Asserts that success can slowly dull a company's competitive edge, explains how to maintain creative tension, and looks at successful companies

We live in an exciting time. Technology, globalization and demographic shifts provide new potential for personal and business success. Yet, research tells that only 30% of our attempts to implement change succeed amid the turbulence we encounter both within and outside today’s organizations. We need new ways of thinking and doing if we are to turn potential into performance. Managing at the Leading Edge provides a new evidence-based roadmap for leadership success in a dynamic context. Managing at the Leading Edge highlights lessons from the navigation and piloting practices used in high performing sailing. In the contemporary “white water” business environment, as at sea, achieving goals requires choosing a destination amidst uncertainty, adjusting to continually shifting conditions, converting the push and pull of environmental forces into momentum and using different skills at different times to negotiate hazards and achieve success. Easy-to-grasp and recall, this book proposes a framework of leadership with a dual focus on navigating and piloting. This framework is supported by new evidence-based insights about personal and organizational high performance. Systematic comparisons of high performing leaders and organizations with leaders and organizations that have not yet achieved this distinction illustrate how the principles of navigation and piloting apply. This research featured surveys of over 1,000 senior and mid-level leaders, the results of over a 100 interviews and the author’s extensive consultation experience with a host of leaders and organizations. Through case studies, discussion of relevant research, practical tools and templates, Managing at the Leading Edge will help you learn: • The critical tasks of leader navigating and piloting that lead to successful business change • Leadership skills through which the critical tasks of navigating and piloting are successfully executed including accountability, influence, problem solving agility and engagement • Strategies and tactics for managing points along a strategic initiative’s leading edge through with resistance to change is converted into momentum and progress • The critical hand-offs between the navigating and piloting functions and these functions drive change at the leading edge as synchronized system of high performance leadership • Leadership practices that create organizational high performance Armed with leadership capabilities of high performance navigating and piloting you will be able to recognize and act on opportunities for enhanced leadership impact and achieve results that matter for you, your peers and your organization.

Case study research conducted in 1981 in nine US companies and seven Japanese companies.

Are you missing opportunities for growth that are right in front of you? In today’s volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing you to stay focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Profiting from the core is crucial, but the danger is that overfocus on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but risky. Fixating too much on either strategy can cause you to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business. In this insightful yet practical book, strategy experts Alan Lewis and Dan McKone articulate a mindset that helps leaders recognize and capitalize on these opportunities. The Edge Strategy framework challenges how the boundaries of your existing products and services map to your customers’ views of the world and then provides three different lenses through which you can see and leverage value: • Product edge. How to capture incremental profits and other benefits by slightly altering the elements and composition of a core offering • Journey edge. How to create and capture extra value by adjusting your role in supporting the customer’s journey to and through your offering • Enterprise edge. How to unlock additional value from resources and capabilities that support your core offering by applying them in a different context, for a different offering or different set of customers With engaging examples across many industries, Lewis and McKone coach you on how to identify and assess each of the different “edges” and then provide concrete insights and advice on applying edge strategy and tactics to use in specific business contexts. The book concludes with a ten-step process to help executives and managers find and leverage the edges in their own companies. Edge Strategy is the concise, hands-on guide for growing your business by getting more yield from assets already in place, relationships already established, and investments already made.

In their startling new book, authors Brown and Eisenhardt contend that to prosper in today's fiercely competitive business environments, a new paradigm--competing on the edge--must be implemented as a new survival strategy. This book focuses on specific management dilemmas and illustrates solutions that work when the name of the game is change.

EDGE: The Agile Operating Model That Will Help You Successfully Execute Your Digital Transformation “[The authors’] passion for technology allows them to recognize that for most enterprises in the 21st century, technology is THE business. This is what really separates the EDGE approach. It is a comprehensive operating model with technology at its core.” —From the Foreword by Heidi Musser, Executive Vice President and Principal Consultant, Leading Agile; retired, Vice President and CIO, USAA Maximum innovation happens at the edge of chaos: the messy, risky, and uncertain threshold between randomness and structure. Operating there is uncomfortable but it’s where organizations “invent the future.” EDGE is a set of fast, iterative, adaptive, lightweight, and value-driven tools to achieve digital transformation, and EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation is your guide to using this operating model for innovation. Jim Highsmith is one of the world’s leading agile pioneers and a coauthor of the Agile Manifesto. He, Linda Luu, and David Robinson know from their vast in-the-trenches experience that sustainable digital transformation requires far more than adopting isolated agile practices or conventional portfolio management. This hard, indispensable work involves changing culture and mindset, and going beyond transforming the IT department. EDGE embraces an adaptive mindset in the face of market uncertainty, a visible, value-centered portfolio approach that encourages continual value linkages from vision to detailed initiatives, incremental funding that shifts as strategies evolve, collaborative decision-making, and better risk mitigation. This guide shows leaders how to use the breakthrough EDGE approach to go beyond incremental improvement in a world of exponential opportunities. Build an organization that adapts fast enough to thrive Clear away unnecessary governance processes, obsolete “command and control” leadership approaches, and slow budgeting/planning cycles Improve collaboration when major, fast-paced responses are necessary Continually optimize investment allocation and monitoring based on your vision and goals Register your product for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The mere suggestion of employees working from home is enough to make many managers sweat. Faced with the prospect of managing an employee they can’t even see, many discover that their managerial style just doesn’t work anymore. As an increasing number of jobs can be executed from home, managers must learn how to adapt their leadership style to cater to remote employees. Based on years of research, The Virtual Manager provides any manager with the tools he or she needs to successfully work with virtual employees. Trust us: it’s not like managing office-bound employees! This book is a tell-all user manual for a new generation of managers. To stay competitive in a global marketplace, it is essential to incorporate virtual employees into talent management strategy. The Virtual Manager arms managers with the knowledge they need to be become effective virtual leaders, including actionable advice on how to: Leverage the top engagement drivers for virtual employees Develop or alter policies and procedures to fit virtual employees’ needs Impact business outcomes through a flexible work strategy