Companies have more data at their fingertips than ever before. Yet, studies show that many executives and organizations fail to extract real value from it.
Challenging the conventional wisdom of data-driven decision-making, marketing professors and behavioral scientists Bart De Langhe and Stefano Puntoni argue that many analytics efforts flounder because data analyses are disconnected from the decisions to be made. In their important book, they offer a new approach they call decision-driven analytics. Counterintuitively, they argue that the key to making good decisions with data is to start by putting data in the background. Drawing from their own research and teaching, as well as real-world business cases, De Langhe and Puntoni offer four pillars of decision-driven analytics and guide you around common mistakes that have held back many organizations from using data for impact. In Decision-Driven Analytics, you will learn how to: + Avoid common pitfalls in data-driven decision-making;Few people have more experience guiding organizational change than Greg Shea and Cassie Solomon. --Adam Grant, New York Times-bestselling author, Originals and Give and Take
Featured on CNBC and in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company, Leading Successful Change is now updated for 2020 and beyond to help leaders successfully navigate the ever-increasing pace of change. When Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter as CEO in 2015, the company was in trouble. But unlike so many other social media platforms that have crumbled under tough conditions, Twitter is still alive--and thriving. How did Twitter turn itself around in one of the most turbulent and competitive industries? The change management approach of authors Gregory P. Shea and Cassie A. Solomon guided a significant area of the organization's turnaround effort. In this revised and updated edition of Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share success stories from a host of companies including Twitter, Viacom, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, offering a tested method for leading successful change, which they have developed over a combined 50 years of helping organizations do just that. In Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share:A holistic, research-backed framework to future-proof your leadership and unlock the full potential of your team
In the wake of the pandemic and on the cusp of the generative AI revolution, the world of work has undergone a seismic shift. Chronic stress, burnout, and employee disengagement have reached crisis levels, and leaders are struggling to keep their teams motivated and inspired amid relentless change and uncertainty. Conventional management approaches are no longer sufficient, demanding a new leadership framework to address the root causes of these challenges. To meet this moment, Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team provides a timely and practical blueprint for a new era of leadership. Drawing on extensive research and workshops with thousands of leaders, Paula Davis, CEO and founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute and author of Beating Burnout at Work, offers a transformative approach to building high-performing teams that can adapt and grow, even in the face of relentless change. Lead Well offers actionable tools and insights to help you and your team today:The next crisis might be here now, or it might be around the corner. In The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before, two history-making experts in crisis leadership--James, dean of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Wooten, president of Simmons University--forcefully argue that the time to prepare is always.
In no other time in recent history have leaders in every industry and on every continent grappled with so many changes that have independently and simultaneously undermined their ability to lead. The Prepared Leader encapsulates more than two decades of the authors' research to convey how it has positioned them to navigate through the distinct challenges of today and tomorrow. Their insights have implications for every leader in every industry and every worker at every level. In their fast-reading and actionable book, James and Wooten provide tools and frameworks for addressing and learning from crises, and they provide insight into what you need to know to become a Prepared Leader, including: The five phases of crisis management and the skills you need for each phase. They examine how the National Basketball Association and its commissioner, Adam Silver, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.Envision this scenario: An industrial manufacturer is breaking itself in three, and its board chair asks you, the chief financial officer, to step up to the helm of one of the spin-offs. You will take charge of everything, from plant operations and product marketing to human resources and governance practices. Are you ready to lead?
In The Leader's Checklist, 10th Anniversary Edition: 16 Mission-Critical Principles, world-renowned leadership expert and Wharton professor Michael Useem shows you how to lead through any challenge--and shares how ITT's Denise Ramos did just that when she encountered this situation. In this illuminating guide, Useem offers a Leader's Checklist that will help you develop your ability to make good and timely decisions in unpredictable and stressful environments--for those moments when leadership really matters. To illustrate the principles, Useem examines where leaders go right--and wrong. He looks at: How Ramos, the former CEO of ITT, turned around the once-struggling enterprise; How AIG's tone-deaf response to the tumultuous events of the global financial crisis left the company vulnerable to one of the greatest corporate collapses in business history; andHow Virginia Rometty, the former executive chair of IBM, acquired and integrated a cloud-computing company to help turn around IBM's fortunes. Based on Useem's own research experience and an array of leadership investigators, thinkers, and practitioners, The Leader's Checklist offers actionable insights you can put into practice as a leader today.Bringing hard data to the way we think about entrepreneurial success, this bold call to action draws on the latest scientific evidence to dispel the most pervasive startup myths and light a path to entrepreneurship for those eclipsed by the hype.
