Stanford University Press

Groundbreaking research illuminates the pivotal, problematic role of consultants in the nonprofit world.

The nonprofit sector leans heavily on consultants to guide strategic planning, advise on fundraising strategy, gather data on program effectiveness and more. How Consultants Shape Nonprofits explores how consultants, while working diligently to customize solutions for their clients, reinforce status-quo practices and ideas while prioritizing the opinions of people in power (nonprofit funders, leaders, etc.) over those of lower-level staff and communities. Consultants thus leave unaddressed some of the most pernicious problems in the nonprofit sector. The book's important conclusions about the complex role of consultants in the nonprofit world are based on more than a year of ethnographic research and nearly 200 interviews with practitioners. Dr. Reisman concludes with guidance on how consultants, nonprofit leaders, and donors can better collaborate, and overcome traditional "blind spots" in the nonprofit-consultant relationship.

"Brilliantly captures the essence of adult development, offering leaders a roadmap to growth amidst complexity. A must-read for anyone committed to evolving their consciousness and leadership practice."

—Robert Kegan, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, co-author of Immunity to Change and An Everyone Culture

An advanced guide to leadership development and intentional evolution—your own or others

The leaders we need to solve our complex, unprecedented problems can only be developed in the workplace, and they require personal transformation, not just some new leadership skills. The second edition of Jennifer Garvey Berger's influential Changing on the Job explains the advanced perspective, maturity, and personal evolution leaders need to make a powerful difference in their organizations and in the world. The book offers practical tools and deep insights based on adult development theory to help leaders turn their greatest challenges into growth and personal transformation. Berger explains the four predictable stages of leadership maturity and wisdom, and how to accelerate growth toward the third and fourth stages. Whether you're a seasoned leader or an emerging coach, Changing on the Job is a roadmap to cultivating courageous, wise, and steady leadership in an uncertain world.

From the author of Capitalism at the Crossroads, a call to consciousness—and action—for individuals, organizations, communities, and nations.

Our current Milton Friedman–style "shareholder primacy capitalism," as taught in business schools and embraced around the world, has become dangerous for society, the climate, and the planet. Moreover, Stuart L. Hart argues, it's economically unnecessary. But there are surprising reasons for hope—from the history of capitalism itself. Beyond Shareholder Primacy argues that capitalism has reformed itself twice before and is poised for a third major reformation. Retelling the origin story of capitalism from the fifteenth century to the present, Hart argues that a radically sustainable, just capitalism is possible, and even likely, in our lifetime.

Hart goes on to describe what it will take to move beyond capitalism's present worship of "shareholder primacy," including corporate transformations to re-embed purpose and reforms to major economic institutions. A key requirement is eliminating the "externalities" (or collateral damage) of our current shareholder capitalism. Sustainable capitalism will explicitly incorporate the needs of society and the planet, include a financial system that allows leaders to prioritize the planet, reorganize business schools around sustainable management thinking, and enable corporations not just to stop ignoring the damage they cause, but actually begin to create positive impact.

Business leaders have tremendous power to influence our society, how it operates, whether it is fair, and the extent to which it impacts the environment. And yet, we do not recognize or call out the responsibility that comes with that power. This book is meant to challenge future business leaders to think differently about their career, its purpose, and its value as a calling or vocation, one that is in service to society. Its message is for current and prospective business students, business leaders thinking anew about the role of business in society, and the business educators that train all these people.

We face great challenges as a society today, from environmental problems like climate change and habitat destruction, to social problems like income inequality, unemployment, lack of a living wage, and poor access to affordable health care and education. Solutions to these challenges must come from the market (as comprised of corporations, the government, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as the many stakeholders in market transaction, such as the consumers, suppliers, buyers, insurance companies, and banks), the most powerful institution on earth, and from business, which is the most powerful entity within it. Though government is an important and vital arbiter of the market, business is the force that transcends national boundaries, possessing resources that exceed those of many nations. Business is responsible for producing the buildings that we live and work in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the forms of mobility we employ, and the energy that propels us. This does not mean that only business can generate solutions or that there is no role for government, but with its unmatched powers of ideation, production, and distribution, business is positioned to bring the change we need at the scale we need it. Without business, the solutions will remain elusive. Indeed, if there are no solutions coming from the market, there will be no solutions. And without visionary and service-oriented leaders, business will never even try to find them.

There are now over 10,000 benefit corporations and public benefit corporations in the United States, including at least fifteen public companies. This is the authoritative guide for leaders, advisors, and board members.

Entrepreneurs and leaders often have an inspiring vision for how their business can not only make money for shareholders, but also benefit society. In recent years a new legal structure has emerged, the "Benefit Corporation" or "Public Benefit Corporation," which helps organizations make this ethical vision a legally authorized and protected reality. Companies like Patagonia, Kickstarter, Warby Parker, Danone North America, Allbirds, and King Arthur Baking have become benefit corporations to help advance both their business and their broader mission. Rather than narrowly maximizing profits, they consider their businesses' impacts on employees, customers, suppliers, the environment and others. The goal of benefit corporations like these is to foster a new, more humane, and sustainable capitalism by pursuing both profits and mission. Benefit corporation status helps protect the company mission even when leadership changes—and in the face of pressure from investors, shareholders, bankers and lenders.

Becoming a Public Benefit Corporation explains this exciting new type of corporation, when it makes sense, and how becoming a benefit corporation can help leaders and organizations balance the tradeoffs between profits and mission. Law professor and corporate governance expert Michael B. Dorff also covers the weaknesses of benefit corporations, arguing that the enforcement mechanisms around benefit corporations are currently too weak to prevent "purpose washing." With examples from top companies, the book shows mission-driven leaders, board members, and advisors how to use the benefit corporation structure to make the world a better place.

The world is facing dramatic geopolitical, environmental, and technological shifts. Venture Meets Mission argues that if Business, Government, and Society come together, rebuild trust, and collaborate, we have a generational opportunity to address societal challenges—climate change, cybersecurity, disease outbreaks, food insecurity, and education. The book explains, with hope and passion, how our existing entrepreneurial ecosystem, with the ideals of democracy, can be the foundation for a new mission-driven capitalism.

The good news is the components of this problem-solving ecosystem already exist. The authors explain what is required to join people, purpose, and profit together for world-changing impact—starting with rebuilding trust among Business, Government, and Society. The authors draw on their leadership experience with Silicon Valley innovation, venture capital, and work at the highest levels of the federal government. The book tells engaging stories of successful entrepreneurs, with diverse perspectives and intersectional experiences, who combine mission and venture to solve critical societal problems. This book seeks to inspire a generation of students, young professionals, and entrepreneurial executives to pursue mission-driven ventures that can make the world a better place. Venture Meets Mission also explains why and how forward-thinking government officials and policymakers can harness private sector entrepreneurship and innovation to solve society's problems.

Debunking much of the received wisdom regarding the sources of leadership team dysfunctionality, Leadership Team Alignment presents a targeted strategy for building and managing a top executive team to gain competitive advantage. Frédéric Godart and Jacques Neatby bring a wealth of practical experience and in-depth knowledge, with over eight hundred hours of direct observation with more than fifty leadership teams across the globe and thousands of hours working with executives. With this book, they offer solutions to manage conflict and create environments that effectively address misalignments in organizations.

Godart and Neatby take readers through the dual role of leadership team members, the challenges of power games, and the risks of siloed leaders. They give clear advice on how to improve aspects of any leadership team, based on its size and structure and the nature of the organization. While organizational challenges may be inevitable, this book provides leadership teams the tools to correctly diagnose leadership team misalignment, with evidence-based remedies and strategically oriented interventions to maximize organizational performance.

The case for innovation and a clear, targeted strategy for planning and implementation that will help small- and medium-sized mature enterprises (SMMEs) thrive through reinvention and renewal.

In contrast to large companies, SMMEs are on their own to win or lose in the marketplace. They may lack the relative economies of scale and scope, available to large companies, to understand and invest in innovation. Often they are in a position of sustained disadvantage with no perceived path of renewal.

As SMMEs approach maturity, it is common for them to choose to only maintain what they believe to be the safety of maturity attained rather than to opt for a strategy that also includes constant reinvention and renewal. But as Bruce A. Vojak and Walter B. Herbst argue, this path of seemingly least risk and least resistance can be the most detrimental to the company in the long run.

The real risk is to not innovate.

No-Excuses Innovation makes the case to owners, advisors, executives, and leaders—as well as those in the trenches—of the value of innovation: why it's worthy of investment and what it can do for the health and longevity of a company. This book also details how innovation, and thus reinvention and renewal, can be most effectively and efficiently implemented. With case studies and narrative examples drawn from their time in industry and the academy, the authors present a valuable strategy guide specific to SMMEs and to one of the biggest existential dilemmas they encounter.

The social sector is undergoing a major transformation. We are witnessing an explosion in efforts to deliver social change, a burgeoning impact investing industry, and an unprecedented intergenerational transfer of wealth. Yet we live in a world of rapidly rising inequality, where social sector services are unable to keep up with societal need, and governments are stretched beyond their means.

Alnoor Ebrahim addresses one of the fundamental dilemmas facing leaders as they navigate this uncertain terrain: performance measurement. How can they track performance towards worthy goals such as reducing poverty, improving public health, or advancing human rights? What results can they reasonably measure and legitimately take credit for? This book tackles three core challenges of performance faced by social enterprises and nonprofit organizations alike: what to measure, what kinds of performance systems to build, and how to align multiple demands for accountability. It lays out four different types of strategies for managers to consider—niche, integrated, emergent, and ecosystem—and details the types of performance measurement and accountability systems best suited to each. Finally, this book examines the roles of funders such as impact investors, philanthropic foundations, and international aid agencies, laying out how they can best enable meaningful performance measurement.

A research-backed guide to leading with confidence and resilience in an age of anxiety.

Leading is inevitably frustrating and emotionally demanding, yet leaders get little training in how to deal with painful emotions. Since the global pandemic, stresses on leaders have only grown. To lead effectively in an age of anxiety, leaders must build the capacity to act in spite of unpleasant emotions, and bring a learning mindset to challenges that can otherwise feel overwhelming. Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone draws on a wide body of research to show how well-being and resilience emerges from this struggle; leaders grow by adopting a learning mindset in the face of unpleasant emotions. The book explains how to:

- Confidently face new challenges

- Accelerate progress toward goals

- Improve productivity during discouraging, "unfruitful" periods

- Overcome frustration with difficult personalities and organizational politics

- Build confidence and a mindset of stress-less productivity

- Build resilience throughout the organization

Leadership expert D. Christopher Kayes integrates insights from diverse disciplines, including management and organization studies, psychology, sports and military psychology, neuroscience, and education, and presents original research involving over 1,000 leaders. The book focuses on five tools that help leaders develop positive emotional engagement, creative problem-solving, learning identity, flexibility, and social support.

A new model for smarter creativity

Innovators and creators work in cultural, economic, and social contexts that shape their work. These contexts are large-scale, filled with overwhelming multitudes of elements and possibilities—but these contexts can be fruitfully "mined" by creative teams. Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts, by Yale professor Jonathan S. Feinstein, introduces a groundbreaking new "network model" to describe how successful innovation can be focused, generated, and accelerated. The book will help teams and organizations innovate smarter and faster.

Feinstein argues that in large-scale contexts creativity happens most efficiently when it is actively "guided" by a creative leader or team. Guiding creativity involves understanding, navigating, and actively using the cultural context, identifying puzzles and opportunities, and spanning these tensions to create novel connections. With thoughtful guidance, creators and creative teams can find their way through the thicket of possibilities faster, smarter, and with less waste.

Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts draws on case studies of famous creators including Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Indigenous artist Clifford Possum, transgender activist and engineer Lynn Conway, and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. Empirically grounded, this book will be essential for teaching and managing creativity and innovation and will open new avenues for future intellectual growth and practice in the field.

Prepare any team for peak performance when crisis comes.

