Any organization must ask three interrelated questions in order to develop its strategy: where are we, where do we want to be, and how will we get there? While the questions do not change over time, the realities and environments that companies face do. Given today's realities, how should companies answer these questions as they face the challenges of the 21st century? In this book, leading business school educators use their academic, yet managerially-relevant, research to explore these questions. They divide the book into three sections - Understand Your Situation, Develop Your Options, and Lead the Change - and take the reader through some of the latest thinking that helps answer these questions. All the authors have extensive international experience of working with senior managers and are well known academic researchers in their field. They present their ideas in a straightforward, lively, and purposeful way. Their goal is to inform, challenge, and provide practical advice and tools. The book serves as a guide to a range of contemporary business challenges, such as managing uncertainty, creating new markets through innovation, energizing people, leading clever people in organizations with limited hierarchy, and introducing radical change. The central focus is on the core concerns and responsibilities of senior management - strategy and leadership. Clear, crisp, and to the point, this book provides an invaluable and coherent summary of some of the best current business school thinking on contemporary challenges facing organizations. It will be an ideal guide for both MBAs and practicing managers.

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn't driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing--a combination of material well-being and the "good life" in a broader sense--was created by this mass innovation. Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few? A book of immense practical and intellectual importance, Mass Flourishing is essential reading for anyone who cares about the sources of prosperity and the future of the West.

Meeting the Innovation Challenge offers a new way to look at creative leadership that integrates both leadership and management. This book also provides the student key insights into a new and more systematic way to manage transformation. As a result, the student will be able to discover a full range of potential outcomes from their change efforts - from radical new to the world transformation to incremental improvements. Since people are at the heart of any transformation issue, Meeting the Innovation Challenge includes helpful information on the various roles required to initiate and sustain change efforts. Many change initiatives use teams, so specific tools are outlined to create and manage teamwork for transformation. Those who lead and manage organizations have too many change methods from which to choose. This book offers practical advice on how to select and manage a variety of change methods, as well as a helpful selected list of many of the methods available from which to choose. An example is drawn and explained from the area of new product or service development. An often-overlooked element of climate and context is also addressed. Successful innovation, change and transformation require an environment in which people are ready, willing and able to initiate and sustain change. Meeting the Innovation Challenge addresses this area by clarifying the differences between culture and climate, and then offering practical ways to understand and create the climate for transformation.

Organizations must do more than merely respond to changes and therefore be innovative rather then reactionary. This book emphasizes the need for innovation and points out a path to the successful management of change.