Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into 19 languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity - like all great breakthroughs - Porter’s analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into "activities", or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. 

Is your company spending too much time on strategy development - with too little to show for it? you listen to nothing else on strategy, you should at least hear these 10 articles.

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

You need to learn to manage a study like a McKinsey or BCG consultant, without having to work at the firm, and develop deep insights. Follow an engagement team as they assist a large company in diagnosing and fixing deep, persistent organizational issues over an 8-week assignment. Learn how they successfully navigate a challenging client environment, frame the problem and limit the scope, develop hypotheses, build analyses, and provide the final recommendations. These include helping a bank enter the US market, merging IT companies, launching an electric car business, and more!

Michael Porter’s groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work - competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces - but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that. This book provides an engaging summary of Porter’s ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work....

McKinsey & Company is the most respected and most secretive consulting firm in the world, and business readers just can't seem to get enough of all things McKinsey. Now, hot on the heels of his acclaimed international best seller The McKinsey Way, Ethan Rasiel brings listeners a powerful new guide to putting McKinsey concepts and skills into action­­: The McKinsey Mind. It explains, step-by-step, how to use McKinsey tools, techniques, and strategies to solve an array of core business problems and to make any business venture more successful. 

While you can find numerous books focused on the topic of corporate finance, few offer the type of information managers need to help them make important decisions day in and day out. Value explores the core of corporate finance without getting bogged down in numbers and is intended to give managers an accessible guide to both the foundations and applications of corporate finance. Filled with in-depth insights from experts at McKinsey & Company, this reliable resource takes a much more qualitative approach to what the authors consider a lost art. 

With The Firm, financial journalist Duff McDonald pulled back the curtain on consulting giant McKinsey & Company. In The Golden Passport, he reveals the inner workings of a singular nexus of power, ambition, and influence: Harvard Business School. Harvard University occupies a unique place in the public's imagination, but HBS has arguably eclipsed its parent in terms of its influence on modern society.

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”.

Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few excel. For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. To identify the 21st century’s best CEOs, the authors of CEO Excellence started with a pool of over 2,400 public company CEOs. 

In 1990, IBM had its most profitable year ever. By 1993, the company was on a watch list for extinction, victimized by its own lumbering size, an insular corporate culture, and the PC era IBM had itself helped invent.

In an audiobook that challenges everything you thought you knew, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne assert that tomorrow's leading companies will succeed, not by battling their rivals for market share in the bloody "red ocean" of a shrinking profit pool, but by creating "blue oceans" of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

Barbarians at the Gate has been called one of the most influential business books of all time, the definitive account of the largest takeover in Wall Street history. Bryan Burrough's and John Helyer's account of the frenzy that overtook Wall Street in October and November of 1988 gives us not only a detailed look at financial operations at the highest levels but a richly textured social history of wealth in the twilight of the Reagan era.