There are some fierce new competitors on the block, ready to engage your company, and you personally, in extreme competition. In this riveting new book, Peter Fingar and his colleagues from around the globe sound a penetrating wake-up call to governments, companies, organizations, and individuals alike. Bringing great urgency to the book’s pages, Fingar makes it crystal clear that we are not on the brink of a great transition -- we’ve already crossed the threshold to a new economic world order. With precision, insight and clarity, he reveals the key drivers and new realities of extreme competition that are hidden in plain sight. This thought-provoking book is the definitive guide to winning in the new age of global competition. [Description] [Don't Miss the Wake-Up Call presentation!]

Thomas Friedman's runaway bestseller, The World is Flat, is dangerous.  By what it leaves out, it does nothing more than misinform the American people and our leaders. Aronica and Ramdoo show that the world isn't flat; it's tilted in favor of unfettered global corporations that exploit cheap labor in China, India and beyond. This concise monograph brings clarity to many of Friedman's misconceptions, and explores nine key issues that Friedman largely ignores, including the hollowing out of America's debt-ridden middle class. Refreshingly, you can now gain new insights into globalization without weeding through Friedman's almost 600 pages of ill-informed, grandiloquent prose and bafflegab. (Available in Simplified Chinese).[Read more...]

This fast-paced book is changing how America does business in the twenty-first century. Not since Eliyahu Goldratt's 1984 breakaway book, The Goal (2 million in print), has such an intriguing business message been presented at the intersection of business and entertainment. Garimella separates the hype from the reality, arguing for the new mindset and corporate culture necessary to sustain a true process-oriented organization. Process management can enable innovation, address compliance, increase controllership, manage risk, improve customer-centricity, and ensure agility. He turns the inevitable alphabet soup of terms into a gourmet's delight with true business substance. Required reading for anyone wanting to succeed in the brave new world of total global competition. [Read more...]

What do your customers really want? "More for less," of course! They want more value, more service, more consistent delivery, more accuracy, and ever more responsiveness. And, they want to pay "less" for this "more," along with less hassle, less bureaucracy, and less sales pressure. There's no magic to providing more for less, but it requires a management mindset that's different from the norm --and that's precisely what this book is about. The findings in the 2004-2005 Mindset Study, based on exclusive interviews with frontline executives, went into the making of this book. With clarity and insight, Spanyi has penned the definitive guide for business leaders who are determined to deliver more for less.
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This landmark book heralds a breakthrough that redefines competitive advantage for the next fifty years. Don't bridge the business-IT divide: Obliterate it! The book is the first authoritative analysis of how third-wave business process management (BPM) changes everything in business and what it portends. While the vision of process management is not new, existing theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business processes--until now. This book describes a radical, simplifying shift in process thinking and technology that utterly transforms today's information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution. 
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This is a book about new sources of competitive advantage. It’s about time-based competition, and flawless execution of business strategy. In lieu of growth markets, and faced with growing uncertainty and global competition, companies must  change, or their competitors who reinvent the way they work will run circles around them. Why is it that, given two companies with approximately the same assets and number of skilled employees, they achieve completely different results? One struggles; the other grows profits. From where do those profits come? It’s about how work gets done, how companies do what they do. Though that may, at first glance, sound a little boring, Operational Transformation is the next frontier of business advantage. 
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We are now witnessing a grand globalization of white collar work, outsourcing, offshoring and other new forms of extreme competition. Industry and national  boundaries have become a blur. All is changed, and no industry is exempt. Pioneering companies have already disrupted incumbents and come from nowhere to dominate their industries. Their secret sauce? Business process management (BPM). This book brings together some of the best minds to explore the role and value of BPM, and what it portends. In its pages you will find the essential discussions and insights, straight from the thought leaders. In Search of BPM Excellence is for those who want to sustain the success of their businesses in the midst of the current sea of change. Is your company ready for extreme competition?
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British Computer Society Fellow, Martyn Ould, has written the groundbreaking book about a pioneering BPM approach and method. It provides a rigorous way of understanding the mass of concurrent, collaborative activity that goes on within an organization, giving you a solid basis for developing IT systems that actually support your business processes. It is about modelling organizational behavior in a way that is revealing and communicative, showing exactly what processes there are and how they interact. The architecture is derived from an understanding of what business the organization is in, rather than its current structure or culture. 
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Despite advances in business automation over the past fifty years, the heart and soul of every organization is still its people—without whom the organization will stop dead in its tracks. Yet there is presently no complete way to manage the complex, continually changing work processes carried out by humans—and current work support technologies treat people as if they were cogs in a machine. Frankly, we need to do better. This landmark book combines insights drawn from biology, psychology, social sys-tems theory, and learning theory with a deep understanding of business process analysis to form a complete theory of human work. ...
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You’ve no doubt seen or heard talk of "IT Doesn’t Matter" in the May 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review. It’s one of those rare pieces of Harvard-speak that will be heard around the world. As Information Week reported, "Carr’s unshakable belief [that IT is now a commodity] leads him to a conclusion that’s no doubt provocative, but also profoundly short sighted and dangerous." Has IT has reached the Winter of its life? Or is it Springtime, the season of growth for forward-thinking companies like GE, Dell, Wal-Mart and others determined to dominate their industries in the decade ahead? Read Smith & Fingar's critical analysis, and you decide. 
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The world's leading companies now look outward to emphasize a deep understanding of their customers, and what it takes to make their customers successful.  These leading companies are intent on achieving Successful Customer Outcomes, everywhere, all the time. Thrive! discloses how you can learn and deploy these new ideas --immediately. This concise monograph is about realigning your organization for dramatic and immediate results in order to maintain your competitive edge in the new world of total global competition. Towers and McGregor show how you can hone your priorities and strategies by shifting from the old way, with its bear traps and cul-de-sacs, to the new mindset needed in the Age of the Customer. You will never think about business in the same way again.  
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Seemingly simple ideas are often the most powerful, and the hardest to uncover. In the 20th century, it was Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives. In the 21st century, it's Management by Expectation.  Schurter reveals the simple, yet powerful, idea of defining your business, not in terms of the goods and services you provide, but in terms of "customer expectations."  Providing clear and actionable guidelines, along with examples from FedEx, Virgin Mobile, Best Buy and a budget airline, he explains what companies can do to increase the customer pipeline, convert higher percentages of that pipeline to profitability, and extend the duration of the customer relationship where profitability is at its peak.
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