Businesses worry about new technologies, but customers are the ultimate disruptors-Suman Sarkar offers bold strategies for making sure you understand your customers and keep up with their ever-changing needs. Disruption-the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts-drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it....

Planning today is plagued by a lack of imagination. It's often difficult, when working with a business, organization, or any group of people, to upend traditional thinking and unlock new ideas and new possibilities. If you are a strategic planner, or anyone charged with managing growth or facilitating change, it is important to add to your arsenal tools that will allow you to break unhealthy groupthink, avoid old patterns, and escape narrow safe...

Turn Strategy into Performance!In today's world of rapid, disruptive change, strategy can't be separate from execution--it has to emerge from execution. You have to continually adjust your strategy to fit new realities. But if your organization isn't set up to be fast on its feet, you could easily go the way of Blockbuster or Borders. Laura Stack shows you how to quickly drive strategic initiatives and get great results from your team. Her LEAD Formula...

Every business needs a business plan but how do you put one together? Jay, a clothes designer, and Robin, in the forestry business, explain how they wrote their business plans. Objectives: the business plan has to state what the business has been set up to do. Marketing: the plan describes the product, who it's aimed at, how they'll buy it and at what price. Production: the production plan outlines how they'll make their product. Resources: will the...

Strategic planning sounds business-as-usual dull, while innovation conjures up images of corporate vision and risk-taking. The truth is, the two must be brought together for companies to excel in dynamic markets. The Power of Strategy Innovation presents a five-phase Discovery Process for staging, aligning, exploring, creating, and mapping the paths between analytical, numbers-oriented, day-to-day planning and market-centric, discovery-driven innovation...

In From Mobility to Accessibility, an expert team of researchers flips the tables on the standard models for evaluating regional transportation performance. Jonathan Levine, Joe Grengs, and Louis A. Merlin argue for an "accessibility shift" whereby transportation planning, and the transportation dimensions of land-use planning, would be based on people's ability to reach destinations, rather than on their ability to travel fast. Existing models for...

Sun Tzu's ancient The Art of War has inspired military, political, and business leaders across the world with its brilliant strategies for prevailing against opponents. At the core of this classic treatise is the message that sledgehammer approaches can backfire, and size alone does not guarantee wins. Strategy, positioning, planning, leadership--all play equally significant roles, making Sun Tzu's teachings perfect for small business owners and entrepreneurs...

You've probably thought about where you will live in retirement and how you plan to spend your time. But do you know how much income you will need to pay for the type of retirement you want? With Social Security's uncertain future, as well as the increasing cost of healthcare, you need to formulate a retirement strategy with an income stream-available from annuities-that you can't outlive. In The Income Revolution, you will learn what questions to...

The tumultuous changes in the business world during the last decade have forced too many to focus on the short term, rushing to figure out how to produce quarterly profits in chaotic conditions. As a result, the longer view is often obscured, leaving businesses so busy fighting today's battles that they are completely unprepared for tomorrow's war. The next cataclysmic wave is surging relentlessly ahead, demanding leaders who can steer their companies...

DON'T PANIC. RULE! Market turbulence has made opening monthly 401(k) statements shocking rather than reassuring. Michael "Waxie" Parness can help. The standard strategies and advice regarding your retirement accounts are NOT working. Many people's 401(k)s are now 201(k)s, and it may get worse. YOU need to take control of your retirement, and your life. Rule Your Freakin' Retirement, through practical and pragmatic advice and examples, will teach...