Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth

A fascinating insight into how professionals and businesses can develop their foresight and strategy to ensure that they are prepared for an unpredictable future.\nBusinesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.\nIn Facing Our Futures, Nikolas Badminton draws upon his decades of experience as a consultant and futurist to provide readers with the skillset and outlook they need to prepare their organization, team and themselves for whatever obstacles the future may hold. CEOs, executive teams, government leaders and policy makers need to gain a broader perspective and a firmer grasp on how their relevant industry, society or community is evolving and changing. Once they have acquired this foresight, they need to then discover how to fully harness it – by strengthening their foundations, forecasting and establishing a resilient and adaptable strategy.\nFacing Our Futures acts as a primer on the value of seeing how bad things can get and the power in imagining these futures. It also provides a proven strategic planning and foresight methodology - the Positive Dystopia Canvas (PDC) - that allows leaders to supercharge their teams to build evocative visions of futures that strengthen planning today.

Business & Money

Badminton, Nikolas

Management & Leadership

Bloomsbury Business

Kick start your creativity and become an even more effective leader by getting outdoors. Here's how to ditch the boardroom and set off on adventures that might just change your thinking and enhance your leadership skills.\nEvery successful business endeavour is born of a unique and innovative idea, and that in turn was born from the creative thinking of the people behind it. Then why is it the case that so many executives, founders and managers fail to actively develop and apply their creativity? The Creativity Factor clarifies how creativity is a key ingredient of effective leadership, before highlighting the strategies and approaches through which you can actively develop and cultivate your creative capabilities – not least of which is moving meetings and team-building exercises out of the office and into the great outdoors!\nRather than being an unchangeable trait, creativity is an ability and skill that we can train and improve. But how do you develop a creative mind-set that will lead to success? Creativity doesn't tend to come from inspired 'flashes', but from sustained periods of thought and effort. Through a combined effort of both the conscious and subconscious mind, much easier to encourage and develop in an outdoor setting, previously unseen connections are made and original ideas flourish.\nThe Creativity Factor explores the scientific & practical evidence for entrepreneurial creativity, and explains the mechanisms, habits and techniques that help develop this skill. This uniquely holistic guide will provide you with a newfound awareness of your creative potential and how it can lead to business success.\n"Garry Pratt makes a compelling case to take our thinking outdoors as a simple but powerful way to free it from constraints." - Dimo Dimov, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Bath, UK\n"Outside thinking is powerful stuff... Enjoy this fantastic journey!" - João Perre Viana, Founder of Walking Mentorship

The Creativity Factor: Using the power of the outdoors to spark successful innovation

Pratt, Garry

Why do some businesses thrive while many more struggle? In this age of disruption, a key reason is the failure of many leaders to realign all the moving parts of their enterprise, including its business strategy and how it is organised, to best support its enduring purpose. Thousands of enterprises globally are operating below their potential simply because they are not well aligned or fail to realign to reflect the new realities of their changing business environment. This book aims to change that. This book is about strategic realignment, a leadership process to overcome disruption and secure high performance on a sustainable basis. Given that change is a constant and disruption to the business environment ever more likely, strategic realignment must become a core competency in order that all enterprises and leaders can succeed in the future. Most executives recognise this but lack a robust system of thought to execute strategic realignment effectively and realise its full benefits. But once mastered, strategic realignment offers a means of turning disruption into an advantage. In Re:Align, Jonathan Trevor provides a blueprint to help leaders ask good questions, have better conversations and make the best possible choices to realign their enterprise to be fit for purpose. Drawing upon active research at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School (with contributions from the joint works of Dr Jonathan Trevor and Dr Barry Varcoe), the book also provides practical case studies and evidence-based insights. Re:Align offers both a thoughtful and compelling message as well as an effective toolkit to help leaders everywhere to overcome disruption and improve enterprise performance.

Re:Align: A Leadership Blueprint for Overcoming Disruption and Improving Performance

Trevor, Jonathan

Business Culture

The ultimate guide to marketing yourself in a CV or resume, and ensuring you make a professional impression in any job search. The job market has never been more competitive, and marketing yourself can be tricky. And nothing raises a red flag for an employer than a poorly-written or badly-presented CV or resume. This handy guide offers practical, step-by-step advice on preparing, writing, and presenting an impressive document - either on paper or online - that will help you to 'get your foot in the door' with prospective employers. Covering essential issues such as identifying your goals, creating different types of CV, or coming up with a fantastic and persuasive letter to go with them, this is a must-read for job hunters at any stage of their career.

