Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

A radical new leadership strategy to transform business as we know it-from a dream team of INSEAD professors and mega-bestselling author Ram Charan The business landscape is littered with the wreckage of companies that crashed and burned when an apocalypse came-in the shape of new competitive technologies, upstart entrants, demographic shifts, and new world orders. Who can feel safe in firestorm change? The authors of The Phoenix Encounter Method don't advise safety. In fact, their method of leadership thinking requires you to imagine burning your business to the ground-throwing yourself into a firestorm change-and turning the upheaval to your organization's advantage. It can then rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes, stronger and more powerful than ever. Written with a sense of urgency and purposefully radical provocation, The Phoenix Encounter Method represents the forward thinking of legendary business guru Ram Charan and professors from the senior global leadership program of INSEAD, one of the world's top graduate business schools. The resulting methodology, based on analysis of thousands of articles, studies, reports, and academic and business practice, was field tested in real-life Phoenix Encounters conducted with more than fifteen hundred senior executives-from startups and family businesses to legacy companies-representing a broad range of industry and sectors in both developed and developing economies. Whatever your sector or industry, if you're responsible for your organization's ability to use change as a transformative opportunity, you'll appreciate the dramatic impact The Phoenix Encounter Method will have on you, your leadership, and your organization.

When Execution was first published in 2002, it changed the way we did our jobs. By analysing the discipline of getting things done, it helped thousands of business people to make the final leap to success. Now, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan reframe their empowering message for a world in which the old rules have been shattered and radical change is becoming routine. For the foreseeable future: - Growth will be slower. But the company that executes well will have the confidence, speed and resources to move fast as new opportunities emerge. - Competition will be fiercer, with companies searching for any possible advantage in every area. - Governments will take on new roles in their national economies. And companies that execute well will be more attractive as partners and suppliers, and better prepared to adapt to new waves of regulation. - Risk management will become a top priority for every leader, and every company will be looking for the edge in detecting new internal and external threats. Forget formulating a 'vision', then leaving others to carry it out: Execution shows you how to link together people, strategy and operations - the three core elements of every organisation - and create a business based on dialogue, intellectual honesty and realism. With case histories from the real world - including such recent examples such as the diverging paths taken by Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase and Charles Prince at Citigroup - Execution provides the realistic and hard-nosed approach to business success that could only come from authors as accomplished and insightful as Bossidy and Charan.

The hands-on playbook for transforming your business with today's most radically effective leadership thinking In The Phoenix Encounter Method, a dream team of INSEAD professors together with the legendary Ram Charan and provided a radical new game plan for transforming any organization. It's about figuratively "burning your business to the ground," turning the upheaval to your advantage, and rising from the ashes stronger than ever. Their method isn't conventional, and it can be daunting-but it works. Now, the authors provide the play-by-play manual you need to implement their strategic thinking approach for maximum impact. Written in full alignment with the original book, The Phoenix Encounter Method Implementation Guide walks you through the three phases to create a future-ready organization: Phoenix Seeking: confront old mindsets, identify new threats and opportunities, prepare for the Encounter battlefield to come. Phoenix Burning: enter the battlefield of Extreme Attack and Horizon Defense, where you apply Encounter tools of Proactive Scanning and the rituals for Completely Opposite Viewpoints Debates, including Radical Ideation and the Separation Imperative to generate a wider set of options. Phoenix Rising: turn battlefield insights into a Future-Facing Blueprint, as well as analysis, planning, and execution work. Whether you're a corporate leader, academic, consultant, or executive trainer, The Phoenix Encounter Method Implementation Guide provides everything you need to embrace the firestorm of change raging through today's business world, to drive revenue, profits, and long-term sustainability.

