The Carrot and the Stick

After reading The Carrot and the Stick, you will start to look at everyday situations differently. William Putsis provides a compelling narrative across industries and time periods showing how considering strategic control points can swing business outcomes. William Putsis's role as a strategic advisor to many global brand-name corporations that allows him to go beyond what would otherwise be theory and academic and connect it to the practitioner. - Michael Lohnert, Managing Director, Boeing HorizonX Ventures I especially appreciated that The Carrot and the Stick did not 'talk at me' with a series of lessons, but through simple exercises guided me to explore and discover what will make our own unique businesses more valuable. Providing more than just the 'what' and the 'why, ' William Putsis most importantly lays out the 'how' of executing a value creation strategy based on building critical importance to customers. - Terry Theodore, Partner, Center Rock Capital Partners In his first book, Compete Smarter, Not Harder, William Putsis presents a process to strategically prioritize market opportunities. In The Carrot and the Stick, he follows up on this by extending the concept of strategic control to multiple market opportunities. We have found his process to be instrumental to the success we have been having in growing our markets and to our move to adjacent market opportunities. Highly recommend the book to anyone interested in growing their business. - Keith E. Williams, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Trustee, Underwriters Laboratories Inc. The central premise is critical - maintain strategic control and foster proper incentives. The book empowers the reader with method and principles to understand and address strategic control points and to align needed incentives to guarantee success. His storytelling brings the success and failures of the past to the context of the new market realities. An excellent and rewarding read for any leader in the new realities of platforms and ecosystems being shaped by current realities. - Benn R. Konsynski, George S. Craft Professor in Information Systems & Operations Management, Goizueta Business School, Emory University There is no business leader or business student who won't find themselves riveted to the perspectives this book offers on the strategic thinking and execution behind the technologies which have profoundly reshaped industry and transformed the way we live. Thus everyone in legislatures and the media needs this book as well. At a time when appropriate critiques of the unchecked power of big tech abound, this book instead explains how such enterprises flourish, drawing upon examples from our past and present that foreshadow our future as well as key concepts in strategic, marketing, entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology. All this with an engaging writing style. Every page makes you feel 10 percent smarter. - Sonnenfeld, Senior Associate Dean, Yale School of Management, Lester Crown Professor of Management Practice, and author of Firing Back This book is a must-read if you want to compete and win in the markets of today and tomorrow. Success requires understanding how to think in both win-lose and win-win ways. William Putsis lays out a rigorous framework with clever real-world examples to help understand how sustainable profits depend upon ownership of strategic points of control and win-win incentives along the value chain. - Ravi Dhar, Director, Yale Center for Customer Insights, George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing, Yale University William Putsis takes all the small things happening on the periphery of our vision and brings them into focus. He deploys stories from companies in wildly different historical contexts and industries - from Amazon to Owens Corning - forcing us to relinquish the tiresome trope, 'but things are different in my industry.' Everyone has a carrot, and everyone has a stick. If you don't see yourself in this book, you're not reading closely enough. - Molly Nagler, Chief Learning Officer, PepsiCo