Crisis-Ready Teams explains how any team, and any team leader, in any industry or sector, can prepare in advance to manage crises that suddenly pull people together to address high-magnitude events that could seriously harm their organizations. The book is based on extensive, unprecedented research on crisis team dynamics, key success behaviors, and why some teams perform so much better than others. Leading scholars Mary J. Waller and Seth A. Kaplan recorded and statistically analyzed audio and video recordings of hundreds of hours of crisis simulations involving flight crews, nuclear power plant control rooms, mine rescues, emergency room doctors and nurses, etc. Based on this empirical research, and other academic literature on how teams perform in crises, the authors show how crisis teams and leaders can cement crucial behaviors through attention to team composition and communication, especially in the first few minutes of a crisis.

The book provides a valuable framework and research data for scholars studying crises and teams in organizations. It is also appropriate for MBA or executive education instruction on crisis management and leadership.

There is no CEO task more significant than leading change in an organization whose old business model needs updating. Large-scale change involves rethinking how to engage customers, partners and suppliers with new technology and hard decisions about how to reorganize internal operations—plus the challenges of executing the transformation. The stakes are high, filled with risk and reward obvious to all...and it often fails. Why? Most organizations aren't built for change—they're designed for stability, scale, and repetition. Too many things can go wrong, from natural organizational resistance and inertia, to lack of strategic focus, to execution problems. And yet, organizations today must be more dynamic than ever before. Strategy is dynamic, not static, and requires agility, nimbleness, rapid resource deployment, and organizational change.

This practical playbook helps CEOs and other key leaders reduce the risks and see through the overwhelming complexity of a major change in organizational strategy. Unlike many other books on leading change that focus narrowly on overcoming resistance, The CEO Playbook for Strategic Transformation offers a comprehensive framework involving 4 major tasks for leaders: 1) Establish and Communicate the Urgent Need; 2) Engage Stakeholders; 3) Mobilize the Organization; and 4) Develop Organizational Agility. Leaders who guide their organizations through these stages are far more likely to succeed than those who lack a playbook. Professor Scott Snell shares insights based on years of experience working with organizations undergoing change. He also provides a set of self-assessments, frameworks for action, and interventions to help senior leaders succeed at their most challenging and important task.

Innovation and Scaling for Impact forces us to reassess how social sector organizations create value. Drawing on a decade of research, Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair transcend widely held misconceptions, getting to the core of what a sound impact strategy entails in the nonprofit world. They reveal an overlooked nexus between investments that might not pan out (innovation) and expansion based on existing strengths (scaling). In the process, it becomes clear that managing this tension is a difficult balancing act that fundamentally defines an organization and its impact.

The authors examine innovation pathologies that can derail organizations by thwarting their efforts to juggle these imperatives. Then, through four rich case studies, they detail innovation archetypes that effectively sidestep these pathologies and blend innovation with scaling. Readers will come away with conceptual models to drive progress in the social sector and tools for defining the future of their organizations.

Digital transformation is much more than building a digital infrastructure to gather and process data. It is about understanding how digital technologies enable the creation of innovative services and products. It is about identifying new competitive positions and business models and thinking critically about how to both create and capture value. Strategy in the Digital Age directly engages these concerns and provides a comprehensive roadmap for planning a successful digital strategy and executing a digital transformation in organizations.

Covering major topics such as big tech, data analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, autonomy, cybersecurity, data privacy, and antitrust, strategy expert Michael Lenox outlines a set of novel, original frameworks to help those undertaking digital transformation at their organization devise their strategy. Readers will also come away with a greater understanding of how to navigate the human dimension of digital transformation and tackle the numerous social and policy challenges raised by digital technology. With insights from major companies such as Spotify, Facebook, and Uber, Lenox delivers a compelling volume that offers both a foundational understanding of this dynamic environment and an action plan for those seeking a path to digital strategy implementation for their organization.

Fully revised, this second edition offers a proven strategy for using ambidexterity to build discontinuous growth for mature organizations, and the flexibility to adapt in fast-changing environments.

Why do successful firms find it so difficult to adapt in the face of change – to innovate? In the past ten years, the importance of this question has increased as more industries and firms confront disruptive change. The pandemic has accelerated this crisis, collapsing the structures of industries from airlines and medicine to online retail and commercial real estate. Today, leaders in business have an obligation not only to investors but to their employees and communities. At the core of this challenge is helping their organizations to survive in the face of change.

The original edition summarized the lessons that the authors as researchers and consultants had learned over the previous two decades. Since then, they have continued to work with leaders of organizations around the world confronting disruptive change. With updates to every chapter, including new examples and analysis, this fully revised edition incorporates the lessons and insights that the authors have gained in the past five years. Two new chapters critically examine the role of organizational culture in promoting or hindering ambidexterity and its underlying fundamental disciplines. Using examples from firms such as Microsoft, General Motors, and Amazon, O'Reilly and Tushman illustrate how leaders can align their organization's cultures to fit the needed strategy, and how ideation, incubation, and scaling approaches, when used altogether, can successfully develop new growth businesses.

Secrecy is endemic within organizations, woven into the fabric of our lives at work. Yet, until now, we've had an all-too-limited understanding of this powerful organizational force. Secrecy is a part of work, and keeping secrets is a form of work. But also, secrecy creates a social order—a hidden architecture within our organizations. Drawing on previously overlooked texts, as well as well-known classics, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey identify three forms of secrecy: formal secrecy, as we see in the case of trade and state secrets based on law and regulation; informal secrecy based on networks and trust; and public or open secrecy, where what is known goes undiscussed. Animated with evocative examples from scholarship, current events, and works of fiction, this framework presents a bold reimagining of organizational life.

The role of Chief Operating Officer is clearly important. In fact, it's arguable that the number two position is the toughest job in a company. COOs play a critical part in executing the strategies developed by top management. And, in many cases, they are being groomed—or test-driven—as the firm's CEO-elect.

Riding Shotgun provides unique insight into this little-understood role. The authors develop a framework that illustrates who the COO is, why a company should create this position, and what the challenges associated with this job entail. Drawing heavily on first-person accounts from top executives, the authors offer a set of strategies to inform individuals who aspire to serve as COO. With a new preface and conclusion, and even more interviews from some of the most established and important companies in today's economy, this book is a one-of-a-kind resource for the C-suite and the boardroom.

The global electronics industry is one of the most innovation-driven and technology-intensive sectors in the contemporary world economy. From semiconductors to end products, complex transnational production and value-generating activities have integrated diverse macro-regions and national economies worldwide into the "interconnected worlds" of global electronics. This book argues that the current era of interconnected worlds started in the early 1990s when electronics production moved from systems dominated by lead firms in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan towards increasingly globalized and cross-macro-regional electronics manufacturing centered in East Asia. By the 2010s, this co-evolution of production network complexity transformed global electronics, through which lead firms from South Korea, Taiwan, and China integrated East Asia into the interconnected worlds of electronics production across the globe.

Drawing on literature on the electronics industry, new empirical material comprising custom datasets, and extensive personal interviews, this book examines through a "network" approach the co-evolution of globalized electronics production centered in East Asia across different national economies and sub-national regions. With comprehensive analysis up to 2021, Yeung analyzes the geographical configurations ("where"), organizational strategies ("how"), and causal drivers ("why") of global production networks, setting a definitive benchmark into the dynamic transformations in global electronics and other globalized industries. The book will serve as a crucial resource for academic and policy research, offering a conceptual, empirically driven grounding in the theory of these networks that has become highly influential across the social sciences.

This book offers the first introduction to the concepts, theories, and applications of pricing and revenue optimization. From the initial success of "yield management" in the commercial airline industry down to more recent successes of markdown management and dynamic pricing, the application of mathematical analysis to optimize pricing has become increasingly important across many different industries. But, since pricing and revenue optimization has involved the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques, the topic has remained largely inaccessible to students and the typical manager. With methods proven in the MBA courses taught by the author at Columbia and Stanford Business Schools, this book presents the basic concepts of pricing and revenue optimization in a form accessible to MBA students, MS students, and advanced undergraduates. In addition, managers will find the practical approach to the issue of pricing and revenue optimization invaluable.

With updates to every chapter, this second edition covers topics such as estimation of price-response functions and machine-learning-based price optimization. New discussions of applications of dynamic pricing and revenue management by companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Disney, and in industries such as sports, theater, and electric power, are also included. In addition, the book provides current coverage of important applications such as revenue management, markdown management, customized pricing, and the behavioral economics of pricing.

When it comes to mentoring, peer coaching is an undervalued workhorse. It's effective, inexpensive, widely applicable, and relatively easy to implement. Many coaches consider it to be the next wave in professional development. Peer Coaching at Work draws on research and practice to deliver a hands-on guide to this powerful relational learning technique.

The authors—all leaders in the field—present a rigorously tested three-part model for facilitating peer coaching relationships in one-on-one settings and in larger groups. With lively case studies, they define peer coaching as a focused relationship between equals who supportively learn from, actively listen to, and judiciously question each other, which leads to breakthroughs that may otherwise lie dormant in one's career. A fundamental guide for anyone with an interest in mentoring and transformational learning, this book is a must-have for the talent management bookshelf.

Systems Concepts in Action: A Practitioner's Toolkit explores the application of systems ideas to investigate, evaluate, and intervene in complex and messy situations. The text serves as a field guide, with each chapter representing a method for describing and analyzing; learning about; or changing and managing a challenge or set of problems.

The book is the first to cover in detail such a wide range of methods from so many different parts of the systems field. The book's Introduction gives an overview of systems thinking, its origins, and its major subfields. In addition, the introductory text to each of the book's three parts provides background information on the selected methods. Systems Concepts in Action may serve as a workbook, offering a selection of tools that readers can use immediately. The approaches presented can also be investigated more profoundly, using the recommended readings provided. While these methods are not intended to serve as "recipes," they do serve as a menu of options from which to choose. Readers are invited to combine these instruments in a creative manner in order to assemble a mix that is appropriate for their own strategic needs.

When faced with complex challenges or uncertain outcomes, many leaders believe that if they are smart enough, work hard enough, or turn to the best management tools, they will be able to find the right answer, predict and plan for the future, and break down tasks to produce controllable results. But what are leaders to do when this isn't the case?

Rather than offering one-size-fits-all tips and tricks drawn from the realm of business as usual, Simple Habits for Complex Times provides three integral practices that enable leaders to navigate the unknown. By taking multiple perspectives, asking different questions, and seeing more of their system, leaders can better understand themselves, their roles, and the world around them. They can become more nimble, respond with agility, and guide their organizations to thrive in an ever-shifting business landscape. The more leaders use these simple habits, the more they enhance their performance and solve increasingly common, sticky business issues with greater acumen.

Whether in large or small organizations, in government or the private sector, in the U.S. or overseas, leaders will turn to this book as a companion that helps them grow into the best version of themselves.

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth—luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor—do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does?

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components—economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors—to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.

Amidst the deluge of advice for businesspeople, there lies an overlooked tool, a key to thriving in today's fast-paced, unpredictable environment: improvisation. In Getting to "Yes And" veteran improv performer, university professor, CEO, and consultant Bob Kulhan unpacks a form of mental agility with powers far beyond the entertainment value of comedy troupes.

Drawing on principles from cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, and communication, Kulhan teaches readers to think on their feet and approach the most typical business challenges with fresh eyes and openness. He shows how improv techniques such as the "Yes, and" approach, divergent and convergent thinking, and focusing on being present can translate into more productive meetings, swifter decisions, stronger collaboration, positive conflict resolution, mindfulness, and more. Moving from the individual to the organizational level, Kulhan compiles time-tested teaching methods and training exercises into an instrumental guide that readers can readily implement as a party of one or a company of thousands.

Rooted in the study of chaos and complexity, Adaptive Action introduces a simple, common sense process that will guide you and your organization into reflective action.