Get That Job: CVs and Resumes: How to make sure you stand out from the crowd (Business Essentials)

Publishing, Bloomsbury

Job Hunting & Careers

This handy guide offers practical solutions and step-by-step advice on combating and managing stress so that you can achieve the best work-life balance. While it's sometimes said that a little stress is good for you, too much can damage your health, jeopardise your performance at work, and affect your relationships. With the rise of remote and hybrid working, such issues are only becoming more common, and it's too easy to feel worn down and exhausted by stress and worry. With a self-assessment quiz, step-by-step action points, top tips, common mistakes and advice on how to avoid them, and summaries of key points, Deal With Stress will help you to identify and understand the causes, recognise the symptoms, and find the right answers to put you back in control. You will find actionable solutions and practical advice on combating stress and ensuring you can have the best possible work-life balance.

Deal With Stress: Improving your health through changing how you work (Business Essentials)

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

About the Author After a career working as a Chartered Secretary, a company secretary and company director, and as Policy Director of ICSA, the Chartered Governance Institute, Seamus Gillen has spent the past 15 years advising clients around the UK, and internationally, on their governance journeys. He is the founder of Value Alpha, a resource network for those working in the field of corporate governance. Product Description An examination of the true role of governance as a driver of high-quality strategic decision-making, which can help an organization achieve its strategic objectives more efficiently and effectively.Many boards approach the subject of governance from a compliance perspective, which leaves value lying on the table. When boards complain that “we're spending too much time on governance”, what they're usually referring to is 'compliance'. A compliance focus leads to an emphasis on governance as an area of subject-matter expertise, a cost, an overhead, a back-office activity, something which 'has to be done' to satisfy regulation and Code. It manifests itself through a culture of box-ticking. Directors and senior management perceive, and derive, little value from the exercise.Seamus Gillen believes that governance is a commercial discipline, providing a fundamental underpin to the process of value creation, value protection and value preservation. Governance drives the quality of strategic decision-making that helps an organization achieve its strategic objectives more efficiently and effectively. High standards of governance create competitive advantage, a concept as applicable to not-for-profits and public sector bodies as to commercial entities. For organizations pursuing this approach, governance becomes a liberating theology, and a critical business enabler.Building Better Boards resonates with professionals operating across international jurisdictions, and is inclusive rather than exclusive. The book emphasises, and demonstrates, that governance is a live issue, an ongoing priority area of board focus, with developments occurring around the world on, literally, a daily basis. It identifies good practice and progressive thinking across sectors and geographies. It builds on thought leadership and case studies, as well as regulatory guidance and Code principles. It offers new models and approaches based on real-life experience. All to provide boards and directors - as well as senior executives - with the means to leverage governance to achieve their strategic objectives. To help them lead and succeed in a changing world.

Building Better Boards: How to lead and succeed in a changing world

Gillen, Seamus

Belonging: The Key to Transforming and Maintaining Diversity, Inclusion and Equality at Work

About the Author\nSue Unerman is Chief Transformation Officer at MediaCom, the largest media agency in the UK with over 200 clients. She is also the co-author of the bestselling book, The Glass Wall.\nKathryn Jacob OBE is CEO of Pearl and Dean, a cinema advertising company and co-author of the bestselling book, The Glass Wall.\nMark Edwards is a Sunday Times journalist and qualified mindfulness coach who trains businesses in diversity and inclusion as well as leadership.\n"The most important business book of the year" - Esquire\nThere's never been more discussion around diversity and inclusion in the workplace. From gender pay gaps and the #MeToo movement to Black Lives Matter, it seems that every organization has finally recognised that lasting change needs to happen.\nVarious studies show that the most successful and productive senior management teams are those which are truly diverse and eclectic. Yet there remains only 8 female CEOs of FTSE 100 boards, and only 10 BAME people working in leadership roles across companies in the FTSE 100.\nWhile there has been a clear shift in attitudes, actual progress towards more inclusive workspaces has been excruciatingly slow and, in some cases, has ground to a halt. Following extensive research and interviews at over 200 international businesses, Kathryn Jacob, Sue Unerman and Mark Edwards have discovered one major problem that is holding back the move towards greater diversity: why aren't the men getting involved?\nMost men are not engaged with D&I initiatives in the workplace – at one extreme they may be feeling actively hostile and threatened by the changing cultural landscape. But others may be unmotivated to change – recognising the abstract benefits of diversity but not realising what's in it for them. The time for change is long past. Belonging is the call to action we need today -the tool to turn the men in power into allies as we battle discrimination, harassment, pay gaps, and structural racism and patriarchy at every level of the workplace. The lessons in this book will help us work together to build a better workplace where everyone feels they belong.

