Strategies In Failure Management

This book offers a comprehensive overview of failure in business, management and consulting. It features contributions by experts from diverse fields, who share unique insights from their real-life experiences. Readers will find perspectives from leadership, project management, change management, innovation management, human resource management, counseling, restructuring, entrepreneurship and sports. Each chapter combines the latest empirical findings with relevant case studies, making for a unique book that offers a fascinating exploration of the largely unexplored area of setbacks, pitfalls, flops and disappointments in the business world.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

During the past 4O years there have been major conceptual and technical advances in the domain of dialysis methods and renal/organ transplantation for long-term treatment of patients with End-Stage Renal Failure (ESRF). This now enables better defined, more selective strategies of treatment tobe undertaken, according to patient-specific criteria such as age or underlying renal disease also taking into account the lifetime duration of these treatments. For many patients this implies necessary successive changes of mode of therapy depending on their availability, occurrence ofmedical/technical complications or failure and social-environmental and economic factors. This rationale has inspired the structure of this volume which is divided into four sections: 1/ A descriptive overview of the various modes of renal replacement therapy (RRT): Extracorporeal dialysis/filtration, peritoneal dialysis, kidney and multi-organ transplantation.2/ Most appropriate indications and use of these methods, respective advantages, drawbacks and outcome in children,pregnant women and elderly patients 3/ In diabetic patients and in patients with hereditary/congenital diseases. 4/ The ethical issues generated by this new domain in Medicine by limitations in treatment facilities or medical dilemmas for acceptance, best technical choices, withdrawal or terminationof RRT in individual patients. Finally, contributors form Eastern European Countries, Africa and Far Eastern Countries analyse the current status of RRT in their respective geographical area and the ways and means required for a wider implementation of RRT in thus far lesser economically developed countries where the greatmajority of the populations still have no access to these life-saving therapeutic procedures.

William B. Rouse explores eighteen well-known cases of high-consequence failures to outline a conceptual approach to integrated failure management, enabling a cross-cutting of system design principles and practices and an assurance that failure management in any context need not start with a blank slate.

A compelling vision. Bold leadership. Decisive action. Unfortunately, these prerequisites of success are almost always the ingredients of failure, too. In fact, most managers seeking to maximize their chances for glory are often unwittingly setting themselves up for ruin. The sad truth is that most companies have left their futures almost entirely to chance, and don’t even realize it. The reason? Managers feel they must make choices with far-reaching consequences today, but must base those choices on assumptions about a future they cannot predict. It is this collision between commitment and uncertainty that creates THE STRATEGY PARADOX. This paradox sets up a ubiquitous but little-understood tradeoff. Because managers feel they must base their strategies on assumptions about an unknown future, the more ambitious of them hope their guesses will be right – or that they can somehow adapt to the turbulence that will arise. In fact, only a small number of lucky daredevils prosper, while many more unfortunate, but no less capable managers find themselves at the helms of sinking ships. Realizing this, even if only intuitively, most managers shy away from the bold commitments that success seems to demand, choosing instead timid, unremarkable strategies, sacrificing any chance at greatness for a better chance at mere survival. Michael E. Raynor, coauthor of the bestselling The Innovator's Solution, explains how leaders can break this tradeoff and achieve results historically reserved for the fortunate few even as they reduce the risks they must accept in the pursuit of success. In the cutthroat world of competitive strategy, this is as close as you can come to getting something for nothing. Drawing on leading-edge scholarship and extensive original research, Raynor’s revolutionary principle of Requisite Uncertainty yields a clutch of critical, counter-intuitive findings. Among them: -- The Board should not evaluate the CEO based on the company’s performance, but instead on the firm’s strategic risk profile -- The CEO should not drive results, but manage uncertainty -- Business unit leaders should not focus on execution, but on making strategic choices -- Line managers should not worry about strategic risk, but devote themselves to delivering on commitments With detailed case studies of success and failure at Sony, Microsoft, Vivendi Universal, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T and other major companies in industries from financial services to energy, Raynor presents a concrete framework for strategic action that allows companies to seize today’s opportunities while simultaneously preparing for tomorrow’s promise.

This volume presents a fresh international perspective on current approaches to treating heart failure. An accessible reference for hospital-based specialists, the book provides an update on recent advances in therapeutics and pharmacology, as well as ongoing trials. Four major sections concentrate on a review of screening, assessment and diagnosis; an update on drug treatments; an update on device therapy; and a description of best practice recommendations for managing clinically challenging cases

From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented merger and acquisition activity to scandal, greed, and, ultimately, recession -- we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. By outlining the process organizations have used to achieve transformational goals and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.