In Business, strategy is king. Leadership and hard work are all very well and luck is mighty useful, but it is strategy that makes or breaks a business, organisation or team. Of course, it is easier to talk a good strategic game than it is to execute one. This book will help you turn your words into effective and successful actions.

A brilliant business needs a brilliant business plan and this is the book to help you write one. It will take you step by step through the process to help you build a business plan quickly and easily and then use it to build your business. This book introduces the basic concepts of business planning, shows you a swift and smart way to prepare a business plan and reveals how to use a business plan to run your business more effectively. This book is ideal if you need a plan to show your bank manager, small investors and employees, or to use as a chart for steering your business. It contains: - Step-by-step instructions on how to build your brilliant business plan from scratch. - A range of model plans for very different businesses to show you brilliant business planning in action. - Advice on what delights banks and investors, as well as what not to do.

Marketing has never been so important because business has never been so competitive.Brilliant Marketingshows you how you can devise and execute winning marketing strategies. With practical advice from start to finish, this updated new edition gives you the lowdown on what works and shows you how to carry out the most alluring marketing campaigns around, so you can attract, engage and retain customers. Brilliant outcomes: · Understand the ideas, actions, campaigns that make a real difference. · Get a complete marketing skill-set to seduce and inspire. · Be a master of strategy – from thinking to planning to execution.

YOU HAVE A BRILLIANT NEW STRATEGY. NOW IT'S TIME TO EXECUTE. Businesses spend a combined total of $47 billion annually on strategy consulting. Approximately 90 percent of strategic change initiatives fail to deliver the intended results. Something isn't adding up. As companies all over the world concentrate on revisiting, revising, and remaking their strategies, they forget the next step: making sure the strategy happens. So it turns out that billions of dollars are spent on brilliant ideas--but not brilliant results. In this groundbreaking book, business strategy experts Liz Mellon and Simon Carter provide a solution: THE STRATEGY OF EXECUTION. The authors break down the process of ensuring that your new strategy translates into measurable profits and growth into five fundamental and profoundly important steps: MOBILIZE THE VILLAGE: Get your senior executives to embrace the new strategy and actively engage with it. GATHER THE ELDERS: Build a small team of the very highest figures in the corporation to lead strategic change. POWER UP FEELING: Don't overthink it; trust your instincts as much as your intellect. ENERGIZE PEOPLE: Create a culture of communication, ownership, and followthrough of strategic objectives. BUILD ENDURANCE: Drive individual and organizational resilience to play the long game and hardwire change throughout systems and organizational structures to maintain momentum. In the final chapter, the authors illustrate their process in action through a detailed case study of BPB PLC--a century-old building material company that applied these five steps to make extraordinary strategic change happen. You can lead positive change in your company. A strategy is just words on paper until it's executed with care and smarts. Use The Strategy of Execution as a blueprint for long-term business success. There are a lot of smart people coming up with innovative business strategies today. Very few of them, however, are executing them. The gap between strategy and execution has never been wider. The Strategy of Execution provides a practical approach to the work that must be done after a business strategy is agreed upon. "This is a highly readable guide to one of the most under-researched areas of strategy; execution. Strategists have always had more solutions than there are problems, but the issue of what to do when they leave the building has not been satisfactorily addressed. Liz Mellon and Simon Carter have put together a clear framework for execution illustrated with countless examples. Industry leaders are called ‘executives’ for a reason. This crisp and accessible book should be their mandatory reading." -- PAUL WILLMAN, Professor of Management, London School of Economics "This is a clearly written and very readable book, with key insights into the challenges of implementing a strategy and good examples from individuals and organizations that have brought about successful change." -- ANDREW HOBDAY, Chief Sustainability Officer, Mars Incorporated "One aspect of leadership that has always puzzled me is how a leader directs change for the good of the organization and the people. Too often, when a leader talks about change, employees expect the worst. This insightful book lays out a step-by-step guide on how to execute a strategy with warmth and conviction, bringing people with you rather than dragging them, fearful, behind you." -- KEVIN KELLY, former CEO, Heidrick & Struggles

Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. It can be read as a whole or you can dip into the easy-to-read, bite-size sections as and when you need to deal with a particular issue. The structure has been specially designed to make sections quick and easy to use – you’ll find yourself referring back to them again and again.

Love is the surprising emotion that company builders cannot afford to ignore. Genuine, heartfelt devotion and loyalty from customers — yes, love — is what propels a select few companies ahead. Think about the products and companies that you really care about and how they make you feel. You do not merely likethose products, you adore them. Consider your own emotions and a key insight is revealed: Love is central to business. Nobody talks about it, but it is obvious in hindsight. Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It shares what Silicon Valley-based author and Aha! CEO Brian de Haaff knows from a career of founding successful technology companies and creating award-winning products. He reveals the secret to the phenomenal growth of Aha! and the engine that powers lasting customer devotion — a set of principles that he pioneered and named The Responsive Method. Lovability provides valuable lessons and actionable steps for product and company builders everywhere, including: • Why you should rethink everything you know about building a business • What a product really is • The magic of finding what your customers truly desire • How to turn business strategy and product roadmaps into customer love • Why you should chase company value, not valuation • Surveys to measure your company’s lovability Brian de Haaff has spent the last 20 years focused on business strategy, product management, and bringing disruptive technologies to market. And in preparation for writing this book, he interviewed well-known startup founders, product managers, executives, and CEOs at hundreds of name brand and agile organizations. Their experiences, along with headline-grabbing case studies (both inspiring successes and cautionary tales), will help readers discover how to build something that matters. Much has been written about how entrepreneurs build innovative products and successful businesses, but the author's message is original and refreshing. He convincingly explains that there is a better path forward — a people-first way grounded in love. In a business world that has increasingly emphasized hype over substance and get-big-at-any-cost thinking over profitable and sustainable growth, it's time for a new recipe for company success. ​Insightful, thought-provoking, and sometimes controversial, Lovability is the book that you turn to when you know there has to be a better way.