The Purpose Advantage


Book Description

In today's noisy market where people have instant access to nearly everything, quality products and services are no longer enough to differentiate your company or organization--your brand-- from the competition. What a brand stands for, and the actions it takes to prove it, can provide a necessary memorability consumers draw on when they make purchasing decisions. From interviews with CEOs from some of the most purpose-driven brands today, to a step-by-step workshop on finding your own brand's reason for existing beyond profit, The Purpose Advantage explores how standing for something more than just the bottomline is a powerful way to connect to modern consumers--building brand love and loyalty in the process.




The Purpose Revolution


Book Description

Discover the Purpose Advantage! Customers, employees, and investors are no longer satisfied with companies providing good products, good prospects, and good profits—they want them to do some social good, too. These “purpose-driven” companies do better on nearly every traditional metric: greater customer loyalty, higher retention, more innovation, and a healthier bottom line. But a nice mission statement and donations to charity won't make your company stand out. Using scores of real-world examples and practical exercises, John Izzo and Jeff Vanderwielen help leaders find a truly authentic purpose, one that is a natural fit for them and their organization. They describe concrete actions leaders can take to ensure that employees own it, customers and recruits connect with it, and every corporate action and activity reflects it.




The Unfair Advantage


Book Description

The winner of the UK's Business Book of the Year Award for 2021, this is a groundbreaking exposé of the myths behind startup success and a blueprint for harnessing the things that really matter. What is the difference between a startup that makes it, and one that crashes and burns? Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. But an Unfair Advantage is not just about your parents' wealth or who you know: anyone can have one. An Unfair Advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition. This groundbreaking book shows how to identify your own Unfair Advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba offer a unique framework for assessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths. Hard work and grit aren't enough, so they explore the importance of money, intelligence, location, education, expertise, status, and luck in the journey to success. From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds, and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn't realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.




The Advantage


Book Description

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.




Purpose, Incorporated


Book Description

Too many working professionals still subscribe to the old Milton-Friedman logic that "businesses' sole purpose is to generate profit for shareholders." In this revolutionary book, authors John Wood and Amalia McGibbon show once and for all that cause is not the enemy of commercialism, but perhaps the new key to it. Based on over 100 interviews with entrepreneurs, executives and front-line staff, Wood and McGibbon provide a breath-taking tour of this new and inspiring world. You'll learn from mom-and-pop shops and corporate giants like Google and Goldman Sachs why corporate social responsibility is more than just a buzzword or publicity stunt, but instead represents the new competitive advantage. You'll learn how to: - win the war for talent - create a compelling bond with customers - motivate employees - reduce attrition - appease the regulators - and create a positive buzz on social media Purpose Incorporated is a "permission slip" to those businesspeople who want to have a positive impact on the world, but worry the corner office or cubicle isn't the place for it.




The End of Competitive Advantage


Book Description

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.




Positioning for Advantage


Book Description

Most of us have an intuitive sense of superior branding. We prefer to purchase brands we find distinctive—that deliver on some important, relevant dimension better than other brands. These brands have typically achieved positional advantage. Yet few professionals have had the formal training that goes beyond marketing theory to bridge the “theory-doing gap”—understanding the specific techniques and strategies that can be used to create brands that attain positional advantage in the marketplace. Positioning for Advantage is a comprehensive how-to guide for creating, building, and executing effective brand strategies. Kimberly A. Whitler identifies essential marketing strategy techniques and moves through the major stages of positioning a brand to achieve in-market advantage. Introducing seven tools—from strategic positioning concepts to strategy mapping to influencer maps—Whitler provides templates, frameworks, and step-by-step processes to build and manage growth brands that achieve positional advantage. This book presents real-world scenarios, helping readers activate tools to increase skill in creating brands that achieve positional advantage. Brimming with insights for students and professionals alike, Positioning for Advantage helps aspiring C-level leaders understand not only what superior branding looks like but also how to make it come to life.




The Advantage of Now


Book Description

God has a purpose for each and every one of his people, and the time to use our gifts is now. The Advantage of Now deals with taking control of those moments that God ordains in our lives to use as fuel for our purpose. Within the pages of this book, you will receive instruction on how to use time as a resource for our purpose, and you will see yourself through the lenses of biblical characters who used their disadvantages for their advantage.




The Adaptation Advantage


Book Description

A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and ambiguous Future of Work Foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman Technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It's undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential—if we can change the way we think about work and leadership. They have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts affecting the workplace have brought us to this crossroads, The result is a powerful and practical guide to the future of work for leaders and employees. The future can be better, but only if we let go of our attachment to our traditional (and disappearing) ideas about careers, and what a "good job" looks like. Blending wisdom from interviews with hundreds of executives, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes happening in the world of work and posits the solution: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title, and connect it to our sense of purpose. Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Only when we let go of our rigid career identities can we embrace and appreciate the joys of learning and adapting to new realities—and help our organizations do the same. Of course, making this transition is hard. It requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety—despite fierce competition and external pressures. Adapting to the future of work has always called for strong leadership. Now, as a pandemic disrupts so many aspects of work, adapting is a leadership imperative. The Adaptation Advantage is an essential guide to help leaders meet that challenge.




The Purposeful Nine and Soulful Advantage


Book Description

"B corporations are a new kind of business that balance purpose and profit. This community of leaders-now numbering over 4,000-is driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good. The inspirational leaders and engaging stories in The Purposeful Nine and Soulful Advantage represent the essence of B Corps because they are stakeholder-driven, always considering the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, community, suppliers, and environment. This book is a recommended read for business leaders focused on taking corporate purpose to an even higher level." -Bart Houlahan Co-Founder and Co-CEO, B Lab The Purposeful Nine and Soulful Advantage is for business leaders driven to catalyze more purpose within their companies and gain competitive advantage. It tells the stories of nine inspiring, purposeful businesses and for-profit social enterprises authentically committed to-and benefitting from-a strategy of making the world a better place. Unlike the majority of books focused on large consumer companies and well-known brands-think Ben & Jerry's, Microsoft, TOMS, Starbucks, Stonyfield Organic, LEGO, Timberland, IKEA, Unilever, Patagonia, Disney, Dove, Google, Warby Parker, etcetera. The Purposeful Nine and Soulful Advantage spotlights a fresh, diverse group of successful organizations that have been authentically purposeful for decades. Each story comes alive through the first-person perspective of the inspiring founders, CEOs, and sustainability leaders who reveal why they became more purposeful, what they did and how it created competitive advantage. Author, strategic communications veteran, and corporate purpose professional Andre Beaupre has captured the behind-the-scenes decisions and actions across a variety of triple bottom line essentials, including mission and values, workplace culture, sustainability, philanthropy, community engagement, social justice, and diversity/equity/inclusion. Measurable benefits experienced by the Purposeful Nine include mission-aligned, high-performance workplace cultures, recruitment and retention gains, new business impact, improved financial results, brand reputation enhancement, increased stakeholder loyalty, and value-driven customer/partner/supplier relationships. Not sure how to grow purpose? This book is brimming with ideas that will inform and inspire you to reach that goal. Business can, and must be, a force for good. By sharing first-person stories from the leaders who made purpose happen, the book will inspire a wide array of organizations to begin-or broaden-their impact.