Authors: Patrick J. Below. George L. Morrisey. Betty L. Acomb.
Hardcover, 168 pages
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Publication Date: 1987-02-20
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Offers a comprehensive approach to strategic planning: how to formulate strategic plans that will develop the company's strengths, be responsive to changing business conditions, and chart a productive and profitable company future. Provides numerous charts, worksheets, and other resources....

Authors: Jane Arsenault.
Hardcover, 198 pages
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Publication Date: 1998-08-14
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    This insightful guide shows how by joining forces, nonprofits can use consolidation as a strategic tool to enhance, rather than undermine mission. As nonprofits find ways to increase effectiveness in services and fundraising and face the growing competition for limited resources, they can focus on their real goal-serving their constituents.

Arsenault explores the various options for consolidation-including joint ventures and partnerships, management service organizations, parent corporations, and mergers. She also details the negotiation process and demonstrates how to design and frame the consolidation process in a positive and constructive way for staff, donors, and constituents. Written for nonprofit managers and boards, Forging Nonprofit Alliances determines which options are right for an organization and clearly defines the roles and responsibilities of all members of nonprofit board and staff in planning and implementing an alliance....

Authors: John Gamble. Jr.,Arthur Thompson.
Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Publication Date: 2008-04-04
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Essentials of Strategic Management responds head-on to the growing requests by business faculty for a concise, theory-driven strategic management concepts and cases text. This first edition text was written with four objectives in mind: 1) Although relatively brief in length, the text would provide students with an up-to-date and thorough understanding of essential strategic management concepts and analytic tools; 2) The text would simplify the task of demonstrating student learning through course embedded assessment; 3) Like our works preceding this text, it would include especially well-written cases involving headline strategic issues; and lastly, 4) The text could serve as the theoretical foundation of a teaching approach incorporating a business strategy simulation....

Authors: Noel M. Tichy. Stratford Sherman.
Paperback, 720 pages
Publisher: Collins Business
Publication Date: 2005-04-01


Reviews :

   

Acknowledged as the outstanding business leader of the late twentieth century, Jack Welch made General Electric one of the world's most competitive companies. This dynamic CEO defined the standard for organizational change, creating more than $400 billion in shareholder value by transforming a bureaucratic behemoth into a nimble, scrappy winner in the global marketplace.

Here, Tichy and Sherman extract the enduring leadership lessons from the revolution Welch wrought at GE. Of these, the most essential is the limitless power of learning. Leadership has its mysteries, but it is a skill that anyone can acquire and enhance. Above all, great leaders select great people and lure them into an endless process of learning and adaptation.

Jack Welch's Six Rules

1. Control your destiny or someone else will.
2. Face reality as it is, not as it was, or as you wish it were.
3. Be candid with everyone.
4. Don't manage, lead.
5. Change before you have to.
6. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

...

Authors: Chris Roush.
Hardcover, 266 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Publication Date: 1999-02-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    "Reads like a novel, yet serves as a how-to guide for creating a customer culture and marketing strategies that wow Wall Street...I recommend this book as priority reading for all retail executives." Kurt Barnard, President, Barnard Retail Trend Report and Barnard's Retail Consulting Group.

Admirers, competitors, industry and Wall Street analysts alike are intrigued with the question of what makes Home Depot so special. What, exactly, does this giant do that so clearly distinguishes it from the competition? How does Home Depot culture and customer service work? And, most importantly, what lessons can every business learn from the Home Depot example? INSIDE HOME DEPOT takes you behind the scenes to discover the secrets of success of this retail giant how, in just twenty years, Home Depot has not only changed the way hardware is sold, Home Depot has also elevated the superstore concept to a new level of success, inspiring both admiration and fear in the retail community. Relying on inside access to Home Depot's training programs, interviews with key employees both past and present, and meticulous investigative journalism, Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist Chris Roush presents the first uncensored book about how this company has become so successful, and isolates the practical lessons that readers can apply to any industry....

    Chris Roush nails down Home Depot in this unauthorized portrayal of the retailing titan. Inside Home Depot shows how cofounders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank over the past 20 years built their business from two stores in Atlanta into 650 outlets--the world's largest home-improvement retail chain. Roush, a veteran business reporter, finds that much of Home Depot's astonishing financial success comes from its strong "bleeding orange" culture. Home Depot fosters loyalty among workers with the best pay in the industry, generous stock-purchase plans, and first-rate training in home improvement and customer service. Incredibly enough, Blank, the company's chief executive, still spends a third of his time personally training employees--unthinkable for any other CEO of a multibillion-dollar company. Roush also examines plenty of defects. Home Depot was so macho that it could be a house of horrors early on for its women employees: the company paid $104.5 million to settle sexual-discrimination lawsuits.

The author points out that the company's hegemony is threatened by competitors like Lowe's and community activists who fear that Home Depot means suburban sprawl and schlock. Nevertheless, Roush predicts that Big Orange, which is experimenting with new home-design and rural stores, will become even more ubiquitous in the future:

Home Depot has only just begun to build itself into a retail power. With each customer that enters its orange-colored doors and walks its vast aisles, buying do-it-yourself items to repair roofs and fix leaky faucets, Home Depot hammers away.

Business managers, investors and customers of Home Depot will enjoy reading this inside story about one of America's top-10 retailers. --Dan Ring...

