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Businesses hoping to survive over the long term will have to remake themselves into better competitors at least once along the way. These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, rightsizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds, to name a few. In almost every case, the goal has been to cope with a new, more challenging market by changing the way business is conducted. In this article, John Kotter outlines the eight largest errors that can doom these efforts.

For generations, Procter & Gamble generated most of its growth by innovating from within - building global research facilities and hiring the best talent in the world. Back when companies were smaller and the world was less competitive, that model worked just fine. But in 2000, newly appointed CEO A.G. Lafley saw that P&G couldn't meet its growth objectives by spending greater and greater amounts on R&D for smaller and smaller payoffs. So he embraced a "connect and develop" model.

Jeremy Heimans, a cofounder and CEO of Purpose, a social business that builds movement; and Henry Timms, the executive director of 92nd Street Y, write about how power isn’t what it used to be – and how you can harness that new power.

John Kotter, the world's foremost expert on business leadership, distills 25 years of experience into Leading Change. A must-have for any organization, this visionary and very personal audiobook is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future. Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail.

Even for the most gifted individuals, the process of becoming a leader is an arduous, albeit rewarding, journey of continuous learning and self-development. The initial test along the path is so fundamental that we often overlook it: becoming a boss for the first time. That's a shame, because the trials involved in this rite of passage have serious consequences for both the individual and the organization. For a decade and a half, the author has studied people making major career transitions to management.

Innovation gets rediscovered as a growth enabler every half dozen years. Too often, grand declarations about innovation are followed by mediocre execution that produces anemic results, and innovation groups are quietly disbanded. Each managerial generation embarks on the same enthusiastic quest for the next new thing. And each faces the same challenges to protect existing critical revenue streams while supporting new concepts that may be crucial to future success.

In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen ( The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution) build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact. By identifying behaviors of the world’s best innovators the authors outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers.

This audiobook was created based on Clayton Christensen's landmark book The Innovator's Dilemma. This was Mr. Christensen's synopsis of his book for the Harvard Business Review. The audio tracks listed here cover the key elements of Mr. Christensen's book. This audiobook emphasizes the Idea in Brief "Does my organization have the right resources, processes, values, and team to innovate?" Then it covers the right structure for your specific type of innovation.

Alex Rawson and Ewan Duncan, partners in McKinsey’s Seattle office, and Conor Jones, a partner in its Dublin office, write about why it’s the customer’s end-to-end journey that is most important – not touchpoints.

Marc Pfitzer, Valerie Bockstette, and Mike Stamp, of FSG, a nonprofit consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations develop solutions to challenging social issues, report on how companies that deliver both social benefit and business value rely on five mutually reinforcing elements.