Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times

by Ram Charan (MBA ’65, DBA ’67)
(McGraw-Hill)

Economic turbulence has arrived with a vengeance, and only companies that face it head-on at the beginning of this worldwide crisis will be the ones left standing once the dust clears. Charan traces the causes of this crisis, identifies the essential priorities managers need to focus on now, and offers clear guidelines for top executives and managers.

Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition

by Adam Hartung (MBA ’82)
(FT Press)

Companies that cannot change in response to market disruptions die. Other companies that respond eventually survive but see their profits squeezed, their growth flattened. The long-term winners are companies that create their own disruptions and thrive on change. Hartung shows how to become one of the winning companies: how to attack competitors’ lock-ins, make their success formulas obsolete, and create the space needed to invent formulas for success. He shows how disrupting your company is critical to reaping the benefits of market changes.

Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing — Yours Doesn’t Have To

by Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever (MBA ’88)
(Yale University Press)

The authors analyzed the growth experiences of more than 600 Fortune 100 companies over the past fifty years to identify why growth stalls. The top four reasons: premium position captivity, innovation management breakdown, premature core abandonment, and talent shortfall. The book includes methods for articulating and monitoring strategic assumptions and ends with a self-test built around fifty signs of an impending growth stall.

Negotiating with Giants: Get What You Want against the Odds

by Peter D. Johnston (MBA ’90)
(Negotiation Press)

How do you negotiate with Wal-Mart or with an intimidating boss about an ethical issue? How do you negotiate a capital infusion for a struggling start-up or better health care for your family? Johnston gives surprising answers to these questions, presenting unique strategies and concrete steps useful for handling the growing number of giants in our personal and professional lives.

The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs

by Karen Page (MBA ’89) and Andrew Dornenburg
(Little, Brown & Co.)

This guide to creating delicious dishes contains tips, anecdotes, and signature dishes from the most imaginative chefs in the country. Thousands of ingredient entries, organized alphabetically and cross-referenced, provide a wealth of flavor combinations that will teach readers to use ingredients more effectively, experiment with temperature and texture, excite the nose and palate, and balance all elements of an extraordinary meal.

Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen

by Michael A. Roberto (MBA ’95, DBA ’00)
(Wharton School Publishing)

The most dangerous problems are those you don’t know about. Roberto presents seven skill sets useful for uncovering such problems: how to get past dangerous information “filtering”; watch how people behave, not what they say; pick meaningful patterns out of raw data; encourage smarter risk-taking and “useful failures”; build a culture that welcomes challenges to conventional wisdom; draw crucial lessons from your organization’s “game film”; and get your team to act on what you’ve learned.

Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and How Great Companies Can Catch Up and Win

by Steven J. Spear (DBA ’99)
(McGraw-Hill)

Spear finds that the internal operations of such market leaders as Toyota, Alcoa, and top-tier teaching hospitals have one thing in common: the skillful management of complex internal systems to generate constant, almost automatic self-improvement, resulting in levels of profitability, quality, efficiency, and reliability unmatched by rivals. The book shows how to build and manage such a system of dynamic discovery.

The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By

by Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, and Kate Sweetman (MBA ’88)
(Harvard Business Press)

Faced with thousands of studies, theories, frameworks, tools, and best practices in the discipline of leadership — an enormous, confusing body of knowledge — how does one learn to become a better leader? To find the essentials of great leadership, the authors talked to experienced executives, academics, leadership researchers, and consultants, asking them “What makes an effective leader?” They identify five things that all great leaders do.

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