This elegant method prompts readers to engage with three deceptively simple questions: What? So what? Now what? The first leads to careful observation. The second invites you to thoughtfully consider options and implications. The third ignites effective action. Together, these questions and the tools that support them produce a dynamic and creative dance with uncertainty. The road-tested steps of adaptive action can be used to devise solutions and improve performance across multiple challenges, and they have proven to be scalable from individuals to work groups, from organizations to communities.

In addition to laying out the adaptive action framework and clear protocols to support it, Glenda H. Eoyang and Royce J. Holladay introduce best practices from exemplary professionals who have used adaptive action to meet personal, professional, and political challenges in leadership, consulting, Alzheimer's treatment, evaluation, education reform, political advocacy, and cultural engagement—readying readers to employ this new toolkit to meet their own goals with a sense of ingenuity and flexibility.

An essential guide for managers and leaders on building resilient teams in turbulent times.

As a result of global economic changes, new technologies, and increased competition, business environments are becoming increasingly turbulent and unpredictable, requiring new forms of resilient work teams.

Due in part to the increasing complexity of business environments, more and more organizations worldwide are using teams of employees to respond to adversity. Whether it be new product development teams; business crisis response teams in companies; front line response teams such as fire, emergency medical technicians, or emergency room teams; research and development teams; or pharmaceutical development teams, employees can no longer rely on their own knowledge, skills, and abilities to get their work done. Rather, employees have to work collaboratively with one another and combine their expertise to achieve the synergy and breakthrough thinking that is necessary to be successful at completing complex tasks in today's dynamic environments.

Today more than ever before, work teams must demonstrate resilience. In the face of volatile, complex, and ambiguous business environments, all teams inevitably suffer setbacks. Bradley L. Kirkman and Adam C. Stoverink provide in their new book the hands-on practical tips for building and leading resilient teams equipped to bounce back from those challenges. They highlight four team resources that are essential to any resilient team, including: team confidence, teamwork roadmaps, capacity to improvise, and psychological safety. These four resources are brought to life through compelling stories of teams that performed well in the face of adversity—and a few that didn't. They also provide leaders with step-by-step guidance for how to grow these resources in their own teams, whether they're in-person, remote, or hybrid. This book delivers all the tools necessary to build and lead resilient teams that are virtually unbreakable.

Strategy as Leadership is about making sense of predictable but drastic changes that can alter the relationship between businesses and their competition, posing substantial leadership challenges to senior management teams. Roberto S. Vassolo and Natalia Weisz provide a framework to address and respond to these critical changes by identifying them, describing the inner tensions these changes generate, and providing guidance for their successful navigation. This outside-in approach specifies the salient leadership challenges that executives will face while mobilizing their organizations to respond effectively to competitive and environmental change.

This book claims that strategy is leadership as, in this framework, these environmental changes demand shifts in strategic priorities that result in a consistent pattern of resistance. If we know that changes are occurring in the competitive environment, we can soon identify who will be most resistant to the shift in priorities necessary to address the new situation. This book is for senior management teams to enable their organizations' capabilities to adapt and address environmental changes successfully.

After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries.

This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.

An essential guide for finance managers to leverage advanced technology in long-term investing.

Institutional Investors underpin our capitalist world, and could play a major role in addressing some of the greatest challenges to society such as climate change, the ballooning wealth gap, declining infrastructure, aging populations, and the need for stable funding for the sciences and arts. Advanced technology can help institutional Investors deliver the funds needed to tackle these grave challenges. The Technologized Investor is a practical guide showing how institutional Investors can gain the capabilities for deep innovation by reorienting their strategies and organizations around advanced technology. It dissects why technology has historically failed institutional Investors and recommends realistic changes that they can make to unlock technological superpowers. Grounded in the actual experiences of institutional Investors from around the globe, it's a unique reference manual for practitioners on how to reboot their organizations for long-term performance. The book walks readers through many detailed frameworks for analyzing how well new technologies fit with their organization's goals and resources, as well as how to make the organization itself more robust to technological change. It also envisions the ways that the durable empowerment of institutional Investors enables them to achieve their long-term objectives. Based on first-hand empirical analysis, the book will help institutional Investors to rethink their perspectives on the role of technology in their organizations, and the future possibilities it can unlock.

Entrepreneurial Finance: Venture Capital, Deal Structure & Valuation, Second Edition illustrates how the theory and methods of finance and economics can be used to guide strategic decision-making. This text prepares readers for a variety of situations that confront stakeholders in the rapidly evolving fields of entrepreneurial finance and venture capital, outlining ways to think from the investor's and entrepreneur's perspectives. Readers will find a unique and direct focus on value creation as the objective of each strategic and financial choice. The authors specifically address the influences of risk and uncertainty on new venture success and investment performance, devoting substantial attention to methods of financial modeling and contract design. Finally, they provide a comprehensive survey of approaches to new venture valuation, with an emphasis on applications.

The second edition is thoroughly revised to reflect new data, research, and changes in practice in this fast-moving field. It has an increased focus on venture capital, while maintaining its hallmark coverage of the financial aspects of entrepreneurship. Updates throughout address technological changes that have the potential to dramatically change the landscape for finance, such as recent innovations in contracting for early-stage ventures, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and Internet connectivity. Lastly, the book offers a companion website with a useful suite of resources for students and instructors alike, including spreadsheets, templates, simulation applications, and interactive cases and tutorials.

In this new book, Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo argue that current approaches to leadership fail to produce positive outcomes for either businesses or the communities they serve. Employee disengagement and customer fickleness remain high, resulting in a lack of creativity and collaboration at all levels of entrepreneurial activity. Investor demand for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) continues to be poorly integrated into profit strategies.

Drawing on extensive research, this book shows how changing a person's consciousness is the most powerful lever for unlocking his or her leadership potential to create wealth and serve humankind. A wide range of practices of connectedness provide the keys. The journey to higher consciousness changes people at a deep intuitive level, combining embodied experience with analytic-cognitive skill development. Tsao and Laszlo show how leaders who pursue this journey are more likely to flourish with significant benefits to both business and society. These include greater creativity and collaboration along with an increased capability to inspire people and produce lasting change. Readers will come away with a deep understanding of quantum leadership and the day-to-day practices that can help them achieve greater effectiveness and wellbeing at work.

CEOs regularly identify strategic execution as their biggest challenge, and the top priority facing today's business leaders. Based on their research with senior executives across a variety of industries—and including firms like Marriott, Microsoft, SunTrust, UPS, and Vail Resorts—Kenneth J. Carrig and Scott A. Snell have distilled the elements that are most critical for execution. This book addresses the challenges of execution, why it matters, and why the approach remains elusive. It introduces an integrated framework for understanding four priorities underlying execution excellence. Ultimately, it all comes down to alignment, agility, ability, and architecture. The authors lay out a process for applying the framework, helping business leaders to diagnose their challenges and to determine their path toward breakthrough performance.

This is the first book-length treatment of the concepts, designs, methods, and tools needed to conduct effective advocacy and policy change evaluations. By integrating insights from different disciplines, Part I provides a conceptual foundation for navigating advocacy tactics within today's turbulent policy landscape. Part II offers recommendations for developing appropriate evaluation designs and working with unique advocacy and policy change–oriented instruments. Part III turns toward opportunities and challenges in this growing field. In addition to describing actual designs and measures, the chapters includes suggestions for addressing the specific challenges of working in a policy setting, such as a long time horizon for achieving meaningful change.

To illuminate and advance this area of evaluation practice, the authors draw on over 30 years of evaluation experience; collective wisdom based on a new, large-scale survey of evaluators in the field; and in-depth case studies on diverse issues—from the environment, to public health, to human rights. Ideal for evaluators, change makers, and funders, this book is the definitive guide to advocacy and policy change evaluation.

The global race for talent is on, with countries and businesses competing for the best and brightest. Talented individuals migrate much more frequently than the general population, and the United States has received exceptional inflows of human capital. This foreign talent has transformed U.S. science and engineering, reshaped the economy, and influenced society at large. But America is bogged down in thorny debates on immigration policy, and the world around the United States is rapidly catching up, especially China and India. The future is quite uncertain, and the global talent puzzle deserves close examination.

To do this, William R. Kerr uniquely combines insights and lessons from business practice, government policy, and individual decision making. Examining popular ideas that have taken hold and synthesizing rigorous research across fields such as entrepreneurship and innovation, regional advantage, and economic policy, Kerr gives voice to data and ideas that should drive the next wave of policy and business practice.

The Gift of Global Talent deftly transports readers from joyous celebrations at the Nobel Prize ceremony to angry airport protests against the Trump administration's travel ban. It explores why talented migration drives the knowledge economy, describes how universities and firms govern skilled admissions, explains the controversies of the H-1B visa used by firms like Google and Apple, and discusses the economic inequalities and superstar firms that global talent flows produce. The United States has been the steward of a global gift, and this book explains the huge leadership decision it now faces and how it can become even more competitive for attracting tomorrow's talent.

Please visit www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/research/Pages/default.aspx to learn more about the book.

In Leading Matters, current Chairman of Alphabet (Google's parent company), former President of Stanford University, and "Godfather of Silicon Valley," John L. Hennessy shares the core elements of leadership that helped him become a successful tech entrepreneur, esteemed academic, and venerated administrator.

Hennessy's approach to leadership is laser-focused on the journey rather than the destination. Each chapter in Leading Matters looks at valuable elements that have shaped Hennessy's career in practice and philosophy. He discusses the pivotal role that humility, authenticity and trust, service, empathy, courage, collaboration, innovation, intellectual curiosity, storytelling, and legacy have all played in his prolific, interdisciplinary career.

Hennessy takes these elements and applies them to instructive stories, such as his encounters with other Silicon Valley leaders including Jim Clark, founder of Netscape; Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State and Stanford provost; John Arrillaga, one of the most successful Silicon Valley commercial real estate developers; and Phil Knight, founder of Nike and philanthropist with whom Hennessy cofounded Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University.

Across government, education, commerce, and non-profits, the need for effective leadership could not be more pressing. This book is essential reading for those tasked with leading any complex enterprise in the academic, not-for-profit, or for-profit sector.

In a political climate that is skeptical of hard-to-measure outcomes, public funding for research universities is under threat. But if we scale back support for these institutions, we also cut off a key source of value creation in our economy and society. Research Universities and the Public Good offers a unique view of how universities work, what their purpose is, and why they are important.

Countering recent arguments that we should "unbundle" or "disrupt" higher education, Jason Owen-Smith argues that research universities are valuable gems that deserve support. While they are complex and costly, their enduring value is threefold: they simultaneously act as sources of new knowledge, anchors for regional and national communities, and hubs that connect disparate parts of society. These distinctive features allow them, more than any other institution, to innovate in response to new problems and opportunities. Presenting numerous case studies that show how research universities play these three roles and why they matter, this book offers a fresh and stirring defense of the research university.

The market for green products has expanded rapidly over the last decade, but most consumers need something more than eco-benefits to motivate their purchases. Magali A. Delmas and David Colgan argue that many green products now offer the total package—a "green bundle" that checks the environmental box, but also offers improved performance, health benefits, savings, and status. To help consumers cut through the noise and make their best decisions, we need new strategies. The Green Bundle offers some of the best and most effective communication techniques for pushing consumers in the right direction.

Framing product benefits to motivate behavior is the key. Combining insights from sustainable business and behavioral economics, Delmas and Colgan show managers how to lead buyers from information to action. If you are looking to win over the convenient consumer or understand how companies can create the next tipping point in green consumption, this is the research-based, practical guide for you.

Philanthropy is a booming business, with hundreds of billions of dollars committed to the social sector each year. Money Well Spent, an award-winning guide on how to structure philanthropy so that it really makes a difference, offers a comprehensive and crucial resource for individual donors, foundations, non-profits, and scholars who focus on and teach others about this realm.

