ALAN'S BOOKS
4 Best Selling Books
Premium is the new black
With every passing day, the speed and complexity of change accelerates exponentially. Businesses around the world and across different sectors are trying to be even more relevant in a new marketplace. Successful organisations recognise that excellence in customer experience is the next great battleground. “Premium is the New Black”.
Retailers in particular have experienced more disruption than most. From single channel, to multiple channels, to omni-channel, retailers have been at the forefront of all that is good and challenging in business. The lessons learnt from working with some of the best global brands and shared in this book, can be applied to all industries in B2C, B2B and the Public Sector.
The key principle at the core of this practical guide is how to ensure your customers have consistently great experiences – making them more likely to buy from you repeatedly and become strong advocates for your brand.
Culture Matters
In Culture Matters: The Four ‘Must-have’ Values to Supercharge Your Business, Alan O’Neill makes an overwhelming case for organisational culture and health eclipsing all other matters. After all, a carefully designed culture presents any organisation with the foundation for differentiation and success.
Drawing on his extensive experience consulting with global companies, Alan cleverly weaves the learning into an easy-to-absorb modern business fable. Set on the beautiful River Shannon in Ireland, prepare to be mesmerised with relevant real-life examples that will inspire you to refresh your culture.
This book shows how to achieve sustainable growth. Its far-reaching impact extends to all types of organisations, business schools, and career-minded individuals.
Show me the lid on the box
As an organisation navigates its way to growth, the North Star that it follows could be described as the picture on the lid of a puzzle box.
Then as the organisation reacts to market forces and develops over time, the picture on the lid will change. But if employees are not engaged in the change or if communications are inadequate, what happens? They continue to assemble the old puzzle, to find that it doesn’t fit with the new lid on the box. This leads to frustration and the misnomer that ‘people resist change’.
This insight is at the core of successful change management. In Show Me the Lid on the Box: How to Manage Change with Least Resistance, Alan O’Neill shows how to avoid such pitfalls while outlining his tried-and-tested model for managing change.
The Leader's Six-Pack
New Leadership Priorities for a Changing World
Experience the seismic shifts of our time and navigate the turbulent waters of modern leadership with confidence. In the wake of the pandemic and amid global unrest, the call for leaders equipped with profound self-awareness and emotional intelligence resounds louder than ever before. In The Leader’s Six-Pack: How to Balance Grit and Grace, Alan O’Neill unveils a blueprint for success in the dynamic landscape of contemporary leadership.
Drawing from a range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, organizational behaviour, and management theory, this book is a comprehensive guide for leaders at every level. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or a rising star, this book provides invaluable insights to elevate your leadership profile.
Prepare to embark on a transformative journey that transcends conventional leadership paradigms. From gritty competencies, like strategic thinking, to graceful skills, like empathy, The Leader’s Six-Pack will empower you to lead with purpose, poise and confidence.
How Culture Transformed an Icon Using the Kara Playbook
Culture is what people do when no one is watching… and it can make or break even the most iconic brands. In This Is ‘So Selfridges!’, Dr. Alan O’Neill tells the inside story of one of the most remarkable culture-led transformations in modern retail. When Selfridges faced stagnation in the early 2000s, strategy and branding alone weren’t enough. What followed was a deliberate, disciplined culture reset that reignited pride, performance, and belief across the business.
Drawing on his lead role in the transformation, O’Neill shows how the Kara Playbook turned culture from an abstract idea into a practical system… built around clear values, visible behaviours, leadership role-modelling, and relentless follow-through. The result was not just a stronger culture, but extraordinary commercial outcomes, including profit growth from £45m to around £200m and multiple “World’s Best Department Store” awards. This book explores:
What culture really is (and what it isn’t)
How values become lived behaviours, not slogans
Why culture is the engine of execution and profit
How Selfridges made culture its competitive advantage
Part story, part playbook, This Is ‘So Selfridges!’ proves that culture isn’t soft, it’s strategic, commercial, and transformative.
Get culture right, and everything else follows.
Unleash Your Potential
The 7-Steps to Profit
Why do some organisations consistently outperform others across industries, cycles, and geographies? In Unleash Your Potential, Dr. Alan O’Neill distils over 30 years of hands-on consulting into a clear, practical framework for sustainable success: the 7-Steps to Profit. This is not theory. It’s a proven system that aligns ambition, culture, strategy, people, customers, proposition, and execution into one coherent path to performance.
At the heart of the book is a simple insight… profit is an outcome, not a strategy. When organisations get the fundamentals right, starting with a clear North Star and a deliberately designed culture, everything else becomes easier to execute and easier to sustain.
Using real-world examples, including the transformation of Selfridges from £45m to £200m in profit, O’Neill shows how winning hearts and minds, sharpening focus, and applying disciplined execution can unlock extraordinary results.
This book will help leaders:
Diagnose what’s really holding their organisation back
Understand culture as a commercial lever, not a “soft” issue.
Create alignment from the boardroom to the frontline
Turn strategy into consistent, measurable action
Clear, practical, and refreshingly honest, Unleash Your Potential is for leaders who want less complexity, stronger culture, and results that endure.
Because sustainable profit starts from the inside out.
Supercharge Your Strategy with the K-PLANT Growth Framework™
Most organisations don’t fail because people aren’t working hard enough. They fail because their strategy lacks clarity, focus, and ownership.
In The One-Page Plan, Dr. Alan O’Neill challenges the way strategy is commonly misunderstood… as budgets, slogans, or long documents that few people read and even fewer act on. Drawing on decades of consulting experience and doctoral research, he introduces the K-PLANT Growth Framework™, a practical system designed to turn strategy into a clear, disciplined guide for action.
The one-page plan forces leaders to make real choices about where to focus, what to stop, who owns what, and how progress will be tracked. This book shows how to:
Cut through complexity and prioritise what truly matters
Align leaders and win hearts and minds
Translate strategy into frontline action
Keep plans alive through disciplined governance
Clear, practical, and grounded in real-world examples, The One-Page Plan is for leaders who want less noise, more alignment, and results that actually stick.
Because strategy isn’t about writing plans. It’s about making progress.
TESTIMONIALS
What others are saying
Juan (Nacho) Fernandes
CEO AB Vista
Working with them has been a game-changer for me! Through insightful discussions and tailored strategies, I now feel empowered and motivated to take action, and I couldn't be happier with the progress I've made!
Leo Crawford
CEO BWG Foods
We in BWG have successfully engaged with Kara on a number of strategic projects in recent years. They bring a unique Customer Experience perspective and dimension to sales and marketing strategic discussions. I would recommend them to any person or organisation that is focusing on improving sales performance.
Unleash Your Business Potential.
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