Wow your customers . . . with "less." Cut costs-it's a common corporate refrain. But if you constantly slash expenditures, what happens to innovation? How can you stay competitive and satisfy customers? Costovation solves the dilemma of how to spend less and innovate more. The book's revolutionary approach broadens the definition of innovation beyond products to the business model itself. With costovation, you let go of assumptions, take a fresh look at the market, and relentlessly focus on what customers really want. Consider Planet Fitness-it grew to 7.3 million members by concentrating on casual exercisers. Those folks don't care about frills. They want easy, low-cost access to good equipment. Although it's inexpensive to run, Planet Fitness ranks highest in gym satisfaction. Gourmet grocer, Picard, sells only frozen food. With less perishable inventory, they compress costs while delighting a discerning but busy clientele. Packed with examples and interactive exercises, the book explores cost innovation strategies that work for big and small companies alike. From open innovation and cost-sharing to simplifying products and turning waste into new offerings-readers learn how rivals are carving out niches, protecting positions, and dominating industries. Innovation and cost-cutting are not opposites. Combined, they expose untapped opportunities to outsmart and underspend competitors.

In a challenging economy filled with multiple competitors, no one can afford to stagnate. Yet, innovation is notoriously difficult. How do you pinpoint the winning ideas that customers will love? Sifting through purchasing data for clues about what might sell or haphazardly brainstorming ideas are typical strategies. However, innovation expert Stephen Wunker offers the effective Jobs method: determining the drivers of customer behavior--those functional and emotional goals that people want to achieve. This simple shift in perspective opens up new insights about your customers and a wealth of hidden opportunities. For example, social media newcomer Snapchat used the Jobs process to capture the millennial demographic. By reducing functionality, the company satisfied its users' unmet need to document real life in the moment, without filters and "like" buttons. Packed with similar examples from every industry, this complete innovation guide explains both foundational concepts and a detailed action plan developed by Wunker and his team. In Jobs to Be Done, the groundbreaking Jobs Roadmap takes you step-by-step through the innovation process and reveals how to: Gather valuable customer insights Turn those insights into new product ideas Test and iterate until you find original profitable solutions And much more! Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a roadmap for discovering new markets, new products and services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.

What do winners of major sales do differently than the sellers who almost won, but ultimately came in second place? Mike Schultz and John Doerr, bestselling authors and world-renowned sales experts, set out to find the answer. They studied more than 700 business-to-business purchases made by buyers who represented a total of $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power. When they compared the winners to the second-place finishers, they found surprising results. Not only do sales winners sell differently, they sell radically differently, than the second-place finishers. In recent years, buyers have increasingly seen products and services as replaceable. You might think this would mean that the sale goes to the lowest bidder. Not true! A new breed of seller—the insight seller—is winning the sale with strong prices and margins even in the face of increasing competition and commoditization. In Insight Selling, Schultz and Doerr share the surprising results of their research on what sales winners do differently, and outline exactly what you need to do to transform yourself and your team into insight sellers. They introduce a simple three-level model based on what buyers say tip the scales in favor of the winners: Level 1 "Connect." Winners connect the dots between customer needs and company solutions, while also connecting with buyers as people. Level 2 "Convince." Winners convince buyers that they can achieve maximum return, that the risks are acceptable, and that the seller is the best choice among all options. Level 3 "Collaborate." Winners collaborate with buyers by bringing new ideas to the table, delivering new ideas and insights, and working with buyers as a team. They also found that much of the popular and current advice given to sellers can damage sales results. Insight Selling is both a strategic and tactical guide that will separate the good advice from the bad, and teach you how to put the three levels of selling to work to inspire buyers, influence their agendas, and maximize value. If you want to find yourself and your team in the winner's circle more often, this book is a must-read.

"Based on extensive interviews with today's . . . corporate leaders, this look at how the best CEOs do their jobs focuses on the mindsets and actions that foster an environment of excellence"--

Ten years ago, world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne broke ground by introducing "blue ocean strategy," a new model for discovering uncontested markets that are ripe for growth. In this bound version of their bestselling Harvard Business Review classic article, they apply their concepts and tools to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of employees. Research indicates that this gulf is vast: According to Gallup, 70% of workers are disengaged from their jobs. If companies could find a way to convert them into engaged employees, the results could be transformative. The trouble is, managers lack a clear understanding of what changes they could make to bring out the best in everyone. In this article, Kim and Mauborgne offer a solution to that problem: a systematic approach to uncovering, at each level of the organization, which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees to give their all, and a process for getting managers throughout the company to start doing them. Blue ocean leadership works because the managers' "customers"--that is, the people managers oversee and report to--are involved in identifying what's effective and what isn't. Moreover, the approach doesn't require leaders to alter who they are, just to undertake a different set of tasks. And that kind of change is much easier to implement and track than changes to values and mind-sets. The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

What Color Is Your Imagination? was inspired by a conversation with Nadine Owens Burton's then preschool aged son during a car ride home. That four-year-old's question and subsequent declaration about the color of his imagination developed into a lesson on problem-solving for her staff while as a Head Start Director. It has since provided information and inspiration for various other teams. For the past decade plus, Ms. Owens Burton has presented workshops and keynotes based on the theme through her company, Owens Burton Consulting. She is now putting those lessons into a book. The first half of the book begins with a metaphor of the various types of creative and problem solving environments, where these environments are represented by various colors. The ideal is Purple Imagination. The second half gives the reader ten ways to increase one's own creativity and problem solving skills, one's own Purple Imagination.

"If you look at Southwest Airlines, and I admire what they do, they've been the most successful airline in the industry." --Gerard Arpey, CEO, American Airlines "Through extensive research Jody Hoffer Gittell gets to the bottom of what has sustained Southwest Airlines' positive employee relations and high performance through good and bad times." --Thomas A. Kochan, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Global Airline Industry Program In an industry with losses in the billions, Southwest Airlines has an unbroken string of 31 consecutive years of profitability. The Southwest Airlines Way examines how the company uses high-performance relationships to create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among employees. It then goes further to show how any company can foster these powerful cooperative relationships and explains how to: Lead with credibility and caring Invest in frontline leaders Hire and train for relational competence Use conflicts to build relationships Make unions its partners, not its adversaries Build relationships with its suppliers