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Protecting Creativity
The B2B Reset is built around the idea of “buyability,” which is described as a brand’s lasting ability to stay top of mind and be selected when a buyer’s need eventually emerges. What inspired you to write this book?
Over the last few years, I have been incredibly fortunate to be part of a global community of people focused on progressing the thinking behind what best-in-class B2B marketing looks like today. I found myself in conversations with some of the smartest minds in the discipline, exploring ideas around brand, creativity, effectiveness, buying behaviour and, increasingly, Buyability.
What struck me was what a privilege it was to have access to those conversations, and how fragmented much of that thinking still was for the broader marketing community. I wanted to bring those ideas together into one simple, practical handbook that a CMO could read, but equally the most junior marketer in her team could pick up and use to understand what world-class B2B marketing looks like now.
At the centre of the book is Buyability because it fundamentally reframes how we think about the job of B2B marketing. A buyer may encounter your marketing months or even years before a genuine category need emerges. When that moment eventually comes, the question is whether your brand is already present in their consideration set and feels credible, familiar, and easy to choose.
That is really what inspired the book: a desire to make the best current thinking in B2B more accessible, practical and useful to the people doing the work every day.
What misconceptions do companies often have about how their customers actually make buying decisions?
One of the ideas I challenge in the book is the myth of rational consensus. B2B buying processes look incredibly rational on paper. There are committees, procurement processes, evidence, validation, and business cases. But underneath all of that are human beings navigating risk, emotion, identity and accountability.
Buyers don’t arrive at a decision carrying only the information presented to them at that moment. They bring everything they have seen, heard, felt and inferred about a brand over time. Eventually, something gives them enough confidence to act. That means every interaction before the buying moment matters because it is either making that future decision easier or harder.
That is why confidence is such an important idea throughout the book. In complex B2B decisions, where buying committees are larger, and the consequences of a poor decision can be significant, the challenge is not simply persuading one buyer. It is building enough accumulated confidence for multiple people to believe this is a choice they can support.
What does a B2B brand need to do differently to remain memorable during long, complex buying cycles?
The first thing is to accept that memory is part of the commercial strategy.
Buyability is built through the long, patient work of becoming mentally available to people who may not be in-market today. A buying decision might ultimately happen quite quickly, but it can draw on years of accumulated impressions about a brand.
That places a premium on consistency, distinctiveness and meaning. Every interaction should leave something behind. It might strengthen familiarity, reinforce trust, express a point of view or create a little more confidence. Over a long buying cycle, those effects accumulate. Brand creates preference, familiarity and confidence, while demand converts that accumulated confidence into action when the buyer is ready.
For me, this is also why creativity matters so much in B2B. Buyers cannot choose a brand they don’t remember. In markets where several organisations may be perfectly credible and capable, being understood, trusted and easy to choose becomes a genuine commercial advantage.
What advice would you give to teams trying to protect creativity while operating under increasing pressure for short-term performance?
I would start by looking very carefully at what your measurement system is rewarding. Measurement is one of the most powerful forces shaping behaviour inside a marketing organisation. If we reward only immediate response and clean attribution, we shouldn’t be surprised when the work becomes narrower, experimentation becomes harder to defend, and longer-term brand building starts to look indulgent.
Protecting creativity doesn’t mean protecting it from commercial accountability. It means being much more rigorous about what different parts of the marketing system are designed to achieve, over what timeframe, and therefore how they should be measured. Some work exists to convert demand today. Other work is creating preference and confidence that will make future demand easier and less expensive to convert. A mature marketing organisation needs to be capable of valuing both.
The line from the book I would come back to is that good measurement should make it easier to defend the right bets, not harder. Creativity and commercial discipline belong together. When performance loses creative ambition, it becomes indistinguishable, and when creativity loses commercial pressure, it can become self-referential. The strongest work holds both at once.
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The B2B Reset is a practical handbook for the modern marketer navigating that gap.
It explores the real questions B2B marketers face every day, from brand and demand to creativity, measurement, AI, and the complexity of buying groups. It strips away jargon and outdated thinking to offer a clearer, more coherent way to approach the discipline as it exists now.
Written for marketers at every stage of their career, from those building their foundations to those leading entire teams, this is a book designed to be used; picked up, applied, and returned to when the work gets harder.
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought
Wendy Walker’s The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought is a strategic argument for treating business-to-business marketing with the creative ambition, commercial rigor, and human understanding its economic importance warrants. Walker organizes the book around “buyability,” which she defines as a brand’s durable readiness to be recalled and chosen when a buyer’s need finally arises. That concept gives coherence to the book’s wide-ranging discussion of positioning, category design, demand generation, measurement, team structure, artificial intelligence and privacy. Rather than presenting marketing as a sequence of isolated campaigns, Walker describes it as the sustained construction of confidence across long buying cycles and complex groups of decision-makers.