When you think of a successful entrepreneur, who comes to mind? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe even Jesse Eisenberg, the man who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network? It may surprise you that most successful founders look very different from Zuckerberg or Gates. In fact, most startup origin stories are very different from the famous unicorns that have achieved valuations of over $1 billion, from Facebook to Google to Uber. In The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors, Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick takes us to the forefront of an empirical revolution in entrepreneurship. New data and better research methods have overturned the conventional wisdom behind what a successful founder looks like, how they succeed, and how the startup ecosystem works. Among the issues he examines:A QUICK BUT THOUGHTFUL LOOK INTO THE PROS AND CONS OF GAMIFICATION....--Daniel H. Pink, Author, Drive
Why can't life--and business--be fun? For thousands of years, we've created things called games that tap the tremendous psychic power of fun. In a revised and updated edition of For the Win: The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue that applying the lessons of gamification could change your business, the way you learn or teach, and even your life. Werbach and Hunter explain how games can be used as a valuable tool to address serious pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, education, innovation, customer engagement, human resources, and sustainability. They reveal how, why, and when gamification works--and what not to do. Discover the successes--and failures--of organizations that are using gamification:A pioneering neuroscientist reveals how brain science can transform how we think about leadership, team-building, decision-making, innovation, marketing, and more.
Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain: Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt explains how. Over two decades as a professor and practitioner in neuroscience, psychology, and marketing, Platt's pioneering research has deepened our understanding of how key areas of the brain work--and how that understanding can be applied in business settings. Neuroscience is providing answers to many of leadership's most vexing challenges. In The Leader's Brain, Platt explains:A first-of-its-kind, science-backed toolkit takes a holistic approach to burnout prevention by helping individuals, teams, and leaders build resilience and thrive at work.
Burnout has become one of the most talked about workplace topics, and its impact is far-reaching. The 24/7 pace of work, constant demands, and scant resources can easily put busy professionals on a path to burnout, a cycle that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Burnout affects the health and well-being of the entire organization, yet most attempts to help focus on quick-fix strategies aimed at individuals. Something is missing. In Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience, Paula Davis, founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute, provides a new framework to help organizations prevent employee burnout. Davis's research-driven, fast-reading, and actionable book is the first of its kind to explore a new solution to the burnout problem at work: a comprehensive approach focused on building the resilience of teams of all sizes. Davis argues that teams, and their leaders, are uniquely positioned to create the type of cultures that are needed to prevent burnout. In Beating Burnout at Work, Davis shares stories from her work coaching, teaching, and training leaders and teams of all sizes, and she explores: How she navigated her own burnout as a lawyer, and how that led her to study burnout and launch a business with the aim of helping organizations and their employees become more resilient; How teams and leaders can utilize simple, science-backed strategies to create cultures that promote resilience and well-being and reduce burnout; How the Mayo Clinic, one of the most renowned medical centers in the world, has developed a powerful model to reduce burnout in its organization; How organizations dealing with high-stress challenges, including the US Army, work to increase resilience in a systemic way; andHow the German company trivago is piloting a new approach to work amid COVID-19 in order to increase team connection and resilience.Solving the burnout puzzle requires a systemic approach. In Beating Burnout at Work, Davis offers an actionable method to help leaders create cultures of well-being and resilience in their organizations.The Strategic Leader's Roadmap provides an essential playbook for combining business strategy with great leadership.--William P. Lauder, Executive Chairman, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.
