WHY IS WRITING A STRATEGY SO DIFFICULT? Every organisation needs a good strategy, but it's hard to create one. Michael uses real-life experiences to guide you through creating a strategy that works. This book clarifies complex concepts so you can easily implement them in your organisation.
Making strategy requires undertaking major—often irreversible—decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts. Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist. This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.
You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.
Businesses need strategies that determine the direction of functioning and further development. If a company deals with several multifaceted businesses, each of them subsequently requires their own strategy. The issue of strategy creation and realization is a key factor that must receive the closest possible attention. In order to assure victory and be thoroughly prepared for various directions and situations that may arise, companies create their own unique strategies. This book is primarily aimed at suggesting the necessary repertoire of knowledge and skills for strategy creating with the help of the TASGRAM integrated system – Thinking, Analyzing, Strategy, Goals, Risks, Actions, and Monitoring. The main outcome of TASGRAM is a combined strategic table: business strategy, corporate strategy, goals, risks, actions, and monitoring. Each element in TASGRAM has a concrete goal and it helps users become more focused. Creating Business and Corporate Strategy: An Integrated Strategic System offers a new tool for company strategy creation, showcasing various cases and examples based on theory and practice. Unlike the existing tools, the suggested system of strategy creation is simpler and definite. Its main purpose is to help create and further develop the created strategy, making this book especially valuable to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of strategy, leadership, and management.
How to close the gap between strategy and execution Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don’t have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors. Based on new research, the authors reveal five practices for connecting strategy and execution used by highly successful enterprises such as IKEA, Natura, Danaher, Haier, and Lego. These companies: • Commit to what they do best instead of chasing multiple opportunities • Build their own unique winning capabilities instead of copying others • Put their culture to work instead of struggling to change it • Invest where it matters instead of going lean across the board • Shape the future instead of reacting to it Packed with tools you can use for building these five practices into your organization and supported by in-depth profiles of companies that are known for making their strategy work, this is your guide for reconnecting strategy to execution.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.
Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Blue Ocean Shift is the essential follow up to Blue Ocean Strategy, the classic and over 4 million copy global bestseller by world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Drawing on more than a decade of new work, Kim and Mauborgne show you how to move beyond competing, inspire your people's confidence, and seize new growth, guiding you step-by-step through how to take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space. By combining the insights of human psychology with practical market-creating tools and real-world guidance, Kim and Mauborgne deliver the definitive guide to shift yourself, your team, or your organization to new heights of confidence, market creation, and growth. They show why nondisruptive creation is as important as disruption in seizing new growth. Blue Ocean Shift is packed with all-new research and examples of how leaders in diverse industries and organizations made the shift and created new markets by applying the process and tools outlined in the book. Whether you are a cash-strapped startup or a large, established company, nonprofit or national government, you will learn how to move from red to blue oceans in a way that builds your people's confidence so that they own and drive the process. With battle-tested lessons learned from successes and failures in the field, Blue Ocean Shift is critical reading for leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs alike. You'll learn what works, what doesn't, and how to avoid the pitfalls along the way. This book will empower you to succeed as you embark on your own blue ocean journey. Blue Ocean Shift is indispensable for anyone committed to building a compelling future.
Advance praise for Corporate-Level Strategy. "At last a book that cuts through all the corporate jargon and academic generalizations to answer the question 'Does the corporate parent create or destroy value for the organization?' The authors suggest a simple yet compelling framework for making this determination. Must reading for students and practitioners alike." -Robert Cizik Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Cooper Industries "In an era when the role of corporate-level management is quite justifiably being questioned and challenged, it is refreshing to find a book that clearly shows how parent companies can add rather than destroy value in their businesses. As we would expect of these world class authorities, Goold, Campbell, and Alexander have leveraged their fascinating research findings into an eminently readable and highly practical book." -Chris Bartlett Professor Harvard Business School "A vital and deeply researched contribution to thinking about corporate strategy." -Gary Hamel London Business School "I am very impressed by the extensive work on which this book is based, and by the concept of parenting advantage that it puts forward." -Yasutaka Obayashi Senior General Manager, Corporate Strategy Canon "Great companies grow, they don't just cut. With breakups and restructuring done, corporate parenting is coming back. Goold, Campbell, and Alexander have produced a comprehensive and intelligent book which should become a standard guide on the subject." -Tom Hout Vice President The Boston Consulting Group "A perceptive and valuable insight into an often underestimated area of strategy. This book clearly demonstrates the importance of parenting to the longer term development and prosperity of multibusiness companies." -Alan R. Jackson Chief Executive, BTR "I am glad someone has so well and so fully shed light on this important body of thinking." -Sigurd Reinton Director, McKinsey & Company, 1981-1988
Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. It can be read as a whole or you can dip into the easy-to-read, bite-size sections as and when you need to deal with a particular issue. The structure has been specially designed to make sections quick and easy to use – you’ll find yourself referring back to them again and again.