?? One-Hour-Strategy Book Review

I recently had the opportunity to read Jeroen Kraaijenbrink ’s new book, “The One-Hour Strategy: Building a Company of Strategic Thinkers.”

Here are my key takeaways.

The book's proposition is that strategy should be the rule and not the exception.

What Jeroen means by this is that the whole organization should be involved in strategy so that strategy becomes everybody’s job, a continuous process, and everybody works on strategy at their own level and from their own perspective.

To achieve this, Jeroen proposes the One-Hour-Rule: Every executive should spend one hour per day, every manager one hour per week, and every employee one hour per month on strategy.

This one-hour work is guided by a series of questions and frameworks like the 3Qs, 6Ms, and 3Is (don’t want to give them away here…go buy the book!) ;-)

These frameworks are supplemented by a series of Key Takeaways, Evaluation Questions which are great to get you thinking about how strategy is currently done in your organization and what could be done to make the process better, a chapter on pitfalls (the usual suspects: executive sponsorship and putting resources behind), and a chapter on how to put the ideas into practice.

In my opinion, the approach is well suited to drive strategy execution once the boundaries (e.g., where to play and how to win) have been defined.

One of the key challenges in strategy is how much direction you provide and much freedom do you give the organization. We can think about strategy as the “what” and about tactics as the “how.” I believe Jeroen’s approach works best with the “how.”

I fail to see how it can be used to develop a new strategy, mostly because the approach doesn’t address the coordination between what executives, managers, and employees do (maybe I missed that part), and, without these boundaries, my concern would be that in an extreme case “everybody does whatever they want” without any focus and alignment.

The book is rather short (my Kindle tells me 95 pages), so one can read it quickly. I didn’t like the storytelling style it is written in…it feels a bit like the story was just meant to fill the pages…the core content would probably fit on 20 pages. (You can download the core content from Jeroen’s website, which is only 14 pages or so.) But that’s just my personal gusto.

I highly recommend reading it if you’re interested in a practical framework to involve your entire organization in strategy ("execution"…my addition)…which, I believe we all agree on, is much needed.

What is your favorite strategy book?