Behind every successful grant is a smart strategy. Paul Brest and Hal Harvey draw on the experiences of hundreds of foundations and non-profits to explain how to deliver on every dollar. They present the essential tools to help readers create and test effective plans for achieving demonstrable results. Brest and Harvey tackle thorny issues, such as how to choose among different forms of funding, how to measure progress, and when to abandon a project that isn't working.

The second edition accounts for a decade of progress: a rise in impact investing, the advent of pay-for-success programs, the maturation of impact evaluation, and the emergence of a new generation of mega-donors. Today, the notion of results-driven philanthropy is more important than ever. With this book, the social sector has the techniques it needs to deliver on that idea with impact.

It is estimated that approximately seventy percent of organizations fail in their attempts to implement transformative change. This book will help lessen that rate. Using real-world examples, Bruce J. Avolio maps four states of change that any organization must go through: identifying and recognizing, initiating, emerging and impending, and institutionalizing new ways of operating. Each state is described in detail, as are the leadership qualities necessary to solidify and transition from one to the next. These "in-between moments" are an often-overlooked key to organizational transformation. So too is the fact that organizational change happens one individual at a time. For transformation to take root, each person must shift his or her sense of self at work and the role that he or she plays in the transforming organization.

Intended as a road map, rather than a "how-to" manual with fixed procedures, Organizational Transformation will help leaders to locate their organization's position on a continuum of progress and confidently navigate planned, whole-systems change, overcoming the challenges of growing from and adjusting to watershed moments.

As a field, human resources has been slow to evolve, despite a great need and opportunity for change. Human Resource Excellence delivers the newest findings about what makes HR successful and how it can add value to today's organizations. Tracing changes in a global sample of firms across the US, Europe, and Asia, this landmark volume provides an international benchmark against which to measure a company's HR practice.

For over twenty years, USC's Center for Effective Organizations has conducted the definitive longitudinal study of the human resource management function. Analyzing new data every three years, the Center charts changes in HR and offers guidance on how human resource professionals can drive firm performance. In this latest survey, Edward E. Lawler III and John W. Boudreau conclude that HR is most powerful when it plays a strategic role, makes use of information technology, and has tangible metrics and analytics. Their insights offer an essential understanding of HR's changing role in strategy, big data, social and knowledge networks, and the gig economy.

Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies is a call to action, focusing on the role that evaluators can play in addressing social and economic problems. Evaluation extends beyond theories and methods, encompassing a range of proven approaches for addressing ecological complexities that drive inequities around the globe.

Bringing together leading thinkers and problem-solvers, this collection traverses the range of contexts at the frontiers of the field—from inadequate food supply and housing to unemployment and poverty. Editors Rodney Hopson and Fiona Cram demonstrate the effects of an engaged approach to evaluation, in which three considerations take center stage: its relevance, the relationships it engenders, and the responsibilities it requires. This is a handbook for tackling the social and economic problems of the twenty-first century which, though wicked, are amenable to the tools of the trade.

Increasingly, business leaders are tasked with developing new products, services, and business models that minimize environmental impact while driving economic growth. It's a tall order—and a call that is only getting louder.

In Can Business Save the Earth?, Michael Lenox and Aaron Chatterji explain just how the private sector can help. Many believe that markets will inevitably demand sustainable practices and force them to emerge. But Lenox and Chatterji see it differently. Based on more than a decade of research and work with companies, they argue that a bright green future is only possible with dramatic innovation across multiple sectors at the same time.

To achieve this, a broader ecosystem of players—including inventors, executives, customers, investors, activists, and governments—all must play a role. The book outlines how and the extent to which each group can serve as a driver of green growth. Then, Lenox and Chatterji identify where economic incentives currently exist, or could exist with institutional change, and ultimately address the larger question of how far well-coordinated efforts can take us in addressing the current environmental crisis.

What has made Silicon Valley so productive of new technologies and new firms? How did its pioneering achievements begin—in computer networking, semiconductors, personal computing, and the Internet—and what forces have propelled its unprecedented growth? This collection of nine chapters by contributors from varied disciplines—business, geography, history, regional planning, and sociology—examines the history, development, and entrepreneurial dynamics of Silicon Valley.

Part I, “History,” provides context for the Valley’s success by exploring its early industrial roots. It traces the development of the electronics industry in Silicon Valley back to the founding of Federal Telegraph in 1908, and discusses the role of defense spending and the relationship with Stanford University in the region’s growth. Part II, “Institutions,” emphasizes the importance of supporting institutions and practices in helping Valley startups succeed. Four chapters explore the role of law firms in facilitating the formation of new companies, the evolution of the venture capital industry and its role in funding new firms, the importance of labor mobility, and the significance of close interfirm relationships in the success of Silicon Valley companies.

Part III, “General Explanations,” presents three different perspectives on the environment that has made Silicon Valley so successful. The first chapter considers Silicon Valley as an ecosystem of interacting institutions, individuals, and a culture that encourages and nurtures entrepreneurship. The second chapter argues that Silicon Valley should not be seen as a region in which relationships are based on civic virtue, but rather one in which trust is based on performance, which makes it uniquely permeable to new ideas and talented individuals. The final chapter contends that institutions specializing in new firm formation are responsible for Silicon Valley's unique ability to foster technological advances.

Whether from customers, supply-chain partners, policymakers, or regulators, organizations in virtually every industry are facing calls to do more with less. They are feeling compelled to provide higher-quality outcomes, more rapidly, at a lower cost.

This book offers a road-tested approach for delivering these outcomes through positive organizational change. Its message comes just in time, for too many companies have gone the way of low-road strategies, such as cutting pay and perks, and working harder not smarter. Drawing on her path-breaking research, Jody Hoffer Gittell reveals that high performance is fundamentally relational—rooted in both human and social capital.

Based on this insight, she provides a unique model that will help companies to build meaningful relationships among colleagues, develop smarter work processes, and design organizational structures fit for today's pressure test. By following four organizations on their change journeys, she illustrates how "relational coordination" unfolds in real-world settings. Tools for change guide readers as they learn how to implement this new model in their own workplaces.

Storytelling can be a lifelong and life sustaining habit of mind, a personal inheritance that connects us to our communities. It can also serve as an organizational inheritance—a management tool that helps businesses to develop and thrive. For more than a decade, award-winning author Janis Forman has been helping executives to tell stories in service of their organizational objectives. In Storytelling in Business: The Authentic and Fluent Organization, she teaches readers everywhere how the craft of storytelling can help them to achieve their professional goals.

Focusing on the role of storytelling at the enterprise level, this book provides a research-driven framework for engaging in organizational storytelling. Forman presents original cases from Chevron, FedEx, Phillips, and Schering-Plough. Organizations like those featured in the book can make use of storytelling for good purposes, such as making sense of their strategy, communicating it, and developing or strengthening culture and brand. These uses of storytelling generate positive consequences that can have a sustained and significant impact on an organization. While large firms employ teams of digital and communication professionals, there's much that any of us can extrapolate from their experience to create stories to further our own objectives.

To show the reach of storytelling, Forman conducted 140 interviews with professionals ranging from CEOs in small and thriving firms, to corporate communication and digital media experts, to filmmakers—arguably the world experts in visual storytelling. She draws out specific lessons learned, and shows how to employ the road-tested strategies demonstrated by these leaders. Although this book focuses on storytelling in the context of business, Forman takes inspiration from narratives in literature and film, philosophical and social thought, and relevant concepts from a variety of other disciplines to instruct the reader on how to develop truly authentic and meaningful tales to drive success. A final chapter brings readers back to square one: the development of their own "signature story."

This book is a pioneering work that guides us beyond the pressure and noise of daily organizational life to influence people in a sustained, powerful way. It teaches us to be fluent storytellers who succeed by mastering this vital skill.

The enormous and sustained success of Silicon Valley has excited interest around the globe. Startup companies the world over are attempting to emulate its high tech businesses, and many governments are changing their institutions in order to foster Silicon Valleys of their own. What accounts for the Valley’s leading edge in innovation and entrepreneurship?

This book gives an answer by insiders, by prominent business leaders and academics from the heart of the Valley. They argue that what distinguishes the Valley is not its scientific advances or technological breakthroughs. Instead, its edge derives from a “habitat” or environment that is tuned to turn ideas into products and take them rapidly to market by creating new firms.

This habitat includes supportive government regulations for new firm formation, leading research universities that interact with industry, an exceptionally talented and highly mobile work force, and experienced support services in such areas as finance, law, accounting, headhunting, and marketing, all specializing in helping new companies form and grow. Not least is a spirit of adventure and a willingness to take risks.

The elements of this habitat are packed into a small geographic area. In it, networks of specialists form communities of practice within which ideas develop and circulate and from which new products and new firms emerge. Feedback processes are strongly at work: the successes of Valley firms strengthen the habitat, and the stronger it becomes, the more new, successful firms are created.

Among industries, electronics came into the Valley first, followed by semiconductors, computers, software, and, in the 1990s, biotechnology, networking, and the Internet. This extraordinary ability to keep adding new industrial sectors itself affects the prospect for the Silicon Valley's future. What lies ahead? From within, the Valley faces serious challenges in defining a new generation of entrepreneurs, addressing a growing digital divide, and maintaining quality of life. At the same time, the Valley must redefine its global role with respect to other rising innovative regions worldwide. Nevertheless, the proven ability of its highly effective habitat suggests that in both innovation and entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley will maintain its edge.

Formerly prosperous cities across the United States, struggling to keep up with an increasingly global economy and the continued decline of post-war industries like manufacturing, face the issue of how to adapt to today's knowledge economy. In Invention and Reinvention, authors Mary Walshok and Abraham Shragge chronicle San Diego's transformation from a small West Coast settlement to a booming military metropolis and then to a successful innovation hub. This instructive story of a second-tier city that transformed its core economic identity can serve as a rich case and a model for similar regions.

Stressing the role that cultural values and social dynamics played in its transition, the authors discern five distinct, recurring factors upon which San Diego capitalized at key junctures in its economic growth. San Diego—though not always a star city—has been able to repurpose its assets and realign its economic development strategies continuously in order to sustain prosperity. Chronicling over a century of adaptation, this book offers a lively and penetrating tale of how one city reinvented itself to meet the demands of today's economy, lighting the way for others.

"Reliability" has become a watchword in the business community. Increasingly, it refers to anticipation and resilience organizations' ability to plan for, absorb, and rebound from shocks. Across many sectors and cases, the approach to improving reliability in primary technical systems has been remarkably similar. Stakeholders assume that improved reliability lies in better design and technology.

This book speaks to the severe limits of formal design and technology relative to operational skills, experience, and knowledge. The debate over the vulnerability of critical infrastructures has far too often neglected the managerial dimension of public security and business continuity. High Reliability Management is the first book about the people who manage for high reliability, namely, those professionals who provide critical services continuously and safely, even during peak demand times or periods of stress.

The text draws on one of the most intensive studies of a critical infrastructure within a high reliability framework. This longitudinal analysis examines the California electrical gridone of the largest, most complex, and economically important in the world. From this research comes a new perspective on strategic balances in society, and practical advice to researchers and professionals who confront reliability daily.

Foundations for Inquiry, a philosophy of social science book, is both a primer and a resource for anyone interested in social and behavioral research. As a "reader" with excerpts from classic and soon-to-be classic writings on research in the organizational sciences, the book shows the myriad choices facing researchers—including assumptions they make about ways of creating knowledge, beliefs and values they hold regarding reality, and philosophical and managerial allegiances they form. This book will give readers the information they need to select among these choices, appreciate the tradeoffs involved, and understand how they affect the ways in which data is collected, analyzed, and interpreted, and in which "truth" is ultimately created.

Most books about research address the "how to" of inquiry rather than the "why." Foundations for Inquiry enlightens readers about the variety of philosophical assumptions regarding inquiry and organizational phenomena, demonstrates how these assumptions shape subsequent choices about theories, and shows how theoretical and philosophical choices consequently shape and guide the research process. Awareness of these choices and tradeoffs enables readers to be more discriminating consumers of, and adept contributors to, research-based knowledge.

