“This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.” Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering. Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside. The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities. Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities--and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you. Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation Systematically engineering your opportunities Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”

Savvy managers no longer look at contracting processes and documents reactively but use them proactively to reach their business goals and minimize their risks. To succeed, these managers need a framework and A Short Guide to Contract Risk provides this. The foundation of identifying and managing contract risk is what the authors call Contract Literacy: a set of skills relevant for all who deal with contracts in their everyday business environment, ranging from general managers and CEOs to sales, procurement and project professionals and risk managers. Contracts play a major role in business success. Contracts govern companies' deals and relationships with their suppliers and customers. They impact future rights, cash flows, costs, earnings, and risks. A company's contract portfolio may be subject to greater losses than anyone realizes. Still the greatest risk in business is not taking any risks. Equipped with the concepts described in this book, business and risk managers can start to see contracts differently and to use them to find and achieve the right balance for business success and problem prevention. What makes this short guide from the authors of the acclaimed Proactive Law for Managers especially valuable, if not unique, is its down-to-earth managerial/legal approach. Using lean contracting, visualization and the tools introduced in this book, managers and lawyers can achieve legally sound contracts that function as managerial tools for well thought-out, realistic risk allocation in business deals and relationships.

Organic business growth is governed by its own natural laws—underlying truths that set the stage for growth and innovation, much in the way that Einstein's law of relativity accounts for the movement of objects in the space-time continuum. The most fundamental law is that uncertainty is the only certainty. Dominating forces are ambiguity and change; the processes at work involve exploration, invention, and experimentation. Unfortunately, these truths run counter to the principles of stability, predictability, and linearity that have long informed the design of our firms. The Physics of Business Growth helps readers understand how to create growth in today's business environment, providing them a roadmap and a set of practical tools to navigate its challenges. The book lays out a three step formula that will prove invaluable to professionals who have the opportunity to influence growth now, as well as to tomorrow's growth leaders, guiding them in (1) creating the right employee and organizational mindsets to enable growth (2) building an internal corporate growth system, and (3) putting in place processes that result in identifying opportunities, launching growth experiments, and managing a growth portfolio.

Wall Street believes that all public companies should grow smoothly and continuously, as evidenced by ever-increasing quarterly earnings, and that all companies either "grow or die." Introducing a research-based growth model called "Smart Growth," Edward D. Hess challenges this ethos and its dangerous mentality, which often deters real growth and pressures businesses to create, manufacture, and purchase noncore earnings just to appease Wall Street. Smart Growth accounts for the complexity of growth from the perspective of organization, process, change, leadership, cognition, risk management, employee engagement, and human dynamics. Authentic growth is much more than a strategy or a desired result. It is a process characterized by complex change, entrepreneurial action, experimental learning, and the management of risk. Hess draws on extensive public and private company research, incorporating case studies of Best Buy, Sysco, UPS, Costco, Starbucks, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Room & Board, Home Depot, Tiffany & Company, P&G, and Jet Blue. With conceptual innovations such as an Authentic Earnings and Growth System framework, a seven-step growth funnel pipeline, a Growth Decision Template, and a Growth Risks Audit, Hess provides a blueprint for an enduring business that strives to be better, rather than simply bigger.

Savvy managers no longer look at contracts and the law reactively but use them proactively to reduce their costs, minimize their risks, secure key talent, collaborate to innovate, protect intellectual property, and create value for their customers that is superior to that offered by competitors. To achieve competitive advantage in this way managers need a plan. Proactive Law for Managers provides this plan; The Manager's Legal PlanTM. George Siedel and Helena Haapio first discuss the traditional, reactive approach used by many managers when confronted with the law, then contrast it with a proactive approach that enables the law and managers' legal capabilities to be used to prevent problems, promote successful business, and achieve competitive advantage. Proactive Law for Managers shows how to use contracts and the law to create new value and innovate in often neglected areas - and implement ideas in a profitable manner.

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.