In The Strategic Leader's Roadmap, Updated and Revised Edition: 6 Steps for Integrating Leadership and Strategy, Wharton management professors Harbir Singh and Michael Useem offer a six-point checklist for today's leaders to follow. They explain how leading strategically will help managers strengthen their capacity to develop strategy and to lead its execution. Drawing on one-on-one interviews with CEOs, in-depth research, and their experience teaching today's executives and tomorrow's leaders, Singh and Useem take readers into the offices--and mindsets--of some of today's foremost strategic leaders. In this fully updated and revised edition, Singh and Useem explore: How Indra Nooyi rose to become CEO of PepsiCo and led its successful strategic redirection; How Jack Ma consistently pivoted and outflanked competition to position Alibaba to become a global behemoth; How John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems, changed his and other company leaders' leadership to stay ahead of disruption; How Lawrence Culp Jr., the CEO of General Electric, has increased efficiency by up to 900% by undertaking a thorough examination of process and strategy. Fast-reading and actionable, The Strategic Leader's Roadmap will enable leaders at all levels to master the abilities necessary to keep their companies ahead of the competition.Available for the First Time: The Complete Social Entrepreneur's Playbook
Covers all three phases of the start-up to scale-up process, developed with reader feedback from one of the more unusual ebook...experiments of the year (ThinReads) 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. MacMillan and Thompson used their own systematic framework to publish The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook. To test the market, they offered the first phase in their start-up method (step 1) as a free ebook. Readers were invited to join The Social Entrepreneur's Advisory Group, and nearly 300 aspiring and active social entrepreneurs shared feedback that helped shape the complete edition of the book, which covers all three steps in the start-up to scale-up process. Based on this crowd-sourced feedback from readers of the free ebook and drawing on the authors' more than 26 years' combined experience developing and studying social enterprises in the field across Africa and in the United States, this new edition provides guidance for each phase: Phase One: Pressure Test Your Start-Up Idea. Based on the free ebook, this expanded section now includes advice on setting revenue and social impact goals, how to navigate the sociopolitical landscape, and how to develop a strong concept statement. In addition, MacMillan and Thompson provide advice on how to identify and test a proposed revenue-generating solution and define and segment your target population.The language of business
In order to understand how your business is performing right now and to evaluate, assess, and devise new strategies to boost future performance, you need information. Financial statements are a critical source of the information you need. In direct and simple terms, Richard A. Lambert, Miller-Sherrerd Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, demystifies financial statements and concepts and shows you how you can apply this information to make better business decisions for long-term profit. You will learn to use and interpret financial data; find out what we can learn from Pepsi, Krispy Kreme, General Motors, and other companies; learn how to evaluate investment strategies; and apply your financial know-how to develop a coherent business strategy.A powerful call to action, Customer Centricity upends some of our most fundamental beliefs about customer service, customer relationship management, and customer lifetime value.
Despite what the old adage says, the customer is not always right. Even companies that can seemingly do no wrong--like the coffeehouse giant Starbucks--have only recently started to figure this out. Starbucks is one of many companies that has successfully executed a pivot that puts the company in a customer-centric mindset, an approach that Wharton professor Peter Fader describes in Customer Centricity. Fader advocates that in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers ... and then there is pretty much everybody else. In a new preface and afterword to Customer Centricity, Fader reflects on how the landscape has changed over nearly a decade since he first proposed that businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. Using examples from Starbucks, Nordstrom, and more, Fader provides insights to help you understand: Why customer centricity is the new model for success in today's data-driven environment. How the ideas of brand equity and customer asset value help us understand what kinds of companies naturally lend themselves to the customer-centric model and which ones don't; Why the traditional models for determining the value of individual customers are flawed; How executives can use customer lifetime value (CLV) and other customer-centric data to make smarter decisions about their companies; How the well-intended idea of customer relationship management (CRM) lost its way--and how your company can properly put CRM to use; How customer centricity will help you realign your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.ALSO AVAILABLE: Once Fader convinces you of the value of customer centricity in this book, The Customer Centricity Playbook, with Sarah Toms, will show you where to get started to bring it to the forefront of your organization. THE WHARTON EXECUTIVE ESSENTIALS SERIESDiscover your own path to entrepreneurship and make your mark in the world
