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strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete?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.

And, they avoid the common frustrations stemming from lack of perceived relevance and engagement around on the strategy process. How you choose and execute the right approach is the focus of this book. From Global BCG strategy experts Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, Janmejaya Sinha (and based on the bestselling article in Harvard Business Review), Your Strategy Needs a Strategy offers a practical guide to help you to match your approach to strategy to your environment and execute it effectively, to combine different approaches for companies which operate in multiple environments, and to lead your organization in making better strategic choices. Organizing approaches into five strategic archetypes-Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, Be Viable-the authors explain the conditions under which each is appropriate, when and how to execute each one, and how to avoid common strategy traps.

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.

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.

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.

Set your company up for long-term success. Every company needs a strategy. A focused strategy aligns decision making throughout the organization and helps establish a competitive edge in the marketplace. But with so many options to consider, how do you define a unique strategy that will ensure growth? Whether you're starting a business from scratch or leading an existing company facing new threats, this book offers the direction you need. The HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy provides practical tips and advice that break down the process of crafting strategy so you can identify the areas your company should build on to help it thrive long into the future. You'll learn to: Understand what strategy is—and what it isn't Define where you'll play and how you'll win Conduct more-effective strategic discussions with your team Test your strategy before you implement it Communicate your strategy to key stakeholders Ensure your strategy is flexible and adaptable Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Simons presents the seven key questions a manager and his team must continually ask. Drawing on decades of research into performance management systems and organization design, "Seven Strategy Questions" is a no-nonsense, must-read resource for all leaders in any organization.

Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company "Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" —legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy—which thousands of executives are already using—is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies. Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success. "This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." —Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V. The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition. This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia. "A different kind of book—I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." —Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America

The playing field for business has changed significantly in recent decades. The pace of change is accelerating, driven by increased technological progress and shrinking business lifespans. Economic and political uncertainty has risen dramatically and is likely to remain at elevated levels. Industry boundaries are blurring, increasing the potential paths to competitive disruption. Strategy is not dead—in fact, as the gap between winners and losers within industries continues to grow, it is more important than ever. However, the playbook needs to be reinvented for today’s business environment. Classical sources of competitive advantage, such as scale and differentiation, have not gone away, but they have been complemented by new dimensions of competition. This book discusses the new role of strategy in a dynamic, unpredictable context. Part 1 of this book revisits classical strategy frameworks and what changes should be made to apply them to the modern era. Part 2 discusses new strategic capabilities companies need today, such as adapting to uncertain environments and shaping new or disrupted ones. Part 3 examines the expanding boundaries of strategy, including new competitive imperatives as well as the wider range of timescales on which businesses must now operate. Drawing on the work of the BCG Henderson Institute and its fellows and ambassadors over several years, Dynamic Strategy will help business professionals as well as academics and students with an interest in strategy understand the new competitive challenges that businesses face and develop a playbook to address them. Events around the book Link to a De Gruyter Online Event in which Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, talks about successful business strategies in turbulent times: https://youtu.be/84YE4DBdQpo