Capturing the ecommerce edge in customer growth and retention has been a decades-long battle between eRetail startups and large traditional retailers. The two face different sets of challenges and those challenges are constantly evolving in our digital world. Goliath Strikes Back: How Traditional Retailers Are Winning Back Customers from Ecommerce Startups expands on this current industry shift in one of the most accessible, intriguing business books in recent times. Each chapter covers a different industry, as diverse and eclectic as consumer electronics, newspapers, groceries, logistics, and more. By looking at how traditional retailers are facing off against internet startups, you can gauge the landscape and form your own strategies. Author Peter S. Cohan expertly guides you from one case study to the next and makes topics enthralling even for the non-industry layperson. Goliath Strikes Back helps executives create an effective strategy in the modern ecommerce realm. Business professionals and outside enthusiasts alike are in for fascinating insights from Cohan about the mindsets and strategies of successful companies and their leaders. Changing strategies on a dime has always been essential in commerce, and never more so than in ecommerce's industry overhaul. Don't get left behind. What You Will Learn What to emulate and what to avoid by studying the mindsets and strategies of the successful and unsuccessful companies How companies can identify, attract, hire and motivate executives who embody the strategic mindset needed to remain successful An insight into six key industries, including consumer electronics and grocery, to understand why companies are failing or succeeding Who This Book Is For Executives, business professionals, business students, and curious laypeople

Accelerate your company's growth in a disciplined fashion. This book provides leaders of large and small companies a proven comprehensive framework to think systematically about growth options and to yield practical strategies that produce faster growth. Drawing insights from case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies, strategy teacher and venture capitalist Peter Cohan models his systematic approach to brainstorming, evaluating, and implementing growth strategies across five dimensions: Customers, Geography, Products, Capabilities, Culture. He examines each of these five growth dimensions in turn, selecting and organizing his cases to compare the growth strategies deployed successfully and unsuccessfully by large and small companies along the given dimension. In each of his five dimensional chapters, the author derives from his case analyses the key principles and processes for creating and achieving faster growth. Professor Cohan draws on a network of hundreds of founders, CEOs, and investors developed through his decades of consulting, authorship of 11 books, and over five years as a Forbes columnist. He shows through many compelling stories how leaders craft effective growth strategies. Business leaders will learn the following lessons from this book: Achieving rapid but sustainable growth is a business leader's most important responsibility - and leaders must approach this challenge with a mixture of vision, intellectual humility, and a willingness to experiment and learn from failure. The growth challenges facing companies that are currently growing quickly differ from the ones that stagnating or shrinking companies must overcome. Companies can achieve growth along one or more of the dimensions simultaneously - and they often expand geographically to customers in the same segments. Useful insights can emerge from comparing case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies pursuing similar growth strategies. Companies should select a growth strategy based on three factors: the attractiveness of the growth opportunity, the company's capabilities to provide superior value to customers in the selected market, and the expected return on investment in the growth vector. Companies should select a growth strategy that best fits their capabilities and culture and they must enhance both to adapt to new growth opportunities. Who This Book Is For The people in companies who are responsible for growth: chief executive officers, chief marketing officers, chief product officers, heads of business development, product managers, sales people, and human resources managers

