Why do most people spend two months’ salary to buy an engagement ring? * Does Pay What You Want pricing really work? * How can you get your customers to trade up? * Why do Supreme t-shirts sell for $1,500 or more? * Why do so many consumers hate Uber’s surge pricing even though economists love it? In Priced to Influence, Sell & Satisfy, you will find answers to these and many more questions. The book introduces the latest thinking about Psychological Pricing, the science of designing effective pricing strategies using behavioral economics principles. You will learn how customers search for, evaluate, share, and use prices in their buying decisions, how they participate in setting prices, and what managers can do to understand and influence these processes. Psychological pricing actions are levered. Many of them require relatively small investments and produce disproportionately large returns to the business.

A Wall Street Journal and Washington Post Bestseller A playbook for creating your company's winning strategy. 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.

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 Michael E. Porter to Daniel Kahneman and company examples from P&G to Adobe, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations to your fingertips. This book will inspire you to: Reconsider what keeps your customers coming back Create visualizations that send a clear message Assess how quickly disruptive change is coming to your industry Boost engagement by giving your employees the freedom to break the rules Understand what blockchain is and how it will affect your industry Get your product in customers' hands faster by accelerating your research and development phase This collection of articles includes "Customer Loyalty Is Overrated," by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin; "Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Decision Making," by Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser; "Visualizations That Really Work," by Scott Berinato; "Right Tech, Wrong Time," by Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor; "How to Pay for Health Care," by Michael E. Porter and Robert S. Kaplan; "The Performance Management Revolution," by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis; "Let Your Workers Rebel," by Francesca Gino; "Why Diversity Programs Fail," by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev; "What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class," by Joan C. Williams; "The Truth About Blockchain," by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani; and "The Edison of Medicine," by Steven Prokesch.

Is Apple conscious? Could a cyber–human system sense a potential terrorist attack? Or make diagnosing a rare and little-known disease routine? Computers are not replacing us: they are enhancing us. Different intelligences are joining together to do things we thought were impossible. Whether it’s devising innovations to tackle climate change, helping job seekers and employers find one another, or identifying the outbreak of a serious disease, groups of humans and machines are already working together to solve all sorts of problems. And they will do a lot more. The future will be like another world – a place where we’ll think differently. In many ways, we are already there.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is redefining the nature and principles of general management. The technological revolution is reshaping industries, disrupting existing business models, making traditional companies obsolete and creating social change. In response, the role of the manager needs to urgently evolve and adjust. Companies need to rethink their purpose, strategy, organisational design and decision-making rules. Crucially they will also need to consider how to nurture and develop the business leaders of the future and develop new ways to interact with society on issues such as privacy and trust. Containing international insights from leading figures from the world of management and technology, this book addresses the big challenges facing organisations, including: · Decision-making · Corporate strategy · People management and leadership · Organisational design Taking a holistic approach, this collection of expert voices provides valuable insight into how firms will discover and commit to what makes them unique in this new big data world, empowering them to create and sustain competitive advantage.

A new approach to addressing the contemporary world’s most difficult challenges, such as climate change and poverty. Conflicts over “the problem” and “the solution” plague the modern world and land problem solvers in what has been called “wicked problem territory”—a social space with high levels of conflict over problems and solutions. In Design Strategy, Nancy C. Roberts proposes design as a strategy of problem solving to close the gap between an existing state and a desired state. Utilizing this approach, designers and change agents are better able to minimize self-defeating conflicts over problems and solutions, break the logjam of opposition, and avoid the traps that lock problem solvers into a never-ending cycle of conflict. Design as a field continues to grow and evolve, but Design Strategy focuses on three levels of design where “wicked problems” tend to lurk—strategic design (of private and public organizations), systemic design (of networked and overlapping economic, technical, political, and social subsystems), and regenerative design (of life-giving realignment between humanity and nature). Within this framework, Roberts presents refreshingly interdisciplinary case studies that integrate theory and practice across diverse fields to guide professionals in any domain—from business and nonprofit organizations to educational and healthcare systems—and finally offers hope that humanity can tackle the existential challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Financial Times, Best Business Books of 2022 Forbes, Best Business Books of 2022 The Next Big Idea Club, Best Leadership Books of 2022 The Globe & Mail, Best Management Books of 2022 The paradigm-busting theory for doing strategy. What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it. Rumelt defines the essence of the strategist’s skill with vivid storytelling, from how Elon Musk found the crux that propelled the success of SpaceX to how the American military came to grips with the weaknesses of its battle strategy. Musk’s core challenge, for example, was rocket reusability. His intense focus on the soft landing of SpaceX’s rockets enabled them to be used again—radically reducing the cost of putting a pound in orbit. Musk’s strategy was not based on how value is created or how to position SpaceX in its industry. It was a design foraction, the mental maneuver that focuses energy on what really made a difference through understanding the crux and creating an effective response that led to breakthrough.

How to win market leadership in a fast-changing world In the past, companies could pick a strategy and stick with it, maintaining a competitive edge for years. But today, companies surge ahead, fall behind, or even disappear in mere months. If you and your company are going to thrive for the long run, you need to continuously evolve, change, and stay a step ahead of your competition. The ability to see and capitalize on new opportunities is the cornerstone of agility. Successful technology-based firms like Google, Tesla, and Amazon have all mastered agility within their core business practices, but companies in any sector can—and must—learn to spot new opportunities and make the right choices about what to invest in, what to change, and what to abandon. The Agility Advantage first shows how to identify those aspects of your business where agility is most crucial—where the business environment is changing fast—and which elements have the greatest impact on the customer’s decision to buy. Amanda Setili then shows how to master the three components of agility: Market agility: Gain ideas from your most demanding and forward-thinking customers and from outside your industry. Engage, observe, and mix with customers to identify the opportunities created by their changing demands. Decision agility: Anticipate the changes that may affect you and turn even troubling trends into opportunities. Design your strategy to maximize learning and to manage risk. Generate diverse alternatives and make fast, fact-based decisions about which to pursue. Execution agility: Build new capabilities, shed what doesn’t fit, and take the first steps in a new direction. Experiment, then reinforce and build on what works. Enlist and inspire your organization around a compelling purpose and grant employees the autonomy and resources to continuously adapt and adjust course. The future will present more opportunities but narrower windows to capture them. With a wealth of valuable information and practical strategies, The Agility Advantage is essential reading to help any organization adapt and thrive—both today and tomorrow.