Business Forecasting

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Research. Together, they outline an innovative plan that urges businesses to create disruption rather than fleeing from it. Named one of 2003's Best Business Books by Business Week, this book is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best seller.

7 Powers breaks fresh ground by constructing a comprehensive strategy toolset that is easy for you to learn, communicate, and quickly apply. Drawing on his decades of experience as a business strategy adviser, active equity investor and Stanford University teacher Hamilton Helmer develops from first principles a practical theory of strategy rooted in the notion of power, those conditions which create the potential for persistent differential returns. Using rich real-world examples, Helmer rigorously characterizes exactly what your business must achieve to create power.

Seeing What's Next is a framework for predicting industry winners and losers. Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and can lead to costly errors in judgment. Internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth, present this guide for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry.

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Every time we choose a route to work, decide whether to go on a second date, or set aside money for a rainy day, we are making a prediction about the future. Yet from the global financial crisis to 9/11 to the Fukushima disaster, we often fail to foresee hugely significant events. In The Signal and the Noise, the New York Times' political forecaster and statistics guru Nate Silver explores the art of prediction, revealing how we can all build a better crystal ball.

In their eagerly awaited book, Kim and Spear bring to light a new theory of high-achieving organizations. They examine how companies solve the most important problems better, faster, and easier than their competitors by quickly and regularly closing the gap between aspirations and real-world success. This book teaches companies that are struggling to perform how to achieve the continual greatness seen in the best of the best.

What if strategy could instead be clear, simple, bold, and even actually useful? That’s what No Bullsh*t Strategy is all about. It sweeps away all the garbled corporate nonsense and dry academic theorising to leave you with pure strategic sauce, which can be actioned right away. It’ll make you see your business in a totally new light, and effortlessly unlock insights you didn’t know you had in you. Even better, it makes strategy fun.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

Pattern Breakers had its roots in the time when Mike Maples, a seasoned venture capitalist, was stumped, unable to get a grip on why some businesses he funded—Twitter, Twitch, and Okta, for example—took off, while others, some deemed “most likely to succeed,” shut their doors despite doing everything right. Was it dumb luck that separated gold from dross?

Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into 19 languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.

You don't have to be a 23-year-old dancer with no savings to end up with the excruciating debts young Iris is confronted with in this latest work by financial and legal advisor Tad Crawford. Every year, thousands of Americans of all ages and backgrounds overtax their bank accounts and credit cards and are left with the tricky task of pulling themselves out of their financial chaos. Rarely can they receive such high-quality financial and moral support as The Money Mentor provides.

What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment?

Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja.

Empty shelves, queues for petrol and energy shortages: crises more familiar to those who lived through the 1960s and 1970s have now become a reality as global shipping times are squeezed, containers lie unopened at docks and supply shortages push up inflation, increasing the cost of consumer goods from milk to cars to building materials. In Sold Out!, economic forecaster James Rickards (The Road to Ruin, The Death of Money) explains why the shelves are empty, who fractured the supply chain and why shortages will persist.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into activities, or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

Africa's Business Revolution provides the inside story on business in Africa and its future growth prospects and helps executives understand and seize the opportunities for building profitable, sustainable enterprises.

A breakthrough solution is exposed when some unexpected events force Caroline and Paul, a married couple working for their family's retail business, to make a few small changes in the way things are done. A solution that propels the family's regional chain of stores into a very profitable, rapidly growing, international enterprise. If there is a hint of Jonah, from The Goal, reappearing in this novel, it is Henry, the soon-to-retire president and majority owner of the company who logically states that, "if you do not deal directly with the core problem, don't expect significant improvement."

In his most practical book to date, financial expert and investment advisor James Rickards shows how and why our financial markets are being artificially inflated and what smart investors can do to protect their assets. What goes up must come down. As any student of financial history knows, the dizzying heights of the stock market can't continue indefinitely. In turbulent times, the elites are prepared but what should the average investor do? James Rickards lays out the true risks to our financial system and offers invaluable advice on how best to weather the storm.

In their book Abundance, best-selling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the best-selling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next 10 years of rapid technological disruption.

When we think about the future, it can be difficult to feel that we have any control. We aren't confident that we can take actions and make decisions that help determine what happens next. We want to feel prepared, hopeful and equipped and to face the future with optimism. Or, better yet, change the future. But how do we map out our lives when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year? Jane McGonigal, a renowned future forecaster, reveals that 'unimaginable' events aren't unimaginable before they happen.