How can you spot the next big market opportunity?  And how should you design an offering that will capture that opportunity?

In our summary of Cultural Strategy:  Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron outline their new cultural strategy framework, which they developed using what they call a “laboratory” approach.  They devoted a decade of academic research to conducting careful cultural analyses of more than a dozen brands, while simultaneously testing their framework during consulting assignments, which allowed them to further refine the framework.

Holt and Cameron are Co-Principals of The Cultural Strategy Group consulting firm.  They have developed cultural strategies for such brands as Ben & Jerry's, Coca-Cola, Fat Tire beer, FOX Sports, Jack Daniel's, MasterCard, Microsoft, Mike's Hard Lemonade, Planet Green, Qdoba, Sprite, and Svedka Vodka.

Their comprehensive new strategic discipline guides managers and entrepreneurs on how to pursue cultural innovation through a step-by-step framework.  This summary will enable start-ups to leapfrog incumbents, fading brands to revitalize themselves, and technology-driven businesses to avoid becoming commoditized.

In an era of simultaneous innovation and commoditization, enabled by digital technologies, managers around the world are asking themselves, “How can we adapt to rapid changes in technology and markets, and still make enough money to survive – and thrive?”

To answer this important question, Michael A. Cusumano draws on nearly 30 years of research.  He examines in-depth the practices of global corporations that have been acknowledged leaders and benchmark-setters in a range of high-technology, services, and manufacturing industries. 

In our summary of Staying Power, Cusumano distills six enduring principles that have been crucial to their strategy, innovation management practices, and ability to deal with change and uncertainty.

Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, with a joint appointment in MIT's Engineering Systems Division.  He has consulted for more than 90 firms around the world and is the author or co-author of eight books, including Microsoft Secrets and Competing on Internet Time:  Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft, which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Businessweek.

By mastering these six principles, you can understand how great companies are built, and then you can build a great organization of your own.

David Novak, the chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, has been named one of the world's "30 Best CEOs" by Barron's, one of Fortune's "Top People in Business," and one of the "100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World" by Harvard Business Review.

Novak learned long ago that you can't lead a great organization of any size without getting your people aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission.  But how do you do that?  There are countless leadership books, but how many will actually help a Taco Bell shift manager, a Fortune 500 CEO, a new entrepreneur, or anyone in between?

Over his 15 years at Yum!, Novak has developed a trademarked program he calls Taking People with You.  He spends several weeks each year personally teaching it to thousands of managers around the world.  He convinces them that they'll never make big things happen until they learn how to get people on their side.  No skill in business is more important.  And Yum!'s extraordinary success – demonstrated by at least 13 percent growth for each of the past nine years — proves his point.

Now, in our summary of Taking People with You:  The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen, Novak explains how you can implement his powerful approach to getting breakthrough results in your own organization.  An instant classic, Taking People with You has reached #1 on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.  Novak is donating all of his proceeds from every book sold to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Yum! operates more than 36,000 restaurants in more than 117 countries and employs more than 1 million people.  All three of the company's restaurant chains — KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell — are global leaders in fast food.  Prior to leading Yum!, Novak was president of both KFC and Pizza Hut, and he held senior management positions at Pepsi-Cola. 

Over the past few decades, globalization and Googlization have kicked off the first phase of an innovation revolution.  These developments have brought us such advances as the World Wide Web, social networking, 24/7 connectivity, and global markets.

But the benefits of all this progress have not been distributed evenly.  Even as rural women in Africa and Asia have seen their lives transformed by mobile phones and the Internet, the middle classes and blue-collar workers in prosperous countries have been squeezed by the new global realities. 

All this leads to the central political and economic question of our age:  How can the extraordinary benefits of the innovation revolution be shared more fully among all of humanity? 

In our summary of Need, Speed, and Greed, Vijay Vaitheeswaran answers that question, offering the essential insider’s guide to this new world of innovation. 

Vaitheeswaran is an award-winning global correspondent for the Economist.  He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to the World Economic Forum, and an adjunct faculty member at NYU’s Stern School of Business. 

Need, Speed, and Greed will explain the new rules and skills you must develop to unleash your inner innovator and profit from the shifting global economic order.

Every marketer knows the frustration of the so-called “say-feel gap” — that is, the disconnect between what consumers say versus how they feel and what they will actually do. How can you avoid the say-feel gap? The solution is to adopt a new approach to measuring and managing emotions.

As our summary of Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success, byDan Hill, explains, the key to winning over people is to make a sensory-emotional connection through superior creativity and empathy. How? By exploiting the latest breakthroughs in brain science to transform how companies conduct business in the 21st century.

Yet, this approach doesn't require the use of expensive state-of-the-art hardware. According to Hill, the key is to use facial coding, a research tool so powerful that the CIA and FBI both rely on it. It works because even a person born blind signals his or her feelings to others using the same facial muscle movements.

Hill is a recognized authority on the role of emotions in consumer behavior, and an expert in applying facial coding to business issues. He is the author of About Face: The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising, as well as the founder and president of Sensory Logic, a research-based consultancy that specializes in helping to enhance companies’ sensory-emotional connection with consumers.

