You know your organization needs to change. You may even know what the change needs to be: a new strategy, a new IT system, an acquisition or reorganization. But somehow, change comes too slowly, or it feels like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill, or the implementation of hat great new idea has stalled – again.

What’s missing? As change expert John Kotter shows in this book, what’s missing, and is needed in almost all organizations today, is a real sense of urgency – a distinctive attitude and gut-level feeling that lead people to grab opportunities and avoid hazards, to make something important happen today, and constantly shed low-priority activities to move faster and smarter, now.

Kotter knows about urgency. “Raising urgency” is the first step in his enormously successful eight-step framework, first articulated in Leading Change. But as Kotter illustrates, increasing urgency is the toughest of the eight steps, and the one without which even the most brilliant, high-powered initiatives will sputter and die.  More important, as we transition to a world where change is continuous – not just episodic – he shows how urgency must become a core, sustained capability.

Kotter provides key tactics for increasing urgency, as well as exposing and rooting out complacency, with chapters on:
Bringing the outside in:

• Behaving with urgency everyday
• Finding opportunity in crises
• Dealing with “NoNos” or naysayers

In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area - not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans. It doesn't have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations, the authors describe a multistage system that enables you to gain measurable benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy. This book shows you how to:

• Develop an effective strategy - with tools such as SWOT analysis, vision formulation, and strategic change agendas
• Plan execution of the strategy - through portfolios of strategic initiatives linked to strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards
• Put your strategy into action - by integrating operational tools such as process dashboards, rolling forecasts, and activity-based costing

For the past two decades, Michael Porter’s work has towered over the field of competitive strategy. On Competition, Updated and Expanded Edition, brings together Porter’s most influential work, including a major revision of the strategy classic, “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy.” There is also important new work on health care, corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, and leadership.

Porter’s unique ability to bridge theory and practice has made these articles essential reading for business leaders, nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and academics. His ideas about competition and value creation continue to set the agenda in multiple fields.

Porter has addressed an ever-widening circle of questions: How do companies compete in a particular business? What are the principles of strategy for multibusiness entities? How do regions and nations compete, and in what ways does location really matter for strategy? How do changes like globalization and the Internet impact the dynamics of competition? How can companies link strategy with social issues? How can strategic thinking transform society as a whole in fields such as philanthropy and health care?

This collection is organized by topic, allowing easy access to the wide range of Porter’s work.

• Part I addresses how companies gain and sustain competitive advantage, including the core strategy concepts for which Porter is best known: the five forces, the value chain, and strategic positioning.
• Part II reveals how regions and nations compete, and the role played by clusters and Porter’s “diamond theory” in explaining the competitiveness of locations.
• Part III shows how strategic thinking can address society’s most pressing challenges, from environmental sustainability to improving patient value in health care. Porter points the way to an integration of social and economic policy, realms that traditionally have been in conflict.
• Part IV lays out how both nonprofits and corporations can create value for society more effectively by applying strategy to philanthropy.