Scenario planning allows companies to move away from linear thinking and better understand external change. Eight years (and 30,000 copies) after publication Scenarios is still acknowledged as the definitive work in the field. Now, Kees van der Heijden brings his bestseller up to date, following up on his original case studies and adding significant new material. The Second Edition changes focus slightly by providing more in-depth analysis and application of the concept of the 'strategic conversation'. While maintaining the underlying rigour of the first edition, van der Heijden revisits the text to make it far more practical and accessible, and in doing so gives you the tools you need to set out and negotiate a successful future course for your organization in the face of significant uncertainty.
Even the most well thought out initiatives will fail without true employee ownership, accountability, and engagement. Yet most managers and executives don’t have a clear system for ensuring the support they need from those around them. The Power of Strategic Commitment helps readers improve their strategic processes by enlisting the support of managers, employees, boards, suppliers, investors, and others. The book outlines the key factors that determine commitment, providing powerful ways to build buy-in that cost nothing. Readers will discover how to:continuously measure buy-ininvolve everyone in creating their own piece of a larger organizational futuretailor commitment strategies for individual employeeskeep everyone on the road to achieving stated goalscreate a commitment-inspiring rewards systemhire fully-engaged talentThis book provides practical methods for getting everyone behind the kind of important organizational actions that drive results.
"The future of a company lies in its ability to make authentic connections in a global, "flattened world" economy, spanning departments, cultures, and countries. Flat World Navigation explains how network-building, collaboration, and authentic communication are essential to navigating this new business landscape. Exploring the essential skills, tools, techniques, and technologies involved in making and maintaining business relationships, author Kim Chandler McDonald integrates practical tips and advice with interviews with leading figures who are successful flat world navigators"-- "Flat World Navigation introduces the new future of work in the 'flattened world' of the new digital attention-based economy, where real connections can be made in seconds across departments, businesses, cultures and countries. Combining the best elements of networking, social media outreach and collaborative techniques, flat world navigation is an essential capability to build and maintain relationships between colleagues, customers and partners. Employees who can transform themselves into flat world navigators, experts in mediating these powerful relationships and bringing the customer into the conversation, will mean the difference between success and failure in business. Flat World Navigation includes exclusive insights and interviews with international business leaders who successfully use flat world navigation skills, such as the Emmy-winning former NBC and Wall Street Journal reporter Kare Anderson, Sandy Carter at IBM, Gordon Feller at CISCO Systems, Aria Finger at DoSomething.org, Louise Guido at ChangeCorp, Jeffrey A. Finkle at the International Economic Development Council and Carolyn Lawrence, CEO of Women of Influence. This book is grounded in real-world experience with insights and advice to build your skills base and empower the next generation of business people. Additionally, it is of great use to business owners and managers looking to effectively leverage the skills of these flat world navigators, whose critical role brings attention to ideas, products and services and, as such, must be part of a successful business strategy"--
Is your company on a clear track to the future, with a defined goal that sets its direction and with determined employees powering its engine? Or is it stumbling toward whatever comes next, dragged along by circumstance, or "staying the course" out of fear? Karl Albrecht, renowned business thinker and co-author of the bestseller Service America!, challenges today's business leaders to embark on a journey on The Northbound Train. His northbound train is a metaphor for achieving a focused vision of the direction your company must take to succeed and then moving inexorably toward that goal. And as Albrecht shows, this vision must always be based upon an understanding of what will create value for your customers. In The Northbound Train Albrecht provides a step-by-step guide to soul searching, strategy setting, and customer wooing. Using insightful, real-world examples of effective and ineffective processes, he helps you map out a path - a strategic success model - that your company must follow to find out what makes its business unique. He illustrates how to formulate a reality-based vision; define your company's core values and philosophy; create a company mission statement that is accurate, concise, and inspiring; evaluate your competitive strategy to see if it's based on real strengths; reach a unified concept for creating value for your customers; and distill these decisions, finally, into a few critical areas of focus. Of course, all this thinking and planning is useless if the people in your organization are not "on board." Albrecht explains that "the leader must help people in the organization understand and commit to the vision. And the leader must help them learn to do what it takes to make the vision a reality." The author provides advice for exactly how to lead your company (or your portion of the company) in the right direction and how to reward employees based on their real, verifiable contributions to that end-of-the-track goal. Is your company ready to board the northbound train? The trip requires just three things: the eagerness to ask fundamental business questions, the courage to listen to the answers and face what must be done, and the stamina to keep at it until the necessary changes take place. The Northbound Train will stock you with the provisions you need to be successful: the inspiration of a great business thinker and a process for keeping on track.
The ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy—from the cofounder of the LSU Hurricane CenterAfter warning for years about the looming threat of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden was one of the highest-profile media experts during the Katrina disaster. Over the following eighteen months, he was even more prominent as he challenged the official version of those events and campaigned for an engineering plan that would protect all of southeastern Louisiana, once and for all. In The Storm, van Heerden lays out in full detail the stunning incompetence among the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city.
Scenarios by Kees van der Heijden | Literally Just Books
