This book is a primer on organizational ambidexterity: being able to both exploit and explore. It reviews culture, leadership, learning, and structure as elements of ambidexterity; addresses the environment of complexity; and offers strategies for cultivating an ambidextrous mind and an ambidextrous organization.

In the past few years, a number of well-known firms have failed; think of Blockbuster, Kodak, or RadioShack. When we read about their demise, it often seems inevitable—a natural part of "creative destruction." But closer examination reveals a disturbing truth: Companies large and small are shuttering more quickly than ever. What does it take to buck this trend? The simple answer is: ambidexterity. Firms must remain competitive in their core markets, while also winning in new domains. Innovation guru Clayton M. Christensen has been pessimistic about whether established companies can prevail in the face of disruption, but Charles A. O'Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman know they can! The authors explain how shrewd organizations have used an ambidextrous approach to solve their own innovator's dilemma. They contrast these luminaries with companies which—often trapped by their own successes—have been unable to adapt and grow. Drawing on a vast research program and over a decade of helping companies to innovate, the authors present a set of practices to guide firms as they adopt ambidexterity. Top-down and bottom-up leaders are key to this process—a fact too often overlooked in the heated debate about innovation. But not in this case. Readers will come away with a new understanding of how to improve their existing businesses through efficiency, control, and incremental change, while also seizing new markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation rule the day.

Organizing Marketing and Sales offers case studies to demonstrate in detail the kinds of challenges faced by multinational, multiproduct firms. It also draws upon theoretical perspectives in order to examine contemporary challenges in marketing and sales organization.

How can businesses balance the demands of both exploiting and exploring? Companies and their leaders have to use both hands: on the one hand making next quarter's targets through existing business, whilst simultaneously exploring new opportunities. This is the first book to explain how to use this approach to encourage innovation.

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.

Describes the organizational aspects of contemporary society, explaining how organization occurs not only inside formal organizations, but also outside and among them.

#3 New York Times Advice/How-To Bestseller #7 Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller "This book is game changing in a way I have never seen in a business book. I learned about myself and gained new insights into the work I've been doing for thirty years. It is a spectacular read." – John Riccitiello, CEO, Electronic Arts This is not a management book. This is a book for managers. Ever have the feeling that no matter how rewarding your job is that there's an entirely different level of success and fulfillment available to you? Lingering in the mist, just out of reach… There is, and Stan Slap is going to help you get it. You hold in your hands the book that entirely redraws the potential of being a manager. It will show you how to gain the one competency most critical to achieving business impact, but it won't stop there. This book will put a whole new level of meaning into your job description. You will never really work for your company until your company really works for you. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is about igniting the massive power of any manager's emotional commitment to his or her company-worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. Sometimes companies get this from their managers in the early garage days or in times of tremendous gain, but it's almost unheard of to get it on a sustained, self-reinforced basis. Of course your company is only going to get it if you're willing to give it. Slap proves that emotional commitment comes from the ability to live your deepest personal values at work and then provides a remarkable process that allows you to use your own values to achieve tremendous success. This is not soft stuff; it is the stuff of hard-core results. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is the highest-rated management development solution at a number of the world's highest-rated companies—companies that don't include "patience" on their list of corporate values. It has been exhaustively researched and bench tested with tens of thousands of real managers in more than seventy countries. You'll hear directly from managers about how this legendary method has transformed their careers and their lives. As Big as It Gets Stan Slap is doing nothing less than making the business case for a manager's humanity-for every manager and the companies that depend on them. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B gives managers the urgency to change their world and the energy to do it. It will stir the soul, race the heart, and throb the foot used for acceleration. Buckle Up. We're Going Off-Road. Slap is smart, provocative, wickedly funny and heartfelt. He fearlessly takes on some of the most cherished myths of management for the illogic they are and celebrates the experience of being a manager in all of its potential and potential weirdness. And he talks to managers like they really talk to themselves.