This summary will give you a practical tool for navigating the emotional dynamics that ultimately determine your company’s sales, productivity, and profits.

Despite the countless books offering advice on innovation, most companies continue to struggle to create the profitable growth their companies need.  The reason?  When it comes to predicting successful innovation, little attention has focused to teaching decision-makers how to apply the rigor of the scientific method to proving what will work in the real world. 
 
Until now.  In our summary of The Innovator’s Manifesto, Michael E. Raynor demonstrates that  “Disruption Theory” not only explains why new businesses emerge and mature companies fall, but it actually enables us to accurately predict the future success or failure of new business models and products. 

Raynor is a director at Deloitte Consulting LLP.  He co-authored the national best-seller The Innovator’s Solution with Harvard's Clayton Christenson, and he is the author of the critically acclaimed classic, The Strategy Paradox. 

In The Innovator’s Manifesto, Raynor’s groundbreaking research and deep understanding of the mechanisms and drivers of Disruption have enabled him to synthesize an extremely powerful and useful approach that you can put to work immediately to deliver breakthrough results.  Regardless of your perspective, this summary will give you the tools you can use to achieve successful innovation and avoid major missteps:

• If you are an investor, it will allow you to accurately pick which businesses have the best chance of survival.
• If you are an entrepreneur, it will help you to shape your ideas and your strategies so that your new businesses have a better chance of surviving, getting additional funding, and ultimately thriving.
• If you are a manager trying to grow an existing business, it will improve your ability to identify opportunities to innovate successfully.  And,
• If you are in corporate M&A, it will enable you to identify viable targets and manage them in ways that are more likely to create value.

Many businesspeople wisely focus on polishing their leadership skills or taking courses to expand their knowledge of how people think, but they often forget that relationships are even more important to success.  In fact, all of life’s successes come from initiating relationships with the right people, and then strengthening those relationships by using good people skills.  Fortunately, you can learn to become a "people person" and to succeed in the things that matter the most. 

Our summary of Winning with People, by John C. Maxwell, will provide you with the tools you need to immediately improve your existing relationships as well as cultivate new, strong, and exciting ones. 

Maxwell is an internationally respected leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold more than 20 million books.  He is the founder of EQUIP, a non-profit organization that has trained more than 5 million leaders in 126 countries worldwide.  A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week best-selling author, Maxwell has written three books that have sold more than a million copies each: 

• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, 
• Developing the Leader Within You, and 
• The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. 

In this summary, you will learn the People Principles that will help make you a success in life – and become the kind of person who makes others successful, too.

The days when you could plan out your marketing and public relations programs well in advance and execute them on your timetable are gone. News now breaks in “real time” — over minutes, not days. This means that companies must now be the first to see an opportunity, and the first to act on it. And they must develop or refine their products or services instantly, based on feedback from customers or events in the marketplace.

In our summary of the Revised and Updated edition of Real-Time Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott reveals the proven, practical steps to take your business into the "real-time era."

Scott is the author of:

• The New Rules of Marketing & PR,
• World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories,and
• Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From The Most Iconic Band In History.

He served as VP of marketing for two publicly traded technology companies and was also Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, which at the time was one of the world's largest newspaper and electronic information companies. His blog is at www.WebInkNow.com.

Real-Time Marketing and PR clearly explains why scale and media buying power are no longer decisive competitive advantages. What counts today is speed and agility. While your competitors scramble to adjust, you can seize the initiative, open new channels, and grow your brand. Master the ideas in this summary and become the first to act, the first to respond, and the first to win.

Charles G. Koch may very well be the most successful businessman you’ve never heard of.  Under his leadership, Koch Industries has become a dynamic enterprise that Forbes magazine called “the world’s largest private company.”

Koch is chairman of the board and CEO, a position he has held since 1967.  He credits the company’s success to a unique management methodology that he developed called Market-Based Management®, or MBM®. 

MBM is a holistic approach to management that integrates theory and practice, and provides a framework for dealing with the ongoing challenges of growth and change. 

Our summary of Koch’s book, The Science of Success:  How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company, explains the proven principles used by the leaders and employees of Koch companies to get results.  As you will discover, there really is a science behind success, and it can be applied to any organization, including yours.

With so many different philosophies and methods of leadership, as well as a rapidly changing workplace, it can seem like a major challenge to convey your personal approach to leading others. 

Our summary of One Piece of Paper provides a simple yet powerful model for doing just that.  Based on leadership expert Mike Figliuolo’s popular “Leadership Maxims” training course, One Piece of Paper guides you through a practical approach for creating, articulating, and living your personal leadership philosophy – one that can be shared with others on a single piece of paper.

Figliuolo is the founder and managing director of thought LEADERS, LLC, a professional services firm specializing in leadership development.  Before founding his own company, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and an executive at Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro.

The unique approach involves answering a series of questions that will help you to develop a set of personal leadership maxims.  These maxims, in turn, enable you to build a concise living document that communicates the passions, goals, and standards that define your leadership style. 

The result is one sheet of paper that provides an accessible touchstone for you and your team, enabling you to:

• work together effectively,
• grow the organization,
• and get great results,

while achieving your full potential as a leader.