Authors: John Strohmeyer.
Paperback, 248 pages
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: 1994-08-16


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Alistair McAlpine.
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Wiley
Publication Date: 1999-10-20


Reviews :

    Ignore the latest buzz about the kinder, gentler world of new age, team-based management. It's dog-eat-dog out there, and the sooner you realize it, the better. The New Machiavelli mines Machiavelli's The Prince for the timeless rules and stratagems that can help today's business rulers survive and prosper in the jungle of greed and treachery that is commerce. Alistair McAlpine enriches Machiavelli's text with scenarios from modern business, offering keen new insight into what motivates people. You'll learn the reasons why:
* Loyalty is not a reliable factor in the workplace
* Great power is held by the "little people" in a business
* It is better to spread power than to centralize it
* You should never believe your own publicity

Fail to read it at your peril.

"For most of my lifetime politicians have been trying to tell businessmen how to go about their tasks ... Both groups, however, will enjoy this shrewd commentary on Machiavelli's timeless principles of skullduggery."-Margaret Thatcher

"Anyone working in corporate America who doesn't find, read, and master Alistair McAlpine's amazing new guidebook to the art of politics in business may soon find themselves self-employed." -Charles Saatchi, Partner, M&C Saatchi

"Written in a style, like Machiavelli's own, at once didactic and charming... A work which is a standing satirical reproof to the various management manuals which promise corporate success."-Times Literary Supplement...

    Books offering instruction on how to succeed in business have drawn inspiration from diverse sources. Recent titles include Jesus CEO, The Kabbalah of Money, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, and of course, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. Now comes a volume of career tips loosely based on the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli. A citizen of Florence during the height of the Renaissance, Machiavelli scandalized moralists with his now-classic work of political theory, The Prince. In it, he calmly describes and appears to justify the lies and cruelty of effective leaders. He may have been the world's first exponent of Realpolitik.

The New Machiavelli quotes liberally from The Prince and imitates its quaint style throughout. The book offers thoughtful perspectives on many modern business topics--starting a business, mounting an unfriendly takeover, managing people, controlling costs, handling public relations. Yet, Machiavellian it is not. Where the master endorsed dishonesty as though he had read Bill Clinton's popularity ratings, McAlpine warns would-be tycoons that cheaters never prosper. In The New Machiavelli, moralism lives.

Its imitation of Machiavelli's rhetorical style keeps it wonderfully free of modern management jargon. Occasionally its insights strike home with eloquence. Surely everyone in business has sometimes lain awake at night running spreadsheet numbers in his or her head. All will recognize the wisdom of McAlpine's advice, "Under no circumstances should the businessperson engage in mental arithmetic after sunset." --Barry Mitzman ...

Authors: Michael E. Porter.
Hardcover, 896 pages
Publisher: Free Press
Publication Date: 1990-05-01


Reviews :

   

With the publication of his best-selling books Competitive Strategy (1980) and Competitive Advantage (1985), Michael E. Porter of the Harvard Business School established himself as the world's leading authority on competitive advantage. Now, at a time when economic performance rather than military might will be the index of national strength, Porter builds on the seminal ideas of his earlier works to explore what makes a nation's firms and industries competitive in global markets and propels a whole nation's economy. In so doing, he presents a brilliant new paradigm which, in addition to its practical applications, may well supplant the 200-year-old concept of "comparative advantage" in economic analysis of international competitiveness.

To write this important new work, Porter and his associates conducted in-country research in ten leading nations, closely studying the patterns of industry success as well as the company strategies and national policies that achieved it. The nations are Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. The three leading industrial powers are included, as well as other nations intentionally varied in size, government policy toward industry, social philosophy, and geography.

Porter's research identifies the fundamental determinants of national competitive advantage in an industry, and how they work together as a system. He explains the important phenomenon of "clustering," in which related groups of successful firms and industries emerge in one nation to gain leading positions in the world market. Among the over 100 industries examined are the German chemical and printing industries, Swiss textile equipment and pharmaceuticals, Swedish mining equipment and truck manufacturing, Italian fabric and home appliances, and American computer software and movies. Building on his theory of national advantage in industries and clusters, Porter identifies the stages of competitive development through which entire national economies advance and decline.

Porter's finding are rich in implications for both firms and governments. He describes how a company can tap and extend its nation's advantages in international competition. He provides a blueprint for government policy to enhance national competitive advantage and also outlines the agendas in the years ahead for the nations studied. This is a work which will become the standard for all further discussions of global competition and the sources of the new wealth of nations....

Authors: Gordon Walker.
Paperback, 346 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Publication Date: 2006-05-18
Edition: 2

Reviews :

    Modern Competitive Strategy, 2e, by Gordon Walker, provides concise, rigorous, and broad synthesis of the theory and empirics of the strategy field. The approach is eclectic, reflecting the diversity of the discipline, drawing on studies in industrial and institutional economics, economic and organizational sociology, mainstream strategy, and finance and marketing when appropriate. Both single business and corporate-level organizations are covered. Ideal for current and budding managers, many short cases, company examples, and practical tools are used to illustrate the concepts. The material is appropriate for either a full semester course or a single module in MBA programs, advanced undergraduate courses, EMBA and executive education classes....

Authors: John M. Bryson. Farnum K. Alston.
Paperback, 117 pages
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Publication Date: 1995-10-01
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    An updated companion to Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, Creating and Implementing Your Strategic Plan is a step-by-step guide to strategic planning. This second edition is filled with useful tools, including illustrative examples, detailed questionnaires, and easy-to-understand worksheets. It takes users through every step of creating a tailored strategic plan, from concrete guidelines for brainstorming sessions, to developing show cards, to outlining a workshop equipment checklist....