This indispensable guide for the creative manager takes readers on a powerful, comprehensive, and illuminating tour through the fields of strategic management. The result is a brilliant, penetrating primer on business strategy that is, at the same time, immensely readable and fun.

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.

Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. It can be read as a whole or you can dip into the easy-to-read, bite-size sections as and when you need to deal with a particular issue. The structure has been specially designed to make sections quick and easy to use – you’ll find yourself referring back to them again and again.

William DugganÕs 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, showed how innovation really happens in business and other fields and how that matches what modern neuroscience tells us about how creative ideas form in the human mind. In his new book, Creative Strategy, Duggan offers a step-by-step guide to help individuals and organizations put that same method to work for their own innovations. DugganÕs book solves the most important problem of how innovation actually happens. Other methods of creativity, strategy, and innovation explain how to research and analyze a situation, but they donÕt guide toward the next step: developing a creative idea for what to do. Or they rely on the magic of ÒbrainstormingÓÑjust tossing out ideas. Instead, Duggan shows how creative strategy follows the natural three-step method of the human brain: breaking down a problem into parts and then searching for past examples to create a new combination to solve the problem. ThatÕs how innovation really happens. Duggan explains how to follow these three steps to innovate in business and any other field as an individual, a team, or a whole company. The crucial middle stepÑthe search for past examplesÑtakes readers beyond their own brain to a Òwhat-works scanÓ of what others have done within and outside of the company, industry, and country. It is a global search for good ideas to combine as a new innovation. Duggan illustrates creative strategy through real-world cases of innovation that use the same method: from Netflix to Edison, from Google to Henry Ford. He also shows how to integrate creative strategy into other methods you might currently use, such as PorterÕs Five Forces or Design Thinking. Creative Strategy takes the mystery out of innovation and puts it within your grasp.

In this book, an expert in business strategy shows how to create and evaluate a strategic plan and execute that plan successfully. When it comes to strategic planning, B. Keith Simerson knows from experience what works and what doesn't. Strategic Planning: A Practical Guide to Strategy Formulation and Execution weaves that knowledge into a roadmap for anyone charged with creating a strategic plan, evaluating a strategic planning process, or executing resulting strategies in an effective and efficient way. Not a one-size-fits-all solution, the book offers a menu of information and options based on a broad view of strategic planning and offers correspondingly broad applicability. The guide focuses on two major aspects of the planning process: the multitude of factors contributing to an effective strategic planning framework and the multitude of drivers and enablers of successful execution. Armed with concrete information, readers will learn to create and execute a business strategy, a personal strategic action plan, or strategies for any kind of for-profit or nonprofit organization. Specific methodologies, tools, and techniques will guide readers to successful strategy formation—and execution.

User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team craft innovative multi-device products that people want to use. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, UX/UI designer, product manager, or part of an intrapreneurial team, this book teaches simple-to-advanced strategies that you can use in your work right away. Along with business cases, historical context, and real-world examples throughout, you’ll also gain different perspectives on the subject through interviews with top strategists. Define and validate your target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques Conduct competitive research and analysis to explore a crowded marketplace or an opportunity to create unique value Focus your team on the primary utility and business model of your product by running structured experiments using prototypes Devise UX funnels that increase customer engagement by mapping desired user actions to meaningful metrics