Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.
“This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.” Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering. Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside. The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities. Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities--and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you. Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation Systematically engineering your opportunities Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”
A Blueprint for Building Entrepreneurial Organizations Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can't, and don't, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today's strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete. Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan's bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as "Discovery-Driven Planning," the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset will show you how to: * Eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished and what would be worthwhile * Create a richly stocked opportunity register in which you mobilize great ideas for redesigning existing products, finding new sources of differentiation, resegmenting existing markets, reconfiguring market spaces, and seizing the huge upside potential of breakthroughs * Build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future * Execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk * Develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.
Robust methods to identify new growth opportunities YOUR SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND growth; your company needs growth; and your career can suffer or soar because of how you drive growth—or don’t. While executives often talk about their great growth plans, very few of these plans actually deliver real gains in growth and profitability. How do some companies manage to beat the odds and bust through the obstacles that make explosive growth so elusive? In this hands-on guide, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan identify powerful strategic moves they call “MarketBusters”—approaches that dramatically reconfigure profit streams in an industry, upend conventional competition, and ultimately deliver blockbuster growth. Based on insights from an extensive three-year study, McGrath and MacMillan describe forty proven marketbusting moves and outline five overall strategies companies have used to drive new growth: • Change the customer’s total experience: Make it simpler, faster, or more beneficial for customers to buy from you • Reconfigure your products and services: Transform your offerings to make them clearly superior to competitors’ • Redefine your business and associated key metrics: Change how you do business or how your customers do business in ways that dramatically boost performance • Anticipate or exploit industry shifts: Capitalize on changes before competitors do • Create a new market space: Trigger the emergence of a new market Every marketbusting move is illustrated in practice through vivid company examples—including cautionary tales that alert you to potential pitfalls you may encounter. Action-oriented tools and checklists provide concrete guidance in finding opportunities across your own business platform, executing your chosen move successfully, and exploiting new opportunities to maximize their bottomline impact. The book also provides guidelines for avoiding common implementation challenges and for developing the organizational alignment needed to smooth execution. New opportunities for explosive growth are waiting to be unleashed. MarketBusters is the field guide you need to develop a reliable, robust approach to fueling continuous, profitable growth.
A Blueprint for Building Entrepreneurial Organizations Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can't, and don't, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today's strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete. Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan's bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as "Discovery-Driven Planning," the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset will show you how to: * Eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished and what would be worthwhile * Create a richly stocked opportunity register in which you mobilize great ideas for redesigning existing products, finding new sources of differentiation, resegmenting existing markets, reconfiguring market spaces, and seizing the huge upside potential of breakthroughs * Build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future * Execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk * Develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.
Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.
“This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.” Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering. Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside. The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities. Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities--and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you. Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation Systematically engineering your opportunities Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”
Based on extensive research and the authors' combined thirty years of experience, Discovery-Driven Growth provides a breakthrough system for managing strategic growth. You will learn how to identify and prioritize your company's full portfolio of opportunities - from new product lines to entirely new businesses. The authors then show how to best execute specific initiatives, test major project assumptions, and develop a culture that values disciplined experimentation and learning over meeting mindless and unrealistic goals. Tools for dealing with each challenge are backed by examples from companies, from small firms to global giants, that have successfully put these methods into practice.
