John Butman – författare

If you're like most people, you bet your career and company on innovation--because you must. Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation offers you a new way to think about and manage innovation that will dramatically improve the odds of success. Authors James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, senior partners in The Boston Consulting Group, describe an approach to managing innovation based on the concept of a cash curve--which tracks investment against time. They ask the questions you need to ask: How much should you invest in a new product or service? How fast should you push it to market? How quickly can you get to optimal value? How much additional investment should you pour into sustaining and building the product or service? Payback offers you practical and economically sound advice on when to pursue cash flow indirectly by first pursuing other benefits, such as brand and knowledge. It also shows you how to reshape the cash curve by using different business models--integrator, orchestrator, and licenser--each of which balances risk and reward differently.The authors then present a short list of decisions and activities that you must make--not delegate--to achieve a high return on innovation. You won't find facile answers in Payback--but you will find valuable insights and practical guidance for mastering one of the most challenging and critical business activities: innovation.

It's easy to miss many innovations in strategy until they appear on the front page of a major business publication. But by then everyone--including all your competitors--is using them. As a CEO or senior executive, your job is to detect these strategies?and implement them--before your competitors. That's where this book comes in. Author George Stalk has often been called a guru of business strategy. In the 1980s, before anyone else saw its importance, he and his colleagues at The Boston Consulting Group developed the concept of time-based competition: how meeting the needs of your customers faster than your competitors can give you an unassailable advantage. In this Memo to the CEO, Stalk discusses five strategies that have not yet become widely practiced but are nonetheless worthy of your attention now. He offers advice on how to identify and manage them while they still present opportunities to jump ahead of the competition. They are: Addressing supply chain deficiencies One example of a supply chain crisis is the growing lack of West Coast port capacity. Stalk reviews the strategic implications of this problem, reveals its impact, and recommends specific courses of action.Sidestepping economies of scale Many business leaders are reexamining their assumptions about the benefits of scale. Scaling down, not up, and building "disposable factories" and even "disposable strategies" are becoming new keys to lowering costs and boosting performance. Profiting from dynamic pricing Today, using real-time data, it is increasingly possible to match the price of your product or service with the immediate, second-by-second needs of the customer. Embracing complexity Simplicity is the mantra of the day. But with examples from a few leading-edge companies, Stalk shows that embracing complexity can achieve competitive advantage. Utilizing infinite bandwidth In a world of infinite bandwidth, companies that know how to take advantage of it become more productive, efficient, and profitable, and create entirely new businesses along the way. Written in a refreshingly clear, concise format, Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now is filled with actionable ideas for seizing these emerging strategic opportunities.

How do you gain influence for an idea? In Breaking Out, idea developer and adviser John Butman shows how the methods of today's most popular "idea entrepreneurs"--including dog psychologist Cesar Millan, French lifestyle guru Mireille Guiliano (French Women Don't Get Fat), TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and many others--can help you take an idea public and build influence for it. It isn't easy. Butman argues that the rise of the "ideaplex" (TED, Twitter, NPR, YouTube, online learning, and all the rest) has caused such an explosion in the creation and sharing of ideas that it has become much easier to go public--yet much harder to gain influence. But it can be done. Based on his own experience in advising content experts worldwide, Butman shows how the idea entrepreneur breaks out--by combining personal narrative with rich content, creating many forms of expression (from books to live events), developing real-world practices, and creating "respiration" around the idea such that other people can breathe it in and make it their own. The resulting idea platform can reach many different audience groups and continue to build influence for many years and even decades.If you have an idea and want to make a difference in your organization, build a change movement in your community, or improve the world in some way--this book will get you started on the journey to idea entrepreneurship.

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they don't have it. Start-ups shut down if they can't develop it. "It" is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mindset so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage--they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair. In their "hardball manifesto," authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer of the leading strategy consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group show how hardball competitors can build or maintain an enviable competitive edge by pursuing one or more of the classic "hardball strategies": unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, devastate profit sanctuaries, raise competitors' costs, and break compromises. Based on 25 years of experience advising and observing a range of companies, the authors argue that hardball competitors can gain extreme competitive advantage--neutralizing, marginalizing, or even destroying competitors--without violating their contracts with customers or employees and without breaking the rules.A clear-eyed paean to the timeless strategies that have driven the world's winning companies, Hardball Strategy redefines and reinterprets the meaning of competition for a new generation of business players. George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer are directors of The Boston Consulting Group. Stalk is the author of Competing Against Time, the classic work on time-based competition.