The book is particularly persuasive when it examines the psychology of B2B purchasing. Walker shows that corporate decisions may be supported by data, procurement procedures and financial models, but they’re still made by people managing professional risk, reputation and accountability. Her observation that “The decision may be shared, but the risk rarely is” neatly captures why reassurance, identity and emotional credibility matter alongside evidence. This human-centered perspective also strengthens her critique of generic product messaging. Buyers aren’t simply evaluating functionality. They’re considering whether a choice can be explained internally, defended under pressure and trusted when circumstances change.
Walker’s strongest practical contribution is her insistence that brand and demand, marketing and sales, and creativity and performance are interconnected parts of the same commercial system. She replaces the conventional linear funnel with a loop in which buyers repeatedly return, consult new stakeholders and test whether a brand’s claims remain coherent. Positioning, in this model, must be useful throughout the organization, not merely polished for an external campaign. Briefs must create space for judgment, measurement must recognize effects that develop over time, and performance creative must build memory as well as generate immediate activity. The book’s later chapters extend this reasoning thoughtfully into AI and data use, arguing that technology can accelerate production and analysis while leaving responsibility, restraint, and strategic choice firmly with people.
Written in direct, polished prose, The B2B Reset functions as both a leadership framework and a working standard for modern marketing organizations. Its chapters are concise and deliberately cumulative, repeatedly connecting creative quality to commercial outcomes such as pricing power, trust, preference and ease of selection. Walker’s statement that “Proof establishes parity but purpose creates preference” summarizes the book’s central conviction: evidence earns consideration, while meaning makes a brand worth choosing. For marketing leaders, strategists, creative teams and revenue executives, the book offers a disciplined vocabulary for building B2B brands that are distinctive, internally defensible and memorable long before a purchase is imminent.
Pages: 167 | ASIN : B0H4SGQXTT
Innovation Portfolio Management: Linking Strategy to Execution
Innovation Portfolio Management, by Noel Sobelman, is a practical business management book about turning innovation from a collection of promising projects into a coordinated enterprise capability. Sobelman treats innovation portfolio management as the link between strategy, investment decisions, resource allocation, and day-to-day execution. Drawing on decades of work with global organizations, he explains why companies often struggle to translate ambitious growth plans into a pipeline that can realistically deliver them. The book’s central idea is persuasive: innovation performs more consistently when leaders manage the whole system, including governance, data, talent, incentives, culture, and execution, rather than concentrating on individual projects.
As an innovation strategy book and corporate leadership guide, it’s impressively thorough. Sobelman begins with a maturity model that moves from ad hoc, static portfolio management to a world-class, continuously adapting discipline. He then walks readers through portfolio scope, investment categories, project evaluation criteria, governance roles, review meetings, resource planning, and allocation frameworks. The progression gives the material a clear logic, and the recurring examples help translate process language into recognizable workplace situations. His discussion of core, adjacent, and transformative innovation is especially useful because it shows how companies can fund current priorities while still creating room for longer-term growth.
The book becomes most engaging when it turns from frameworks to organizational behavior. Sobelman understands that a well-designed portfolio system still depends on leaders who’ll make trade-offs, employees who trust the process, and incentives that support the company’s stated strategy. Chapters on resistance, psychological safety, employee engagement, career paths, and cultural change give this book a welcome human dimension. The later discussions of enterprise software, artificial intelligence, external partnerships, and innovation ecosystems also widen the lens, showing how portfolio management can evolve from periodic reporting into a more responsive decision-making system.
This is a substantial, detail-rich business strategy book best suited to executives, innovation leaders, portfolio managers, R&D teams, and consultants who expect to apply what they read. Its greatest strength is the way it assembles strategy, governance, resource management, culture, and technology into one coherent operating model. The diagrams, diagnostic questions, maturity stages, and implementation guidance make it feel like a working manual that teams could bring into planning sessions and portfolio reviews. Sobelman has produced a grounded and highly usable guide for organizations that want innovation investment to reflect strategic intent and lead to measurable execution.
Pages: 250 | ASIN : B0GXNF3W96
Become Relentlessly Curious
The UnConventional Strategist is a conversational business strategy built around the idea that strategic thinking comes from experience, curiosity, judgment, and action. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This is the book I wish someone had handed me early in my career. Maybe I could have avoided a few mistakes—or at least made different ones. I wrote it with a servant leader’s mindset, hoping to mentor not just the handful of people I’ve worked with directly over the years, but anyone looking for practical guidance on becoming a better strategist, product manager, innovator, or wanting to manage their life with intention and goals in mind. One of the greatest compliments I’ve received is when people tell me, “This book sounds just like you.” They can hear my voice in their heads as they read it, and that’s exactly what I wanted.
