Ram Charan is the patient coach of the business world, constantly reminding readers to learn the fundamentals of the profession.

What the ceo Wants you to know by Ram Charan

In What the CEO Wants You to Know, Charan explains how to understand companies through the simple, fundamental concepts that are at the core of every business: cash, margin, proit, return on assets, velocity, growth, valuation, customers, employees, and shareholders. Along the way, he explains how these concepts interact in both large and small companies, and how you can improve your business by understanding the basics and focusing on improving your execution of the fundamentals.

Proitable growth is everyone's Business by Ram Charan

Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business is a deeper look at how businesses grow and how they can stumble if they attempt to grow in the wrong way. Healthy businesses grow organi- cally by reinvesting proits, focusing on day-to-day execution, and improving the core of the business over time. All employees (at every level of the organization) need to understand how the business operates and what the company is working to achieve. By focusing on the things that make the business successful, Charan argues that companies can quickly adapt to changes in the market and pursue continual and sustainable growth for long periods of time.

On competition by Michael Porter

Michael Porter has been a world-renowned expert on corporate strategy for decades, and his articles are assigned to students in business schools around the world. His "ive forces" model of corporate competition provides an intuitive way to analyze the attractiveness of any indus- try. By paying particular attention to the power of suppliers and customers, the threats of new entry and substitutes, and the level of internal rivalry in the industry, it is possible to develop strategies that create a defensible competitive position for your irm. On Competition is a compilation of eleven of Porter's Harvard Business Review articles, two previously unpublished papers on health care and capital investment, and a comprehensive introduction to his work.

Blue ocean strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

The thesis of Blue Ocean Strategy is simple: why compete with other irms if you don't have to? In contrast to Porter's work, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne advocate a diferent ap- proach to strategy: try to create new industries that change the competitive landscape com- pletely. By focusing your resources on creating uncontested market space (a "Blue Ocean"), you're working to make your irm the industry leader while simultaneously making your current competition irrelevant. There's no sense in operating in competitive war-zones ("Red Oceans") if you have a choice.