survive and thrive

Summary

Whether big or small, companies incessantly face challenges that can threaten their bottom line and even their survival. These threats keep corporate leaders up at night. What can companies do to stay alive?

Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business features a collection of essays by strategy professors at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Canada’s #1 business school. The essays take the reader on a tour through some of the most vexing threats to business today, threats that put the very existence of organizations into question. From disruptive innovation, to social media disasters, to mistaken technical investments, to gender discrimination, to misunderstood competition, companies need to be able to anticipate crises and prepare to deal with them head on. Across this collection of essays, readers will get warnings about four mistakes that companies commonly make – failing to appreciate interactions within systems, getting stuck in existing ways of doing business, falling victim to cognitive biases, and getting derailed by short-term incentives.

But, Survive and Thrive isn’t just about mistakes. Its primary goal is to provide step-by-step actions to help companies stay alive. Executives will find principles and practices for anticipating potential threats and creating responses that permit their businesses to not only survive but thrive.

Praise for Survive and Thrive

“Eleven Rotman professors tackle some of the most compelling issues in a far-ranging work that covers such topics as health care, gender diversity, corporate reputation management, and innovation. …a highly focused, elegantly written treatise. Actionable solutions for senior corporate leaders that will also make engaging reading for others interested in business challenges.” Kirkus Reviews

Featured in Rotman Management Magazine! See the article here.

Chapters

1: Introduction: Strategic Threats to Survival by Joshua Gans and Sarah Kaplan
2: Managing the Risk of Catastrophic Failure by András Tilcsik
3: Surviving the Threat from Healthcare to Organizational Health by Anita M. McGahan
4: The Challenge of Gender Diversity by Sarah Kaplan
5: Reputation Management in a Digital World by Anne Bowers and A. Rebecca Reuber
6: Surviving Disruptive Innovation by Joshua Gans
7: The Perils of Path Dependence by Kevin Bryan
8: Finding the Right Innovation Ecosystem by Ajay Agrawal and Alberto Galasso
9: Avoiding Implementation Traps by Will Mitchell
10: Missing the Real Competition by Michael Ryall
11: Conclusion: Survive and Thrive by Joshua Gans and Sarah Kaplan