Invest in your most valuable resource: your people. Top talent is hard to come by. And seeing your stars walk out the door is painful-and expensive. You need to take steps to ensure that you attract, develop, and retain your best people. If you read nothing else on managing talent in your organization, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you boost the engagement, skills, and commitment of your highest performers. This book will inspire you to: Build a winning talent strategy Recruit and hire the best candidates Identify and develop high-potential employees Foster a just and inclusive workplace Overcome the challenges of hybrid work Prepare your workforce for the future This collection of articles includes "Building a Game-Changing Talent Strategy," by Douglas A. Ready, Linda A. Hill, and Robert J. Thomas; "Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong," by Peter Cappelli; "'A Players' or 'A Positions'?: The Strategic Logic of Workforce Management," by Mark A. Huselid, Richard W. Beatty, and Brian E. Becker; "Turning Potential into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development," by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, Andrew Roscoe, and Kentaro Aramaki; "Making Business Personal," by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller; "The Power of Hidden Teams," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "The Performance Management Revolution," by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis; "People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO," by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey; "Toward a Racially Just Workplace," by Lauren Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo; "How to Do Hybrid Right," by Lynda Gratton; and "Your Workforce Is More Adaptable Than You Think," by Joseph Fuller, Judith K. Wallenstein, Manjari Raman, and Alice de Chalendar. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever-changing business environment.

Inflation is here. Do you know how it's impacting your company? It's not just a matter of rising costs. Inflation eats cash, squeezes margins, threatens working capital, and throws all your great forecasts and plans into question. Its effect is cumulative and pervasive. Yet this period of economic discontinuity is a huge opportunity to come out stronger for those who know how to lead in the face of inflation and a looming recession. Ram Charan has guided hundreds of companies through many tough business challenges. In the early 1980s, he helped GE preserve its teetering credit rating in the face of double-digit inflation. Now, in Leading Through Inflation, he brings the same common sense and wisdom that made his book Execution, coauthored with Larry Bossidy, a long-time New York Times bestseller. This book will be your guide to avoiding the hazards of inflation while positioning your company to thrive when the business cycle stabilizes. It provides Ram's down-to-earth recommendations and real-world examples to help you navigate a landscape that may be new to you. As you learn to lead through inflation, you will be better prepared for recession and stagflation as well. You will know how to protect your cash, your customers, and your capital investments. Your psychology will shift from anxiety and fear to optimism and excitement as you define the path to a reimagined future.

How do some Companies Multiply their Market Cap several times over? Learning to build a high performing talent engine - today's strategic imperative! In this book, General Atlantic's Operating Partner Anish Batlaw and veteran business advisor and New York Times bestselling author Ram Charan, show you how to build and incentivize management teams that can multiply enterprise value several times over in 4-5 years. No matter how high your company's growth goal is, you'll get from here to there by learning from this book's riveting narrative of the high-stakes personnel decisions and bold actions taken by CEOs, investors, and boards who grew six real-and world-class-companies, ranging from ecommerce startups to major corporations like Johnson & Johnson. Told from both authors' firsthand vantage point inside each company, and from Batlaw's active role in shaping their outcomes, TALENT offers a rare inside look at how shareholder value is created when CEOs move with speed and accuracy to get the right leadership teams in place. How can you be sure that your company can grow its value as much as these six companies did? By learning from the versatile and replicable methodology presented in this book, which has worked effectively across geographies, cultures, and sectors. TALENT is the answer. Now is the time.

Keep shareholders happy and manage for the long term. Earning a board seat is a rite of passage. But directors must juggle many responsibilities, from steering company strategy, managing risk, and appointing leaders to setting the right incentives, meeting shareholder expectations, and dealing with activist investors. How do you balance it all? If you read nothing else on boards, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you set your board up for success. This book will inspire you to: Ensure you have directors who can meet company goals Establish a robust succession-planning process Encourage the risk-taking that will generate breakthrough innovation Prioritize the health of the enterprise without neglecting shareholders Provide the critical support a new CEO needs to succeed Ignite nonprofit board members by engaging them in work that matters Take on the world's toughest economic, social, and environmental problems This collection of articles includes "What Makes Great Boards Great," by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld; "Building Better Boards," by David A. Nadler; "The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership," by Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine; "The New Work of the Nonprofit Board," by Barbara E. Taylor, Richard P. Chait, and Thomas P. Holland; "Dysfunction in the Boardroom," by Boris Groysberg and Deborah Bell; "The Board's New Innovation Imperative," by Linda A. Hill and George Davis; "Managing Risks: A New Framework," by Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes; "Ending the CEO Succession Crisis," by Ram Charan; "Comp Targets That Work," by Radhakrishnan Gopalan, John Horn, and Todd Milbourn; and "Sustainability in the Boardroom," by Lynn S. Paine. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever-changing business environment.