In this book, Hoyk and Hersey describe 45 "unethical traps" into which any one of us can fall. These traps, they say, can erupt in any organizational environment. Some of these traps distort our perception of right and wrong—so we actually believe our unethical behavior is right. Many of them are psychological in nature, and if we are not aware of them they are like illusions—webs of deception. In the authors' analysis, these traps significantly contributed to the large-scale corporate disasters we witnessed in recent years.

Hoyk and Hersey take account of these realities and offer a "real-world" method that will predict, preclude, and, if necessary, "get us out of" these traps. Given the increased scrutiny under which all executives and mangers operate today, this book is a 'must read' for anyone who is charged with achieving an organization's mission—whether that mission is increasing profit, serving the common good, or both.

Businesses that produce bioscience products—gene tests and therapies, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and medical devices—are regularly confronted with ethical issues concerning these technologies. Conflicts exist between those who support advancements in bioscience and those who fear the consequences of unfettered scientific license. As the debate surrounding bioscience grows, it will be increasingly important for business managers to consider the larger consequences of their work.

This groundbreaking book follows industry research, development, and marketing of medical and bioscience products across a variety of fields, including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and bio-agriculture. Compelling and current case studies highlight the ethical decisions business managers frequently face. With the increasing visibility and public expectation placed on businesses in this sector, managers need to understand the ethical and social issues. This book addresses that need and provides a framework for incorporating ethical analysis in business decision making.

"Let your social and environmental conscience be your guide" can be a successful and durable strategy for a firm. This is the first book to explain how following a vision for the earth and for society can be a powerful route to profits for small and medium sized companies.

Companies on a Mission explains that mission-driven companies appreciate and leverage traditional strategic principles—with a twist—to win in the marketplace. By clearly and pragmatically laying out this argument, author Michael V. Russo crystallizes for enlightened businesses what Michael Porter made clear for mainstream firms years ago. The book shows that a mission-driven approach creates significant barriers to imitation by larger, established rivals. Mission-driven firms build their brands on authenticity. Only you are you. And, authenticity builds customer loyalty. Later in the book, Russo moves beyond the firm level to look at these companies in context. He finds, for instance, that just as specific industries often develop in geographic clusters, mission-driven companies also aggregate. But, they put down roots where other businesses are pursuing complementary goals. Portland and the Bay Area are two such hotbeds. This allows for cooperation, as opposed to breeding stiff competition.

The rise to prominence of mission-driven companies like Patagonia, Seventh Generation, Kettle Foods, and Calvert Group is undoubtedly the result of powerful trends in consumer markets, including the rise of conscious consumerism, the transparency movement, and fallout from global competition. Most books that address social and environmental issues are focused on large corporations, crafted as autobiographies by CEOs, or written as moral calls to action without regard for the bottom line. Companies on a Mission both chronicles a movement and provides grounded guidance to entrepreneurs and managers who wish to join the wave. For these readers, this book is a one-of-a-kind bible.

Listen to people in every field and you'll hear a call for more sophisticated leadership—for leaders who can solve more complex problems than the human race has ever faced. But these leaders won't simply come to the fore; we have to develop them, and we must cultivate them as quickly as is humanly possible. Changing on the Job is a means to this end.

As opposed to showing readers how to play the role of a leader in a "paint by numbers" fashion, Changing on the Job builds on theories of adult growth and development to help readers become more thoughtful individuals, capable of leading in any scenario. Moving from the theoretical to the practical, and employing real-world examples, author Jennifer Garvey Berger offers a set of building blocks to help cultivate an agile workforce while improving performance.

Coaches, HR professionals, thoughtful leaders, and anyone who wants to flourish on the job will find this book a vital resource for developing their own capacities and those of the talent that they support.

Large, mature companies often struggle when it comes to the uncertain process of breakthrough innovation. But innovation is an imperative in today's cutthroat business environment. To fulfill its potential, there has to be a better way—and there is.

Beyond the Champion argues that innovation is a talent all its own that requires distinct skills and expertise, just like finance or marketing. Viewing innovation as a discipline in its own right, it is easy to see that breakthrough wins require an organizational design with clearly delineated roles, responsibilities, and career tracks for those who shoulder the responsibility for new products. Drawing on the results of a four-year study and two decades of related research, this book outlines three fundamental competencies necessary for innovation: discovery, incubation, and acceleration. Mapping these skills onto roles and opportunities for advancement, the authors deliver a pioneering blueprint for sustainable innovation.

Increasingly, scholars view reliability—the ability to plan for and withstand disaster—as a social construction. However, there is a tendency to evoke this concept only in the face of catastrophes, such as the British Petroleum oil spill or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. This book frames reliability as a fundamental issue in the study of organizations—one that can also improve day-to-day operations.

Bringing together a diverse cast of contributors, it considers how we can account for the ability of some organizations to maintain high reliability and what we can learn from them. The chapters distinguish reliability from related lines of inquiry; take stock of relevant research from different disciplinary perspectives; highlight implications for practice; and identify directions, questions, and priorities for future research. The first of its kind in over twenty years, this volume delivers a dynamic base of shared knowledge and an integrative research agenda at a time when organizational reliability has never been so important.

In today's fast-moving business world, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) plays a critical yet often misunderstood role. Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles's Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO offers a deep dive into what it takes to succeed as a second-in-command.

  This insightful book explores how COOs support CEOs, drive strategy, and ensure smooth day-to-day operations. Drawing from real-world examples and extensive research, Bennett and Miles uncover the unique challenges and opportunities of the job. Whether you're a current or aspiring COO, a CEO looking to strengthen your leadership team, or simply curious about executive dynamics, this book provides valuable takeaways.

  With engaging storytelling and practical insights, Riding Shotgun breaks down the different types of COOs, the skills required to excel in the role, and how businesses can leverage this position for long-term success. It's a must-read for anyone interested in leadership, corporate strategy, and the power of effective teamwork at the highest levels of an organization.

Five essential steps to take you from "zero to superhero" with AI for marketing

  For marketers, the landscape is shifting underfoot. Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept but a present-day reality, rewriting the rules of relevance, differentiation, and connection. Navigating this new era is the single greatest challenge, and opportunity, for marketing leaders. How do you move beyond scattered experiments and buzzwords to unlock AI's true transformative power?

  In the newly revised and essential second edition of The AI Marketing Canvas, top MBA marketing professors Rajkumar Venkatesan and Jim Lecinski provide the definitive roadmap. They distill complexity into clarity with a field-tested, five-step plan for marketers at every stage of their AI journey. This is not a speculative look at the future; it is a practical guide for winning your "AI Moment of Truth" now.

  The concepts, frameworks and examples in the book will enable you to:

  Master the two core functions of AI: Wield predictive AI for unparalleled insights and optimization, and generative AI for creating compelling content and communications at scale.

  Pinpoint your greatest opportunities: Use a powerful 2x2 framework to identify the highest-value AI use cases for your business, whether driving internal productivity or explosive external growth.

  Build your AI "exosuit": Learn how to augment your team's strategic expertise and human judgment with machine intelligence, turning your department into a marketing powerhouse.

  Lead with confidence: Navigate the critical challenges of ethics and governance while preparing for the next wave of disruption, from Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to autonomous AI agents.

  Rich with case studies, best practices, and the latest insights on AI's impact on decision-making and customer engagement, this book empowers CMOs and marketers alike to harness AI's full potential. Whether you are laying the groundwork for AI adoption, scaling across functions, or reinventing your go-to-market approach, The AI Marketing Canvas provides clarity and confidence at every stage of your journey.

  It's not too late to be an early adopter, but the train is leaving the station. This book is your ticket to the forefront of marketing innovation.

Many companies today are turning to sustainable business models in order to maximize success while utilizing environmentally friendly practices. This book offers the most comprehensive list of patterns of sustainable business models ever written and presents an accessible approach to design models from scratch. The 45 patterns of sustainable business models are mapped into a "sustainability triangle", a canvas for navigation of empirically derived sustainability innovation solutions, and are illustrated with over 300 real world examples of companies and startups that have implemented them. These patterns are designed to help managers and entrepreneurs develop new businesses and create sustainable value.

A Harvard Business School professor's guide to thinking about thinking, using the creative power of the unconscious.

Gerald Zaltman's pioneering research methods for understanding the unconscious desires of customers are used by companies around the world. Dare to Think Differently draws on the same groundbreaking methods to explain the deep and innovative thinking used by highly successful executives.

Reflecting emerging viewpoints in neuroscience, Zaltman contends that multiple forces, not just a brain, collaborate to produce a mind. Highly effective decision-makers are able and willing to go beyond their conscious thinking and surface powerful, creative, unconscious thoughts and feelings. They candidly ask whether what they feel they "know" is actually warranted, opening their minds to new alternatives.

This book's insights emerge from a large number of one-on-one in-depth interviews with senior leaders around the globe, reinforced with research findings from scientific literatures. Zaltman presents six techniques he developed to help his students at Harvard, and his blue chip consulting clients, tap into the creative power of the unconscious: "befriending your ignorance," "serious play," "chasing your curiosity," asking the right "discovery questions," "panoramic thinking," and using the "voyager outlook." These techniques provide a research-based set of ideas for improving decision-making that go beyond the existing literature on "thinking smarter."

Mirroring Zaltman's Harvard Business School classroom practice, each chapter opens with a practical-thinking exercise that helps readers surface the mental processes and biases that unconsciously close minds and constrict thinking. This creative surfacing is the crucial foundation for any leader operating in a complex, uncertain environment, who needs unconventional solutions to challenging problems.

A leading global consulting firm on how to achieve new product launch success rates far above industry averages.

New product launches are risky. But disciplined innovation practices lead to success rates well above industry benchmarks. Predictable Winners is a comprehensive handbook of best practices for improving the odds of success at every step of the innovation journey—from concept development through commercial launch and beyond. Product leaders, innovation teams, and senior executives will find practical insights to reduce product risk and improve R&D effectiveness and ROI, while delighting customers with a pipeline of compelling new products and services.

The authors' systematic approach is covered step-by-step in twenty-five chapters on topics like assembling the right team, identifying innovation opportunities, conducting a disciplined, data-driven assessment of a new product's revenue potential, making wise investment decisions, and more. Predictable Winners also details how to use quantitative tools to disaggregate and reduce the distinct risks around competing product concepts, customer segments, channels, pricing, and launch planning. Finally, because not all breakthrough innovation comes from internal teams, the authors also explain advanced strategies for improving the odds of success: balancing organic innovation with external acquisitions or licensing.

A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for August 2025!

Competing in tech today requires an understanding of "product-led growth"

Companies like Dropbox, Zoom, Slack, Atlassian, and DocuSign grew into multibillion-dollar companies using the 3-step "Freemium" product strategy: (1) instead of hiring an expensive sales force, give away software for free; (2) let happy users tell others; (3) offer a premium subscription version, producing a recurring revenue stream. Over the last three decades, Freemium strategy has evolved into a practice known to tech industry insiders as "product-led growth," which Harvard Business School Lecturer Frank Cespedes calls, "probably the fastest-growing go-to-market model for businesses globally."

Freemium is the authoritative guide to product-led growth, written by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Harvard MBA Dave Boyce, who teaches the first MBA-level course on the topic. Freemium explains how to develop a product that can sell itself, how to ward off competitors, and how to seamlessly move upmarket, selling to larger customers. It details how the product itself (instead of expensive employees) can be used for customer onboarding, customer service, and customer retention. Freemium also details how non-software companies and enterprise sales-led companies are combining product-led growth tactics with more traditional go-to-market initiatives.

Competing in nearly every tech-related industry today requires an understanding of the principles of product-led growth. Freemium is the comprehensive, practical handbook for this unicorn-building strategy.