Was there a particular moment in your career when you realized strategy was less about having all the answers and more about making better decisions with uncertainty?
There wasn’t one dramatic moment—it was a pattern that repeated itself over my career. The more responsibility I was given, the less complete the information became. I realized that the people who were successful weren’t the ones who waited until they had all the answers. They were the ones who could make good decisions with imperfect information, adjust when new facts emerged, and keep moving forward. That’s really what strategy is. It’s not certainty—it’s judgment under uncertainty. It’s trusting that gut instinct but balancing it with experience.
How can professionals learn to listen for what customers, colleagues, or competitors are not saying?
Most people spend their time listening to answers. Strategists listen to gaps. They pay attention to what’s avoided, what keeps coming up indirectly, what people hesitate to say, or where actions don’t match words. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t hidden in what someone tells you—it’s hidden in what they assume, ignore, or can’t quite articulate.
What is one strategic habit you believe every professional should develop?
Become relentlessly curious. Have an insatiable appetitive for knowledge. Look beyond what’s obvious. Every successful person I’ve known asks better questions than everyone else. They don’t assume they already know the answer. They stay curious about customers, competitors, technology, and even their own assumptions. Curiosity compounds over time, and eventually it becomes judgment. Trust your gut but temper it with experience.
Get Straight Talk from the School of Hard Knocks
Jay Nakagawa’sThe UnConventional Strategist will be your ultimate guide for strategic skillsets, a new mindset and creative edge. Tools that you should have been taught 10 years ago.Do you want to see strategic opportunities before everyone else?
Do you desire to escape career autopilot and become indispensable?
Do you need to make better decisions in the middle of the chaos around you?
Do you seek to innovate in environments that aren’t built to kill your creativity?
Becoming strategic is a challenge. It doesn’t happen because you read the right frameworks or memorized the right buzzwords. It happens through awkward starts, wrong turns, and hard-earned scars.
The UnConventional Strategist cuts through buzzwords and frameworks to deliver a practical, experience-driven guide for leaders who want to think more clearly, anticipate change, and practice real strategy—not strategic theater.
-Robert Bunchek, Strategy and Intelligence Professional
Officer & VP Strategic Intelligence, Fortune 30 company
You’ll learn …Why perfect kills progress faster than failure.
Why validation always trumps wishful thinking.
Why knowing yourself is the ultimate competitive edge.
Why asking the uncomfortable question no one else will flip the whole game.
Throughout The UnConventional Strategist, you’ll discover the elements of becoming strategic in thinking and approach.
Jay Nakagawa has lived through the School of Hard Knocks. As an international speaker and consultant, he leaves his audiences and clients more grounded using his bold moves, resources, and strategies.
The UnConventional Strategist – Building, Keeping, and Thriving in Your Career
The UnConventional Strategist, by Jay Nakagawa, is a conversational business strategy book, leadership book, and career development guide built around the idea that strategic thinking comes from experience, curiosity, judgment, and action. Nakagawa draws on decades in product management, sales, competitive intelligence, international business, mentoring, music, and family life to show how people learn to recognize patterns and make decisions with incomplete information. The book moves through five broad areas, from becoming strategic and executing a vision to competitive intelligence, professional behavior, legacy, and the long game of a career.
What gives this book its personality is Nakagawa’s willingness to teach through stories. Negotiations in Japan, troubled product launches, awkward customer meetings, corporate politics, raising five children, public speaking, and playing music all become lessons in strategy. His central principles are practical and easy to remember: validate a problem before building a solution, listen for what people aren’t saying, move before the data is perfect, know your strengths, control the pace of a negotiation, and treat competitive intelligence as a way of seeing. He’s especially effective when connecting strategic foresight with execution, since the book repeatedly shows how insight only becomes valuable when someone has the nerve to act on it.
The voice is blunt, funny, and personal, with plenty of pop culture references, sharp metaphors, and candid accounts of mistakes. That style makes a long business leadership book feel more like an extended conversation with an experienced mentor. At times, the repeated slogans and end-of-chapter lesson summaries make points that are already clear, and some of the humor lands more strongly than other bits. Still, the repetition reflects the book’s coaching approach. Nakagawa wants readers to remember the principles when they’re facing a difficult meeting, a stalled decision, a political workplace, or a competitor that’s moving faster than expected.
