Breakthrough Marketing Plans: How to Stop Wasting Time and Start Driving Growth

by Tim Calkins (MBA ’91)
(Palgrave Macmillan)

Most marketing plans are a waste of time — too long, complicated, and dense — and end up unread and unrealized. This book provides simple, clear frameworks for marketing plans that are easy to apply. It highlights why marketing plans matter and where they go wrong and explains how to create a powerful plan that will help build a strong, profitable business.

More than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer

by Mark Albion (PhDBE, 1981)
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

This consciousness-raising book asks business students, who are usually risk-averse, to look at risk in a new way. It argues that choices they think are “safe” (lucrative jobs taken only for financial gain, service to others deferred until retirement) are actually quite risky, for they lead people to “sell their souls.” Albion helps MBA students give themselves “permission” to be who they really want to be.

The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs

by Charles D. Ellis (MBA ’63)
(Penguin Press)

Now a bank holding company, Goldman Sachs was, until recently, the most profitable and powerful investment bank in the world. Ellis, a strategy consultant to Goldman Sachs for over thirty years, explains how it rose to leadership in the United States and abroad, made many partners great fortunes, and became a leader in IPOs, M&A, bond dealing, stockbrokerage, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity, and real estate.

KFC in China: Secret Recipe for Success

by Warren Liu (MBA ’81)
(Wiley)

Liu examines the major factors that catapulted KFC to the top of the Chinese restaurant- service industry in less than two decades. He focuses on KFC China’s competitive advantages and how they jelled to support a coherent business strategy. The successful execution of this strategy has made KFC China the industry leader in growth, profitability, market share, and brand recognition in the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Megacommunities: How Leaders of Government, Business and Non-Profits Can Tackle Today’s Global Challenges Together

by Reginald Van Lee (MBA ’84), Fernando Napolitano (AMP 157, 1999), and others
(Palgrave Macmillan)

Based on interviews with over 100 leaders from around the world, this book introduces a new framework for solving today’s thorniest problems — hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and global warming, for example — that are too large for any one authority to tackle. The increasingly globalized and interconnected world calls for trisector leadership, in which business, government, and nonprofits collaborate in a state of permanent negotiation.

Managing the Dragon: How I’m Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China

by Jack Perkowski (MBA ’73)
(Crown Business)

Perkowski went to China in the early 1990s and built ASIMCO Technologies from the ground up to become a major player in the country’s fast-growing automotive business. A rich source of practical wisdom about the realities of China today, this book presents Perkowski’s insights about the challenges and potential of Western involvement in the country’s great expansion.

Turn Strategy into Action: Strategic Project Management Tools for Leaders and Teams

by Terry Schmidt (MBA ’71)
(Strategic Mastery Press)

Fortune magazine estimates that 75 percent of all strategies and projects fail; this book offers a proven system to ensure being among the 25 percent that succeed. It provides interactive analytical tools and a step-by-step process to help knowledge workers of all types successfully plan and execute their most critical projects. This flexible system avoids the activity/budget focus of traditional project planning and increases managers’ ability to achieve big-picture strategic objectives.

How the Wise Decide: The Lessons of 21 Extraordinary Leaders

by Bryn Zeckhauser (MBA ’01) and Aaron Sandoski (MBA ’04)
(Crown Business)

The authors talked with 21 extraordinary leaders — people like Steve Schwarzman (MBA ’72) and Pete Peterson, founders of the Blackstone Group, HBS professor Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, and inventor Dean Kamen (OPM 7, 1982) — to discover how these individuals with remarkable success and experience in both corporate and public life went about making crucial, often make-or-break decisions. The book presents lessons distilled from these conversations.

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