With the rise of the knowledge economy, the knowledge content of goods and services is going up just as their material content is declining. Economic value is increasingly seen to reside in the former - that is, in intangible assets - rather than in the latter. Yet we keep wanting to turn knowledge back into something tangible, something with definite boundaries which can be measured, manipulated, appropriated, and traded. In short, we want to reify knowledge. Scholars have been debating the nature of knowledge since the time of Plato. Many new insights have been gained from these debates, but little theoretical consensus has been achieved. Through six thematically linked chapters, the book articulates the theoretical approach to the production and distribution of knowledge that underpins Max Boisot's conceptual framework, the Information Space or I-Space. In this way the book looks to provide theoretical and practical underpinnings to Boisot's book Knowledge Assets (OUP, 1998). Following an introductory chapter, how knowledge relates to data and information is first examined in chapter 1, and how different economic actors - entrepreneurs, managers, etc - use knowledge as a basis for action is explored in chapter 2. Chapter 3 looks at how the heterogeneity of economic actors arises naturally from their respective data processing strategies in spite of any similarities in the data that they might share. Chapter 4 argues, contra much transaction-based economics, that an organizational order must have preceded a market order, something that should be reflected in any knowledge-based theory of the firm. Chapter 5 discusses the cultural and institutional significance of different kinds of knowledge flows. Finally, chapter 6 presents an agent-based simulation model, SimISpace, that illustrates how the I-Space might be applied to concrete problems such those of intellectual property rights. A concluding chapter proposes a research agenda based on the theorizing developed in the book. The approach the book sets out is used by a whole range of organizations to issues of knowledge management, policy, economics, and organizational and cultural change.
Robust methods to identify new growth opportunities YOUR SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND growth; your company needs growth; and your career can suffer or soar because of how you drive growth—or don’t. While executives often talk about their great growth plans, very few of these plans actually deliver real gains in growth and profitability. How do some companies manage to beat the odds and bust through the obstacles that make explosive growth so elusive? In this hands-on guide, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan identify powerful strategic moves they call “MarketBusters”—approaches that dramatically reconfigure profit streams in an industry, upend conventional competition, and ultimately deliver blockbuster growth. Based on insights from an extensive three-year study, McGrath and MacMillan describe forty proven marketbusting moves and outline five overall strategies companies have used to drive new growth: • Change the customer’s total experience: Make it simpler, faster, or more beneficial for customers to buy from you • Reconfigure your products and services: Transform your offerings to make them clearly superior to competitors’ • Redefine your business and associated key metrics: Change how you do business or how your customers do business in ways that dramatically boost performance • Anticipate or exploit industry shifts: Capitalize on changes before competitors do • Create a new market space: Trigger the emergence of a new market Every marketbusting move is illustrated in practice through vivid company examples—including cautionary tales that alert you to potential pitfalls you may encounter. Action-oriented tools and checklists provide concrete guidance in finding opportunities across your own business platform, executing your chosen move successfully, and exploiting new opportunities to maximize their bottomline impact. The book also provides guidelines for avoiding common implementation challenges and for developing the organizational alignment needed to smooth execution. New opportunities for explosive growth are waiting to be unleashed. MarketBusters is the field guide you need to develop a reliable, robust approach to fueling continuous, profitable growth.
Britain in the Twentieth Century is a new approach to teaching and learning twentieth century British history at A level. It meets the needs of teachers and students studying for today's revised AS and A2 exams. In a unique style, Britain in the Twentieth Century focuses on the key topics within the period. Each topic is then comprehensively explored to provide background, essay writing advice and examples, source work and historical skills. From 1900 to the new millennium, the key topics featured include: * Britain in a new century, 1900-1914 * the First World War and its impact * inter-war domestic problems * British foreign policy, 1919-1939 * Britain and the Second World War * social and economic change, 1945-1979.
An African fable (written in English) about a little girl elephant that starts off agonizing about other animals' teasing of her appearance. In an encounter with a Magic Baobab Tree she is told she can earn respect of others by giving helpful advice to them. After finding out that advice is not at all easy to give, she learns how to do this. Over time she advises other baby animals: A girl giraffe worried about her lankiness, a girl hippo worried about how fat she is, a boy baboon worried about his beady close-knit eyes, and a boy hyena worried about his ungainly looks. She finds ways of showing the animals that the feature they are unhappy about actually carries advantage. In the end of all the animals assemble and appoint her as the wisest of animals. The animals that she advises or interacts with are named in various African languages: elephant (Zulu), owl (Xhosa) giraffe (Wolof), hippo (Swahili), baboon (Shona), hyena (Hausa). Prounications of the African names and where the languages are spoken are provided in a short glossary. 18 pages, each page a mini-story (with its own illustration) is suitable for a short five-minute reading session. Suitable for kids age three to eight.
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