How HR can lead. If you read nothing else on reinventing human resources, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones on how HR leaders can partner with the C-suite, drive change throughout the organization, and develop the workforce of the future. This book will inspire you to: Overhaul performance management practices to jump-start motivation and engagement Use agile processes to transform how you hire, develop, and manage people Establish diversity programs that increase innovation and competitiveness as well as inclusion Use people analytics to bring unprecedented insight to hiring and talent management Prepare your company for the double waves of artificial intelligence and an older workforce Close the gap between HR and strategy This collection of articles includes: "People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO," by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey; "How Netflix Reinvented HR," by Patty McCord; "HR Goes Agile," by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis; "Reinventing Performance Management," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "Better People Analytics," by Paul Leonardi and Noshir Contractor; "21st-Century Talent Spotting," by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz; "Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Contract," by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh; "Creating the Best Workplace on Earth," by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones; "Why Diversity Programs Fail," by Frank Dobbins and Alexandra Kalev; "When No One Retires," by Paul Irving; and "Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces," by H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty.

From a dream team of business leadership experts—including INSEAD professors and mega-bestselling author Ram Charan—this Power Pack helps transform any business in our unprecedented times of change  Advanced technologies, upstart entrants, demographic shifts, new world orders, and a global pandemic have put many businesses out of business. CEOs and managers can spin their wheels trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t—or they can take the “phoenix� approach.     Based on reams of research into effective leadership during times of disruption and crisis, The Phoenix Encounter Method provides a radical new leadership strategic thinking approach to transform business as we know it. Then, the companion to this breakthrough work, The Phoenix Encounter Method: Implementation Guide walks readers through the process steps of executing this leadership method throughout their organization in a practical, hands-on way.  This power pack makes both books available to corporate leaders, academics, consultants and executive trainers at a discounted price.  The main book asks business leaders to imagine burning their business to the ground, throwing themselves into a “firestorm of change,� and turning upheaval into advantage. The implementation guide then walks readers through the process of executing the action steps this leadership method needs throughout their organization in a practical, hands-on way. With both books, readers will learn that they can then rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes—stronger than ever.

Is your firm's board creating value--or destroying it? Change is coming. Leadership at the top is being redefined as boards take a more active role in decisions that once belonged solely to the CEO. But for all the advantages of increased board engagement, it can create debilitating questions of authority and dangerous meddling in day-to-day operations. Directors need a new road map--for when to lead, when to partner, and when to stay out of the way. Boardroom veterans Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem advocate this new governance model--a sharp departure from what has been demanded by governance activists, raters, and regulators--and reveal the emerging practices that are defining shared leadership of directors and executives. Based on personal interviews and the authors' broad and deep experience working with executives and directors from dozens of the world's largest firms, including Apple, Boeing, Ford, Infosys, and Lenovo, Boards That Lead tells the inside story behind the successes and pitfalls of this new leadership model and explains how to: * Define the central idea of the company * Ensure that the right CEO is in place and potential successors are identified * Recruit directors who add value * Root out board dysfunction * Select a board leader who deftly bridges the divide between management and the board * Set a high bar on ethics and risk With a total of eighteen checklists that will transform board directors from monitors to leaders, Charan, Carey, and Useem provide a smart and practical guide for businesspeople everywhere--whether they occupy the boardroom or the C-suite.

Radical Advice for Reinventing Talent--and HR

Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of human capital, and yet the talent practices their organizations use are stuck in the twentieth century.

Typical talent-planning and HR processes are designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where "lines and boxes" still define how people are managed. As work and organizations have become more fluid--and business strategy is no longer about planning years ahead but about sensing and seizing new opportunities and adapting to a constantly changing environment--companies must deploy talent in new ways to remain competitive.

Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent--for today's agile, digital, analytical, technologically driven strategic environment--and for creating the HR function that business needs. Filled with examples of forward-thinking companies that have adopted radical new approaches to talent (such as ADP, Amgen, BlackRock, Blackstone, Haier, ING, Marsh, Tata Communications, Telenor, and Volvo), as well as the juggernauts and the startups of Silicon Valley, this book shows leaders how to bring the rigor that they apply to financial capital to their human capital--elevating HR to the same level as finance in their organizations.

Providing deep, expert insight and advice for what needs to change and how to change it, this is the definitive book for reimagining and creating a talent-driven organization that wins.

NEW from the bestselling HBR's 10 Must Reads series. Learn why bad decisions happen to good managers--and how to make better ones. If you read nothing else on decision making, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you and your organization make better choices and avoid common traps. Leading experts such as Ram Charan, Michael Mankins, and Thomas Davenport provide the insights and advice you need to: * Make bold decisions that challenge the status quo * Support your decisions with diverse data * Evaluate risks and benefits with equal rigor * Check for faulty cause-and-effect reasoning * Test your decisions with experiments * Foster and address constructive criticism * Defeat indecisiveness with clear accountability Looking for more Must Read articles from Harvard Business Review? Check out these titles in the popular series: HBR's 10 Must Reads: The Essentials HBR's 10 Must Reads on Communication HBR's 10 Must Reads on Collaboration HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams

‘The most influential consultant alive.’ Fortune

Have you ever noticed that the best CEOs seem to have a special kind of intelligence, an ability to sense where the opportunities in their industries are and how to take advantage of them? The best have a knack for simplifying the most complex business practices down to the fundamentals – the same fundamentals of the small family business.

In What the CEO Wants You To Know, Ram Charan explains in clear, simple language how to do what great CEOs do instinctively and persistently – understand the basic building blocks of a company and use them to figure out how to make it work as a total business. Being able to decide what to do when, despite the clutter of day-to-day to-do lists and the complexity of the real world, takes the mystery out of business and offers a clear road map of organisational success.

First published in 2001 (with over 300,000 copies sold worldwide) but never before published in the UK, this business classic has been completely rewritten and updated with new stories from today’s market leaders and companies, and the latest insights from the cutting edge of management research.

Set your sights on High-Potential leadership and help your organization thrive In today s tumultuous and rapidly evolving business environment, High-Potential leaders are in high demand. Do you possess the relationship skills, strategic vision, innovation, and determination needed to thrive as a high-potential leader in your organization? New York Times bestselling author Ram Charan answers that question and helps you hop on the fast-track to leadership success in this insightful guide. Traditionally, leaders have risen up through the ranks based on their cognitive abilities, analytical skills, thoroughness, and even perfectionist tendencies, but as modern businesses have moved to a more digitally-driven model, the criteria for leaders has markedly changed. The High-Potential Leader explains the modern business climate while highlighting the critical role relationship building, communication style, engagement, and ability to motivate and bring out the best performance in others play in becoming an impactful leader. Whether you re just embarking on your leadership journey or are ready to make the leap to the next leadership level, Charan s real-world lessons and practical advice will help you discover who you are as a leader, chart your path, accelerate your growth, and ultimately, become the high-potential leader your organization needs to succeed.

Welcome to the age of big tech. The old rules no longer apply.

How do companies get ahead in the digital age? In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan - bestselling author and advisor to some of the world's top CEOs - reveals that the tech giants have radically rewritten the rules of business. If you want to be competitive, you need to learn to play a new game.

Drawing on behind-the-scenes stories from the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Alibaba, Charan sketches out a map of today's business landscape. He shows that the biggest companies succeed because they adhere to a simple rule: pick a single customer experience, then build a platform that transforms it from start to finish. It's a principle that has already revolutionised how the world watches movies (Netflix), goes shopping (Amazon) and browses the internet (Google).

But this approach needn't be the preserve of Silicon Valley. By studying the tech giants' methods, Charan has uncovered the eight principles that any company can use to tap into their ecosystems: from homing in obsessively on individual customers' experiences, to using big data to inform every decision, to forging an ambitious culture among employees. And he offers a practical toolbox for implementing these lessons in your business, starting today.

Whether you're a C-suite executive or a fledgling entrepreneur, your company can beat the competition in the era of big tech. This book will show you how.

