You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

Process Management is a compendium for modern design of process-oriented companies. A hands-on approach introducing, realizing and continually administering process management is presented with a thoroughly critical reflection of the necessary activities regarding the state of the art of organization theory and information management. This is done by following individual stages of a process model which has already successfully proved in practice. The progress of the project is described by a continuous case study which is the process management project of a modern service company. The included recommendations are summarized in a series of checklists for each stage of the project.

To keep your competitive edge in the marketplace, you must find practical and inexpensive ways to retain the clients you have, develop new clients, and increase your bottom line. Marketing Your Consulting Services is a complete how-to guide that will help you develop and implement a dynamic marketing plan that will make your consulting business more visible to clients and more competitive in the marketplace. Written by Elaine Biech—one of the foremost experts in the field of consulting—this practical and easy-to-use resource includes useful guidance, practical ideas, special consulting considerations, and creative tips. Marketing Your Consulting Services is filled with the information you need to help you: Develop a successful marketing plan Understand the marketing ins and outs of a small consulting firm Find new clients Get your clients to refer you to other clients Implement inexpensive and effective marketing tools Develop creative marketing ideas Retain the clients you have today Biech urges you to develop a "market all the time" attitude, and to help you get started, she recommends hundreds of ideas that can be easily implemented. In addition, the book's "Fast Fourteen To Do Today" are suggestions you can put immediately into practice to help jump-start your business. Written to be a hands-on resource, Marketing Your Consulting Services also includes Quick tips throughout each chapter for easy reference. Marketing Your Consulting Services offers you the practical tools and helpful suggestions necessary to market and sell your consulting services. It includes everything a consultant needs to know about marketing to be—and stay—successful.

The 13th volume in the RMC series, The Changing Paradigm of Consulting, is based on the best papers presented at the Academy of Management’s Management Consulting Division’s fourth international conference (2009) on the underlying dynamics within the fast-paced world of business and management consulting. Held in Vienna, Austria, the conference brought together academicians, consultants and organizational practitioners to examine the changes taking place within the consulting field. The book’s 19 chapters are divided into five sections that explore the emergence and implications of this new paradigm, delineating and illustrating the paradigm shift taking placing within consulting, exploring the ramifications for global consulting, examining the challenges inherent in attempts to capture collaboration and cooperation in inter-organizational networks, analyzing the push toward the professionalization – and professionalism – of consultancy, and assessing new approaches to management consulting, focusing on innovative instruments, tools and intervention frameworks. The book captures the myriad complexities and uncertainties faced by consultants and their clients and the concomitant search for appropriate mindsets, attitudes and orientations as well as methods, tools and techniques. As each of the chapters indicates, while there are significant challenges facing the consulting industry, there are also a number of promising frameworks and approaches that can help us successfully meet these challenges.