Good Additions to your Bookshelf…

Benchmarking: The Search for Industry Best Practices that Lead to Superior Performance
Robert C. Camp"A non-technical text, Camp walks the reader through the benchmarking process in a step-by-step format. Using a case study approach to illustrate topics, the author covers all the bases. From determining the right issues to address and questions to ask, to selecting a benchmark organization, to final results analysis, the text is comprehensive."

Business Process Benchmarking
Robert C. Camp"Business Process Benchmarking, provides the most up-to-date information to show readers how to conduct successful benchmarking projects. Readers will discover how t use Camp's renowned 10-step benchmarking process to achieve peak performance; analyze the performance gap and ensure that every employee contributes toward enhanced corporate performance; train employees to use benchmarking tools to maximize the company's results."

Global Cases in Benchmarking
Robert C. Camp"Now, innovative executives can learn from actual success stories and case studies that demonstrate the power of benchmarking--sharing the best practices to set quality standards for topics, problems, and, most importantly, processes. Camp shows how global leaders in manufacturing, service, government, and other areas have used benchmarking to reduce waste, improve quality, and streamline current systems."

Competitive Advantage - Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
Michael E. Porter"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."

Competitive Intelligence - How to gather, analyze and use information to move your business to the Top
Larry Kahaner"Explains how to turn the raw facts, statistics, and numbers about competitors' activities and market trends into practical guidelines for making the right business decisions. Helps separate the useless from the useful. "

Competitive Strategy - Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
Michael E. Porter"Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided."

The New Competitor Intelligence
Leonard Fuld"The complete resource for finding, analyzing and using information about your competitors."

Contextual Design - Defining Customer-Centered Systems
Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt"This book introduces a customer-centered approach to business by showing how data gathered from people while they work can drive the definition of a product or process while supporting the needs of teams and their organizations. This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations."

Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus
Edward F. McQuarrie"Visits to customers by a cross-functional team of marketers and engineers play an important role in new product development, entry into new markets, and in exploring customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The new edition of this widely used professional resource provides step-by-step instructions for making effective use of this market research technique. Using a wealth of specific examples, Edward F. McQuarrie explains how to set feasible objectives and how to select the right number of the right kind of customers to visit. One of the leading experts in the field, McQuarrie demonstrates how to construct a discussion guide and how to devise good questions, and offers practical advice on how to conduct face-to-face interviews. Extensively updated throughout, this third edition includes three new chapters as well as expanded coverage of the analysis of visit data. It also discusses which industries and product categories are most (and least) suitable to the customer visit technique. The author also covers how the customer visit technique compares to other market research techniques such as focus groups. "

2025 -Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology
Joseph Coates, John Mahaffie, Andy Hines"This book taps the worlds of science, technology, and engineering to look at the thirty year period of 1995 to 2025. Written in the form of a history book in 2025, Coates gives fifteen scenarios which reflect what life will be like in the United States as well as other societies (both affluent and less prosperous)."

Learning from the Future: Competitive Foresight Scenarios
Liam Fahey, Robert M. Randall"Reveals how innovative organizations harness imagination and strategic management techniques to create scenarios that simulate future opportunities and threats. Shows how scenario learning readies companies for industry and market evolutions and customers new needs."

Scenarios-The Art of Strategic Conversation
Kees van der Heijden"Artful scenario spinning is a form of convergent thinking about divergent futures. It ensures not that you are always right about the future but—better—that you are almost never wrong about the future."

Technological Forecasting for Decision Making
Joseph Paul Martino"The Classic Book on the methods of Technological Forecasting"

The Art of the Long View-Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World
Peter Schwartz"Presents lessons in thinking for the future. Schwartz offers scenarios from the oil industry that can be applied to all aspects of life. His first-hand accounts, originally developed for Royal Dutch/Shell, are invaluable tools for creative thinking in one's personal life and in business."

40 Principles: TRIZ Keys to Technical Innovation
Genrikh Altshuller, Lev Shulyak (Translator), Steven Rodman"TRIZ (the Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) was developed by this book's author, Genrich Altshuller. Studied and respected around the world, TRIZ shows that technical systems evolve following predictable patterns. "

Breakthroughs!
John M. Ketteringham, P. Ranganath Nayak"Remarkable accounts of impossible visions made possible by human endeavor. The authors examine the creativity, determination, special skills, politics, and perceptions that opened the way to new processes and products that changed the way millions of us do things. "

How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate
Andrew Hargadon, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt"…Based on ten years of study into the origins of historic inventions and modern innovations from the lightbulb to the transistor to the Reebok Pump athletic shoe, How Breakthroughs Happen takes us beyond the simple recognition that revolutionary innovations do not result from flashes of brilliance by lone inventors or organizations. In fact, innovation is really about creatively recombining ideas, people, and objects from past technologies in ways that spark new technological revolutions. This process of "technology brokering" is so powerful, explains Hargadon, because it exploits the networked nature-the social side-of the innovation process. Moving between historical accounts of labs and factory floors where past technological revolutions originated and field studies of similar processes in today's organizations, Hargadon shows how technology brokers create an enduring capacity for breakthrough innovations."

Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts
R.Leifer, C.McDermott, G.O'Connor, L.Peters, M.Rice, R.Veryzer"This book reveals the patterns through which game-changing innovation occurs in large, established companies, and identifies the new managerial competencies firms need to make radical innovation happen. Defines a radical innovation project as one that delivers a product, process, or service with either unprecedented performance features, or with familiar features that will enable market transformation through significant performance improvements or cost reductions."

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor"Drawing on years of in-depth research and illustrated by company examples across many industries, Christensen and Raynor argue that innovation can be a predictable process that delivers sustainable, profitable growth. They identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help managers create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed."

Marketing Management- Analysis, Planning and Control
Phillip Kotler"Emphasizes the importance of teamwork between marketing and all the other functions of the business; introduces new perspectives in successful strategic market planning; and presents additional company examples of creative, market- focused, and customer-driven action. Kotler underscores the importance of computers, telecommunications, and other new technologies in improving marketing planning and performance. "

The Market Research Toolbox
Edward F. McQuarrie"An introduction to market research which defines and examines the goals and techniques associated with six traditional market research methods. Also discusses nontraditional market research, and shows how to combine individual market research techniques into a research strategy."

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas."

What Were They Thinking?
Robert M. McMath, Thom Forbes"Marketing Lessons learned from over 80,000 New-Product Innovations and Idiocies. This book shares insightful suggestions for avoiding the extraordinarily damaging (or at least extremely embarrassing) commercial misstep, illustrated perfectly by tales of formidable foul-ups from days of yore, ensures that this trip down memory lane can be more than just a pleasure cruise. Nonetheless, it's simply fun to relive such agonies as Ben-Gay Aspirin, Rabbit Jerky, and of course, New Coke."

Design and Marketing of New Products
Glen Urban, John Hauser"Presents a thorough yet practicial, how-to exploration of each step in the strategy, opportunity identification, design, testing, launch and profit management stages of new-product development"

Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools
Preston G. Smith, Donald G. Reinertsen"Time is worth money, and if you quantify this value you can buy time wisely, often to enormous advantage. Rather than pursing development speed at any price, the authors emphasize subjecting time-to-market decisions to the same hard-nosed business logic used for other management decision. Developing Products in Half the Time, 2/E is unique in providing tools for trading off schedule against other business objectives. It integrates powerful methods to manage risk and use resources effectively with proven techniques to accelerate product development. "

Product Design and Development
Karl T. Ulrich and Steven D. Eppinger"Contains a collection of methods that guide teams in developing new products. Focuses on a different method per chapter and provides examples drawn from industrial practice to illustrate each step. Focuses on tools and techniques that draw together members of cross-functional teams to make sound development decisions."

The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development
Milton D. Rosenau (Editor)"Product development professionals at the cutting edge of knowledge in their respective areas of new product expertise present a complete picture of the information needed for effective product development. Describes all aspects of the topic from the creation of the concept through development and design to the final production, marketing, and service."

The Power of Product Platforms: Building Value and Cost Leadership
M.H. Meyer, A. Lehnerd"Most companies know that long-term success does not hinge on any single product but on a continuous stream of value-rich products that target growth markets. Yet many firms inexplicably develop one product at a time, and by doing so fail to embrace commonality, compatibility, standardization, or modularization among different products and product lines. Firms must focus their energies on developing families of products simultaneously which share common components and technology."

Total Design : Integrated Methods for Successful Product Engineering
Stuart Pugh"Provides a framework for design whose overriding purpose is to create innovative products that satisfy the needs of the consumer. Based around a core of design activities, design is presented as a systematic and disciplined process."

Total Quality Development - A step-by-step Guide to World Class Concurrent Engineering
Don Clausing"Total quality development is the modern way of developing new products that will be competitive in the global economy. It combines the best engineering, the best management, the best strategy, and especially, the best teamwork- far beyond traditional product development practices. The resulting improvements are greatly reduced development time, a reduction in all costs, higher quality and increased product variety. Combined these improvements greatly increase customer satisfaction"

Value - Its Measurement, Design and Management
Larry Shillito, David De Marle"Offers a modern approach to using value analysis for product development, this is a structured process that unites interdisciplinary teams in an organization to select and analyze projects in terms of investment potential and to integrate quality and productivity."

Winning at New Products : Accelerating the Process from Idea to Launch
Robert G. Cooper"Demonstrates why consistent product development is so vital to corporate growth and how to maximize your chances of success. Most product concepts never make it to market, and of those that do, most fail. Winning at New Products cites the most recent research and showcases innovative practices to present a field-tested game plan for achieving product leadership."

