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strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete?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.

Economic Revitalization is unique in that it discusses leading revitalization strategies in the context of both city and suburban settings, offering case studies of program development and implementation. In Economic Revitalization: Cases and Strategies for City and Suburb Fitzgerald and Leigh answer the need for a text that incorporates social justice and sustainability into how we think about and practice economic development. It is one of the first to talk about how revitalization strategies are implemented in both cities and suburbs, particularly inner-ring suburbs that are experiencing decline previously associated only with inner-city neighborhoods. After setting the context with a brief history of economic development practice and its shortcomings, Fitzgerald and Leigh focus on six economic development strategies: sectoral strategies, Brownfield redevelopment, industrial retention, commercial revitalization, industrial and office property reuse, and workforce development. Each of these chapters begins with an overview of the strategy and then presents cases of how it is being implemented. The cases draw from Atlanta, Chicago and its suburbs, Emeryville, Kalamazoo, Louisville, New Haven, Portland, Sandy Springs, and Seattle (and suburban King County). They illustrate the tradeoffs often made in achieving one goal at the expense of another. Although they admit that some of the cases come up short in illustrating a more equitable and sustainable economic development practice, Fitzgerald and Leigh conclude with an optimistic view that the field is changing. The book is aimed at students and practitioners of economic development planning who seek to foster stronger economies and greater opportunity in inner cites and older suburbs. It is also meant to assist planners in thriving new towns and suburban communities seeking to avoid future economic decline as their communities mature. Economic Revitalization: Discusses practice in both suburban and inner-city settings Integrates the planning values of social justice and sustainability into the discussion of implementation strategies Includes cases that reveal the political nature of the planning process and the types of tradeoffs that often must be made Provides insights for planners seeking to adopt "best practice" programs from other localities

'Readers will find in these pages a very lucid, creative, and highly readable version of many of the ideas that have taken shape through the medium of the Human Development Reports during the last four years. Busy policy makers all over the world will find this an indispensable primer.' - Mahbub ul Haq, from the preface. This book introduces the basic concepts of human development and presents policy guidelines for implementing a human development strategy in developing countries. Human development is seen both as an end in itself and as a means to increase the capabilities of people. The role of the state, the market and of people's participation in such a strategy are described. Specific chapters discuss the structure of incentives, allocation of public sector resources, structural reforms, the relationship of human development to environmental issues and finance and administration.

There are a range of views of the strategic development process within organisations. Some see the process as being purely creative, with little or no scope for analysis at any stage (hunch-and-hope). Others see it as being over-formalised, static and focusing on producing a strategic plan rather than on actions. The approach adopted in this book argues that for effective strategic decision making, creativity needs to be supported by structured methods. The strategic development process consists of a series of elements which need to be working effectively for the process to ensure the successful development of the organisation. These elements include objective setting and performance measurement, strategic initiative formulation, strategic evaluation and a process for modelling uncertain/uncontrollable factors. The book then presents a range of hard and soft methods and models capable of supporting them. These include the balanced scorecard, visioning, the TOWS matrix, cognitive mapping, scenario development, systems dynamics modelling, transformation methods such as reengineering, strategic investment appraisal and real option theory. The book should be of interest to both academics and practitioners concerned with strategic development and those teaching and researching in the fields of strategic management, management science and operational research. The book is developed from a previous text Strategic Planning: Models and Analytical Techniques, (Wiley, 1992) following a similar approach and including some of the same methods and models but incorporating an entirely new set of articles including contemporary classics by Eden, Kaplan, Keeney, Porter, Schoemaker and others.

Align your L&D strategy to the overall business strategy to benefit employees and the organization as a whole

Providing new insight into an important community development challenge, this text looks at how to stimulate the formation of community-based organizations and effective citizen action in neighbourhoods.