Includes 10 handy do's and don'ts of strategy development

* Need powerful decision-making tools at your fingertips?

* Want to get the most out of strategic thinking models like Porter's Five Forces?

* Only want what you need to know, rather than reams of theory?

With the critical strategy tools required to drive your business forward, this book tells you what you need to know, fast.

Want to take your company to the next level? You need a roadmap, a strategy. Preferably one that is simple, workable and saleable. This book provides you with just that. It sets out a straightforward strategy development process, the ‘Strategy Pyramid’, and guides you through it. It uses a lively central case study throughout, as well as drawing on examples of how real businesses have developed winning strategies. Whether you are intent on growing your business, or setting out on your start-up, this book offers an uncomplicated, practical and readable guide on how to get the strategy you need for your business to succeed.

It offers sound advice on the following areas:

- Setting goals and objectives

- Forecasting market demands

- Gauging industry competition

- Tracking competitive advantage

- Targeting the strategic gap

- Bridging the gap with business strategy

- Bridging the gap with corporate strategy

- Addressing risk and opportunity

The FT Essential Guide to Developing a Business Strategy will help businesses of all sizes to chart and realise their growth ambitions.

Whether you seek financial backing or board consent, The Financial Times Essential Guide to Writing a Business Plan will give you the critical knowledge you need to get the go-ahead. By focusing clearly on your objective, it will help you to gather the necessary evidence and address all your backers concerns. This brand-new edition draws out the specific challenges faced by start-ups, particularly on pinning down your perceived market niche and determining your competitive advantage. There are new chapters on pitching the plan and performing against the plan, using key performance indicators and milestones. Finally, new appendices outline alternative sources of funding and display an example business plan from start to finish.Written by a seasoned practitioner with years of experience in both writing and evaluating business plans for funding, it will help you formulate a coherent, consistent and convincing plan with your backers needs in mind. Follow its guidance and your plan will have every chance of winning the backing you need for your business to succeed.

Empowers managers with over 75 key strategic tools to ensure both short-term and long-term success for their business.

This book delivers professional-level information in the practical and accessible framework synonymous with the Key series. This book provides readers with the full gamut of tools and techniques needed to create their own strategic plan, breaking the subject down into over 75 accessible tools and models.

Key Strategy Tools be will help cherry-pick the most useful approaches for business and create a robust strategy that withstands investor scrutiny and becomes the roadmap to success.

Strategy Plain and Simple’s uniquely powerful, successful and practical framework
will show you how to quickly develop a strategy to get from where you are today
to where you want to be tomorrow.

Strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or complex. Strategy doesn’t have to be left to
the academics or the consultants. So keep it simple and make it count. This compact,
instantly-applicable guide to developing la business strategy practical insights,
straightforward actions and plain guidelines to accelerate your company and its results.

With 3 simple steps, this quick-read book will help you to:

• Understand your market – how to assess supply and demand
• Gain competitive advantage – how to identify strategic gaps and how to bridge them
• Manage the risk – how to balance risk and opportunity
• Take control of your business strategy and its success with Strategy Plain and
• Simple.

At the beginning of every successful business is a well-thought-out and exceptionally prepared business plan that was written with one audience in mind--investors. But too many budding entrepreneurs have written their business's bible with a focus on details most important to managers or employees or even themselves, completely avoiding the questions most crucial to those who determine the fate of the business's genesis . . . its potential backers.The Standout Business Plan is an immensely practical and readable guide that shows readers how to create a business plan that not only speaks directly to investors and lenders but also makes it easy for them to say yes. Featuring case studies and examples of both what to do and what not to do, this invaluable book reveals how to: - Include the vital information backers need, while leaving out extraneous filler that gets in the way - Address key factors such as market demand, competition, and strategy - Spell out the essence of your business proposition - Outline resources and financial forecasts - Assess risk from the backer's perspective - Evaluate and improve the plan to ensure its successYour business plan is too important to not get exactly right from the beginning. With the easy-to-follow guidance in The Standout Business Plan, now anyone can present a clear, concise, and convincing case that will win them the funding they need to succeed.

Public speaking and presenting rank in the top ten of people's greatest fears. Yet being able to speak coherently and persuasively in a speech, seminar or meeting room is important when progressing our careers and living our lives to the fullest. In this book, 37 pithy, lively and witty mini-speeches tell us how to construct and deliver a speech or presentation. Each example speech follows a simple, perfect structure which will soon become imprinted in your mind. Each focuses on one facet of speaking and gives you the very essentials picked up by the author over 25 years of experience. And each speech will entertain as much as inform you. Stand, Speak, Deliver! will enable you to learn how to use your eyes, vary your voice and move your body. It will also look at how to inform, entertain, humour, persuade, motivate or inspire the audience; how to present, to colleagues or clients; how to introduce a speaker; and how to wow as best man. And you will discover the ultimate secret...! Read the book, enjoy it and you will survive as a speaker. Follow it and you will thrive!