In a world where entrepreneurship often seems to be driven by tech prodigies and venture-backed unicorns, many aspiring entrepreneurs find themselves wondering: What if I don't fit the stereotype of a Silicon Valley wunderkind? Is there a place for me in this landscape? In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at The Wharton School, shatters these limiting perceptions, revealing a diverse array of entrepreneurial paths that are open to anyone with the drive to create value through innovation. Drawing from her thirty-year career and interactions with more than 20,000 students, Rosenkopf offers a compelling roadmap for entrepreneurial success. From Amy Errett's disruption of the hair care industry with Madison Reed to Jarrid Tingle's mission to diversify venture funding through Harlem Capital, the book showcases a rich tapestry of founders who have carved their own unique paths. These inspiring stories reveal that entrepreneurship is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, but a realm of possibilities limited only by one's imagination and determination. In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, discover:2019 AXIOM BUSINESS BOOK AWARD WINNER
Featured in Forbes, NPR's Marketplace, and a Google Talk, The Customer Centricity Playbook offers actionable insights to drive immediate value, according to Neil Hoyne, Head of Customer Analytics and Chief Analytics Evangelist, Google. How did global gaming company Electronic Arts go from being named Worst Company in America to clearing a billion dollars in profit? They discovered a simple truth--and acted on it: Not all customers are the same, regardless of how they appear on the surface. In The Customer Centricity Playbook, Wharton School professor Peter Fader and Wharton Interactive's executive director Sarah Toms help you see your customers as individuals rather than a monolith, so you can stop wasting resources by chasing down product sales to each and every consumer. Fader and Toms offer a 360-degree analysis of all the elements that support customer centricity within an organization. In this book, you will learn how to:Discover how Japan's new leadership model has transformed its top companies and created a new paradigm for business success
In Resolute Japan, Waseda University's Jusuke J. J. Ikegami and the Wharton School's Harbir Singh and Michael Useem reveal a new leadership model that has led Japan's corporations to make a stunning comeback. In the process, they share what they have learned from interviews with more than 100 CEOs and top executives of Japan's largest and most influential companies, including Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, NTT, and Panasonic. In this book, you will discover:Everywhere we turn, brands and organizations are under fire for failing to treat their customers with respect and dignity. And increasingly, consumers want firms to take a lead in helping to shape a better society. Yet, most don't know where to start or have struggled to get things right.
In Marketplace Dignity, Cait Lamberton, Neela A. Saldanha, and Tom Wein introduce a tangible, practical way to take a stand on the fundamental value of humans, and in so doing, be a force for good in a society that increasingly demands that they do so. Marketplace dignity is the idea that customers seek respect and recognition from the firms they interact with, not just rational or emotional benefits. Marketplace dignity appeals to humans' sense of justice and goes to the essence of what makes customers human. It is also a powerful driver of their engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction. In this book, you will discover how to:As a leader in your organization, you will be very familiar with your organization's key financial statements and monthly management reports. You may have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures.
But how much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that these revenues are generated by actual customers--the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers' buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base. A customer-base audit is a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm's customers using data captured by its transaction systems. It will help you answer questions such as: -- How healthy is your customer base? How realistic are your growth objectives?The Ostrich Paradox boldly addresses a key question of our time: Why are we humans so poor at dealing with disastrous risks, and what can we humans do about it? It is a must-read for everyone who cares about risk.
--Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
A 2018 DIGITAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST BUSINESS BOOK
Covered in Forbes, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review, Crack the C-Suite Code is a true insider's guide, according to Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg. How can I reach the C-suite? That is the most common question Cassandra Frangos hears from the executives she coaches. Many aspire to reach the C-suite, but the typical paths to the top are hard to find and difficult to follow. In Crack the C-Suite Code, Frangos reveals the hidden dynamics for reaching the C-suite. She offers expert guidance based on her experience as a consultant at Spencer Stuart and former head of global executive talent at Cisco, a company with 70,000 employees. Her deep research on the topic includes candid interviews with CEOs, hundreds of aspiring C-suite candidates, and the leading experts in the field. Frangos identifies four core paths you can follow to reach the C-suite: The Tenured Executive, The Free Agent, The Leapfrog Leader, and The Founder. To actively improve your chances for success, she presents: