Why am I passionate about this?

I have taught marketing strategy to MBAs and Executives at Business Schools and companies around the world, and have consulted for major companies in financial services, consumer packaged goods, software, and others for over three decades. Some of my Harvard Business Review articles are among the review’s bestsellers, and my book on marketing strategy, TILT: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers, received the best business book award in 2014. I run a marketing strategy consultancy at Brand Strategy Group with clients on three continents. 


I wrote

Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers

By Niraj Dawar,

Book cover of Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers

What is my book about?

This book is an antidote to product-centricity. Businesses in technology, pharma, materials, commodities, and even financial services all suffer from…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

Niraj Dawar Why did I love this book?

This is your strategy playbook: it will teach you to think systematically about the amorphous subject of strategy. It is both concrete and an eye-opener on what strategy is and can do for an organization. Use it as a step-by-step guide to think about strategy, and use it also to understand what strategy is.

By A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Playing to Win as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Are you just playing--or playing to win? Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It's hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future--something that doesn't happen in most companies. Now two of today's best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy--explaining what it's for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point. A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership…


Book cover of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

Niraj Dawar Why did I love this book?

Marketing today is a battle for the customer’s mind-space. In Attention Merchants, Tim Wu lays out the stakes, the players, and the methodologies they use to grab and grasp space in the consumers’ mind. Marketing has transformed, for better or worse, from a game of cajoling the consumer through alluring branding and advertising to discipline of converting consumers’ attention into purchase and loyalty behavior. Tim Wu describes how this is done. While not intended as a “how-to” book, it is a must-read for any marketer with a conscience.

By Tim Wu,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked The Attention Merchants as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.
In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the 'attention merchants', contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion…


Book cover of Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy

Niraj Dawar Why did I love this book?

This book described the economics of the internet age as the web was taking off. It remains a classic in that it not only predicted many of the transformations that were to play out on the web, including social media, and it continues to be useful as a template for predicting the coming transformations that will be wrought by Web3 and Blockchain.

By Philip Evans, Thomas S. Wurster,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Blown to Bits as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Richness or reach? The trade-off used to be simple but absolute: your business strategy either could focus on 'rich' information - customized products and services tailored to a niche audience - or could reach out to a larger market, but with watered-down information that sacrificed richness in favor of a broad, general appeal. Much of business strategy as we know it today rests on this fundamental trade-off. Now, say Evans and Wurster, the new economics of information is eliminating the trade-off between richness and reach, blowing apart the foundations of traditional business strategy. "Blown to Bits" reveals how the spread…


Book cover of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Niraj Dawar Why did I love this book?

This book has stood the test of time in its description of how small changes have large impact and make things (products, trends, ideas) take off. Chock full of examples and stories, as you would expect from Gladwell, this is a well-crafted, well-told, and coherent idea.

By Malcolm Gladwell,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked The Tipping Point as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An introduction to the Tipping Point theory explains how minor changes in ideas and products can increase their popularity and how small adjustments in an individual's immediate environment can alter group behavior.


Book cover of Nudge: The Final Edition

Niraj Dawar Why did I love this book?

A large part of what we buy today is information or products wrapped in information. How that information is presented changes the experience of consumption. Thaler shows how presenting the information differently (sometimes even consumers presenting the information to themselves) can change the choices we make. This is a book about how the consumer mind works.

By Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Nudge as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*Once again a New York Times bestseller! First the original edition, and now the new Final Edition*

An essential new edition revised and updated from cover to cover of one of the most important books of the last two decades, by Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

More than 2 million copies sold

Since the original publication of Nudge more than a decade ago, the title has entered the vocabulary of businesspeople, policy makers, engaged citizens, and consumers everywhere. The book has given rise to more than 400 "nudge units" in governments around the world and…


Explore my book 😀

Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers

By Niraj Dawar,

Book cover of Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers

What is my book about?

This book is an antidote to product-centricity. Businesses in technology, pharma, materials, commodities, and even financial services all suffer from a turgid obsession with their product. Everything within the business is defined by the product – in fact, if you ask managers what business they’re in, they’ll talk about the product. Measures of success are product-based (units sold, market share), behaviors are linked to product moved (quotas), and even innovation is defined solely in terms of better products.

TILT helps you rethink not just the product focus, but what an organization should look like to become more customer-centric. It takes you through the thought process with sparkling examples and practical checklists. If you want to make your business more customer-centric, start with this book.

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No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

Rona Simmons Author Of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”

Rona's book list on World War II featuring the average Joe

What is my book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.

No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…

No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

What is this book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…


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