The hidden dangers of randomized controlled trials

The need to demonstrate the effectiveness of nonprofit social programs has led to a rapid rise in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), for evaluation. As a result, most nonprofit sector professionals can tell you why nonprofits should do an RCT. This book tells you why they probably shouldn't, and what to do instead.

Mismeasuring Impact explores why RCTs are being embraced as the "gold standard" for nonprofit evaluation, despite the high cost and time investment required and the serious problems with using RCTs in a nonprofit context. (Most RCTs conducted in nonprofits fail to meet required standards for rigor, undercutting their accuracy). The book describes what happens inside nonprofits when they take part in RCTs, the unintended equity issues that arise, and why nonprofits feel pressured participate in RCTs despite the problems.

University of Chicago professors Marwell and Mosley's research is based on extensive interviews with key players: nonprofit managers, professional program evaluators, and program officers in philanthropic foundations. The book argues that, ultimately, RCTs are used to poorly ground nonprofit legitimacy, not to foster nonprofit improvement. RCTs also privilege program and organizational standardization over the key strengths of nonprofit organizations: flexible innovation and responsiveness to community needs.

Nonprofits and funders need forms of evaluation that lift up these strengths. Mismeasuring Impact offers alternative approaches that build strong organizations, not just cookie-cutter programs, and which funders and nonprofits of all sizes can support.

The intellectual foundation for the next generation of business leaders

Today's business schools were designed for a world that no longer exists. Capitalism raised the standard of living for billions of people over the past 150 years, but is now causing systemic challenges it is unable to address, including climate change and inequality. And yet, business schools continue to teach ideas that are making things worse: elevating the primacy of shareholder profits above the interests of employees, the environment, and society; viewing government as an intrusion on the free market rather than an arbiter of its proper functioning; and promoting unlimited economic growth despite the devastating environmental and social consequences. Business schools cannot simply drop an elective into their curriculum to address these challenges. We must rethink the faulty foundations.

Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market explains the intellectual foundation MBA students, faculty, and administrators need to reform capitalism and restore its noble purpose for the 21st century. Many business students are in fact seeking this kind of education and frustrated that they are not getting it from their professors. This book will fill in gaps in their education, equipping them with the models and mindset to rethink shareholder capitalism and serve society's needs. Business faculty and administrators will find a practical program for amending curriculum and pedagogy, changing student and faculty rewards, and bringing a new spirit and sensibility to the business school.

Why do so many organizations fail to mobilize the social networks of employees to respond to disruptions, innovate, and change? In Digital Relationships, Jason Davis argues that individual and organizational interests about networking can come out of alignment such that the network ties that individuals form are organizationally sub-optimal for achieving their most ambitious goals. Developing a new perspective about networks and organizations, he explains through network agency theory how network problems emerge, the role of digital technology adoption by organizations in amplifying misalignment, and the capacity of managers and function of the executive to resolve agency problems and mitigate their impact. Drawing on over a decade of qualitative research in US, Asian, and European "big tech" companies and new analytical and computational modeling, this book offers new interpretations and solutions to the pathologies that emerge from organizationally detrimental networking behaviors and in the face of managerial interventions.

A provocative new analysis of immigration's long-term effects on a nation's economy and culture.

Over the last two decades, as economists began using big datasets and modern computing power to reveal the sources of national prosperity, their statistical results kept pointing toward the power of culture to drive the wealth of nations. In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential.

Built upon mainstream, well-reviewed academic research that hasn't pierced the public consciousness, this book offers a compelling refutation of an unspoken consensus that a nation's economic and political institutions won't be changed by immigration. Jones refutes the common view that we can discuss migration policy without considering whether migration can, over a few generations, substantially transform the economic and political institutions of a nation. And since most of the world's technological innovations come from just a handful of nations, Jones concludes, the entire world has a stake in whether migration policy will help or hurt the quality of government and thus the quality of scientific breakthroughs in those rare innovation powerhouses.

Employers are stepping in to innovate new approaches to training talent that increasingly operates independently of the higher education sector.

The value proposition of the college degree, long the most guaranteed route to professional preparation for work, is no longer keeping pace with rapidly evolving skill needs that derive from technological advancements impacting today's work force. If the university system does not engage in responsive restructuring, more and more workplaces will bypass them entirely and, instead, identify alternative sources of training that equip learners with competencies to directly meet dynamic needs.

The College Devaluation Crisis makes the case that employers and other learning and development entities are emerging to innovate new approaches to training talent that, at times, relies on the higher education sector, but increasingly operates independently in order to satisfy talent needs more agilely and effectively.

Written primarily for managers, the book focuses on case studies from leading companies, including Google, Ernst & Young, and General Assembly, to illustrate their innovative strategies for talent development across varying levels of individual education, age, and background. The book also addresses professionals on the university side, urging readers to consider the question: Will higher education pivot and adapt, or will it resist change and, therefore, be replaced?

Executive development programs have entered a period of rapid transformation, driven by digital disruption and a widening gap between the skills that participants and their organizations demand and those provided by their executive programs. This work delves into the objective functions of the executive development space, analyzes the demand characteristics of the learners and the organizations that pay for the programs, and the ways in which business schools and other providers deliver (or not) on the promises they make regarding skill development and the continued value of learning to the organization. They show how a trio of disruptive forces (disintermediation, disaggregation and decoupling) which have figured prominently in industries disrupted by digitalization,are reshaping the structure of demand for executive development. The authors look at the future of executive development in the era of self-refining algorithms (aka machine learning) and wearable sensors and computers, and offer a compass for making the right choice for CEOs and CLOs who are guiding executive program design. Ultimately, they offer a guide for to optimize the learning production function for both skill acquisition and skill transfer – the two charges that the new skills economy has laid out for any educational enterprise.

Design leadership at scale requires leaders who design the design function, establish a thriving environment for the creative team, and shape the design organization to drive progress, advance innovation, and enhance meaningful customer experiences.

To examine the foundations of successful design leadership, the authors performed extensive in-depth interviews with design leaders working for Fortune 500 organizations across industries. Based on these insights, Design Leadership Ignited delineates a pathway to design excellence, which includes establishing a forward-looking strategy and an adequate organizational structure for the design function, empowering the design team, and scaling the impact of design across the entire organization. This book takes the position that a core challenge in the journey towards design excellence is the need to recognize and balance the often-contradictory objectives and activities that design leaders encounter. Combining their practitioner experience and research, the authors provide a framework to embrace the complexity of design leadership that will elevate design at scale.

The global electronics industry is one of the most innovation-driven and technology-intensive sectors in the contemporary world economy. From semiconductors to end products, complex transnational production and value-generating activities have integrated diverse macro-regions and national economies worldwide into the "interconnected worlds" of global electronics. This book argues that the current era of interconnected worlds started in the early 1990s when electronics production moved from systems dominated by lead firms in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan towards increasingly globalized and cross-macro-regional electronics manufacturing centered in East Asia. By the 2010s, this co-evolution of production network complexity transformed global electronics, through which lead firms from South Korea, Taiwan, and China integrated East Asia into the interconnected worlds of electronics production across the globe.

Drawing on literature on the electronics industry, new empirical material comprising custom datasets, and extensive personal interviews, this book examines through a "network" approach the co-evolution of globalized electronics production centered in East Asia across different national economies and sub-national regions. With comprehensive analysis up to 2021, Yeung analyzes the geographical configurations ("where"), organizational strategies ("how"), and causal drivers ("why") of global production networks, setting a definitive benchmark into the dynamic transformations in global electronics and other globalized industries. The book will serve as a crucial resource for academic and policy research, offering a conceptual, empirically driven grounding in the theory of these networks that has become highly influential across the social sciences.

Time is of the essence. Climate change looms as a malignant force that will reshape our economy and society for generations to come. If we are going to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we are going to need to effectively "decarbonize" the global economy by 2050.

This doesn't mean a modest, or even a drastic, improvement in fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. It means 100 percent of the cars on the road being battery-powered or powered by some other non-carbon-emitting powertrain. It means 100 percent of our global electricity needs being met by renewables and other non-carbon-emitting sources such as nuclear power. It means electrifying the global industrials sector and replacing carbon-intensive chemical processes with green alternatives, eliminating scope-one emissions—emissions in production—across all industries, particularly steel, cement, petrochemicals, which are the backbone of the global economy. It means sustainable farming while still feeding a growing global population.

Responding to the existential threat of climate change, Michael Lenox and Rebecca Duff propose a radical reconfiguration of the industries contributing the most, and most harmfully, to this planetary crisis. Disruptive innovation and a particular calibration of industry dynamics will be key to this change. The authors analyze precisely what this might look like for specific sectors of the world economy—ranging from agriculture to industrials and building, energy, and transportation—and examine the possible challenges and obstacles to introducing a paradigm shift in each one. With regards to existent business practices and products, how much and what kind of transformation can be achieved? The authors assert that markets are critical to achieving the needed change, and that they operate within a larger scale of institutional rules and norms. Lenox and Duff conclude with an analysis of policy interventions and strategies that could move us toward clean tech and decarbonization by 2050.

An extraordinary confluence of forces stemming from automation and digital technologies is transforming both the world of work and the ways we educate current and future employees to contribute productively to the workplace.

The Great Skills Gap opens with the premise that the exploding scope and pace of technological innovation in the digital age is fast transforming the fundamental nature of work. Due to these developments, the skills and preparation that employers need from their talent pool are shifting. The accelerated pace of evolution and disruption in the competitive business landscape demands that workers be not only technically proficient, but also exceptionally agile in their capacity to think and act creatively and quickly learn new skills.

This book explores how these transformative forces are—or should be—driving innovations in how colleges and universities prepare students for their careers. Focused on the impact of this confluence of forces at the nexus of work and higher education, the book's contributors—an illustrious group of leading educators, prominent employers, and other thought leaders—answer profound questions about how business and higher education can best collaborate in support of the twenty-first century workforce.

In the last decade, research on negative social evaluations, from adverse reputation to extreme stigmatization, has burgeoned both at the individual and organizational level. Thus far, this research has largely focused on major corporate risks. Corporate public relations and business executives intuitively know that a negative image deters important relationships—from customers and partners, to applicants, stakeholders, and potential funding. At the same time, business is conducted in an age of heightened connection, including digital platforms for criticism and a 24-hour news cycle. Executives know that some degree of public disapproval is increasingly unavoidable. Negative social evaluations can also put social actors on the map. In the era of identity politics, many political leaders express controversial views to appeal to specific audiences and gain in popularity. Through network and signaling effects, being controversial can potentially pay off.

Thomas J. Roulet offers a framework for understanding not only how individuals and organizations can survive in an age of increasing scrutiny, but how negative social evaluations can surprisingly yield positive results. A growing body of work has begun to show that being "up against the rest" is an active driver of corporate identity, and that firms that face strong public hostility can benefit from internal bonding. Synthesizing this work with his original research, and drawing comparisons to work on misconduct and scandals, Roulet addresses an important gap by providing a broader perspective to link the antecedents and consequences of negative social evaluations. Moreover, he reveals the key role that audiences play in assessing these consequences, whether positive or negative, and the crucial function of media in establishing conditions in which public disapproval can bring positive results. Examples and cases cover Uber and Google, Monsanto, Electronic Arts, and the investment banking industry during the financial crisis.

Today, social media offers an alternative broadcast and communication medium for nonprofit advocacy organizations. At the same time, social media ushers in a "noisy" information era that renders it more difficult for nonprofits to make their voices heard. This book seeks to unpack the prevalence, mechanisms, and ramifications of a new model for nonprofit advocacy in a social media age. The keyword for this new model is attention. Advocacy always starts with attention: when an organization speaks out on a cause, it must ensure that it has an audience and that its voice is heard by that audience; it must ensure that current and potential supporters are paying attention to what it has to say before expecting more tangible outcomes. Yet the organization must also ensure that advocacy does not end with attention: attention should serve as a springboard to something greater. The authors elaborate how attention fits into contemporary organizations' advocacy work and explain the key features of social media that are driving the quest for attention. Developing conceptual models, they explain why some organizations and messages gain attention while others do not. Lastly, the book explores how organizations are weaving together online and offline efforts to deliver strategic advocacy outcomes.