Mining Group Gold : How to Cash in on the Collaborative Brain Power of a Group
Thomas Kayser"Explores the process of managing people and ideas to achieve a high level of results in a complex, turbulent global economy. This book is a practical, easy to use guide to building and maintaining collaboration within and across teams."

New Products Management
C. Merle Crawford, C. Anthony Di Benedetto"Provides a management approach, with the perspective of marketing. In every organization there is a person or group of persons who are charged with getting new goods and services onto the market. Frequently those people are new product managers, or project managers, or team leaders. They lead a multifunctional group of people, with the perspective of a general manager. This book recognizes the value of the cross-functional team with representatives from all areas of business. A team leader (or future team leaders) will benefit from this text and its approach"

Product Juggernauts : How Companies Mobilize to Generate a Stream of Market Winners
Jean-Philippe Deschamps, P. Ranganath Nayak (Contributor)"Two management concepts that have received a lot of attention recently are 'virtual corporation' and 'continuous improvement.' A key component of each is the idea that product development becomes an ongoing and interactive process, with the manufacturer, sales force, and customer all working together to refine, adapt, and improve products and to suggest and create new ones. The authors call companies that are successful at doing this 'product juggernauts.' Deschamps and Nayak provide specific, practical advice on how best to organize companies to emulate these juggernauts, using examples such as Phillips, Casio, Rubbermaid, SONY, Lexus, and Braun."

The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work
David Schmaltz"'The Blind Men and the Elephant,' is a welcome addition to the project management literature. It won't teach you how to draw a PERT chart, or use Microsoft Project, or construct a formal work breakdown and budget. What it will do is give you some invaluable tools for thinking about projects and the people who do them--including yourself..."

The Creative Brain
Ned Herrmann"Presents a four-quadrant model of the brain and the corresponding thinking styles: logician, organizer, communicator, and visionary. Most people and organizations are stuck in a "brain rut" because their work is dominated by just one mode."

Type Talk at Work
Otto Kroeger, Janet Thuesen"The first layman's version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Where they take Typewatching to the workplace and reveal how managers, executives, and workers can use the technique to better handle both personal and personnel matters."

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen Covey"True success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness. Anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges"

Portfolio Management for New Products
Robert G. Cooper, Elko J. Kleinschmidt"Provides corporate leaders with the tools, practical guidelines, & cutting-edge strategies they need to manage their product portfolio, make better use of R&D, and prosper in the competitive environment of product development."

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne"Kim and Mauborgne's blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike "red oceans," which are well explored and crowded with competitors, "blue oceans" represent "untapped market space" and the "opportunity for highly profitable growth." The only reason more big companies don't set sail for them, they suggest, is that "the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies"-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. "

Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore"Every year millions of dollars invested in high-tech entrepreneurial ventures are lost trying to 'cross the chasm' from early market success to mainstream market leadership. Presents specific strategies in marketing and all other areas of the business to help technology companies cross this critical chasm successfully."

Inside the Tornado
Geoffrey Moore"Moore shows how to capitalize on the profit-rich niches and hypergrowth mass markets beyond the chasm. Continuing to chart the impact of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, he explores its effects not just on marketing but on overall business planning, especially partnership, competitive advantage, positioning and organizational leadership."

The Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton Christensen"Shows how Honda, Intel, and others introduced products that cut into the low end of the marketplace and eventually evolved to displace high-end competitors and their reigning technologies."

Quality Function Deployment-How to Make QFD Work for You
Lou Cohen"Explains the fundamentals and advanced techniques of a structured planning system to incorporate the desires of the customers into the design of software, hardware, services, and other products. Provides details of the House of Quality, the most commonly used matrix and explores the potential for other matrices at every phase of product development. Also discusses organizational aspects such as establishing support, creating a schedule, and gathering customer data. "

Quality Function Deployment-Integrating Customer Requirements into Product Design
Yoji Akao"Quality Function Deployment is a method for satisfying customers by translating their demands into design targets and quality assurance points. Yoji Akaoexplains the concepts and methods of this remarkable systems engineering approach."

A New American TQM-Four Practical Revolutions in Management
Shoji Shiba, Alan Graham, David Walden"Focusses on the topics of customer focus, continuous improvement, total participation and societal networking, providing methods and dramatically depicting actual implementation of TQM methods in a variety of organizations."

Hohin Kanri - Policy Deployment for Successful TQM
Yoji Akao"Hoshin Kanri, the Japanese term for policy deployment, is an approach to strategic planning and quality improvement that has become a pillar of TQM for a growing number of US firms. This book is a compilation of examples of policy deployment that demonstrates how company vision is converted into individual responsibility."