The book’s most satisfying shift comes in its later chapters, where strategy expands beyond markets and products into time, identity, mentorship, succession, and legacy. Nakagawa presents career strategy as the deliberate management of a whole life, including work, relationships, health, creativity, and the people you help develop. That broader perspective gives the book more emotional weight than a standard competitive intelligence or strategic management guide. The UnConventional Strategist is a practical, spirited field guide for product leaders, executives, strategists, entrepreneurs, and professionals who want to think more clearly, build better judgment, and create a career whose value continues through other people.
Pages: 338 | ASIN : B0GX2RYLM5
The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought
Wendy Walker’s The B2B Reset is a focused, persuasive examination of how business-to-business marketing can better reflect the economic importance and human complexity of the decisions it influences. Its central concept is “buyability,” defined as a brand’s durable readiness to be recalled and chosen when a buyer’s need emerges, often long after the marketing encounter itself. Walker uses this idea to connect brand building, demand generation, positioning, creativity, measurement, sales, procurement and organisational design into one commercial system. Her governing argument is captured neatly in the line, “The category has powered the world behind the world for a very long time. This is the decade when the marketing catches up.”
The book is strongest when it describes B2B buying as an emotional and social process conducted under professional pressure. Walker shows that committees don’t simply compare features and prices. Their members weigh reputational exposure, internal politics, trust and the defensibility of a choice. This understanding gives substance to her discussions of positioning and creative strategy. She repeatedly asks marketers to replace exhaustive explanation with a clear point of view that buyers can remember, repeat and advocate for. Her formulation that “Story is structure, not embellishment” is especially effective because it explains storytelling as a practical aid to decision-making rather than a decorative communications technique.
Walker also succeeds in translating her strategic argument into organisational consequences. Chapters on briefs, performance creative, measurement, procurement and team design demonstrate how promising work is often weakened by fragmented responsibilities, narrow dashboards and approval systems that reward consensus. Her account of the modern funnel as a loop is particularly useful, since it recognises that buyers return, reconsider and introduce new stakeholders instead of progressing cleanly through fixed stages. The later chapters on artificial intelligence and privacy extend the book’s logic thoughtfully. AI can accelerate production and analysis, Walker argues, but judgement, trust, restraint and responsibility remain sources of meaningful differentiation.
The book’s direct, declarative style gives it authority and makes individual chapters easy to use in leadership discussions, although its core themes of clarity, conviction, coherence and human judgment recur frequently enough to create some repetition. That repetition also reinforces the book’s purpose as a shared operating standard rather than a collection of isolated observations. The practical tools at the end strengthen its value for teams that need to assess briefs, positioning, measurement and decision quality. Overall, The B2B Reset is a commercially grounded guide to building B2B brands that earn memory, trust and preference. It’s most valuable for marketers and business leaders seeking a common framework for producing distinctive work and defending its contribution inside the organisation.
Pages: 167 | ASIN : B0H4SGQXTT
WIN BEFORE YOU SPEAK: NONVERBAL STRATEGIES FOR SALES, NEGOTIATIONS AND LEADERSHIP
Tetyana Didenko’s Win Before You Speak is a practical business communication book about the signals people send before their words have a chance to land. Positioned at the intersection of business self-help, leadership development, sales training, and negotiation strategy, it explores how posture, facial expressions, eye contact, vocal tone, gestures, pacing, and physical presence shape trust and authority. Didenko’s central idea is clear and memorable: effective communication begins with alignment between what you’re saying and what your body is expressing.
The book moves logically from the science of nonverbal communication into specific professional situations. Chapters on first impressions, negotiations, sales, executive presence, and reading other people give the material a strong real-world focus. Readers learn how to enter a room with composure, notice early signs of resistance, use stillness more intentionally, adjust their energy to a client, and respond when someone’s body language contradicts their words. These sections make Win Before You Speak especially relevant for readers looking for a body language book, a sales communication guide, or a leadership and executive presence book.
Didenko writes in an encouraging, conversational style and organizes the advice into manageable pieces. Practical exercises, reflection questions, short scenarios, key takeaways, and body language homework turn each chapter into something closer to a workshop than a traditional business book. The examples help translate broad ideas like confidence, gravitas, and rapport into observable behavior. Some concepts return several times, particularly stillness, open posture, and congruence, but the repetition also reinforces the habits the book wants readers to practice.
What makes Win Before You Speak useful is its emphasis on awareness rather than theatrical performance. Its approach to nonverbal communication connects external technique with internal regulation, reminding readers that calm breathing, grounded posture, and thoughtful pauses can affect both how they feel and how others perceive them. For professionals in leadership, sales, negotiation, public speaking, or client-facing work, this practical nonfiction guide offers plenty of tools to test immediately. It’s the kind of book that works best when read with a notebook nearby and revisited before an important meeting, presentation, or conversation.
Pages: 157 | ASIN : B0GXH81RJX