To succeed in the face of disruptive competition, companies will need to harness the power of a wide range of partners who can bring different skills, experience, capacity, and their own networks to the task.

With the advent of new technologies, rapidly changing customer needs, and emerging competitors, companies across more and more industries are seeing their time-honored ways of making money under threat. In this book, Arnoud De Meyer and Peter J. Williamson explain how business can meet these challenges by building a large and dynamic ecosystem of partners that reinforce, strengthen, and encourage innovation in the face of ongoing disruption.

While traditional companies know how to assemble and manage supply chains, leading the development of a vibrant ecosystem requires a different set of capabilities. Ecosystem Edge illustrates how executives need to leave notions of command and control behind in favor of strategies that will attract partners, stimulate learning, and promote the overall health of the network. To understand the practical steps executives can take to achieve this, the authors focus on eight core examples that cross industries and continents: Alibaba Group, Amazon.com, ARM, athenahealth, Dassault Systèmes S.E., The Guardian, Rolls-Royce, and Thomson Reuters. By following the principles outlined in this book, leaders can learn how to unlock rapid innovation, tap into new and original sources of value, and practice organizational flexibility. As a result, companies can gain the ecosystem edge, a key advantage in responding to the challenges of disruption that business sees all around it today.

Today, social media offers an alternative broadcast and communication medium for nonprofit advocacy organizations. At the same time, social media ushers in a "noisy" information era that renders it more difficult for nonprofits to make their voices heard. This book seeks to unpack the prevalence, mechanisms, and ramifications of a new model for nonprofit advocacy in a social media age. The keyword for this new model is attention. Advocacy always starts with attention: when an organization speaks out on a cause, it must ensure that it has an audience and that its voice is heard by that audience; it must ensure that current and potential supporters are paying attention to what it has to say before expecting more tangible outcomes. Yet the organization must also ensure that advocacy does not end with attention: attention should serve as a springboard to something greater. The authors elaborate how attention fits into contemporary organizations' advocacy work and explain the key features of social media that are driving the quest for attention. Developing conceptual models, they explain why some organizations and messages gain attention while others do not. Lastly, the book explores how organizations are weaving together online and offline efforts to deliver strategic advocacy outcomes.

Companies are increasingly facing intense pressures to address stakeholder demands from every direction: consumers want socially responsible products; employees want meaningful work; investors now screen on environmental, social, and governance criteria; "clicktivists" create social media storms over company missteps. CEOs now realize that their companies must be social as well as commercial actors, but stakeholder pressures often create trade-offs with demands to deliver financial performance to shareholders. How can companies respond while avoiding simple "greenwashing" or "pinkwashing"? This book lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them. Suggesting that the shared-value mindset may actually get in the way of progress, bestselling author Sarah Kaplan shows in The 360° Corporation how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation.

For many years, there has been quite a bit of talk about employee engagement as a means to lift corporate profits and reduce absenteeism and turnover. However, this talk has not produced better companies. In fact, the evidence shows that incivility and instances of employee abuse are getting worse. Additionally, with profit as the primary goal of organizations, most employees view any benign treatment they receive as a secondary convenience that will dissipate once corporate fortunes decline. That is, many employees still believe they are expendable in the eyes of their employers. This book turns that equation around by examining the practices of twenty-one companies that put the interests and needs of employees first. Profits are necessary but insufficient for corporate health. The companies featured in this book see it as their mission to offer people a better, more fulfilling life for themselves, and assist with that holistic journey by providing the organizational elements people need to reach their potential. They do this first by creating respectful and kind cultures that treat every person as an equal, sentient partner in the success of the company. Second, they diligently work to satisfy people's basic needs: financial security, belonging, meaning, autonomy, self-acceptance, self-confidence, and growth. The result is a web of fellow-feeling: earnest affection among people who feverishly work to live up to both the high standards of the institution and their obligations to one another. By providing a place where people can do their best work and thrive as individuals and as members of a cohesive community, everyone profits.

The biomedical industry, which includes biopharmaceuticals, genomics and stem cell therapies, and medical devices, is among the fastest growing worldwide. While it has been an economic development target of many national governments, Asia is currently on track to reach the epicenter of this growth. What accounts for the rapid and sustained economic growth of biomedicals in Asia?

To answer this question, Kathryn Ibata-Arens integrates global and national data with original fieldwork to present a conceptual framework that considers how national governments have managed key factors, like innovative capacity, government policy, and firm-level strategies. Taking China, India, Japan, and Singapore in turn, she compares each country's underlying competitive advantages. What emerges is an argument that countries pursuing networked technonationalism (NTN) effectively upgrade their capacity for innovation and encourage entrepreneurial activity in targeted industries. In contrast to countries that engage in classic technonationalism—like Japan's developmental state approach—networked technonationalists are global minded to outside markets, while remaining nationalistic within the domestic economy.

By bringing together aggregate data at the global and national level with original fieldwork and drawing on rich cases, Ibata-Arens telegraphs implications for innovation policy and entrepreneurship strategy in Asia—and beyond.

The global race for talent is on, with countries and businesses competing for the best and brightest. Talented individuals migrate much more frequently than the general population, and the United States has received exceptional inflows of human capital. This foreign talent has transformed U.S. science and engineering, reshaped the economy, and influenced society at large. But America is bogged down in thorny debates on immigration policy, and the world around the United States is rapidly catching up, especially China and India. The future is quite uncertain, and the global talent puzzle deserves close examination.

To do this, William R. Kerr uniquely combines insights and lessons from business practice, government policy, and individual decision making. Examining popular ideas that have taken hold and synthesizing rigorous research across fields such as entrepreneurship and innovation, regional advantage, and economic policy, Kerr gives voice to data and ideas that should drive the next wave of policy and business practice.

The Gift of Global Talent deftly transports readers from joyous celebrations at the Nobel Prize ceremony to angry airport protests against the Trump administration's travel ban. It explores why talented migration drives the knowledge economy, describes how universities and firms govern skilled admissions, explains the controversies of the H-1B visa used by firms like Google and Apple, and discusses the economic inequalities and superstar firms that global talent flows produce. The United States has been the steward of a global gift, and this book explains the huge leadership decision it now faces and how it can become even more competitive for attracting tomorrow's talent.

Please visit www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/research/Pages/default.aspx to learn more about the book.

The leading companies of the past twenty years have all harnessed the power of information to gain competitive advantage. But as access to big data becomes ubiquitous, it can no longer guarantee a leg up. Fast/Forward makes the case that we are entering a new era in which firms that understand the limits of 1s and 0s will take the lead.

Whereas the industrial age saw the rise of bureaucracy, and the information age has been described as a meritocracy, we are witnessing the rise of adhocracy. In uncertain, rapidly-changing times, adhocracic organizations scan the horizon for winning opportunities. Then, instead of questing after more analysis, they respond with agility by making smart, intuitive decisions. Combining decisive action with emotional conviction, future-facing firms seize the day.

Fast/Forward paints the big picture of a new approach to strategy and provides the necessary playbook to make your company fit for the future.

In a political climate that is skeptical of hard-to-measure outcomes, public funding for research universities is under threat. But if we scale back support for these institutions, we also cut off a key source of value creation in our economy and society. Research Universities and the Public Good offers a unique view of how universities work, what their purpose is, and why they are important.

Countering recent arguments that we should "unbundle" or "disrupt" higher education, Jason Owen-Smith argues that research universities are valuable gems that deserve support. While they are complex and costly, their enduring value is threefold: they simultaneously act as sources of new knowledge, anchors for regional and national communities, and hubs that connect disparate parts of society. These distinctive features allow them, more than any other institution, to innovate in response to new problems and opportunities. Presenting numerous case studies that show how research universities play these three roles and why they matter, this book offers a fresh and stirring defense of the research university.

The market for green products has expanded rapidly over the last decade, but most consumers need something more than eco-benefits to motivate their purchases. Magali A. Delmas and David Colgan argue that many green products now offer the total package—a "green bundle" that checks the environmental box, but also offers improved performance, health benefits, savings, and status. To help consumers cut through the noise and make their best decisions, we need new strategies. The Green Bundle offers some of the best and most effective communication techniques for pushing consumers in the right direction.

Framing product benefits to motivate behavior is the key. Combining insights from sustainable business and behavioral economics, Delmas and Colgan show managers how to lead buyers from information to action. If you are looking to win over the convenient consumer or understand how companies can create the next tipping point in green consumption, this is the research-based, practical guide for you.

Creativity has long been thought of as a personal trait, a gift bestowed on some and unachievable by others. While we laud the products of creativity, the stories behind them are often abridged to the elusive "aha!" moment, the result of a momentary stroke of genius.

In The Craft of Creativity Matthew A. Cronin and Jeffrey Loewenstein present a new way to understand how we innovate. They emphasize the importance of the journey and reveal the limitations of focusing on outcomes. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, their own research, and interviews with professionals and learners who employ creativity in the arts, engineering, business, and more, Cronin and Loewenstein argue that creativity is a cognitive process that hinges on changing one's perspective. It's a skill that anyone can hone, and one that benefits from thinking with others and over time. Breaking new ground in the discussion about how we innovate, this book provides strategies that everyone can use to be more creative.

After two decades of research on founders, a best-selling book on the subject, and experience teaching and mentoring thousands of students in this field, Noam Wasserman is a prominent authority on startups. Hearing from countless readers and students that his insights helped them with important life decisions, beyond the incubator and boardroom, Wasserman brings us a new book that applies to everyday life his research on the methods of successful startup founders.

Like entrepreneurs, we all deal with uncertainty, tough decision-making, and necessary problem-solving. Whether we freelance or work for large organizations, whether we're married or single, have kids or not, we must be able to think on our feet, assess risks and opportunities, and recruit others to help us navigate them. This book offers important advice for envisioning change in our lives—from contemplating the next step in a relationship to making a radical career move—and managing changes to which we've already committed. We can learn to recognize our own well-worn patterns and keep our tendencies and habits in check, recruit a personal taskforce—our own board of directors—to advise us, and plan ahead for growth. With his extensive database of entrepreneurship case studies—from Pandora to Twitter to Nike—complemented with data on 20,000 founders, Wasserman is able to go deeply into the entrepreneurial mindset and show us how startups provide specific lessons for crafting our most successful lives.

Creativity has long been thought of as a personal trait, a gift bestowed on some and unachievable by others. While we laud the products of creativity, the stories behind them are often abridged to the elusive "aha!" moment, the result of a momentary stroke of genius.

In The Craft of Creativity Matthew A. Cronin and Jeffrey Loewenstein present a new way to understand how we innovate. They emphasize the importance of the journey and reveal the limitations of focusing on outcomes. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, their own research, and interviews with professionals and learners who employ creativity in the arts, engineering, business, and more, Cronin and Loewenstein argue that creativity is a cognitive process that hinges on changing one's perspective. It's a skill that anyone can hone, and one that benefits from thinking with others and over time. Breaking new ground in the discussion about how we innovate, this book provides strategies that everyone can use to be more creative.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it became apparent that pricing loans in a way that is profitable for lenders and sensitive to risk is anything but simple. Increasingly, lenders are following the lead of other retailers by segmenting their market and more precisely targeting customers. To do this successfully, lenders must engage analytic approaches, such as machine learning and optimization, in setting prices for each segment.

Robert L. Phillips worked with major banks and financial services companies for more than a decade to help them improve their pricing capabilities. This book draws on his experience, as well as the latest academic research, to demonstrate how lenders can apply the proven techniques of price optimization to responsibly improve the profitability of their loans. It is a go-to resource for academics and professionals alike, particularly lenders who are looking for ways to do better business in an increasingly competitive (and regulated) market.

