Business & Economics

Negotiation is not a zero-sum game. It’s an essential skill for your career that can also improve your closest relationships and your everyday life. Still, people often shy away from it, feeling defeated before they’ve even started. In this groundbreaking new book on negotiation, Alexandra Carter—Columbia law professor and mediation expert who has helped students, business professionals, the United Nations, and more—offers a straightforward accessible approach anyone can use to ask for and receive more.

We’ve been taught incorrectly that the loudest and most assertive voice prevails in any negotiation, or otherwise, both sides compromise, ending up with less. Instead, Carter shows that you get far more value by asking the right questions of the person you’re negotiating with than you do from arguing with them. She offers a simple yet powerful ten-question framework for successful negotiation where both sides emerge victorious. Carter’s proven method extends far beyond one “yes” and instead creates value that lasts a lifetime.

Why do some businesses thrive while many more struggle? In this age of disruption, a key reason is the failure of many leaders to realign all the moving parts of their enterprise, including its business strategy and how it is organised, to best support its enduring purpose. Thousands of enterprises globally are operating below their potential simply because they are not well aligned or fail to realign to reflect the new realities of their changing business environment. This book aims to change that.

This book is about strategic realignment, a leadership process to overcome disruption and secure high performance on a sustainable basis. Given that change is a constant and disruption to the business environment ever more likely, strategic realignment must become a core competency in order that all enterprises and leaders can succeed in the future. Most executives recognise this but lack a robust system of thought to execute strategic realignment effectively and realise its full benefits. But once mastered, strategic realignment offers a means of turning disruption into an advantage.

In Re:Align, Jonathan Trevor provides a blueprint to help leaders ask good questions, have better conversations and make the best possible choices to realign their enterprise to be fit for purpose. Drawing upon active research at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School (with contributions from the joint works of Dr Jonathan Trevor and Dr Barry Varcoe), the book also provides practical case studies and evidence-based insights. Re:Align offers both a thoughtful and compelling message as well as an effective toolkit to help leaders everywhere to overcome disruption and improve enterprise performance.

Businesses everywhere are plagued by managers who seem to think that keeping their staff miserable is the best way to deliver profits. This is a failure of leadership that also hurts the bottom line; research has shown that maintaining a happy, engaged workforce consistently drives measurably better business results across the board.

In When They Win, You Win, Russ Laraway, the Chief People Officer of Goodwater Capital, provides a simple, coherent, and complete leadership standard that teaches organizational planners and managers how to develop incredible levels of employee engagement. The book identifies three key elements: clear direction-setting, frequent coaching, and active engagement with employees on their long-term career goals.

Russ Laraway’s approach to management, developed at Google, Twitter, Qualtrics, and Goodwater, shows the way to cultivate a happy, productive, and engaged team. Happy results are sure to follow―for you, your customers, your shareholders, and your employees alike.

Leading companies invest a lot of resources into competitive intelligence, so why are they still caught off guard by the actions and reactions of their competitors?

In Inside the Competitor’s Mindset, John Horn shares proven techniques to help businesses think like the competition and understand why they act the way they do. The keys to unlocking this mindset are cognitive empathy and a strategic approach to competitive insight that focuses on the “why” of a competitor’s move, and not just on “what happened.”

Inside the Competitor’s Mindset presents a systematic approach to competitive intelligence that starts with three frameworks to get inside the competitor’s mindset, predict their reactions to your moves, and assess whether the competition is getting ready for a spontaneous move of their own. Horn also demonstrates the importance of collecting forward-looking, predictive data; explains how to use war games, Black Hat exercises, mock negotiations, and premortems to build competitive insight; and makes the case for creating a dedicated competitive insight function within the organization.

When every move matters, staying a step ahead of the competition is critical. Inside the Competitor’s Mindset prepares leaders from any industry to be ready when it is time to act (and react) in the competitive market.