Most Recent Articles
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Blog / ChangeThis
Strategic Thinking: A Framework for Individual Executives to Elevate Business
By Rich Horwath
"The inability to effectively navigate strategy challenges can have devastating long-term effects on an organization. ... While it's convenient to blame an organization's failings on external factors such as the economy, decisions about strategy account for failure a whopping 70 percent of the time. Yes, strategy does matter. When poor decisions about strategy are made and an organization goes through a revenue stall, it's been shown that, on average, low performance continues for more than 10 years. Unfortunately, this prolonged period of poor performance can lead to bankruptcy. Research on 750 bankruptcies during a 25-year period showed that the number-one factor behind these bankruptcies was bad strategy. Contrary to popular opinion, the researchers attributed the failures to flaws in the strategies themselves, not to poor execution of the strategies. Therefore, it's important to be skilled at crafting strategy."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Cultivate Winning Relationships
By Morag Barrett
"Having fun and feeling satisfied with relationships at work are important! For many of us, the hours we spend at work far exceed the time we spend with our families or in social settings. So why not actually enjoy this massive part of our lives? Working respectfully is not a win/lose power struggle. Nor is it 'soft' to have a conversation about how you work together. When you cultivate winning relationships, everyone involved can benefit—especially you."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How Your Biases Make You Blind
By Faisal Hoque, Drake Baer
"We best empathize with people—be they colleagues or customers—that we have some shared experience with. So if a company is homogenous in form, it will only be able to connect with a homogenous swathe of humans outside the organization—you'll only be able to communicate with people who have the same hand on the elephant as you do. This leads to a lack of understanding of what value the customer wants. That misunderstanding is the seed of disruption, for the gap between the value you think your customers want and the value your customers actually want is precisely the space where a competitor can replace you."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / News & Opinion
The 2014 Business Book Awards: Submissions Are Open
By 800-CEO-READ
We are now accepting submissions for the 2014 Business Book Awards. Thousands of business books are published each year, each with the potential to promote change and enlighten the way people think about business. We began recognizing these efforts in 2007 with the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards, highlighting the best works in a number of categories.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Soft Edge
By 800-CEO-READ
The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success by Rich Karlgaard, Jossey-Bass, $28. 00, Hardcover, April 2014, ISBN 9781118829424 When you see a book has a foreword written by Tom Peters, and an afterword penned by Clayton Christensen, you pay attention. When the author of that same book is the publisher of Forbes, you get your wallet out.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - A Bigger Prize
By 800-CEO-READ
A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better Than the Competition by Margaret Heffernan, Public Affairs, $27. 99, Hardcover, 391 pages, 9781610392914 In everything from sports to business, from educational achievement to ideas, our society encourages vigorous competition. In her new book, A Bigger Prize, Margaret Heffernen warns that there are some significant detriments that come with “our outsize veneration of competition.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Things a Little Bird Told Me
By 800-CEO-READ
Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind by Biz Stone, Grand Central Publishing, 240 pages, $26. 00, Hardcover, April 2014, ISBN 9781455528714 Twitter is an interesting company. For years I’ve wondered, “how does it make money?
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / News & Opinion
Subscribe to our kBOX & get Pitch Perfect and Think Like a Freak!
By Sally Haldorson
From the practical to the radical, we've got two outstanding books for your quarterly KnowledgeBOX shipment. These books will ship the week of the 21st, so if you haven't signed up for our kBOX deliveries, sign up today! Your kBOX feature book is: The media coach and Emmy Award-winning correspondent Bill McGowan shares his secrets of pitch-perfect communications, showing readers how to communicate with confidence.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
A New KB Giveaway! Thanks for the Feedback
By Sally Haldorson
Here is the first thing that popped into my head when I first glimpsed a copy of this book: I need to give this to my husband! Because his reaction to feedback is usually defensive. And that's what we always think, right?
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Hard Thing About Hard Things
By 800-CEO-READ
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, HarperBusiness, 304 pages, $29. 99, Hardcover, March 2014, ISBN 9780062273208 Imagine you were going to bake something. You had never baked it before but from what you heard of the dish, it sounded delicious.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