The late George B. Dantzig , widely known as the father of linear programming, was a major influence in mathematics, operations research, and economics. As Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, he continued his decades of research on linear programming and related subjects. Dantzig was awarded eight honorary doctorates, the National Medal of Science, and the John von Neumann Theory Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

The 24 chapters of this volume highlight the amazing breadth and enduring influence of Dantzig's research. Short, non-technical summaries at the opening of each major section introduce a specific research area and discuss the current significance of Dantzig's work in that field. Among the topics covered are mathematical statistics, the Simplex Method of linear programming, economic modeling, network optimization, and nonlinear programming. The book also includes a complete bibliography of Dantzig's writings.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long been uncomfortable bedfellows. Out of fear of pirating and lost profits, entertainment companies have historically resisted technological changes. Conversely, high-tech companies, more concerned with technological progress, have largely ignored the needs of the entertainment industry. Nevertheless, those products that we now take for granted, such as DVDs, MP3 players, and the Internet, are all due to the synergy of technology and entertainment.

The switch to digital and web formats for entertainment represents huge potential market opportunities for both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It has opened up new possibilities for entertainment and expanded the way content is created, distributed and consumed. Consider the phenomenon of YouTube and its wildly popular user-created content, or the ability to download movies and TV shows from sites such as iTunes and watch them on your iPod or computer, anytime and anywhere.

The dual forces of consumer demand and rapidly changing content distribution are combining in new ways to create changes that will strike at the very foundations of the entertainment and technology industries. Depending upon how entertainment and technology companies respond, these changes can help them prosper or put them out of business. Media companies will have to become more like technology companies; and technology companies will need to change too. Because content creation, distribution and consumption are ever more tightly linked, Hollywood will need to understand what's happening in Silicon Valley and vice versa; changes in one industry will reverberate through the other. Some companies such as AOL and Time Warner have tried and failed (at least so far) to harness these forces, while a few companies such as Disney, Intel, and Google have recently taken the initial steps. But many more companies wait, afraid to change but knowing they cannot conduct business as usual.

With an insider's knowledge, researcher and consultant, Philip Meza insightfully clarifies what managers and investors in media and technology companies will need to do in order to successfully navigate today's tricky environment. Coming Attractions? Hollywood, High Tech, and the Future of Entertainment discusses the history of the key forces driving the relationship between entertainment and technology today and into the future.

We are entering a new era—an era of impact. The largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will soon be under way, bringing with it the potential for huge increases in philanthropic funding. Engine of Impact/> shows how nonprofits can apply the principles of strategic leadership to attract greater financial support and leverage that funding to maximum effect.

As Good to Great author Jim Collins writes in his foreword, this book offers "a detailed roadmap of disciplined thought and action for turning a good nonprofit into one that can achieve great impact at scale."

William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker identify seven essential components of strategic leadership that set high-achieving organizations apart from the rest of the nonprofit sector. Together, these components form an "engine of impact"—a system that organizations must build, tune, and fuel if they hope to make a real difference in the world.

Drawing on decades of teaching, advising, grantmaking, and research, Meehan and Jonker provide an actionable guide that executives, staff, board members, and donors can use to jumpstart their own performance and to achieve extraordinary results for their organization. Along with setting forth best practices using real-world examples, the authors outline common management challenges faced by nonprofits, showing how these challenges differ from those faced by for-profit businesses in important and often-overlooked ways.

By offering crucial insights on the fundamentals of nonprofit management, this book will help leaders equip their organizations to fire on all cylinders and unleash the full potential of the nonprofit sector. Visit www.engineofimpact.org for additional information.

China is inevitably becoming a giant in the world economy. All international companies in the United States have a presence in China, and many international Chinese companies have a presence in the United States. These companies face complex challenges in their global value chain: strategy, sales and marketing, supply chain management, information technology, and production. This book examines case studies from companies who have successfully navigated this new market environment. The book starts with strategy as a fundamental stage in the value chain. It then proceeds to explore globalization of sales and marketing, logistics and supply chain challenges of supporting global operations, necessary changes to the IT system capabilities as firms begin to address new markets, and finally, efficient and competitive production processes. The book will be valuable to managers who are looking for tools that have been used successfully by industry leaders, as well as to instructors who would like to use real-world practice to educate future managers and decision makers.

We are entering a new era—an era of impact. The largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will soon be under way, bringing with it the potential for huge increases in philanthropic funding. Engine of Impact/> shows how nonprofits can apply the principles of strategic leadership to attract greater financial support and leverage that funding to maximum effect.

As Good to Great author Jim Collins writes in his foreword, this book offers "a detailed roadmap of disciplined thought and action for turning a good nonprofit into one that can achieve great impact at scale."

William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker identify seven essential components of strategic leadership that set high-achieving organizations apart from the rest of the nonprofit sector. Together, these components form an "engine of impact"—a system that organizations must build, tune, and fuel if they hope to make a real difference in the world.

Drawing on decades of teaching, advising, grantmaking, and research, Meehan and Jonker provide an actionable guide that executives, staff, board members, and donors can use to jumpstart their own performance and to achieve extraordinary results for their organization. Along with setting forth best practices using real-world examples, the authors outline common management challenges faced by nonprofits, showing how these challenges differ from those faced by for-profit businesses in important and often-overlooked ways.

By offering crucial insights on the fundamentals of nonprofit management, this book will help leaders equip their organizations to fire on all cylinders and unleash the full potential of the nonprofit sector. Visit www.engineofimpact.org for additional information.

Our networks—and how we work them—create vital ties that bind. Organizations recognize and reward this fact by leaning ever more heavily on collaboration, particularly when it comes to getting new things done. This book offers a framework that explains how innovators use network processes to broker knowledge and mobilize action.

How well they do so directly influences the outcome of attempts to innovate, especially when a project is not tied to prescribed organizational routines. An entrepreneur launches a business. A company rolls out a new product line. Two firms form a partnership. These instances and many more like them dot today's business landscape. And yet, we understand little about the social dimension of these undertakings. Disentangling brokerage from network structure and building on his theoretical work regarding tertius iungens, David Obstfeld explains how actors with diverse interests, expertise, and skills leverage their personal and intellectual connections to create new ventures and products with extraordinary results.

Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion.

Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of "pioneer entrepreneurs"—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways.

Corporations are now publicly committed to sustainability. But, beneath the public relations happy face, executives and managers are perplexed. The majority of them have a genuine desire to work in an ethical and sustainable manner, yet, when they engage with their stakeholders for that purpose, they often encounter a world of hardball politics, full of hostile activists, self-interested elites, and unpredictable attacks.

Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development and The Corporation gives companies a "how to" guide for addressing the twin problems of maintaining political legitimacy, and promoting sustainable development. The text presents a typology of stakeholder networks that helps managers and community leaders identify and improve the social capital patterns in their own networks. Once they know these patterns, they can move their networks towards those that foster sustainable community development. The book describes vivid cases in which managers and community stakeholders have used the authors' approach successfully, and in addition provides managers with handy tools for predicting and avoiding community-level socio-political risk around stakeholder issues. With its proven and practical approach, Stakeholder Politics promises to be a valuable guide for managers and academics who are invested in sustainable development worldwide and stakeholder issues alike.

Information technology is a critical element of virtually every business. But effectively aligning and using it to achieve business objectives is very difficult. That is because success requires so many elements to be done properly. Over 60 business leaders and university faculty members have collaborated to bring together insights from a broad spectrum of disciplines—from strategy and finance to information systems and project management. This information is contained in clearly written, concise answers to 100 questions that every manager needs to know to use information technology effectively. Each answer includes references to web and print resources for readers needing more detailed or the most current information. Business professionals will value the book because it covers a range of important areas that few know completely. University students will find the book a valuable source of necessary information for technology and management courses. Rarely is so much diverse expertise brought together and focused in a single book. It will become an essential resource for anyone working with information systems in an organization.

Over the past few years, the business world has been wracked by corporate scandals. With news of a new scandal an almost weekly occurrence, one cannot help but wonder: "Is business success synonymous with a lack of morality?" With a resounding "no," Bowen H. "Buzz" McCoy, former partner at Morgan Stanley, shows that ethical business leadership is possible and, moreover, desirable. Seeking inspiration from an eclectic range of sources, such as Dante, Kant, and Peter Drucker, and drawing from his own career as a successful investment banker, the author examines how business leaders—and those who aspire to be business leaders—can flourish in a corporate environment without shedding personal values or compromising integrity. Living Into Leadership: A Journey in Ethics is based on the author's actual life experiences, personal ethical dilemmas, and concerns. This groundbreaking work incorporates classroom materials developed by the author for ethics programs at various business schools, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of Southern California, UCLA, and Notre Dame. The central question this book considers is how to pursue an engaged business career while living a balanced life and continuing to grow as an integrated person.

McCoy acts as a "mentor" for readers, providing personal and professional guidance on the development of a personal business plan for life. The book presents the case for creating a moral compass that allows one to make decisions under uncertainty, lead a life of integrity, establish the practice of ethics both personally and in society, and know when to embrace change and when to hold one's ground. It includes an abbreviated version of the author's acclaimed work, the seminal Harvard Business Review article, "The Parable of the Sadhu," and shows readers how to prepare in advance for dilemmas they may face, both in their private and professional lives.

How might Russia and Eurasia attract private investment and trade from the West over the next several years, and what conditions in Russia and Eurasia may Western investors and traders expect? In this unprecedented volume, leading American experts and policymakers and their Russian and Eurasian counterparts survey economic prospects for the region and assess its important resources and institutions.

The book begins by examining the overall trade and investment outlook in Russia and Eurasia. It then takes up critical sectors: energy, aerospace, automobiles, agriculture, and telecommunications. It turns to current institutional impediments to trade and investment such as problems in corporate governance, the banking system, and the rule of law. The final chapters look to the future and assess the prospects for economic reform, the movement to join the World Trade Organization, and the impact of political dynamics in the region.

The experts are joined by Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who in their forewords acknowledge not only the crucial importance of trade and investment for the future but also the necessity of bringing the integrity of institutions up to international standards. A third foreword by the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, stresses the place of commerce in economic growth and in the integration of Russia and Eurasia with the world community.

Cultural understanding is indispensable for people who live and work abroad or in multicultural settings, but few have appropriate knowledge and training in this area. Working Across Cultures addresses this need. Suitable for general readers yet intellectually challenging, the book illustrates how to thrive in unfamiliar cultures by understanding and tapping into the stress management mechanisms used by the people who live there.

The book begins by refuting the notion that professional life interacts with culture only at the level of etiquette. Distinguishing between rule-based and relationship-based cultures, the author examines the roles of authority, individualism, competition, security, negotiation, contracts, supervision, lifestyle, and even humor in different cultures. He shows how different concepts of time, space, information, and wealth shape everyday life across cultures. The book concludes with a comprehensive reading list for more than one hundred countries.

Corporate Community Involvement offers the first-ever roadmap to strategic community involvement. Building on their extensive experience, Nick Lakin and Veronica Scheubel have designed this book to be practical—for those who want to act upon what they read.

The book's advice is backed by inspiring interviews with best-in-class practitioners from businesses like Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Ericsson—as well as leading experts in corporate responsibility and community involvement. The text highlights best-practice approaches, effective methods, and concise tools to help managers "get there faster" and "get it right first time."

The core of the book is a step-by-step guide that shows readers how to: conduct a current state analysis and devise a strategy; organize staffing and budgets; integrate corporate community involvement throughout the business and create high-profile programs' partner across sectors; measure and evaluate results; communicate successful activities; and overcome challenges.

Corporate Community Involvement will be an indispensible resource for those working at the interface between business and the community. With this day-to-day reference in hand, practitioners will learn from both successes and failures. Representatives from other sectors, such as government, international agencies, and NGOs, will come to better understand companies' internal requirements for cross-sector collaborations.