This book offers a comprehensive model for explaining the success and failure of cities in nurturing startups, presents detailed case studies of how participants in that model help or hinder startup activity, and shows how to apply these lessons to boost local startup activity. Startup Cities explains the factors that determine local startup success based on a detailed comparison of regional startup cities-pairing the most successful and less successful cities within regions along with insights and implications from case studies of each of the model's elements. The book compares local city pairs, highlighting factors that distinguish successful from less successful cities and presents implications for stakeholders that arise from these principles. Peter Cohan is a lecturer of Strategy at Babson College and one of the world's leading authorities on regional startup ecosystems. Starting in 2012, he created and led Startup Strategy courses that explore four regional startup ecosystems-Hong Kong/Singapore, Israel, Paris, and Spain/Portugal. These courses are based on an original framework for evaluating why a few cities host most startup creation and the rest fail to do so. In running these courses, Peter has built a network of local policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs, and professors from which he draws practical insights for what distinguishes successful Startup Commons from their peers. The book provides vital benefits to these stakeholders. What You'll Learn Local policymakers will know how to build a local team to set objectives for their local Startup Commons and develop a comprehensive strategy to realize those goals Entrepreneurs will know how to choose where to locate their startups based on factors such as the supply and quality of talent-from chief marketing and technology officers to coders and sales people; quality of life, access to capital, customers, and mentors; and costs such as salary and real estate expense University administrators and faculty will know how to take research out of their labs and house it in companies that can commercialize that research, create academic programs that will encourage more entrepreneurship among their students, and connect with local policymakers and capital providers to spur local startup activity Capital providers will know how to scout out emerging startup cities where they can get access to the best investment opportunities at more favorable valuations and have greater influence on how the local startup scene evolves Who This Book Is For All key startup stakeholders, including local policymakers (mayors, directors of economic development, treasurers, controllers, presidents of regional chamber of commerce), entrepreneurs (CEOs, chief marketing officers, chief financial officers, chief HR officers, chief technology officers), universities (presidents; deans of faculty; provosts; professors of finance, management, and entrepreneurship; directors of international education), and capital providers (venture capital partners and associates, angel investors, bank loan officers, managers of accelerator operations)

Know how your company can accelerate growth by not only tapping into new growth vectors, but also by adapting its organization, culture, and processes. To oversee growth from an idea to a company with billions in revenue, CEOs must reinvent many aspects of their company in anticipation of it reaching ever-higher revenues. Author Peter Cohan takes you through the four stages of scaling: winning the first customers, building a scalable business model, sprinting to liquidity, and running the marathon. What You'll Learn Discover how founders keep their CEO positions by managing the organizational change needed to reach the next stage of scaling Read case studies that illustrate how CEOs craft growth strategies, raise capital, create culture, build their organizations, set goals, and manage processes to achieve them Discover principles of successful scaling through comparisons of successful and less successful companies Use the Scaling Quotient to assess your startup's readiness to grow Follow a road map for turning your idea into a company that can change the world Who This Book Is For Entrepreneurs, aspiring CEOs, capital providers, and all other key stakeholders

In Value Leadership, renowned management and investment expert Peter Cohan — whose 2002 stock picks gained 81percent when the S&P 500 plunged 24 percent— provides a new and powerful concept of sustainable corporate value. Using his expertise in understanding shareholder value, Cohan offers executives seven management principles that were tested in periods of economic expansion and contraction. These principles are: valuing human relationships, fostering teamwork, experimenting frugally, fulfilling your commitments, fighting complacency, winning through multiple means, and giving to your community. Cohan illustrates these principles by drawing on examples from eight Value Leaders— Synopsys, WalMart, Goldman Sachs, MBNA, Johnson & Johnson, J. M. Smucker, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft. Through two recessions, these companies grew 35 percent faster, were 109 percent more profitable, and generated five times more shareholder wealth than their peers.

This title offers fast insight into earning hard currency profit from the Internet. It covers the key areas of the pyramid of Web business models, nine Internet business segments, and six core concepts for profiting from the Internet. It includes examples and lessons from some of the world's most successful e-leaders, including GE, Dell, Cisco Systems and NTT DoCoMo, and ideas from the smartest thinkers, including Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreesen, Robert Metcalfe, Vint Cerf and Michael Mandel. It also includes a glossary of key concepts and a comprehensive resources guide.

This title offers a fast track route to understanding and implementing the best ideas from the world's top technology businesses. It covers all key aspects of technology leadership, from open technology to entrepreneurial leadership, and from boundaryless product development to resource allocation. It contains examples, cases and ideas from the world's greatest technology companies, including Hewlett Packard, Cisco, IBM, Schlumberger, Gillette and Merck. It also includes a glossary of key concepts and a comprehensive resources guide.