New Books from HBR Press for August

Check out these new or forthcoming books from HBR Press:

Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere

by Ravi Venkatesan

India is on the minds of business leaders everywhere. Within a few decades, India will be the world's most populous nation and one of its largest economies. But it is also a complex market, with a reputation for corruption, uncertainty, and bureaucracy. Ravi Venkatesan, the former Chairman of Microsoft India, offers inside advice on how your firm can overcome the unique challenges of the Indian market. If you can win in India, you can win everywhere.

Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim

Welcome to the age of data. No matter your interests (sports, movies, politics), your industry (finance, marketing, technology, manufacturing), or the type of organization you work for (big company, nonprofit, small start-up) — your world is awash with data. As a successful manager today, you must be able to make sense of all this information. You need to be conversant with analytical terminology and methods and able to work with quantitative information. This book promises to become your "quantitative literacy" guide — helping you develop the analytical skills you need right now in order to summarize data, find the meaning in it, and extract its value

The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

by Rita Gunther McGrath and Alex Gourlay

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea — that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world's most successful companies use this method to compete and win today.

How CEOs Can Fix Capitalism

Edited by Raymond Gilmartin and Steven E. Prokesch

The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession caused a crisis of public confidence in business and American-style capitalism, with its focus on maximizing shareholder value. Corporate leaders understood that reform was needed and that they needed to commit themselves to the dual goal of producing benefits for society and their firms' bottom lines — to creating "shared value." But the specific actions they could take to bring about this change were less clear. This HBR Single offers some of the freshest thinking today on practical measures that businesses can implement to create shared value.

Work Smarter with LinkedIn

by Alexandra Samuel

If you think LinkedIn is just for job hunting, you're missing out on the many ways you can take advantage of this social network to build the professional relationships you need to advance in your career. LinkedIn can help you initiate, strengthen, and use the very real human connections that make you effective on the job — and help you get ahead. This short, practical book shows you how. In Work Smarter with LinkedIn, social media expert Alexandra Samuel demonstrates the most effective ways to actively build and use your network

True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business

by Ty Montague

Is your company a storyteller — or a storydoer? The old way to market a business was storytelling. But in today's world, simply communicating your brand's story in the hope that customers will listen is no longer enough. Instead, your authentic brand must be evident in every action the organization undertakes. Today's most successful businesses are storydoers. These companies create products and services that, from the very beginning, are manifestations of an authentic and meaningful story — one told primarily through action, not advertising. In True Story creative executive Ty Montague argues that any business, regardless of size or industry, can embrace the principles of storydoing. The book is filled with examples of how forward-thinking organizations — including Red Bull, Shaklee, Grind, TOMS Shoes, and News Corporation — are effectively using storydoing to transform their organizations.

Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value

by Daniel Isenberg

Are you a member of the new class of global entrepreneurs? If not, beware — this book may inspire you to become one. It's a rallying call for those whose ideas were ever called worthless, impossible, or even stupid. In this fascinating read, global entrepreneurship expert Daniel Isenberg illustrates the new rules of starting and growing a business. No longer bound by a western "Silicon Valley" approach to entrepreneurship, a new group of enterprising doers has created a global and diverse mix of organizations that could be tomorrow's leading firms. What can you learn — and what will you be inspired to do? Let Worthless, Impossible & Stupid be your new manual for making change.

Primal Leadership, With a New Preface by the Authors: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee

This is the book that established "emotional intelligence" in the business lexicon — and made it a necessary skill for leaders. Managers and professionals across the globe have embraced Primal Leadership. This refreshed edition, with a new preface by the authors, vividly illustrates the power and the necessity of leadership that is self-aware, empathic, motivating, and collaborative in a world that is ever more economically volatile and technologically complex.