Download or read book Time Talent Energy written by Michael C. Mankins and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Managing Your Scarcest Resources Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization--resources that are too often squandered. There's plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What's really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company's full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article "Your Scarcest Resource," Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag--the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy--and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.
Download or read book Lessons from Private Equity Any Company Can Use written by Orit Gadiesh and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2008-02-07 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private equity firms are snapping up brand-name companies and assembling portfolios that make them immense global conglomerates. They're often able to maximize investor value far more successfully than traditional public companies. How do PE firms become such powerhouses? Learn how, in Lessons from Private Equity Any Company Can Use. Bain chairman Orit Gadiesh and partner Hugh MacArthur use the concise, actionable format of a memo to lay out the five disciplines that PE firms use to attain their edge: · Invest with a thesis using a specific, appropriate 3-5-year goal · Create a blueprint for change--a road map for initiatives that will generate the most value for your company within that time frame · Measure only what matters--such as cash, key market intelligence, and critical operating data · Hire, motivate, and retain hungry managers--people who think like owners · Make equity sweat--by making cash scarce, and forcing managers to redeploy underperforming capital in productive directions This is the PE formulate for unleashing a company's true potential.
Download or read book Mastering the Merger written by David Harding and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's corporate deal makers face a conundrum: Though 70% of major acquisitions fail, it's nearly impossible to build a world-class company without doing deals. In Mastering the Merger, David Harding and Sam Rovit argue that a laserlike focus on just four key imperatives--before executives finalize the deal--can dramatically improve the odds of M&A success. Based on more than 30 years of in-the-trenches work on thousands of deals across a range of industries--and supplemented by extensive Bain & Co. research--Harding and Rovit reveal that the best M&A performers channel their efforts into (1) targeting deals that advance the core business; (2) determining which deals to close and when to walk away; (3) identifying where to integrate--and where not to; and (4) developing contingency plans for when deals inevitably stray. Top deal makers also favor a succession of smaller deals over complex "megamergers"--and essentially institutionalize a success formula over time. Helping executives zero in on what matters most in the complex world of M&A, Mastering the Merger offers a blueprint for the decisions and strategies that will beat the odds.
Download or read book Decide Deliver written by Marcia W. Blenko and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -Identify your critical decisions. Focus on those that matter most to your company's performance. --
Download or read book Aligning the Stars written by Jay W. Lorsch and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2002-04-26 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most businesses rely on talent to succeed, but none so much as professional service firms. Within this rapidly expanding, trillion-dollar industry, professionals--and how they're managed--are the primary source of competitive advantage. In fact, success in this sector is determined more by the people you pay than the people who pay you. This path-breaking book provides readers with a practical and integrated perspective on how to win in the unique and tumultuous world of professional services. From strategy to organization to culture, it offers customized insights for businesses in which professionals drive bottom-line results and long-term company success. Respected academic Jay W. Lorsch and accomplished practitioner Thomas J. Tierney apply their broad experience to the realities of "Monday morning" decision making. Their work reflects decades of personal experience, combined with a rigorous study of outstanding professional service firms in industries that include law, information technology, accounting, advertising, investment banking, executive search, and consulting. Aligning the Stars explains what differentiates the "best of the best" within professional services. By describing how to attract, retain, motivate, organize, and lead the stars that shape a company's destiny, this book provides valuable lessons for the current and future leaders of every talent-driven business.
Download or read book Doing Agile Right written by Darrell Rigby and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agile has the power to transform work--but only if it's implemented the right way. For decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence--the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way. The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. The authors break down how agile really works, show what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise. Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.
Download or read book The Founder s Mentality written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing—and Avoiding—the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external—increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. What’s more, companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. Even for healthy companies, these crises, if not managed properly, stifle the ability to grow further—and can actively lead to decline. The key insight from Zook and Allen’s research is that managing these choke points requires a “founder’s mentality”—behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder—to restore speed, focus, and connection to customers: • An insurgent’s clear mission and purpose • An unambiguous owner mindset • A relentless obsession with the front line Based on the authors’ decade-long study of companies in more than forty countries, The Founder’s Mentality demonstrates the strong relationship between these three traits in companies of all kinds—not just start-ups—and their ability to sustain performance. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader—not only a founder—can instill and leverage a founder’s mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.
Download or read book Winning on Purpose written by Fred Reichheld and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great leaders embrace a higher purpose to win. The Net Promoter System shines as their guiding star. Few management ideas have spread so far and wide as the Net Promoter System (NPS). Since its conception almost two decades ago by customer loyalty guru Fred Reichheld, thousands of companies around the world have adopted it—from industrial titans such as Mercedes-Benz and Cummins to tech giants like Apple and Amazon to digital innovators such as Warby Parker and Peloton. Now, Reichheld has raised the bar yet again. In Winning on Purpose, he demonstrates that the primary purpose of a business should be to enrich the lives of its customers. Why? Because when customers feel this love, they come back for more and bring their friends—generating good profits. This is NPS 3.0 and it puts a new take on the age-old Golden Rule—treat customers the way you would want a loved one treated—at the heart of enduring business success. As the compelling examples in this book illustrate, companies with superior NPS consistently deliver higher returns to shareholders across a wide array of industries. But winning on purpose isn't easy. Reichheld also explains why many NPS practitioners achieve just a small fraction of the system's full potential, and he presents the newest thinking and best practices for doing NPS right. He unveils the Earned Growth Rate (EGR): the first reliable, complementary accounting measure that can truly leverage the power of NPS. With keen insight and moving personal stories, Reichheld advances the thinking and practice of NPS. Winning on Purpose is your indispensable guide for inspiring customer love within your own teams and using Net Promoter to achieve both personal and business success.
