SWOTed by strategy models? Crunched by analysis? Strategy doesn’t have to be this way. Strategy is really all about being different. Thinking about it shouldn't make you reach for the snooze button. Strategy Bites Back brings you a provocative, imaginative and surprising mix of perspectives to help stimulate more creative strategic thinking and more enjoyable strategy making. From voices as diverse as and Lucy Kellaway, Mao Tse Tung and Jack Welch, even Michael Porter and Gary Hamel, you can enjoy exploring the sharper side of strategy. Strategy as a Little Black Dress Forecasting: Whoops! Management and Magic Strategy and the Art of Seduction The Soft Underbelly of Hard Data Strategy as destiny Jack Welch on Planning The Seven Deadly Sins of Planning Strategy One Step at a Time and many, many more. Why not have a good time reading a strategy book for a change?

Swotted by strategy models? Crunched by analysis? Strategy doesn't have to be this way. 'Strategy Bites Back' brings you a provocative, imaginative and surprising mix of perspectives to help stimulate more creative strategic thinking and more enjoyable strategy making.

Professional-level information empowering you with over 75 key strategic tools to ensure both short term and long-term success for your business and providing the full gamut of tools and techniques needed for you to create your own strategic plan. Following the footsteps of the hugely successful Key Management Models and Key Performance Indicators, this book delivers information in the practical and accessible framework synonymous with the Key series. Key Strategy Tools covers strategy tools and techniques within seven distinct areas: - Setting goals and objectives - Forecasting market demand - Gauging industry competition - Rating competitive position - Identifying strategic gaps - Bridging strategic gaps - Addressing risk and opportunity

The FT Guide to Business Coaching shows you everything you need to know about becoming a business coach, from how to find out if you’ve got what it takes, through the basic tools and models that really work. This book gives you a step-by-step guide to the tools, the market knowledge and the crucial new techniques from psychology you need to become an exceptional business coach. Clear, compelling and comprehensive, covering classic and fresh material from both business and psychology, this is the first book to cover both the critical elements of world-class business coaching. This book takes you through a tried and trusted process developed specifically for senior business leaders. It will help you: Know when to coach and when to lead. Build powerful listening skills. Get to grips with the most useful and up-to-the minute coaching tools and psychological techniques. Calculate if – and crucially, how - you can make a living as a business coach. Decide if, how and when to go for accreditation as a coach.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

During the 2015 general election, the contest in Gavin Barwell's constituency of Croydon Central was by any measure - the amount of money spent, the frequency of visits by ministers, the volume of literature delivered or the number of political activists pounding the streets - one of the most intensive constituency campaigns this country has ever seen. At the end of it, after an experience both physically and psychologically gruelling, Gavin had clung on by the skin of his teeth, and had a story well worth telling. Journalists produce a great deal of commentary on the leaders of our political parties, their campaign strategies and key messages. Elections, however, are won and lost on the pavements of only about 100 so-called marginal constituencies - places like Croydon Central. This book gives an unparalleled insight into what it's like to be an MP defending an ultra-marginal seat. It answers questions such as: Why do activists knock on your door - do they really think a quick conversation is going to change your mind? What is it like to find yourself splashed across the front page of a national newspaper? How do you cope with the very real possibility that you might be out of a job tomorrow? How to Win a Marginal Seat is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how campaigning is conducted at the coalface of British politics.