Top 10 Strategy Books

Cascade Strategy: Strategic Monthly Book Review Series – Carl J Cox, CEO, North America

“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” – Michael Porter

To make the Best of the Rest Strategy Books, these are the remaining 4 books that appeared in our Top 9 research from Five Books Every Strategist Should Read. To complete this list, I read 3 more books to make a proper evaluation and added one more that appeared in the list twice. These next 3 books revealed new concepts that will be applied in our future strategy development. The original Top 5 Strategy Books is here.

Another interesting fact about why these are the best of the rest versus the first group – none of these books have their own specific Wikipedia page – although several of the author’s concepts and ideas are still abundant in Wikipedia.

Drum roll please…

#5 – The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff

Number of Times on the Rankings: 3

Other Rankings: Andrew St. George of the Financial Times said this was “My Book of the Year” in 1991.

Key Story: This book provides real life examples to game theory – not just the mathematics behind every principle. As they say, “Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking.” They share what steps we should anticipate in a variety of examples from Yacht racing, to game shows and politics. My favorite part of the book is how they discuss – it is time to go to the gym to work out your brain. Not recommended for the audiobook – you need to read this one to see and compare the various examples.

Best Strategic Insight: The Nash Equilibrium. This concept devises a way to develop a solution when two or more people are not cooperating. I recently had a discussion with an expert who developed a mathematical model to identify the real root cause to support a business to grow. One of the biggest challenges of strategic development is identifying the levers that have a positive or negative impact to the outcomes. Often strategic initiatives lack the corresponding key performance indicators to truly make a difference which leads teams wasting valuable time, energy, and resources.

Why You Should Read It: Being able to anticipate someone’s next move is very powerful. Learning some of the basic theories to the more complex can help us become better leaders and managers. Yet, one should be careful that it is still a “game” and never predicts the future with 100% certainty.

#4 –Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries by Industries and Competitors – Michael E. Porter

Number of Times on the Rankings: 4

Other Rankings: This book has 16 printings in English and translated into 19 languages and this was originally published in 1980. Michael Porter has been awarded the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor – the highest recognition to a Harvard faculty member. This is one of 18 books that he has published. Porter has been recognized by many as the “Father of Strategy”.

Key Story: Porter outlines the five forces for competitive strategy in this book and it has become a principle that is regularly taught throughout business schools for the past 40 years. He argues that the key to survival is to find significant advantage in at least one of the five forces.

Best Strategic Insight: The five forces of competitive strategy are:

1)    Entry of competitors

2)    Threat of substitutes

3)    Bargaining power of buyers

4)    Bargaining power of suppliers

5)    Rivalry among the existing players

Why You Should Read It: At a minimum, this will put you with an equal footing with anyone who has completed a business strategy course with Porter’s teachings. The principles are valuable to evaluate your own company versus your competition.

#3 – Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin

Number of Times on the Rankings: 5 (2nd highest)

Other Rankings: The Economic Times listed this as 20 books by the most influential thinkers in business in 2015. The Washington Post included this in the 2013 books every leader should read. Recently, Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO included this as one of his 4 favorite books to be a successful leader.

Key Story:  This is the story of former CEO A.G. Lafley leading Proctor & Gamble back to prominence. Fellow author, Roger L Martin is strategic consultant who helps guide the CEO and management to identify the best methods to become relevant in a highly competitive global market. During his tenure, Lafley helped double sales, quadruple profits and increase market value by over $100 billion.

Best Strategic Insight: P&G is one of the most complex organizations and it ranked #34 in the Fortune 500. Their teams helped identify five choices that define strategy.

·       A Winning Perspective – A focus on customers and consumers while keeping in mind the competitive landscape.

·       Where to Play – They leverage Porter’s strategic insights to focus on areas where they can be successfully, such as geographies, verticals, competition, product categories and distribution channels.

·       How to Win – Identify the best win to differentiate yourself from the competition – in the eyes of the customer. Are you a cost leader? A differentiator? Choose win and go forward.

·       Core Competencies – Leverage existing strengths and identify new opportunities to develop to exploit a market – while keeping in mind where to play and how to win.

·       Managing Strategy – Strategy is to define what are the exact goals that will help the company complete its objectives. Clear measurements and consistent communication help keep teams focused on what matters.

Why You Should Read It: If you can understand how to turnaround a Fortune 50 company, we can take these same principles to any organization. The most common challenge to this assumption – we are complex and different. I agree. However, few can argue that it is more complex and challenging than P&G’s ability to turn into a winning organization.

#2 – The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey, Chris McChesney and Jim Huling.

Number of Times on the Rankings: 2

Other Rankings: The Franklin Covey Group lead by the authors have worked with more than 13,000 teams and 200,000 people in hundreds of organizations with private and public companies, education, and governments throughout the world. They commissioned studies to evaluate real gaps in performance management and they did not write this book until they had completed over 1,500 implementations.

Key Story: The Franklin Covey Group has been a leader in personal accountability systems for years. Sean Covey has led the next steps in developing corporate accountability for executing strategy. After 1,500 implementations, they refined the process and called it 4DX or The Four Disciplines of Execution. 

Best Strategic Insight: The 4DX process includes the following elements:

·       Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important. Provide your best effort to those few goals that will make a difference.

·       Discipline 2: Identify and act on the Leading Indicators or Measures. With effective leading tracking, the lagging measures will improve.

·       Discipline 3: Create a clear scoreboard so everyone knows quickly and easily if they are winning the game.

·       Discipline 4: Develop a pattern of accountability. Have consistent sessions to assure the goals are moving towards completing the Wildly Important Goals.

Why You Should Read It: This is the best “how to” book on writing goals and getting them done. The 4DX process is simple which enables it to be successful with your leadership and teams. Read it, apply it. As we know a great strategy is worthless if we do not execute on it.

#1 – Good Strategy Bad Strategy – The difference and why it matters. By Richard P. Rumelt.

Number of Times on the Rankings: 4

Other Rankings: Richard Rumelt was ranked #20 on the Thinkers50 List in 2011. The book was short listed on the Financial Times Best Seller List in 2011. John Kay, a British leading economist said that this is “the first book on strategy that I have found difficult to put down.”

Key Story: Professor Richard Rumelt shares his 50 years of compelling strategic consulting and academic research to compile a very good read in Good Strategy Bad Strategy. As with most stories, we tend to learn the most from the mistakes – what we should NOT do. His experiences provide us wonderful insight and a few laughs – you get the experience that you are having a fireside chat with someone who has spent nearly his entire life on the theory and practice application of strategy.

Best Strategic Insight: There are many examples of strategic insights, here are my two favorite Good and Bad insights on strategy development:

Good

·       Clear coordinated steps and goals that cascade and support the successful completion of the strategy.

·       A clear root cause analysis of the problems with a supportable approach to create new opportunities to solve the problems.

Bad

·       Designing a metric or Key Performance Indicator without strategy to support it.

·       Establishing “Fluff” in your vision, strategies or goals that are meaningless. For example, “We are going to be the leading…blah, blah, blah…in our industry.” (Full disclosure – nearly every company that I have worked for had this and I supported the statement – oops!)

Why You Should Read It: This is solid wisdom from an expert in Strategic Planning. The combination of real life examples plus articulated theories will help challenge you to write better strategies. You must think – and using the same fluff approach of the status quo is not strategy. His personal commentary and projections about the future (which has mostly past) is quite entertaining. Enjoy the read.

Next month, I will pull out one of my personal favorites, The Goal and discuss how this one concept can be a breakthrough for your strategic planning or lack of strategic planning.

Until next time, be Strategic with your Reading.