Download or read book What the Best College Students Do written by Ken Bain and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college—and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book—college graduates who went on to change the world we live in—aimed higher than straight A’s. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives. Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a “meta-cognitive” understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn’t achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.
Download or read book Stella Bain written by Anita Shreve and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic story, set against the backdrop of World War I, from bestselling author Anita Shreve. When an American woman, Stella Bain, is found suffering from severe shell shock in an exclusive garden in London, surgeon August Bridge and his wife selflessly agree to take her in. A gesture of goodwill turns into something more as Bridge quickly develops a clinical interest in his houseguest. Stella had been working as a nurse's aide near the front, but she can't remember anything prior to four months earlier when she was found wounded on a French battlefield. In a narrative that takes us from London to America and back again, Shreve has created an engrossing and wrenching tale about love and the meaning of memory, set against the haunting backdrop of a war that destroyed an entire generation.
Download or read book What the Best College Teachers Do written by Ken Bain and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. The short answer is—it’s not what teachers do, it’s what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out—but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn. In stories both humorous and touching, Ken Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.
Download or read book Unstoppable written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2007-05-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the next decade, two out of every three companies will face the challenge of their corporate lives: redefining their core business. Buffeted by global competition and facing an uncertain future, more and more executives will realize that they must make fundamental changes in their core even as they continue delivering the goods and services that keep them in business today. Unstoppable shows these managers how to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with CEOs from companies such as De Beers, American Express, and Samsung, it shows readers how to recognize when the core needs reinvention and how to deploy the "hidden assets" that can be the basis for tomorrow's growth. Building on the author's previous books, Profit from the Core and Beyond the Core, this book shows how any company in crisis can transform itself to become truly unstoppable.
Download or read book Beyond the Core written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work shows executives how to grow profitably by finding and focusing on their core business. It shows how they can increase the odds of successful expansion once their core business no longer provides sufficient new growth.
Download or read book Shuggie Bain written by Douglas Stuart and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Booker Prize Winner of 'Book of the Year' and 'Debut of the Year' at the British Book Awards The Million-Copy Bestseller 'An amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' - The judges of the Booker Prize 'Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.' - Observer It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life, dreaming of greater things. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and as she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different, he is clearly no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. For readers of A Little Life and Angela's Ashes, it is a heartbreaking novel by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell. 'A heartbreaking novel' - The Times 'Tender and unsentimental . . . The Billy Elliot-ish character of Shuggie . . . leaps off the page.' - Daily Mail
Download or read book Winning in Turbulence written by Darrell Rigby and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current downturn may prove more brutal than most previous recessions. It's already hammering companies in markets around the globe. It will test businesses to their fullest-many won't survive. But downturns present strategic opportunities, too. In fact, many more companies achieve dramatic gains during recessions than in normal times. How to ensure your company emerges successful? In Winning in Turbulence, a new volume in the Memo to the CEO series, Bain & Company downturn strategist Darrell Rigby provides the playbook. He presents a powerful framework and diagnostic tool (available in the book and online) for assessing three dimensions of your situation: Your industry's sensitivity: How hard is it hit by this downturn? Your company's strategic position: Are you an industry leader or follower? Your firm's financial position, including cash reserves. The author then explains how to craft an action plan tailored to the situation you've diagnosed, providing tools for: Cutting costs intelligently-sustaining your margins and brand Boosting revenue by refocusing your sales force on the right customers Channeling resources into your core businesses Preparing for bold moves, such as game-changing acquisitions Timely and practical, this book positions you to survive a downturn and emerge stronger once the recovery begins.
Download or read book Repeatability written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a multiyear study of such firms as Apple, IKEA, and Vanguard, the authors warn against complexity as a strategy for business planning, advocating instead for a simple, repeatable model that provides for constant improvement.
Download or read book Profit from the Core written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2010-02-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Profit from the Core was published in 2001, it became an international bestseller, helping hundreds of companies find their way back to profitable growth after the bursting of the Internet bubble. The 2007 global financial meltdown reaffirmed the perils of pursuing heady growth through untested strategies, as firms in industries from finance to retailing to automobiles strayed too far from their core businesses and suffered the consequences. In this updated edition of Profit from the Core, authors Chris Zook and James Allen show that a renewed focus on the core is more critical than ever as firms seek to rebuild their competitive advantage coming out of the downturn—and that a strong core will be the foundation for successful expansion as the economy recovers. Based on more than ten years of Bain & Company research and analysis and fresh examples from firms responding to the current downturn, the book outlines what today’s executives and managers need to do now to revitalize their core, identify the next wave of profitable growth, and build on it successfully. Zook and Allen explain how companies can: • Develop a strong, well-defined core and use it to establish a leadership position • Follow the golden rule of strategy: discourage competitors from investing in your core • Assess whether your core is operating at its full potential • Uncover hidden assets in your core that provide the seeds for new growth • Find a repeatable formula to apply core business strengths in adjacent markets Building on powerful and proven ideas to meet today’s formidable business challenges, Profit from the Core is the back-to-basics strategy field guide no manager should be without.