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Adapting To Environmental Challenges: New Research In Strategy And International Business provides new perspectives to understand strategic adaptation in international business contexts based on corporate responsible behavior and cultural sensitivity as the ingredients for agile operations and a resilient multinational organization.

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.

A guide for mining the imagination to find powerful new ways to succeed. We need imagination now more than ever—to find new opportunities, rethink our businesses, and discover paths to growth. Yet too many companies have lost their ability to imagine. What is this mysterious capacity? How does imagination work? And how can organizations keep it alive and harness it in a systematic way? The Imagination Machine answers these questions and more. Drawing on the experience and insights of CEOs across several industries, as well as lessons from neuroscience, computer science, psychology, and philosophy, Martin Reeves of Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute and Jack Fuller, an expert in neuroscience, provide a fascinating look into the mechanics of imagination and lay out a process for creating ideas and bringing them to life: The Seduction: How to open yourself up to surprises The Idea: How to generate new ideas The Collision: How to rethink your idea based on real-world feedback The Epidemic: How to spread an evolving idea to others The New Ordinary: How to turn your novel idea into an accepted reality The Encore: How to repeat the process—again and again. Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of success. It's what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to transformation—especially during a crisis. The Imagination Machine is the guide you need to demystify and operationalize this powerful human capacity, to inject new life into your company, and to head into unknown territory with the right tools at your disposal.

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.

The playing field for business has changed significantly in recent decades. The pace of change is accelerating, driven by increased technological progress and shrinking business lifespans. Economic and political uncertainty has risen dramatically and is likely to remain at elevated levels. Industry boundaries are blurring, increasing the potential paths to competitive disruption. Strategy is not dead—in fact, as the gap between winners and losers within industries continues to grow, it is more important than ever. However, the playbook needs to be reinvented for today’s business environment. Classical sources of competitive advantage, such as scale and differentiation, have not gone away, but they have been complemented by new dimensions of competition. This book discusses the new role of strategy in a dynamic, unpredictable context. Part 1 of this book revisits classical strategy frameworks and what changes should be made to apply them to the modern era. Part 2 discusses new strategic capabilities companies need today, such as adapting to uncertain environments and shaping new or disrupted ones. Part 3 examines the expanding boundaries of strategy, including new competitive imperatives as well as the wider range of timescales on which businesses must now operate. Drawing on the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years, Dynamic Strategy will help business professionals as well as academics and students with an interest in strategy understand the new competitive challenges that businesses face and develop a playbook to address them. Events around the book Link to a De Gruyter Online Event in which Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, talks about successful business strategies in turbulent times: https://youtu.be/84YE4DBdQpo

As a relatively young subject matter, corporate social responsibility has unsurprisingly developed and evolved in numerous ways since the first edition of this textbook was published. Retaining the features which made the first edition a top selling text in the field, the new edition continues to be the only textbook available which provides a ready-made, enhanced course pack for CSR classes. Authoritative editor introductions provide accessible entry points to the subjects covered - an approach which is particularly suited to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate teaching that emphasises a research-led approach. New case studies are integrated throughout the text to enable students to think and analyze the subject from every angle. The entire textbook reflects the global nature of CSR as a discipline and further pedagogical features include chapter learning outcomes; study questions; ‘challenges for practice’ boxes and additional ‘further reading’ features at the end of each chapter. This highly rated textbook now also benefits from a regularly updated companion website which features a brand new 'CSR Case Club' presenting students and lecturers with further case suggestions with which to enhance learning; lecture slides; updates from the popular Crane and Matten blog, links to further reading and career sites, YouTube clips and suggested answers to study questions. An Ivey CaseMate has also been created for this book at https://www.iveycases.com/CaseMateBookDetail.aspx?id=335.