Amazon's trillion-dollar success is the envy of everyone, but achievable by anyone. What has propelled their record streak of growth? Their management system, and it can do the same for you no matter what business you are in or what level. Learning it is as simple as six building blocks distilled by New York Times bestselling author and global CEO advisor Ram Charan and Julia Yang in The Amazon Management System. The Ultimate Digital Engine that Powered Amazon's Unprecedented Growth and Shareholder Value Creation: Building Block 1: Customer-Obsessed Business Model Building Block 2: Continuous Bar-Raising Talent Pool Building Block 3: AI-Powered Data & Metrics System Building Block 4: Ground-Breaking Invention Machine Building Block 5: High-Velocity & High-Quality Decision-Making Building Block 6: A forever Day 1 culture. From their high-velocity decision-making to their top talent hiring practices, the insider secrets behind Amazon's success are now within anyone's grasp, block by block. Whether you are an established CEO or a recent college grad, this concise and actionable book will help your business win in a new digital era that demands nonstop innovation.

Long-term value creation&#8212the board's new agenda. A big shift in public ownership has created a new set of challenges for boards. Index funds managed by firms like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street represent an emerging class of permanent institutional investors who are focused on creating and preserving long-term corporate value. These investors are stating in no uncertain terms that simply managing for short-term shareholder profit is not acceptable. Bill McNabb, Ram Charan, and Dennis Carey have been on the front lines of these changes with the investment community, corporate boards, and top-level management teams. Since TSR (total shareholder return) cannot keep the short and long term in balance, the authors argue, boards should focus on a different kind of TSR&#8212talent, strategy, and risk&#8212because decisions and actions around these factors, more than any others, determine whether or not a company creates long-term value. This book redefines the board's agenda and explains how to: Build and incentivize the right leadership team Help leaders take a longer view and communicate it to investors Refresh board composition and create diversity to meet the new challenges Keep major risks, such as cyberattacks and sexual harassment allegations, front and center Analyze the business through the eyes of a shareholder activist With the new realities of corporate ownership, boards need to lead for the long term. This authoritative book shows them how.

From the bestselling author of "What the CEO Wants You to Know"?how to rethink sales from the outside in
?We have to face the truth: "the process of selling is broken." Customers have more choices and are under intense pressure. Yet few companies are facing this reality. When they don?t, a lingering malaise sets in.?
More than ever these days, the sales process tends to be a war about price?a frustrating, unpleasant war that takes all the fun out of selling.
But there's a better way to think about sales, says bestselling author Ram Charan, who is famous for clarifying and simplifying difficult business problems. What the customer wants you to know is how his or her business works, so you can help make it work better. It sounds simple, but there's a catch: you won?t be able to do that with your traditional sales approach.
Instead of starting with your product or service, start with your customer's problems. Focus on becoming your customer's trusted partner, someone he can turn to for creative, cost-effective solutions that are based on your deep knowledge of his values, goals, problems, and customers.
This book defines a new approach to selling?which Charan calls value creation selling?that while radical is nonetheless practical. VCS has been battle-tested in companies in a variety of industries, such as Unifi, Mead-Westvaco, and Thomson Financial. It will enable you to:
? Gain a deeper knowledge of your customer's problems
? Understand how your customer's company really makes decisions
? Help your customer improve margins and drive revenue growth
? Connect sales with other key functions such as finance and manufacturing
? Come up with new customized offerings
? Make price much less of an issue
VCS gets you out of the hell of commoditization and low prices. It differentiates you from the competition, paving the way to better pricing, better margins, and higher revenue growth, built on win-win relationships that deepen over time.
Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer, and every manager will realize that sales is everyone's business, not just the sales department?s. In the meantime, this eye-opening book will show you how to get started.

Learn why bad decisions happen to good managers-and how to make better ones. If you read nothing else on decision making, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you and your organization make better choices and avoid common traps. Leading experts such as Ram Charan, Michael Mankins, and Thomas Davenport provide the insights and advice you need to: Make bold decisions that challenge the status quoSupport your decisions with diverse dataEvaluate risks and benefits with equal rigorCheck for faulty cause-and-effect reasoningTest your decisions with experimentsFoster and address constructive criticismDefeat indecisiveness with clear accountability