Out of the Box and Into the Future


Book Description

This is a summary report on the Out of the Box Conference held on 26-27 June 2000. This report is a summary of highlights, rather than an analysis. We have divided the conference findings into three categories: Science, Technology and Acquisition; Military Operations; and General Considerations. In many cases, highlights from presentations have been paraphrased.




The Three-Box Solution


Book Description

How to Innovate and Execute Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business—one that is still thriving—while dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it? Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader’s innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization’s energy, time, and resources—in balanced measure—across what he calls “the three boxes”: • Box 1: The present—Manage the core business at peak profitability • Box 2: The past—Abandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation • Box 3: The future—Convert breakthrough ideas into new products and businesses The three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples—GE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Services—and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.




Create the Future + The Innovation Handbook


Book Description

Learn to Innovate and Make Real Change In our era of disruption and possibility, there are so many great opportunities within your grasp; however, most smart and successful people miss out. Unfortunately, your capabilities are limited by the seven traps of path dependency, which cause you to repeat past decisions. These traps can limit you from seeing the potential of what could be. If you could overcome these traps, what could you accomplish? How much more successful could you be? Create the Future teaches you how to think disruptively, providing specific steps to create real innovation and change. This book combines Jeremy's high energy, provocative thinking with tactics that have been battle-tested through thousands of his team's projects advising leading innovators like Disney, Starbucks, Amex, IBM, Adidas, Google, and NASA. On top of all that, this is a double-sided book, paired with The Innovation Handbook, a revised edition of Jeremy's award-winning book, Exploiting Chaos.




Own the Future


Book Description

The world faces social, political, and economic turmoil on an unprecedented scale—along with unsettling levels of turbulence and volatility. Market leadership today is less of a predictor of leadership tomorrow. Therefore, senior executives today must strive to own the future. In Own the Future, The Boston Consulting Group, one of the world’s most prestigious and innovative management consulting firms, offers a roadmap. Drawing on the firm’s experience advising organizations on how to achieve and sustain competitive advantage, this book offers 50 ideas to help readers chart their organization’s path to future leadership. The articles are organized along ten attributes critical to success in the current environment—adaptive, global, connected, sustainable, customer-first, fit to win, value-driven, trusted, bold, and inspiring. The future may be unknowable, but The Boston Consulting Group offers insights from its 50 years of practice on how readers can position their organization to win—to change the game and to own the future.




Think Outside The Building


Book Description

Over a decade ago, renowned innovation expert Rosabeth Moss Kanter co-founded and then directed Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her breakthrough work with hundreds of successful professionals and executives, as well as aspiring young entrepreneurs, identifies the leadership paradigm of the future: the ability to "think outside the building" to overcome establishment paralysis and produce significant innovation for a better world. Kanter provides extraordinary accounts of the successes and near-stumbles of purpose-driven men and women from diverse backgrounds united in their conviction that positive change is possible. A former Trader Joe's executive, for example, navigated across business, government, and community sectors to deal with poor nutrition in inner cities while reducing food waste. A concerned European banker used the power of persuasion, not position, to find novel financing for improving the health of the oceans. A Washington couple enticed global partners to join an Uber-like platform to match skilled refugees with talent-hungry companies. A visionary journalist-turned-entrepreneur closed social divides by giving fifty million social media users access to free local education and culture. When traditional approaches are inadequate or resisted, advanced leadership skills are essential. In this book, Kanter shows how people everywhere can unleash their creativity and entrepreneurial adroitness to mobilize partners across challenging cultural, social, and political situations and innovate for a brighter future.




The Be- Know-Do of Generalship


Book Description

The title of the book says it all. The Be-Know-Do of Generalship. Generalship is possibly one of the most difficult words to define. It is leadership with a difference that demands varied skills from the very basic to the most sophisticated. It is a position of responsibility like none other. It demands making decisions in the most complex environment pregnant with VUCA character. It carries with its position the heavy weight of values and expectations that have come to characterise military leadership since millennium. A General is the face of the system, is always naked and always under scrutiny by soldiers who expect him to be God like. The book is laid out in two parts. Part I, comprising six chapters covers every aspect of Generalship in a ‘self-help’ easy to assimilate style to develop oneself to be an inspiring General relevant for the future. Part II, comprising Chapter VII is an honest and a dispassionate appraisal of the Indian military leadership since independence. It makes a convincing case to address the existing institutional shortcomings with respect to Generalship and their selection in the Indian Army with de-novo recommendations not heard before. This book is a product of the author’s four decades of passion and dedication to the profession of soldiery and the art of military leadership. It is an excellent tutor to BE the General you should be, to KNOW what you should know and to DO what you should do to be future ready and leave a legacy worth remembering. A unique book on the subject, it is a must read for officers of all service groups in any vocation, not only the uniformed services. This book is a ready recipe for those who aspire to lead with a difference.




The Ministry for the Future


Book Description

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green







Objective English, 4/e


Book Description

The fourth edition of Objective English is a comprehensive test-preparation tool that helps the learner to methodically improve their skills for various competitive examinations. This book assists students in recognizing their weaknesses and enables them to eliminate them. Objective English also highlights learner’s strengths in the process. This book activates, stimulates, and accelerates the learning process, while familiarizing the reader with current trends in questions. This carefully structured and easy-to-read course explains the basic rules of English, and prepares students for examinations with the help of near-original test papers of recent examinations conducted by various bodies such as the UPSC, SSC, Banking Services, Railways Recruitment Boards, private corporate organizations, and central and state recruitment bodies. It is also an indispensable aid for preparing for the CDS, NDA, MBA, MCA, BCA, hotel management, law and NIFT/NID entrance examinations.




The Future of Capitalism


Book Description

Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.