The McKinsey Edge: Success Principles from the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm


Book Description

47 strategies elite managers follow to reach the highest level of success The McKinsey Edge culls the personal best practices of an exclusive group of managers connected to McKinsey & Company, a firm that services eighty percent of the world’s largest corporations. Through a wealth of 47 rigorously selected, battle-tested, immediately implementable, and practical tips, readers discover the secrets to building the self, growing with others, enhancing process management, and going the extra mile to reach the next leadership horizon. Everyone struggling to accelerate their career will keep this book at their fingertips for its rare, real-world advice for ascending through the levels of management—all of which require specific mindsets and capabilities that only a handful of people ever master.




The Firm


Book Description

Star financial journalist Duff McDonald uncovers how the managing consulting firm of McKinsey & Company and its high-powered, high-priced business savants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological shifts to the biggest and best American organizations, revealing a list of world-shaping successes and striking failures.




The McKinsey Edge


Book Description




The McKinsey Way


Book Description

"If more business books were as useful, concise, and just plain fun to read as THE MCKINSEY WAY, the business world would be a better place." --Julie Bick, best-selling author of ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW IN BUSINESS I LEARNED AT MICROSOFT. "Enlivened by witty anecdotes, THE MCKINSEY WAY contains valuable lessons on widely diverse topics such as marketing, interviewing, team-building, and brainstorming." --Paul H. Zipkin, Vice-Dean, The Fuqua School of Business It's been called "a breeding ground for gurus." McKinsey & Company is the gold-standard consulting firm whose alumni include titans such as "In Search of Excellence" author Tom Peters, Harvey Golub of American Express, and Japan's Kenichi Ohmae. When Fortune 100 corporations are stymied, it's the "McKinsey-ites" whom they call for help. In THE MCKINSEY WAY, former McKinsey associate Ethan Rasiel lifts the veil to show you how the secretive McKinsey works its magic, and helps you emulate the firm's well-honed practices in problem solving, communication, and management. He shows you how McKinsey-ites think about business problems and how they work at solving them, explaining the way McKinsey approaches every aspect of a task: How McKinsey recruits and molds its elite consultants; How to "sell without selling"; How to use facts, not fear them; Techniques to jump-start research and make brainstorming more productive; How to build and keep a team at the top its game; Powerful presentation methods, including the famous waterfall chart, rarely seen outside McKinsey; How to get ultimate "buy-in" to your findings; Survival tips for working in high-pressure organizations. Both a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most admired and secretive companies in the business world and a toolkit of problem-solving techniques without peer, THE MCKINSEY WAY is fascinating reading that empowers every business decision maker to become a better strategic player in any organization.




The McKinsey Engagement: A Powerful Toolkit For More Efficient and Effective Team Problem Solving


Book Description

The third volume in the internationally bestselling McKinsey Trilogy, The McKinsey Engagement is an action guide to realizing the consistently high level of business solutions achieved by the experts at the world’s most respected consultingfirms. Former consultant Dr. Paul Friga distills the guiding principles first presented in the bestselling The McKinsey Way and the tested-in-the-trenches methodologies outlined in The McKinsey Mind, and combines them with many of the principles and procedures implemented by the military and other organizations. The result is nothing less than the business equivalent of a Special Forces Field Manual. True to its stated goal of arming consultants and corporate problem solvers with a blueprint for achieving consistently phenomenal results, The McKinsey Engagement is short on theory and long on action. Each chapter focuses on one element in the celebrated TEAM FOCUS problem-solving model and features a concise discussion of a key concept or principle, followed by: Clear rules of engagement A set of operating tactics Sophisticated problem solving tools Easy-to-follow action steps Exercises, checklists, and training tips War stories and best practices case studies A toolkit for bringing clarity, discipline, and purpose to all your problem-solving and change management initiatives, The McKinsey Engagement is an indispensable guide for consultants, as well as for executives, managers, students, and corporate trainers.




IBM Lotus Connections 2.5


Book Description

The Practical, Complete Guide to Leveraging the Power of Social Networks with Lotus Connections 2.5 The first book to cover the newest version of the breakthrough product from IBM: Lotus Connections 2.5. This book includes practical techniques for building dynamic networks of coworkers, partners, and customers that promote innovation, business agility, and authoritative guidance for business and technical planning, deployment, integration, and much more. Social networking is the newest frontier in business collaboration, and IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 gives businesses the tools they need to make the most of it–easily, securely, and cost-effectively. In this book, a team of IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 experts thoroughly introduces the newest product and covers every facet of planning, deploying, and using it successfully. The authors cover business and technical issues and present IBM’s proven, best-practices methodology for successful implementation. The authors begin by helping managers and technical professionals identify opportunities to use social networking for competitive advantage–and by explaining how Lotus Connections 2.5 places full-fledged social networking tools at their fingertips. IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 carefully describes each component of the product–including profiles, activities, blogs, communities, easy social bookmarking, personal home pages, and more. The book contains practical coverage of administering Lotus Connections 2.5 and detailed guidance of integrating and extending Lotus Connections 2.5.