Edwards, Mark

Unerman, Sue

Jacob, Kathryn

The essential guide to creating a successful organization by making things easier, better and more straightforward for your customers. Across all sectors, organizations' fixation with functionality have meant that the 'human' elements of the customer's experience have become neglected. Strict processes and automated procedures have created organizations full of people who aren't allowed to act in a 'human' way. As a result, and despite these new technologies, customers are no more satisfied than they were a decade ago (according to the Institute of Customer Service) and, according to Edelman, they now trust big organizations even less than they did in the past. In The Human Experience, John Sills draws upon extensive research and illustrative case studies to explain that the emotional experience is just as important as the functional one, and, if done right, will create a more efficient business. He also demonstrates that the customer experience is not just the responsibility of front-line employees, but shared across the company, from the CEO operating as the spokesperson of the business to the programmers developing a seamless and welcoming user interface. Whether you're a well-established incumbent or an early-stage start-up, on either end of your product or service is a human. Packed full of practical advice and engaging case studies, The Human Experience is the ultimate guide to creating a culture and an experience with humanity at its heart, helping to develop a customer base that will stay with an organization, and a company that will grow in an increasingly efficient way.

The Human Experience: How to make life better for your customers and create a more successful organization

Sills, John

Marketing & Sales

An illuminating insight into the Metaverse - what it is, how it works, and and why it will soon be playing a major role in business, technology and society. In Into the Metaverse, Cathy Hackl, a globally recognized futurist and one of the world's first Chief Metaverse Officers, shares her insights on what companies need to do to harness the next iteration of the internet - the metaverse. In this book you'll find a wealth of information on issues such as: - What is the metaverse and what it means for your brand, organization or company - How to make money in the metaverse through understanding the underlying concepts behind it such as gaming, synthetic media, spatial computing and artificial intelligence. - How to lead in the metaverse through industries that are already forging ahead, such as fashion and marketing. - Who should manage the metaverse function within your organization and why some companies should consider creating a role for a Chief Metaverse Officer. - Finally, how to protect the metaverse and action steps you can take towards the future. Essential reading for any executive, Into the Metaverse, will reshape how you think about the internet and its place for those who want to lead successful businesses, today and into the future. If the internet was first used to connect us to information, and then developed into a social media forum to connect people, then Web3, which connects people, places and things, will help enable the successor state to today's mobile internet - the Metaverse. It will bring together and merge our physical and digital lives, and - in the same way that social media upended our lives and our businesses - the Metaverse will shake things up even more. Into the Metaverse is the essential business guide to understanding the ground-breaking technologies that enable this monumental shift and the opportunities it presents from a business and societal perspective.

Into the Metaverse: The Essential Guide to the Business Opportunities of the Web3 Era

Hackl, Cathy

Industries

Everything you need to know about writing for business - from working out the message you want to send, to understanding your audience.\nAs everyone adjusts to hybrid and remote ways of working with others around the world, and we develop more ways of communicating, how you can use words to engage, inform, persuade, or sell to others is increasingly important. And writing clear, error-free content that is appropriate for its intended purpose is something that anyone can learn to do.\nWriting Skills for Business is packed full of quick tips and nuggets of advice on how to communicate better in your writing. From choosing the most relevant type of communication, to understanding the needs of your intended audience, and selecting the right layout and the most persuasive tone and style, this new guide will help you produce the most effective communications - whether that's internal reports, business plans, day-to-day emails and team briefings, social media posts or slideshow presentations.\nPractical, easy to read and jargon-free, the book contains step-by-step guidance and action points, top tips to bear in mind for the future, common mistakes and advice on how to avoid them, summaries of key points, and some resources links for those looking to improve their writing skills even further.

Writing Skills for Business: How to communicate clearly to get your message across (Business Essentials)

Skills

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