What It Takes


Book Description

Expert insights on what sets the great professional firms apart from all the rest Having devoted a career that spans fifty years to consulting with and studying professional firms in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, author Charles Ellis learned firsthand how difficult it is for an organization to go beyond very good and attain, as well as sustain, excellence. Now, he shares his hard-won insights with you and reveals "what it takes" to be best-in-class in any industry. Enlightening and entertaining, What It Takes explores firms that are leaders in their particular field and the superior people who create and maintain them. Along the way, it identifies the secrets of their long-term success and reveals exactly how they can put your organization in a better position to excel when properly executed. Contains many stories of achieving excellence, and addresses the obstacles that top-ranking organizations face in sustaining it Includes insights on leaders in their particular field—from McKinsey & Company in consulting and Cravath, Swaine & Moore in law to the Mayo Clinic in healthcare Written by one of the most experienced and respected business consultants/advisors of our time What It Takes skillfully shows you how innovation and a commitment to excellence can drive success, while also revealing how easy it is to fall behind. With it, you'll discover what separates the great firms from the good ones and learn how to attain, and maintain, organizational success throughout the years.




The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy


Book Description

A collection of the best thinking from one of the most innovative management consulting firms in the world For more than forty years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside: "You have to be the scientist of your own life and be astonished four times:at what is, what always has been, what once was, and what could be." "The majority of products in most companies are cash traps . . . .[They] are not only worthless, but a perpetual drain on corporate resources." "Use more debt than your competition or get out of the business." "When information flows freely, reputation, more than reciprocity,becomes the basis for trust." "As a strategic weapon, time is the equivalent of money, productivity,quality, even innovation." "When brands become business systems, brand management becomes far too important to leave to the marketing department." "The winning organization of the future will look more like a collection ofjazz ensembles than a symphony orchestra." "Most of our organizations today derive from a model whose original purpose was to control creativity." "Rather than being an obstacle, uncertainty is the very engine of transformation in a business, a continuous source of new opportunities." "IP assets lack clear property lines. Every bit of intellectual property you can own comes with connections to other valuable innovations."




Entrepreneurship as Experience


Book Description

Do entrepreneurs create ventures or do venture experiences create entrepreneurs? The authors of Entrepreneurship as Experience propose that the answer is 'both'. This important volume examines how individuals experience the creation of a venture as it happens and how that experience determines the types of entrepreneur and venture that ultimately emerge. In essence, entrepreneurship is an experience consisting of large numbers of key events such as a first sale, hiring a first employee, losing a big account events that are processed and made sense of by the entrepreneur. They produce cognitive, emotional and physiological responses, which impact decision-making and behavior. The result is an experience that is purposive, diverse, uncertain, ambiguous and transformative and unique to each individual. Here, the authors argue that as experience unfolds both entrepreneur and venture are being constructed and emerge in unique forms. This experiential view introduces an entirely new lens through which entrepreneurship can be examined. Entrepreneurship as Experience comprises chapters dedicated to sociological, anthropological and psychological research related to human experiencing; the volume presents a new frame for understanding the role of emotions and feelings in venture creation and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how real-time experiencing informs the entrepreneurial process. New insights are provided regarding how the entrepreneurial mindset and an entrepreneurial identity are formed, and why entrepreneurs take on certain traits and develop certain competencies. Further, the authors put forth new approaches to conducting research on the entrepreneurial experience. Students advanced as well as undergraduate and scholars of entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy and management will find themselves turning often to the ideas and research presented here.




Leading Organizations


Book Description

The guide for all leaders and senior managers, offering the answers to critical questions on organizational design and management. Every year, over 10,000 business books are published-and that's before you add in the hundreds of thousands of articles, blogs, and video lectures that are produced. Leaders can't possibly hope to digest it all, and writers increasingly sensationalize and spin their ideas in order to be noticed. The result? Put quite simply, the field of management thinking is in danger of losing the plot. In this new book, Scott Keller and Mary Meaney-Senior Partners at McKinsey & Company, the world's preeminent management consultancy-cut to the chase by answering the 10 most important and timeless questions that every leader needs to answer in order to maximize the performance and health of their organization. What's more, the authors recognize that great leaders may not have time for long-winded business books. In Leading Organizations, answers are kept to the essentials-hard facts, counter-intuitive insights, and practical steps-all presented in an accessible and highly visual format. If there's one essential business book you should read-ever-it's this one.




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